BiblioVault - Books about Developing countries

Campaigns and Voters in Developing Democracies

Argentina in Comparative Perspective

Edited by Noam Lupu, Virginia Oliveros, and Luis Schiumerini

University of Michigan Press, 2019

Voting behavior is informed by the experience of advanced democracies, yet the electoral context in developing democracies is significantly different. Civil society is often weak, poverty and inequality high, political parties ephemeral and attachments to them weak, corruption rampant, and clientelism widespread. Voting decisions in developing democracies follow similar logics to those in advanced democracies in that voters base their choices on group affiliation, issue positions, valence considerations, and campaign persuasion. Yet developing democracies differ in the weight citizens assign to these considerations. Where few social identity groups are politically salient and partisan attachments are sparse, voters may place more weight on issue voting. Where issues are largely absent from political discourse, valence considerations and campaign effects play a larger role. Campaigns and Voters in Developing Democracies develops a theoretical framework to specify why voter behavior differs across contexts.

[more]

Canals and Communities

Small-Scale Irrigation Systems

Jonathan B. Mabry

University of Arizona Press, 1996

From the mountains of South America to the deserts of northern Africa to the islands of south Asia, people have devised myriad ways of moving water to sustain their communities and nourish their crops. Many of these irrigation methods have been used over long periods of time and continue to function in diverse ecological and sociopolitical contexts. This book presents case studies and comparative essays about local institutions for managing water resources. Drawn from around the globe, the cases clearly demonstrate that "indigenous" irrigation is often more sustainable, cost-effective, and flexible than has been generally believed. The contributors discuss a wide range of environments, cultural traditions, and historical contexts in which such systems operate, maintaining a common focus on incentives for cooperation, operational rules, collective-choice arrangements, principles of allocation, and conflict-resolution mechanisms. Canals and Communities can serve as a sourcebook for social scientists and development planners investigating the cultural ecology of irrigated agriculture, the ethnology of cooperative social formations, the politics of collective-resource institutions, and the sociology of rural development. The book also provides examples and generalizations about the cross-cultural characteristics of sustainable water resource management and intensive agriculture. Aside from its theoretical contributions to human ecology and anthropology, the book is of practical importance to development studies. The cases it presents make a convincing argument for perpetuating small-scale irrigation systems as part of the world's repertoire of irrigation knowledge and resources.

CONTENTS
Introduction
The Ethnology of Irrigation: Cross-Cultural Characteristics of Local Water Management, Jonathan B. Mabry
Patterns of Cooperation and Conflict in Local Irrigation
1. La Gente es Muy Perra: Conflict and Cooperation over Irrigation Water in Cucurpe, Sonora, Mexico, Thomas E. Sheridan
2. Dhasheeg Agriculture in the Jubba Valley of Somalia, Catherine Besteman
3. The Dry and the Drier: Cooperation and Conflict in Moroccan Irrigation, John R. Welch
4. The Political Ecology of Irrigation in an Andean Peasant Community, Paul H. Gelles
Methods and Models for Analyzing Local Irrigation
5. Rapid Rural Appraisal of Arid Land Irrigation: A Moroccan Example, John R. Welch, Jonathan B. Mabry, and Hsain Ilahiane
6. Simulation Modelling of Balinese Irrigation, J. Stephen Lansing
7. Institutional Innovation in Small-Scale Irrigation Networks: A Cape Verdean Case, Mark W. Langworthy and Timothy J. Finan
Development Lessons from Local Irrigation
8. Qanats and Rural Societies: Sustainable Agriculture and Irrigation Cultures in Contemporary Iran, Michael E. Bonine
9. The Utility of Tradition in Sri Lankan Bureaucratic Irrigation: The Case of the Kirindi Oya Project, Pamela Stanbury
10. The Relevance of Indigenous Irrigation: A Comparative Analysis of Sustainability, Jonathan B. Mabry and David A. Cleveland
Conclusion
The Hydraulics of History: Evolutionary Trajectories of Local and Centralized Irrigation, Jonathan B. Mabry

[more]

Capital Controls and Capital Flows in Emerging Economies

Policies, Practices, and Consequences

Edited by Sebastian Edwards

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Some scholars argue that the free movement of capital across borders enhances welfare; others claim it represents a clear peril, especially for emerging nations. In Capital Controls and Capital Flows in Emerging Economies, an esteemed group of contributors examines both the advantages and the pitfalls of restricting capital mobility in these emerging nations.

