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The nature and goals of terrorist organizations have changed profoundly since the Cold War standoff among the U.S., Soviet, and Chinese superpowers gave way to the current "polyplex" global system, in which the old rules of international engagement have been shattered by a new struggle for power among established states, non-state actors, and emerging nations. In this confusing state of global disorder, terrorist organizations that are privately funded and highly flexible have become capable of carrying out incredibly destructive attacks anywhere in the world in support of a wide array of political, religious, and ethnic causes.

This groundbreaking book examines the evolution of terrorism in the context of the new global disorder. Richard M. Pearlstein categorizes three generations of terrorist organizations and shows how each arose in response to the global conditions of its time. Focusing extensively on today's transnational (i.e., privately funded and internationally operating) terrorist organizations, he devotes thorough attention to the two most virulent types: ethnoterrorism and radical Islamic terrorism. He also discusses the terrorist race for weapons of mass destruction and the types of attacks, including cyberterrorism, that are likely to occur in coming years. Pearlstein concludes with a thought-provoking assessment of the many efforts to combat transnational terrorism in the post-September 11 period.

DISTINGUISHED PUBLICATION AWARD FOR THE NATIONAL COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION'S COMMUNICATION AND LAW DIVISION

The First Amendment: protected by law, threatened by fear in the Roberts Supreme Court.

In Fear and the First Amendment: Controversial Cases of the Roberts Court, Kevin A. Johnson and Craig R. Smith offer a deeply considered examination of the ways fear figures in First Amendment questions. Bringing together literature on theories of fear in rhetorical and philosophical traditions, Johnson and Smith focus on the rulings from the Roberts Court, which form a pivotal era of dramatic precedents. Each chapter analyzes one or more First Amendment cases and a variety of related fears—whether evidentiary or not—that pertain to a given case.

These cases include Morse v. Frederick, which takes up the competing fears of school administrators’ loss of authority and students’ loss of free speech rights. The authors touch on corporate funding of elections in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, from the fear of corporate influence on electoral politics to corporate fears of alienating their consumers by backing political candidates. They explore religious freedom and fears of homosexuality in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. Similarly, in Snyder v. Phelps, the authors delve further into fears of God, death, emotional distress, failing as a parent, and losing one’s reputation. Next, they investigate parents’ anxieties about violence in video games in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. Finally, Johnson and Smith examine the role of fear in indecent, obscene, and graphic communication in three cases: FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, and United States v. Stevens.

Together these cases reveal fear to be an endemic factor in the rhetoric of First Amendment cases. This fascinating and original work will appeal to current legal practitioners and students of law, rhetoric, philosophy, and the First Amendment.
 

A fascinating deep dive into one city’s urban policy—and the anxiety over immigrants that informs it

 

The city of Toronto is often held up as a leader in diversity and inclusion. In Fearing the Immigrant, however, Parastou Saberi argues that Toronto’s urban policies are influenced by a territorialized and racialized security agenda—one that parallels the “War on Terror.” Focusing on the figure of the immigrant and so-called immigrant neighborhoods as the targets of urban policy, Saberi offers an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to the politics of racialization and the governing of alterity through space in contemporary cities.

A comprehensive study of urban policymaking in Canada’s largest city from the 1990s to the late 2010s, Fearing the Immigrant uses Toronto as a jumping-off point to understand how the nexus of development, racialization, and security works at the urban and international levels. Saberi situates urban policymaking in Toronto in relation to the dominant policies of international development and public health, counterinsurgency, and humanitarian intervention. Engaging with the genealogies and contemporary developments of major policy techniques involving mapping and policy concepts such as poverty, security, policing, development, empowerment, as well as social determinants of health, equity, and prevention, she scrutinizes the parallel ways these techniques and concepts operate in urban policy and international relations. 

Fearing the Immigrant ultimately asserts that the geopolitical fear of the immigrant is central to the formation of urban policy in Toronto. Rather than addressing the root causes of poverty, urban policy as it has been practiced aims to pacify the specter of urban unrest and to secure the production of a neocolonial urban order. As such, this book is an urgent call to reimagine urban policy in the name of equality and social justice.

