From the author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Calamities of Exile combines three gripping narratives that afford a sort of double CAT scan into the natures of both modern totalitarianism and timeless exile.

"Beautiful but harrowing chronicles of three exiles that probe the moral and personal risks of their encounters with totalitarianism. . . . Piercing and timely."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Weschler . . . combines a novelist's gift for drama with the objectivity and research skills of a journalist. . . . The result is three gripping profiles of very human but also extraordinary men."—Publishers Weekly

"[Weschler's] thorough accounting of the men's covert operations, assumed identities and strained relationships with fathers, wives, and colleagues creates a disturbing triptych of the perils of totalitarianism."—Lance Gould, New York Times Book Review

"Weschler tells these three tragic tales with an admirable combination of psychological penetration, intellectual thrust, concision and compassion."—Francis King, Spectator

"Endlessly absorbing. . . . Breathtaking."—Jeri Laber, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Vasili Rukhadze examines the factors that contributed to post-uprising leadership durability in the Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia in 2004–12, after these countries underwent their so-called “Color Revolutions.” Using structured, focused comparison and process tracing, he argues that the key independent variable influencing post-mobilization leadership durability is ruling coalition size and cohesion. He demonstrates that if the ruling coalitions are large and fragmented, as in the Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, the coalitions disintegrate, thus facilitating the downfall of the governments. Alternatively, if the ruling coalition is small and cohesive, as in Georgia, the coalition maintains unity, hence helping the government to stay in power.

This study advances the debate on regime changes. By drawing a clear distinction between political leaderships that come to power as a result of popular uprisings and governments that take power through normal democratic processes, military coup, or any other means, the research offers one of the first studies on post-mobilization leadership. Rukhadze helps scholars differentiate between the factors that affect durability of post-uprising leadership from those factors that impact durability of all other political leadership, in turn equipping researchers with new tools to study power politics.

In the post-Soviet era, democracy has made little progress in Central Asia. In Chaos, Violence, Dynasty, Eric McGlinchey presents a compelling comparative study of the divergent political courses taken by Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan in the wake of Soviet rule. McGlinchey examines economics, religion, political legacies, foreign investment, and the ethnicity of these countries to evaluate the relative success of political structures in each nation. 
      McGlinchey explains the impact of Soviet policy on the region, from Lenin to Gorbachev. Ruling from a distance, a minimally invasive system of patronage proved the most successful over time, but planted the seeds for current “neo-patrimonial” governments. The level of direct Soviet involvement during perestroika was the major determinant in the stability of ensuing governments. Soviet manipulations of the politics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in the late 1980s solidified the role of elites, while in Kyrgyzstan the Soviets looked away as leadership crumbled during the ethnic riots of 1990. Today, Kyrgyzstan is the poorest and most politically unstable country in the region, thanks to a small, corrupt, and fractured political elite. In Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov maintains power through the brutal suppression of disaffected Muslims, who are nevertheless rising in numbers and influence. In Kazakhstan, a political machine fueled by oil wealth and patronage underlies the greatest economic equity in the region, and far less political violence.
      McGlinchey’s timely study calls for a more realistic and flexible view of the successful aspects of authoritarian systems in the region that will be needed if there is to be any potential benefit from foreign engagement with the nations of Central Asia, and similar political systems globally.

City in Sight presents recent scholarship on the various issues facing today’s Dutch metropolitan areas, including immigration and the growing diversity among the urban population, urban restructuring and neighborhood renewal, shifts in urban governance, and the promotion of active citizenship. With its wealth of information and up-to-date research, this text will appeal to scholars of urban politics and social history from all over the globe.

The essays in this important new collection explore the diverse, unexpected, and controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently entered into populist politics and public debate throughout Africa.

In a substantial introduction, anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff offer a critical theoretical analysis of the nature and deployment of the concept—and the current debates surrounding it. Building on this framework, the contributors investigate the "problem" of civil society across their regions of expertise, which cover the continent. Drawing creatively on one another's work, they examine the impact of colonial ideology, postcoloniality, and development practice on discourses of civility, the workings of everyday politics, the construction of new modes of selfhood, and the pursuit of moral community.

Incisive and original, the book shows how struggles over civil society in Africa reveal much about larger historical forces in the post-Cold War era. It also makes a strong case for the contribution of historical anthropology to contemporary discourses on the rise of a "new world order."