In the aftermath of the East Asian currency crises of 1997, the authors consider mechanisms that eight countries have used to control capital inflows and evaluate their effectiveness in altering the maturity of the resulting external debt and reducing macroeconomic vulnerability. This volume is essential reading for all those interested in emerging nations and the costs and benefits of restricting international capital flows.

[more]

Capital Flows and the Emerging Economies

Theory, Evidence, and Controversies

Edited by Sebastian Edwards

University of Chicago Press, 2000

The 1990s witnessed several acute currency crises among developing nations that invariably spread to other nearby at-risk countries. These episodes—in Mexico, Thailand, South Korea, Russia, and Brazil—were all exacerbated by speculative foreign investments and high-volume movements of capital in and out of those countries. Insufficient domestic controls and a sluggish international response further undermined these economies, as well as the credibility of external oversight agencies like the International Monetary Fund. This timely volume examines the correlation between volatile capital mobility, currency instability, and the threat of regional contagion, focusing particular attention on the emergent economies of Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe.
Together these studies offer a new understanding of the empirical relationship between capital flows, international trade, and economic performance, and also afford key insights into realms of major policy concern.

[more]

Capitalist Humanitarianism

Lucia Hulsether

Duke University Press, 2023

The struggle against neoliberal order has gained momentum over the last five decades---to the point that economic elites have not only adapted to the Left's critiques but incorporated them for capitalist expansion. Venture funds expose their ties to slavery and pledge to invest in racial equity. Banks pitch microloans as a path to indigenous self-determination. Fair-trade brands narrate consumption as an act of feminist solidarity with women artisans in the global South. In Capitalist Humanitarianism Lucia Hulsether examines these projects and the contexts of their emergence. Blending historical and ethnographic styles, and traversing intimate and global scales, Hulsether tracks how neoliberal self-critique creates new institutional hegemonies that, in turn, reproduce racial and neocolonial dispossession. From the archives of Christian fair traders to luxury social entrepreneurship conferences, from US finance offices to Guatemalan towns flooded with their loan products, from service economy desperation to the internal contradictions of social movements, Hulsether argues that capitalist humanitarian projects are fueled as much by a profit motive as by a hope that racial capitalism can redeem the losses that accumulate in its wake.

[more]

Challenging Coasts

Transdisciplinary Excursions into Integrated Coastal Zone Development

Edited by Leontine E. Visser

Amsterdam University Press, 2004

Coastal zones are places where environments, cultures, and economies all collide and interact, and Challenging Coasts examines the important issues involved in managing coastal zones. Contributors to the volume argue that coastal zones pose a developmental rather than a management challenge and require a multidisciplinary response from the social and natural sciences. Thus papers collected here examine international case studies and address a variety of issues such as biodiversity protection and the legal concerns of habitat protection. Challenging Coasts is an important and invaluable resource for marine scientists and those interested in coastal zone development.

[more]

Changes in Exchange Rates in Rapidly Developing Countries

Theory, Practice, and Policy Issues

Edited by Takatoshi Ito and Anne O. Krueger

University of Chicago Press, 1999

The exchange rate is a crucial variable linking a nation's domestic economy to the international market. Thus choice of an exchange rate regime is a central component in the economic policy of developing countries and a key factor affecting economic growth.

Historically, most developing nations have employed strict exchange rate controls and heavy protection of domestic industry-policies now thought to be at odds with sustainable and desirable rates of economic growth. By contrast, many East Asian nations maintained exchange rate regimes designed to achieve an attractive climate for exports and an "outer-oriented" development strategy. The result has been rapid and consistent economic growth over the past few decades.

Changes in Exchange Rates in Rapidly Developing Countries explores the impact of such diverse exchange control regimes in both historical and regional contexts, focusing particular attention on East Asia. This comprehensive, carefully researched volume will surely become a standard reference for scholars and policymakers.

[more]

Cheap Threats

Why the United States Struggles to Coerce Weak States

Dianne Pfundstein Chamberlain

Georgetown University Press

Why do weak states resist threats of force from the United States, especially when history shows that this superpower carries out its ultimatums? Cheap Threats upends conventional notions of power politics and challenges assumptions about the use of compellent military threats in international politics.

