Results by title

Domestic terrorist groups, like all violent nonstate actors, compete with governments for their monopoly on violence and their legitimacy in representing the citizenry. Battle for Allegiance shows violence is neither the only nor the most effective way in which nonstate actors and governments work to achieve their goals. As much as nonviolent strategies are a rarely considered piece of the puzzle, the role of the audience is another crucial piece often downplayed in the literature. Many studies emphasize the interactions between the government and the terrorist group at the expense of the constituency, but the constituency is the common cluster for both actors to gain legitimacy and to demand its allegiance. In fact, the competition between the two actors goes far beyond who is superior in terms of military force and tactics. The hardest battles are fought over the allegiance of the citizens.

Using a multimethod approach based on exclusive interviews and focus groups from Turkey and large N original data from around the world, Seden Akcinaroglu and Efe Tokdemir present the first systematic empirical analysis of the ways in which terrorist groups, the government, and the citizens relate to each other in a triadic web of action. They study the nonviolent actions of terrorist groups toward their constituencies, the nonviolent actions of governments toward terrorists, and the nonviolent actions of governments toward the terrorist group’s constituencies. By investigating the causes, targets, and consequences of accommodative actions, this book sheds light on an important, but generally ignored, aspect of terrorism: interactive nonviolent strategies.

On the surface, Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants to the United States seem to share a common cultural identity but often make uneasy neighbors. Discrimination and assimilationist policies have influenced generations of Mexican Americans so that some now fear that the status they have gained by assimilating into American society will be jeopardized by Spanish-speaking newcomers. Other Mexican Americans, however, adopt a position of group solidarity and work to better the social conditions and educational opportunities of Mexican immigrants.

Focusing on the Mexican-origin, working-class city of La Puente in Los Angeles County, California, this book examines Mexican Americans' everyday attitudes toward and interactions with Mexican immigrants—a topic that has so far received little serious study. Using in-depth interviews, participant observations, school board meeting minutes, and other historical documents, Gilda Ochoa investigates how Mexican Americans are negotiating their relationships with immigrants at an interpersonal level in the places where they shop, worship, learn, and raise their families. This research into daily lives highlights the centrality of women in the process of negotiating and building communities and sheds new light on identity formation and group mobilization in the U.S. and on educational issues, especially bilingual education. It also complements previous studies on the impact of immigration on the wages and employment opportunities of Mexican Americans.

Political conflict in many parts of the world has been shaped by notions of who rightfully belongs to a place. The concept of autochthony—that a true, original people are born of a land and belong to it above all others—has animated struggles across postcolonial Africa. But is this sense of rootedness from time immemorial necessary to assertions of original being and thus political supremacy? Belonging, Identity, and Conflict in the Central African Republic examines how political conflict unfolds when the language of autochthony is detached from historical land claims. 

Focusing on violent struggles in the Central African Republic between 2012 and 2019, Gino Vlavonou explores the social practices, discursive strategies, and government policies that emerged in the relentless project of African state building. Conflict pitted Christian-animist communities, loosely organized as vigilante groups under the name anti-Balaka, against Muslim rebels known as the Séléka. Fighters of the anti-Balaka claimed that they were autochthonous, the “true Central Africans,” reframing their Muslim neighbors as foreigners to be expelled. While the country had previously witnessed episodes of violence, both peoples had lived together relatively peacefully and intermarried. The speed and ferocity with which identity was weaponized puzzled many observers. To understand this phenomenon, Vlavonou probes autochthony as a category of identity that differs from ethnicity in important ways. He argues that elites and ordinary citizens alike mobilize the language of original belonging as “identity capital,” a resource to be deployed. The value of that capital is lodged in what people say and do every day to give meaning to their identity, and its content changes across time and space. 

Examines how stories of biblical families were reconfigured and projected in the genre of the oratorio, a form of sacred opera, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Based to a great extent on the Old Testament, the largely Catholic musical-dramatic genre was popular in Italy, Austria, and southern Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Biblical Families in Music reveals how difficult stories of fratricide, child sacrifice, death, and forbidden love performed a didactic function in oratorios, teaching early modern audiences about piety and the rules of proper family life.

In the century after 1670, the heavily adapted tales of Abraham and Isaac, Cain and Abel, and the Egyptian slave Hagar and her son Ishmael were set to music by figures such as Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Sacchini and performed during Lent in churches and other sacred spaces for an audience of court nobility, clergy, and the urban patriciate. By examining the resonance of Catholic oratorios within predominantly upper-class social realities, the book broadens our cultural understanding of the early modern European family and underscores the centrality of family and familial relation to social position, devotional taste, and identity.