Over the last two decades, right-wing populist parties in Western Europe have gained sizable vote shares and power, much to the fascination and consternation of political observers. Meshing traditionalism and communitarian ideals, right-wing populist parties have come to represent a polar normative ideal to the New Left in Western Europe. In his dynamic study Cleavage Politics and the Populist Right, Simon Bornschier applies a cultural as well as political dimension to analyze the parties of both the right and left in six countries. He develops a theory that integrates the role of political conflict around both established cleavages and party strategies regarding new divisions to explain the varying fortunes of the populist right.

Why does the United States need European allies, and why is it getting more difficult for those allies to partner with Washington in standing up to China, pushing back against Russia, and pursuing other common interests around the world? This book addresses the economic, demographic, political, and military trends that are fundamentally upending the ability and willingness of European allies to work with Washington. Brexit and its impact on Britain’s economy and its military, Germany’s seemingly relentless economic and political rise, France’s continuing economic malaise, Italy’s aging population and its withdrawal from major overseas operations, and Poland’s demographic decline and single-minded obsession with Russia will combine to make partnership with Washington nearly impossible. In short, the constellation of allies and partners the United States has relied on since 9/11 will look very different a decade from now. How should Washington respond? It doesn’t hold all the cards, but this book offers an array of practical recommendations for American leaders. By leveraging these proposals, U.S. policy-makers can avoid the worst-case scenarios and make the most of limited opportunities.

Europeans and Americans tend to hold the opinion that democracy is a uniquely Western inheritance, but in The Common Cause, Leela Gandhi recovers stories of an alternate version, describing a transnational history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of ethics in the broad sense of disciplined self-fashioning. Gandhi identifies a shared culture of perfectionism across imperialism, fascism, and liberalism—an ethic that excluded the ordinary and unexceptional. But, she also illuminates an ethic of moral imperfectionism, a set of anticolonial, antifascist practices devoted to ordinariness and abnegation that ranged from doomed mutinies in the Indian military to Mahatma Gandhi’s spiritual discipline.
 
Reframing the way we think about some of the most consequential political events of the era, Gandhi presents moral imperfectionism as the lost tradition of global democratic thought and offers it to us as a key to democracy’s future. In doing so, she defends democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection and mounts a postcolonial appeal for an ethics of becoming common.

Against the background of the prolonged presence of the US military in post–World War II Okinawa, The Community of Nuchi Du Takara (“Life Is the Ultimate Treasure”) in Postwar Okinawa explores the conflict between Okinawa and the US-Japan alliance. Inoue examines how Okinawan activists, artists, writers, and others have resisted US military presence, particularly the planned construction of a new military facility in northern Okinawa. In so doing, however, Inoue also underscores something in postwar Okinawa that one fails to grasp if one approaches it solely through the lens of resistance or protest. In historically and ethnographically grappling with this “something,” he develops a local notion of nuchi du takara (“life is the ultimate treasure”) into an analytical concept. Inoue shows how nuchi du takara has functioned as a cultural cushion inserted between the constituent power of Okinawan social actors from below and the constituted power of the US-Japan alliance from above; it has helped Okinawan social actors externally engage in complex negotiations—compromises and concessions as well as resistances and protests—vis-à-vis Washington and Tokyo, a process involving the development of the internal capacity of their community to embrace diverse and often contradictory attitudes toward the US military for small yet significant and incremental social changes if not revolution. Inoue’s grounded investigation points toward the possibility of a World Republic—an international politics built upon universal peace, global democracy, and shared affluence—against the current sovereignty of global capitalism.

This volume is intended as a contribution to the study of administration.  The contributors represent several branches of social and behavioral sciences, including anthropology, economics, industrial management, sociology, and social psychology.  The data for the empirical studies were gathered in the United States, Germany, Great Britain, Norway, West Africa, and the Fox Indian society, and from different types of organizations, including manufacturing, mining, shipping, higher education, hospitals, the military, and social welfare agencies.

Contributors:  Frederick L. Bates; Warren G. Bennis; Frank A. Cassell; Rose Laub Coser; William R. Dill; Frederick H. Harbison; Ernst Köchling; Walter B. Miller; Stephen A. Richardson; Heinrich C. Ruebmann; Edward J. Thomas; and the editors.

With nuclear proliferation essentially eliminating full-scale warfare, governments have increasingly turned to what Richard W. Cottam calls competitive interference. This type of policy invokes counter-insurgency, political, economic, and psychological manipulations, and often involves looking deeply into the internal affairs of a country, often secretly. Cottam describes and defines competitive interference, explores the United States' institutional adjustment to it, and provides a theoretical framework for projection and evaluation of foreign policy in this changing diplomatic arena. He uses case studies of international relationships involving the United States, India, China, Vietnam, Iran, and the former USSR and East Germany to evaluate his theoretical stance, and proposes long-term institutionalization of policy, rather than covert operations.