Federalism and Regional Development is the resuit of the first German-American geography seminar, held at the University of Texas in September 1979. The chapters deal with the impact of geographic policy planning by various governmental agencies in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States, two countries with federal systems of government. Although various bureaucratic offices at the federal, state, county, and city levels became involved in spatial planning in both countries, no overall coordination of development planning existed. The contributors to this volume offer many theoretical and empirical perspectives on the evolution of federal policies and programs and their impact on geographic planning activities at all levels of government. The topics covered range from actual regional case studies in both countries to the framework of the agencies concerned with spatial planning. Numerous maps and tables document the data resources of the contributors and yield useful insights on the workings of the federal system.

Federalism is one of the most influential concepts in modern political discourse as well as the focus of immense controversy resulting from the lack of a single coherent definition. Malcolm M. Feeley and Edward Rubin expose the ambiguities of modern federalism, offering a powerful but generous treatise on the modern salience of the term.

“At last, an insightful examination of federalism stripped of its romance. An absolutely splendid book, rigorous but still accessible.”
—Larry Yackle, Boston University

“Professors Feeley and Rubin clearly define what is and is not federal system. This book should be required for serious students of comparative government and American government.”
—G. Ross Stephens, University of Missouri, Kansas City

“Feeley and Rubin have written a brilliant book that looks at federalism from many different perspectives—historical, political, and constitutional. Significantly expanding on their earlier pathbreaking work, they have explained the need for a theory of federalism and provided one. This is a must read book for all who are interested in the Constitution.”
—Erwin Chemerinsky, Duke University School of Law

WINNER OF THE 2020 SOCIETY FOR ECONOMIC BOTANY'S MARY W. KLINGER BOOK AWARD

An authoritative and thoroughly accessible overview of farming and food practices at Cahokia

Agriculture is rightly emphasized as the center of the economy in most studies of Cahokian society, but the focus is often predominantly on corn. This farming economy is typically framed in terms of ruling elites living in mound centers who demanded tribute and a mass surplus to be hoarded or distributed as they saw fit. Farmers are cast as commoners who grew enough surplus corn to provide for the elites.

Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland presents evidence to demonstrate that the emphasis on corn has created a distorted picture of Cahokia’s agricultural practices. Farming at Cahokia was biologically diverse and, as such, less prone to risk than was maize-dominated agriculture. Gayle J. Fritz shows that the division between the so-called elites and commoners simplifies and misrepresents the statuses of farmers—a workforce consisting of adult women and their daughters who belonged to kin groups crosscutting all levels of the Cahokian social order. Many farmers had considerable influence and decision-making authority, and they were valued for their economic contributions, their skills, and their expertise in all matters relating to soils and crops. Fritz examines the possible roles played by farmers in the processes of producing and preparing food and in maintaining cosmological balance.

This highly accessible narrative by an internationally known paleoethnobotanist highlights the biologically diverse agricultural system by focusing on plants, such as erect knotweed, chenopod, and maygrass, which were domesticated in the midcontinent and grown by generations of farmers before Cahokia Mounds grew to be the largest Native American population center north of Mexico. Fritz also looks at traditional farming systems to apply strategies that would be helpful to modern agriculture, including reviving wild and weedy descendants of these lost crops for redomestication. With a wealth of detail on specific sites, traditional foods, artifacts such as famous figurines, and color photos of significant plants, Feeding Cahokia will satisfy both scholars and interested readers.

Winner, Bolton-Johnson Prize, Conference on Latin American History, 2011
Murdo J. McLeod Book Prize, 2011

On the eastern coast of Brazil, facing westward across a wide magnificent bay, lies Salvador, a major city in the Americas at the end of the eighteenth century. Those who distributed and sold food, from the poorest street vendors to the most prosperous traders—black and white, male and female, slave and free, Brazilian, Portuguese, and African—were connected in tangled ways to each other and to practically everyone else in the city, and are the subjects of this book. Food traders formed the city's most dynamic social component during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, constantly negotiating their social place. The boatmen who brought food to the city from across the bay decisively influenced the outcome of the war for Brazilian independence from Portugal by supplying the insurgents and not the colonial army. Richard Graham here shows for the first time that, far from being a city sharply and principally divided into two groups—the rich and powerful or the hapless poor or enslaved—Salvador had a population that included a great many who lived in between and moved up and down.

