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2018 books match the query 'Political aspects' and 103 start with d

cover of Dual Justice: America’s Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime

Dual Justice

America’s Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime

Anthony Grasso

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A far-reaching examination of how America came to treat street and corporate crime so differently.

While America incarcerates its most marginalized citizens at an unparalleled rate, the nation has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. Dual Justice unearths the intertwined histories of these two phenomena and reveals that they constitute more than just modern hypocrisy.

By examining the carceral and regulatory states’ evolutions from 1870 through today, Anthony Grasso shows that America’s divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins. During the Progressive Era, scholars and lawmakers championed naturalized theories of human difference to justify instituting punitive measures for poor offenders and regulatory controls for corporate lawbreakers. These ideas laid the foundation for dual justice systems: criminal justice institutions harshly governing street crime and regulatory institutions governing corporate misconduct.

Since then, criminal justice and regulatory institutions have developed in tandem to reinforce politically constructed understandings about who counts as a criminal. Grasso analyzes the intellectual history, policy debates, and state and federal institutional reforms that consolidated these ideas, along with their racial and class biases, into America’s legal system.

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cover of Dwelling in American: Dissent, Empire, and Globalization

Dwelling in American

Dissent, Empire, and Globalization

John Muthyala

Dartmouth College Press, 2012

Globalization is not the Americanization of the world, argues John Muthyala. Rather, it is an uneven social, cultural, economic, and political process in which the policies and aspirations of powerful nation-states are entangled with the interests of other empires, nation-states, and communities. Dwelling in American: Dissent, Empire, and Globalization takes up a bold challenge, critiquing scholarship on American empire that views the United States as either an exceptional threat to the world or the only hope for the future. It does so in order to provincialize America, to understand it from outside the borders of nation and location, and from inside the global networks of trade, power, and culture. Using comparative frames of reference, the book makes its arguments by examining the work of a diverse range of writers including Arundhati Roy (War Talk, Power Politics), Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran), and Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat). This is an original, complex, and often bracingly counterintuitive critique of the idea of American empire that will appeal to anyone interested in understanding the complexities of globalization.
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cover of Dynastic Democracy: Political Families of Thailand

Dynastic Democracy

Political Families of Thailand

Yoshinori Nishizaki

University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

The political history of Thailand since the overthrow of absolute monarchy in 1932 has conventionally been interpreted as a long series of popular struggles for representative democracy and against military authoritarian rule. Yoshinori Nishizaki argues that this history can be better understood as one of struggles by elite political families for and against “dynastic democracy”—a form of democracy that is characterized by the patrimonial transmission of power between members of select ruling families. Dynastic Democracy suggests it is these familial-based contestations for political ascendancy that underlie the tumultuous politics of Thailand, a country that has experienced no fewer than twenty-two coups over the course of the past century.
 
Drawing extensively on Thai-language primary sources, including assets documents and cremation volumes for deceased politicians and their kin, Nishizaki traces the intricate blood and marriage connections among Thailand’s political families. These families may fall into two categories: influential commoner families that have held parliamentary seats since 1932 and form the core of Thailand’s dynastic democracy; and upper-class families that are kin to or aligned ideologically with the royal family and have repeatedly challenged dynastic democracy through coups, constitutional changes, and other political maneuvers. Nishizaki’s exploration of dynastic democracy illustrates how democratic pluralism in Thailand has been consistently stifled, to the detriment of ordinary citizens. Dynastic Democracy fleshes out a widely acknowledged yet heretofore empirically unsubstantiated facet of Thai political history—that in Thai politics, family matters.
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