Drawing on an original dataset of US compellence from 1945 to 2007 and four in-depth case studies—the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 2011 confrontation with Libya, and the 1991 and 2003 showdowns with Iraq—Dianne Pfundstein Chamberlain finds that US compellent threats often fail because threatening and using force became comparatively “cheap” for the United States after the Cold War. Becoming the world’s only superpower and adopting a new light-footprint model of war, which relied heavily on airpower and now drones, have reduced the political, economic, and human costs that US policymakers face when they go to war. Paradoxically, this lower-cost model of war has cheapened US threats and fails to signal to opponents that the United States is resolved to bear the high costs of a protracted conflict. The result: small states gamble, often unwisely, that the United States will move on to a new target before achieving its goals.

Cheap Threats resets the bar for scholars and planners grappling with questions of state resolve, hegemonic stability, effective coercion, and other issues pertinent in this new era of US warfighting and diplomacy.

[more]

Child Soldiers in the Age of Fractured States

Scott Gates

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

Current global estimates of children engaged in warfare range from 200,000 to 300,000. Children's roles in conflict range from armed and active participants to spies, cooks, messengers, and sex slaves. Child Soldiers in the Age of Fractured States examines the factors that contribute to the use of children in war, the effects of war upon children, and the perpetual cycle of warfare that engulfs many of the world's poorest nations.

The contributors seek to eliminate myths of historic or culture-based violence, and instead look to common traits of chronic poverty and vulnerable populations. Individual essays examine topics such as: the legal and ethical aspects of child soldiering; internal UN debates over enforcement of child protection policies; economic factors; increased access to small arms; displaced populations; resource endowments; forced government conscription; rebel-enforced quota systems; motivational techniques employed in recruiting children; and the role of girls in conflict.

The contributors also offer viable policies to reduce the recruitment of child soldiers such as the protection of refugee camps by outside forces, “naming and shaming,” and criminal prosecution by international tribunals. Finally, they focus on ways to reintegrate former child soldiers into civil society in the aftermath of war.

[more]

Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism

Perspectives from the French and Francophone Worlds

Edited by Dina Sherzer

University of Texas Press, 1996

In this first major study of French colonial and postcolonial cinema, Dina Sherzer compiles essays by some of the foremost scholars on the subject who interrogate and analyze the realities behind the images of the nation's past and present. Through an examination of France and its colonies, multiethnic contemporary France, and cinematic discourses which have been and are being produced about France's colonial past, these authors explore how the images relay underlying assumptions and their relation to historical and political facts. A variety of subjects and viewpoints inform these studies, which cover the entire range of films on that topic.

The authors expound upon the role French and Francophone films are currently playing in reconstructing and imagining France's colonial past. Not only do the essays examine how French cinema has represented the encounter of French citizens with individuals from former colonies during the colonial era; they examine how French cinema has portrayed and has come to terms with the immigration of former colonial subjects to France. In addition, the book features another postcolonial facet by analyzing films of directors from the former colonies who give their own representation of colonialism and presentation of their culture.

This study is a major contribution to postcolonial research. Race, gender, and geography are central themes throughout this book that presents innovative material that contributes to the history of French cinema and emphasizes how cinema participates in and is a part of national culture.

[more]

Colonial Subjects

Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology

Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2000

It is often forgotten that anthropology--the scientific study of cultural difference--arose from situations that required a practical management of cultural differences. Out of the practical contexts of colonial contact--administration, mission, nationalism, policing, settler cultivation, tourism, warfare--emerged methods, and images of otherness, that inform anthropological notions of cultural difference to this day.
The essays in this volume share the assumption that "ethnography," far from being the unique purview of anthropology, is a broader field of practice out of which and alongside which anthropology attempted to distinguish itself as a scientific discipline. They explore a variety of situations in colonial South and Southeast Asia and Africa and in the treatment of the indigenous inhabitants of North America and Australia to provide genealogies of present-day anthropological practices, tracing them back to the subjects of colonial ethnography.
This book introduces into the history of anthropology many of the insights developed in recent studies in history, cultural studies, and the anthropology of colonialism. It can serve as a course book in the history of anthropology and the anthropology of colonialism, while at the same time addressing a much larger audience of students of colonial history, of the history of science and modernity, and of globalization.
Peter Pels is Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. Oscar Salemink is Program Officer for Social Sciences and Humanities, The Ford Foundation-Vietnam.

