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Winner of a NWSA/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize

Groundbreaking and ambitious, Indians on Indian Lands presents the case for holding Indian diasporas accountable for acts of violence within a colonial settler nation.

Throughout Latin America, indigenous peoples are responding to state violence and pro-democracy social movements by asserting their rights to a greater measure of cultural autonomy and self-determination. This volume's rich case studies of movements in Colombia, Guatemala, and Brazil weigh the degree of success achieved by indigenous leaders in influencing national agendas when governments display highly ambivalent attitudes about strengthening ethnic diversity.

The contributors to this volume are leading anthropologists and indigenous activists from the United States and Latin America. They address the double binds of indigenous organizing and "working within the system" as well as the flexibility of political tactics used to achieve cultural goals outside the scope of state politics. The contributors answer questions about who speaks for indigenous communities, how indigenous movements relate to the popular left, and how conflicts between the national indigenous leadership and local communities play out in specific cultural and political contexts. The volume sheds new light on the realities of asymmetrical power relations and on the ways in which indigenous communities and their representatives employ Western constructions of subjectivity, alterity, and authentic versus counterfeit identity, as well as how they manipulate bureaucratic structures, international organizations, and the mass media to advance goals that involve distinctive visions of an indigenous future.

Advancing Indigenous and allied voices to address urgent environmental questions at the crossroads of Indigenous and settler state sovereignty

Authored by a group of majority Indigenous scholars from across Canada and the United States, this collection enacts a radical intervention into colonial impulses in traditional political ecology scholarship and its examination of state power in environmental conflicts. Centering the human–nature relationality of Indigenous cosmologies, this book confronts the terms by which land and water degradation, climate change, and other disastrous effects of extractive capitalism are understood.

Drawing on family histories, storytelling, autoethnography, and community-grounded research, Indigenous Political Ecology showcases a deeply self-reflexive examination of intergenerational struggles over land rights and attempts to resist settler colonial dynamics, including struggles over knowledge itself. Contributors recount the fraught history of Bears Ears National Monument, decades of Seminole-led efforts to restore the Everglades ecosystem, the creation of land education programs advancing Cherokee sovereignty, the impact of mining development on Mushkegowuk homelands in the Ring of Fire, and many other ongoing stories in which the “ecological” and “political” are being redefined.

Through its collectively led efforts and transdisciplinary approach, Indigenous Political Ecology models a new type of environmental scholarship that considers its modes of production integral to its contributors’ broader ethical and political commitments. Rooted in Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, this groundbreaking volume sets forth a powerful blueprint for a more just and sustainable path through the field of political ecology.

Contributors: Nicholas A. Brown, Jessica R. Catellino, Andrew Curley, Michelle Daigle, Jean Dennison, Ashley Nichole Lewis, Beth Rose Middleton Manning, Teresa Montoya, Dana E. Powell, Kyle Powys Whyte, Jen Rose Smith, Lisa Wilson.

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How Indigenous communities are transforming the idea and practice of reparations through their laws and leadership

In recent decades, a growing number of Indigenous groups across Canada have initiated movements for colonial reparations. Too often, the settler state has responded by attempting to enfold their work into a narrative of reconciliation that consigns colonialism to “sad chapters” of history. In this book, Pauline Wakeham calls attention to the ways that Indigenous reparations movements exceed state reconciliatory frameworks and prompt a deeper reckoning with the enduring structures of settler colonialism.

To expose and redress colonial injustices, Indigenous reparations movements draw upon long local traditions of political organizing as well as transformations on the global stage since World War II. As international law formulated new instruments regarding gross human rights violations, atrocity crimes, and the reparative obligations of states, colonized peoples across the world have sought to mobilize these mechanisms in their struggles for decolonization and reparations. While international law has provided strategic tools for this work, the colonial foundations of the field continue to limit how it conceptualizes and shapes access to justice. Indigenous Reparations and Settler Colonial Reckoning traces the specific implications for Indigenous nations whose land is occupied by settler states—nations whose legal orders remain subordinated to both settler “domestic” and international legal systems.

Amid this complex multijurisdictional terrain, how are Indigenous peoples carving out space to articulate their own visions of justice? To answer this question, Wakeham learns from the Inuit-led Qikiqtani Truth Commission as well as reparations movements for residential schools and the High Arctic Relocations of 1953 and 1955. These movements offer powerful lessons about the importance of centering Indigenous leadership and laws in redress processes, thereby connecting reparations to the living enactment of Indigenous rights.

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Uprisings by indigenous peoples of Ecuador and Bolivia between 1990 and 2005 overthrew the five-hundred-year-old racial and class order inherited from the Spanish Empire. It started in Ecuador with the Great Indigenous Uprising, which was fought for cultural and economic rights. A few years later massive indigenous mobilizations began in Bolivia, culminating in 2005 with the election of Evo Morales, the first indigenous president.