The day-to-day behavior of those engaged in food marketing leads to questions about the government's role in regulating the economy and thus to notions of justice and equity, questions that directly affected both food traders and the wider consuming public. Their voices significantly shaped the debate still going on between those who support economic liberalization and those who resist it.

This is an introduction to the thought of the radical French thinker Félix Guattari. It is ideal for undergraduates and anyone studying political and cultural theory.

Guattari's main works were published in the 1970s and 1980s. His background was in psychoanalysis -- he was trained by Lacan and he practised as a psychoanalyst for much of his life. He developed a distinctive psychoanalytic method informed always by his revolutionary politics.

Guattari was actively involved in numerous political movements, from Trotskyism to Autonomism, tackling ecological and sexual politics along the way. A true believer in collectivity, much of his work was written in collaboration, most famously with Gilles Deleuze, with whom he wrote the hugely influential books Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. He also wrote with Antonio Negri and others.

This accessible introduction explores his highly original ideas -- including his ground-breaking conception of 'transversal politics' -- and the impact his concern with subjectivity had on wider political theory.

While the stereotype of the persistently pregnant Mexican-origin woman is longstanding, in the past fifteen years her reproduction has been targeted as a major social problem for the United States. Due to fear-fueled news reports and public perceptions about the changing composition of the nation's racial and ethnic makeup—the so-called Latinization of America—the reproduction of Mexican immigrant women has become a central theme in contemporary U. S. politics since the early 1990s.

In this exploration, Elena R. Gutiérrez considers these public stereotypes of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant women as "hyper-fertile baby machines" who "breed like rabbits." She draws on social constructionist perspectives to examine the historical and sociopolitical evolution of these racial ideologies, and the related beliefs that Mexican-origin families are unduly large and that Mexican American and Mexican immigrant women do not use birth control.

Using the coercive sterilization of Mexican-origin women in Los Angeles as a case study, Gutiérrez opens a dialogue on the racial politics of reproduction, and how they have developed for women of Mexican origin in the United States. She illustrates how the ways we talk and think about reproduction are part of a system of racial domination that shapes social policy and affects individual women's lives.

Winner, Book Award, Associaton for Borderland Studies, 2008

The U.S. and Mexican border regions have experienced rapid demographic and economic growth over the last fifty years. In this analysis, Joan Anderson and James Gerber offer a new perspective on the changes and tensions pulling at the border from both sides through a discussion of cross-border economic issues and thorough analytical research that examines not only the dramatic demographic and economic growth of the region, but also shifts in living standards, the changing political climate, and environmental pressures, as well as how these affect the lives of people in the border region.

Creating what they term a Border Human Development Index, the authors rank the quality of life for every U.S. county and Mexican municipio that touches the 2,000-mile border. Using data from six U.S. and Mexican censuses, the book adeptly illustrates disparities in various aspects of economic development between the two countries over the last six decades.

Anderson and Gerber make the material accessible and compelling by drawing an evocative picture of how similar the communities on either side of the border are culturally, yet how divided they are economically. The authors bring a heightened level of insight to border issues not just for academics but also for general readers. The book will be of particular value to individuals interested in how the border between the two countries shapes the debates on quality of life, industrial growth, immigration, cross-border integration, and economic and social development.

Fighting Corporate Abuse demonstrates, through compelling and revelatory analysis, the legislation and regulation needed to deal with the abuses in the corporate sector that have been revealed in recent years. It highlights the more general contribution of company law and practice to the current crisis in capitalism.

The first section develops a controversial argument, using detailed illustrations and vivid examples which show how the various abuses of predatory capitalism have been carried out through the manipulation of the corporate form and the creation of highly complex corporate groups. The group of authors, all experts in their fields, tackle head-on the issues of tax evasion, extraction of value and asset stripping, environmental destruction and managerial self-interest. In doing so, they paint a picture of a system that is abusive, and degenerated, but also a system which can be reformed.

In the run up to the UK general election, the authors develop of a set of practical proposals for an incoming government, outlining how each of these abuses could be curtailed and how a more acceptable and accountable form of corporate capitalism can be developed through national and international action.

Drawing on the group’s activism, as well as their academic experience in law, politics, economics and human rights, this will be an authoritative as well as a highly practical book.

