The arts and sciences have evolved primarily through specialization and broadening of scope. Stepping outside of one’s established discipline, however, involves a danger of "shallowness," even if the primary challenge was a "deep" integration problem. All too often, current ways of defining academic disciplines and fields of research fail to do justice to new approaches—a problem this volume tackles as it debates the possible futures of scholarship and academia.

Undoing the Revolution looks at the way rural underclasses ally with out-of-power elites to overthrow their governments—only to be shut out of power when the new regime assumes control. Vasabjit Banerjee first examines why peasants need to ally with dissenting elites in order to rebel. He then shows how conflict resolution and subsequent bargains to form new state institutions re-empower allied elites and re-marginalize peasants.  

Banerjee evaluates three different agrarian societies during distinct time periods spanning the twentieth century: revolutionary Mexico from 1910 to 1930; late-colonial India from 1920 until 1947; and White-dominated Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) from the mid-1960s to 1980. This comparative approach also allows examination of both the underclass need for elite participation and the variety of causes that elites use to incentivize peasant classes to participate, extending from religious-ethnic identity and common political targets to the peasants’ and elites’ own economic grievances. 

Undoing the Revolution demonstrates that both international and domestic investors in cash crops, natural resources, and finance can ally with peasant rebels; and, after threatened or actual state collapse, they can bargain with each other to select new state institutions.

Latin America in the 1980s was marked by the transition to democracy and a turn toward economic orthodoxy.  Unsettling Statecraft analyzes this transition in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, focusing on the political dynamics underlying change and the many disturbing tendencies at work as these countries shed military authoritarianism for civilian rule.

Conaghan and Malloy draw on insights from the political economy literature, viewing policy making as a “historically conditioned” process, and they conclude that the disturbing tendencies their research reveals are not due to regional pathology but are part of the more general experience of postmodern democracy.