Jeffrey M. Paige, an internationally recognized authority on the sociology of revolutionary movements, interviewed forty-five indigenous leaders who were actively involved in the uprisings. The leaders recount how peaceful protest and electoral democracy paved the path to power. Through the interviews, we learn how new ideologies of indigenous socialism drew on the deep commonalities between the communal dreams of their ancestors and the modern ideology of democratic socialism. This new discourse spoke to the people most oppressed by both withering racism and neoliberal capitalism.

Emphasizing mutual respect among ethnic groups (including the dominant Hispanic group), the new revolutionary dynamic proposes a communal worldview similar to but more inclusive than Western socialism because it adds indigenous cultures and nature in a spiritual whole. Although absent in the major revolutions of the past century, the themes of indigenous revolution—democracy, indigeneity, spirituality, community, and ecology—are critically important.

Paige’s interviews present the powerful personal experiences and emotional intensity of the revolutionary leadership. They share the stories of mass mobilization, elections, and indigenous socialism that created a new form of twenty-first-century revolution with far-reaching applications beyond the Andes.

Indonesia: Archipelago of Fear is a fascinating and at times unsettling journey into the world's most populous Muslim nation as it struggles to emerge from decades of dictatorship and the plunder of its natural resources.

Andre Vltchek brings together more than a decade of investigative journalism in and around Indonesia to chart the recent history of the country, from the revolution which overthrew General Suharto's genocidal dictatorship in 1998 to the present day. He covers the full breadth of the country from Islamic Aceh to mostly Catholic East Timor.

Tracing Indonesia's current problems back to Suharto's coup and the genocide of 1965 – and the support given by the West to Suharto – Vltchek provides an intimate and deeply humane insight into the hopes and fears of Indonesia's people.

The industrialization process in Mexico began before that of any other nation in Latin America except Argentina, with the most rapid expansion of new industrial firms occurring in the 1930s and 1940s, and import substitution in capital goods evident as early as the late 1930s. Though Mexico’s trade relations have always been dependent on the United States, successive Mexican presidents in the postwar period attempted to control the penetration of foreign capital into Mexican markets.

In Industry, the State, and Public Policy in Mexico, Dale Story, recognizing the significance of the Mexican industrial sector, analyzes the political and economic role of industrial entrepreneurs in postwar Mexico. He uses two original data sets—industrial production data for 1929–1983 and a survey of the political attitudes of leaders of the two most important industrial organizations in Mexico—to address two major theoretical arguments relating to Latin American development: the meaning of late and dependent development and the nature of the authoritarian state. Story accepts the general relevance of these themes to Mexico but asserts that the country is an important variant of both.

With regard to the authoritarian thesis, the Mexican authoritarian state has demonstrated some crucial distinctions, especially between popular and elite sectors. The incorporation of the popular sector groups has closely fit the characteristics of authoritarianism, but the elite sectors have operated fairly independently of state controls, and the government has employed incentives or inducements to try to win their cooperation.

In short, industrialists have performed important functions, not only in accumulating capital and organizing economic enterprises but also by bringing together the forces of social change. Industrial entrepreneurs have emerged as a major force influencing the politics of growth, and the public policy arena has become a primary focus of attention for industrialists since the end of World War II.

Inequality, per se, has been with us for millennia. With the creation, growth and deepening of Capitalism across the globe, inequalities take on new dimensions, unknown in previous eras. As Capitalism has spread its wings across the globe over the last 200 or so years, so inequalities have deepened and widened, both inside Nation Sates, between nation States. These inequalities are of income, wealth and of power.

This book, written by the widely respected economic historian Douglas Dowd at the age of 90, is notable for his own experience and vivid memory, of the 1929-31 recession. Since the 1980s, and the predominance of the present neo-liberal ideology, all of the inequalities that the book presents have grown rapidly. Written as a critique of the counter-productivity of growing economic inequality and vindicated by the present world banking crisis, Dowd presents a strong argument against capitalist expansion, exploitation and oligarchic rule.

Dowd's conclusions, that the globalization and growth of the financial sector will impact painfully upon hundreds of millions of people, unknown to most of us in our lifetime, Dowd's book deals with these issues from the unique perspective of inequality. Presenting both a history of the current crisis and an overview of it's, Inequality will appeal to both a broad general readership, and provides an extremely useful reference point for students of political economy, economic history, contemporary economics and global politics.

An insightful rethinking of political socialization within Latino immigrant households.

Conventional wisdom tells us that children are passive recipients of political lessons from their parents, with caregivers being the ones who mold the developing behavior and beliefs of the children under their roof. Roberto F. Carlos challenges this preconception by revealing how Latino children, especially those with immigrant parents, often become key sources of political information and guidance in their families. As migrant parents navigate unfamiliar institutions and customs in the United States, they often turn to their children to broker information about everything from daily life to civic engagement. These roles not only place unique responsibilities on children but also create new pathways for them to shape the political behavior of their parents. Moreover, by taking on these roles, children learn the skills that can make them effective advocates later in life, even as they face resource disadvantages that normally correlate with reduced political participation and sense of political efficacy.