The financial crisis that erupted on Wall Street in 2008 quickly cascaded throughout much of the advanced industrial world. Facing the specter of another Great Depression, policymakers across the globe responded in sharply different ways to avert an economic collapse. Why did the response to the crisis—and its impact on individual countries—vary so greatly among interdependent economies? How did political factors like public opinion and domestic interest groups shape policymaking in this moment of economic distress? Coping with Crisis offers a rigorous analysis of the choices societies made as a devastating global economic crisis unfolded. With an ambitiously broad range of inquiry, Coping with Crisis examines the interaction between international and domestic politics to shed new light on the inner workings of democratic politics. The volume opens with an engaging overview of the global crisis and the role played by international bodies like the G-20 and the WTO. In his survey of international initiatives in response to the recession, Eric Helleiner emphasizes the limits of multilateral crisis management, finding that domestic pressures were more important in reorienting fiscal policy. He also argues that unilateral decisions by national governments to hold large dollar reserves played the key role in preventing a dollar crisis, which would have considerably worsened the downturn. David R. Cameron discusses the fiscal responses of the European Union and its member states. He suggests that a profound coordination problem involving fiscal and economic policy impeded the E.U.'s ability to respond in a timely and effective manner. The volume also features several case studies and country comparisons. Nolan McCarty assesses the performance of the American political system during the crisis. He argues that the downturn did little to dampen elite polarization in the U.S.; divisions within the Democratic Party—as well as the influence of the financial sector—narrowed the range of policy options available to fight the crisis. Ben W. Ansell examines how fluctuations in housing prices in 30 developed countries affected the policy preferences of both citizens and political parties. His evidence shows that as housing prices increased, homeowners expressed preferences for both lower taxes and a smaller safety net. As more citizens supplement their day-to-day income with assets like stocks and housing, Ansell's research reveals a potentially significant trend in the formation of public opinion. Five years on, the prospects for a prolonged slump in economic activity remain high, and the policy choices going forward are contentious. But the policy changes made between 2007 and 2010 will likely constrain any new initiatives in the future. Coping with Crisis offers unmatched analysis of the decisions made in the developed world during this critical period. It is an essential read for scholars of comparative politics and anyone interested in a comprehensive account of the new international politics of austerity.

COVID-19 is the most significant global crisis of any of our lifetimes. The numbers have been stupefying, whether of infection and mortality, the scale of public health measures, or the economic consequences of shutdown. Coronavirus Politics identifies key threads in the global comparative discussion that continue to shed light on COVID-19 and shape debates about what it means for scholarship in health and comparative politics. Editors Scott L. Greer, Elizabeth J. King, Elize Massard da Fonseca, and André Peralta-Santos bring together over 30 authors versed in politics and the health issues in order to understand the health policy decisions, the public health interventions, the social policy decisions, their interactions, and the reasons. The book’s coverage is global, with a wide range of key and exemplary countries, and contains a mixture of comparative, thematic, and templated country studies. All go beyond reporting and monitoring to develop explanations that draw on the authors' expertise while engaging in structured conversations across the book.

For at least two centuries, democratic representation has been at the center of debate. Should elected representatives express the views of the majority, or do they have the discretion to interpret their constituents’ interests? How can representatives balance the desires of their parties and their electors? What should be done to strengthen the representation of groups that have been excluded from the political system? Representative democracy itself remains frequently contested, regarded as incapable of reflecting the will of the masses, or inadequate for today’s global governance. Recently, however, this view of democratic representation has been under attack for its failure to capture the performative and constructive elements of the process of representation, and a new literature more attentive to these aspects of the relationship between representatives and the represented has arisen.

In Creating Political Presence, a diverse and international group of scholars explores the implications of such a turn. Two broad, overlapping perspectives emerge. In the first section, the contributions investigate how political representation relates to empowerment, either facilitating or interfering with the capacity of citizens to develop autonomous judgment in collective decision making. Contributions in the second section look at representation from the perspective of inclusion, focusing on how representative relationships and claims articulate the demands of those who are excluded or have no voice. The final section examines political representation from a more systemic perspective, exploring its broader environmental conditions and the way it acquires democratic legitimacy.