[more]

Common Knowledge

News and the Construction of Political Meaning

W. Russell Neuman, Marion R. Just, and Ann N. Crigler

University of Chicago Press, 1992

Photo opportunities, ten-second sound bites, talking heads and celebrity anchors: so the world is explained daily to millions of Americans. The result, according to the experts, is an ignorant public, helpless targets of a one-way flow of carefully filtered and orchestrated communication. Common Knowledge shatters this pervasive myth. Reporting on a ground-breaking study, the authors reveal that our shared knowledge and evolving political beliefs are determined largely by how we actively reinterpret the images, fragments, and signals we find in the mass media.

For their study, the authors analyzed coverage of 150 television and newspaper stories on five prominent issues—drugs, AIDS, South African apartheid, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the stock market crash of October 1987. They tested audience responses of more than 1,600 people, and conducted in-depth interviews with a select sample. What emerges is a surprisingly complex picture of people actively and critically interpreting the news, making sense of even the most abstract issues in terms of their own lives, and finding political meaning in a sophisticated interplay of message, medium, and firsthand experience.

At every turn, Common Knowledge refutes conventional wisdom. It shows that television is far more effective at raising the saliency of issues and promoting learning than is generally assumed; it also undermines the assumed causal connection between newspaper reading and higher levels of political knowledge. Finally, this book gives a deeply responsible and thoroughly fascinating account of how the news is conveyed to us, and how we in turn convey it to others, making meaning of at once so much and so little. For anyone who makes the news—or tries to make anything of it—Common Knowledge promises uncommon wisdom.

[more]

Competitive Elections in Developing Countires

Myron Weiner and Ergun Özbudun

Duke University Press, 1987

This is the latest in the At the Polls series, in which Duke University Press has joined with the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research to publish studies on the electoral process as it functions around the world. Cited by Choice for its "high standard of scholarly analysis and objectivity," the series provides both a chronicle of events and a thorough analysis of the election results.

[more]

Concrete Revolution

Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation

Christopher Sneddon

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Water may seem innocuous, but as a universal necessity, it inevitably intersects with politics when it comes to acquisition, control, and associated technologies. While we know a great deal about the socioecological costs and benefits of modern dams, we know far less about their political origins and ramifications. In Concrete Revolution, Christopher Sneddon offers a corrective: a compelling historical account of the US Bureau of Reclamation’s contributions to dam technology, Cold War politics, and the social and environmental adversity perpetuated by the US government in its pursuit of economic growth and geopolitical power.

Founded in 1902, the Bureau became enmeshed in the US State Department’s push for geopolitical power following World War II, a response to the Soviet Union’s increasing global sway. By offering technical and water resource management advice to the world’s underdeveloped regions, the Bureau found that it could not only provide them with economic assistance and the United States with investment opportunities, but also forge alliances and shore up a country’s global standing in the face of burgeoning communist influence. Drawing on a number of international case studies—from the Bureau’s early forays into overseas development and the launch of its Foreign Activities Office in 1950 to the Blue Nile investigation in Ethiopia—Concrete Revolution offers insights into this historic damming boom, with vital implications for the present. If, Sneddon argues, we can understand dams as both technical and political objects rather than instruments of impartial science, we can better participate in current debates about large dams and river basin planning.

[more]

Creating a New World Economy

Forces of Change and Plans for Action

edited by Gerald Epstein, Julie Graham and Jessica Nembhard, foreword by Samuel Bowles

Temple University Press, 1993

How is the global economy affected by increased militarization, inequality between nations and classes, environmental degradation, and U.S. economic decline? What are the current debates and issues? Can free enterprise and government deregulation solve global economic problems? As the world's attention is focused on the global economy, 25 activist economists address these and many other questions. Essays in Creating a New World Economy describe in accessible language such complex topics as the international debt, Keynesianism, trade policy, immigration, and drug trade. In addition to analyzing current topics and debates, contributors also offer alternative strategies on topics frequently neglected in traditional economics curricula. Essays explain development strategies and markets in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Japan. For students, activists, and general readers, this timely collection explains national and international economic dilemmas that will increasingly challenge us in the next century.

[more]