Drawing on six original surveys, multiple experiments, and in-depth interviews, including the accounts of youth helping protect their families from deportation, InformationBrokers shows how these dynamics influence both immigrant parents and their children in politically consequential ways. With the Latino population now over 64 million, Information Brokers offers vital insight into the political incorporation of America’s largest ethnic group.

The golden democratic tradition of an informed and involved electorate freely and rationally choosing its public officials seems to be at odds with American political reality. Thus the questions: On what basis do people vote and form opinions? How does the lack of information at the individual level affect system performance?

In this collection twenty-six distinguished political scientists discuss, debate, and define the relationship between information and the democracy it supposedly serves. The contributors address both the empirical and normative aspects of governing in the United States, employing psychological, sociological, and economic perspectives.

Anthony Downs's An Economic Theory of Democracy is one of the handful of books that reshaped political science in the post-World War II period. Information, Participation, and Choice traces the influence of Downs's ideas on subsequent research on voters, candidates, and parties in the United States and elsewhere. Since their publication in 1957, Downs's seminal ideas -- tweedledum and tweedledee politics and the "rationality" of political ignorance and nonparticipation on the part of voters--have shaped an ongoing debate about how politics actually work. The debate pits a public-choice model inspired by microeconomic precepts against a traditional textbook model that presumes a responsible, informed, and civic-minded citizenry and a set of elected officials motivated by concern for the public interest and policy convictions. The essays comprising Information, Participation, and Choice, by leading political scientists and economists, provide both a summary of Downs's key theoretical insights and an empirical examination of how well models inspired by Downs accurately describe U.S. political competition for Congress and the presidency.

Inner Worlds examines the emergence and operation of  representations of interiority—consciousness, “folk mind,” “spirit”—in Japan from its industrial revolution to the rise of fascism during the interwar period. These representations functioned to reproduce the capitalist system by containing its excesses. Thus, poverty in the 1880s was ostensibly the result of defects in one’s innate mental character. A degenerate “crowd mind” explained the strikes and riots of the early twentieth century. State subversion during the 1930s supposedly reflected an attenuated “folk spirit.” By locating the roots of capitalism’s excesses not within the socioeconomic order itself but within a defective interiority, ideologies of interiority operated to contain disruptions to Japan’s socioeconomic order, conceal its defects, and sustain the capitalist system. Inner Worlds reveals how interiority was constituted in ways consistent with both the demands of the emerging capitalist order of the late nineteenth century and the conditions that coalesced to form a fascist conjecture in the 1930s.

Investigating insecurity as the predominant logic of life in the present moment

Challenging several key concepts of the twenty-first century, including precarity, securitization, and resilience, this collection explores the concept of insecurity as a predominant logic governing recent cultural, economic, political, and social life in the West. The essays illuminate how attempts to make human and nonhuman systems secure and resilient end up having the opposite effect, making insecurity the default state of life today.

Unique in its wide disciplinary breadth and variety of topics and methodological approaches—from intellectual history and cultural critique to case studies, qualitative ethnography, and personal narrative—Insecurity is written predominantly from the viewpoint of the United States. The contributors’ analyses include the securitization of nongovernmental aid to Palestine, Bangladeshi climate refugees, and the privatization of U.S. military forces; the history of the concept of insecurity and the securitization of finance; racialized urban development in Augusta, Georgia; Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and the consequences of the Marie Kondo method; and the intricate politics of sexual harassment in the U.S. academy.

Contributors: Neel Ahuja, U of California, Santa Cruz; Aneesh Aneesh, U of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Lisa Bhungalia, Kent State U; Jennifer Doyle, U of California, Riverside; Annie McClanahan, U of California, Irvine; Andrea Miller, Florida Atlantic U; Mark Neocleous, Brunel U London; A. Naomi Paik, U of Illinois, Chicago; Maureen Ryan, U of South Carolina; Saskia Sassen, Columbia U.

President Obama may have delivered on his campaign promise to kill Osama bin Laden, but as an Al-Qaeda strategist bin Laden has been dead for years. This book introduces and examines the new generation of Al-Qaeda leaders who have been behind the most recent attacks.

Investigative journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad dedicated his life to revealing the strategies and inner workings of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He had access to top-level commanders in both movements, as well as within the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service. Shahzad's work was praised by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for 'bringing to light the troubles extremism poses to Pakistan's stability.' Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban explains the wider aims of both organisations and provides an essential analysis of major terrorist incidents, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

In May 2011, Shahzad was abducted and killed in Pakistan, days after writing an article suggesting that insiders in the Pakistani navy had colluded with Al-Qaeda in an attack on a naval air station. This book is a testament to his fearless reporting and analytical rigour. It will provide readers worldwide with an invaluable introduction to a new phase of the ongoing struggle against terrorism which threatens lives in so many countries.