Studies the complex constraints and trade-offs the second administration of Colombian President Uribe (2006–2010) encountered as it attempted to resolve that nation’s violent Marxist insurrection and to have a more efficient judicial system

Fighting Monsters in the Abyss offers a deeply insightful analysis of the efforts by the second administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2006–2010) to resolve a decades-long Marxist insurgency in one of Latin America’s most important nations. Continuing work from his prior books about earlier Colombian presidents and yet written as a stand-alone study, Colombia expert Harvey F. Kline illuminates the surprising successes and setbacks in Uribe’s response to this existential threat.

In State Building and Conflict Resolution in Colombia, 1986–1994, Kline documented and explained the limited successes of Presidents Virgilio Barco and César Gaviria in putting down the revolutionaries while also confronting challenges from drug dealers and paramilitary groups. The following president Andrés Pastrana then boldly changed course and attempted resolution through negotiations, an effort whose failure Kline examines in Chronicle of a Failure Foretold. In his third book, Showing Teeth to the Dragons, Kline shows how in his first term President Álvaro Uribe Vélez more successfully quelled the insurrection through a combination of negotiated demobilization of paramilitary groups and using US backing to mount more effective military campaigns.

Kline opens Fighting Monsters in the Abyss with a recap of Colombia’s complex political history, the development of Marxist rebels and paramilitary groups and their respective relationships to the narcotics trade, and the attempts of successive Colombian presidents to resolve the crisis. Kline next examines the ability of the Colombian government to reimpose rule in rebel-controlled territories as well as the challenges of administering justice. He recounts the difficulties in the enforcement of the landmark Law of Justice and Peace as well as two significant government scandals, that of the “false positives” (“falsos positivos”) in which innocent civilians were killed by the military to inflate the body counts of dead insurgents and a second scandal related to illegal wiretapping.

In tracing Uribe’s choices, strategies, successes, and failures, Kline also uses the example of Colombia to explore a dimension quite unique in the literature about state building: what happens when some members of a government resort to breaking rules or betraying their societies’ values in well-intentioned efforts to build a stronger state?

Prince George’s County, Maryland, is a suburban jurisdiction in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and is home to the highest concentration of Black middle-class residents in the United States. As such, it is well positioned to overcome White domination and anti-Black racism and their social and economic consequences. Yet Prince George’s does not raise tax revenue sufficient to provide consistent high-quality public goods and services. In Fighting for a Foothold, sociologist Angela Simms examines the factors contributing to Prince George’s financial troubles.

Simms draws on two years of observations of Prince George’s County’s budget and policy development processes, interviews with nearly 60 Prince George’s leaders and residents, and budget and policy analysis for Prince George’s County and its two Whiter, wealthier neighbors, Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfax County, Virginia. She argues legacy and ongoing government policies and business practices—such as federal mortgage insurance policy prior to 1968, local government reliance on property taxes, and private investment patterns—have resulted in disparities in wealth accumulation between Black and White Americans, not only for individuals and families but local jurisdictions as well. Prince George’s County has a lower cost of living than its Whiter, wealthier neighbors. As the most affordable county bordering D.C., it attracts a disproportionate share of the region’s core middle-class, lower middle-class, working class, and low-income residents, resulting in greater budget pressure. 

Prince George’s uses the same strategies as majority-White jurisdictions to increase revenue, such as taxing at similar rates and vying for development opportunities but does not attain the same financial returns. Ultimately, Simms contends Prince George’s endures “relative regional burden” and that the county effectively subsidizes Whiter counties’ wealth accumulation. She offers policy recommendations for removing the constraints Prince George’s County and other majority-Black jurisdictions navigate, including increased federal and state taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations, which will enhance the capacity for government to distribute and redistribute resources equitably; increased state-level funding of public goods and services, which would decrease local jurisdictions’ reliance on locally-generated tax revenue; and the creation of equity funds to remediate harms inflicted upon Black Americans.

Fighting for a Foothold is an in-depth analysis of the fiscal challenges experienced by Prince George’s County and by the suburban Black middle-class and majority-Black jurisdictions, more broadly. The book reveals how race, class, and local jurisdiction boundaries in metropolitan areas interact to create different material living conditions for Americans.