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1441 books match the query 'World' and 77 start with p

cover of Pomponius Mela's Description of the World

Pomponius Mela's Description of the World

F. E. Romer

University of Michigan Press, 1998

The Description of the World (Chorographia), written by Pomponius Mela, was last translated into English over 400 years ago, and is the earliest surviving geographical work in Latin. Although first published at the height of the Roman Empire, in roughly 44 C.E., Pomponius Mela's work circulated during Europe's great Age of Exploration. His description is in the form of a voyage around the three "known" continents--Africa, Asia, and Europe. Mela integrates geographical description with more familiar historical, cultural, and mythological information. F. E. Romer's translation and commentary on this work help the reader to appreciate the intellectual and physical shape of the ancient world as Mela and the Romans perceived it.
Frank Romer's introduction assesses Mela as a literary and geographic writer, while his translation matches Mela's style. Mela knows of the Chinese and reports geographical and cultural information about Sri Lanka and India, as well as Mediterranean and European locales that are less remote to his experience. The outer edges of all the continents, including Europe, however, remained unfamiliar to the Romans, and it is on the inhabited world's outer edges that the creatures of legend and mythology were believed to live. Romer's commentary clarifies specific ideas raised in the text. He identifies and explains issues, and he points the reader to ancient sources and modern studies.
This new study will intrigue students and teachers of ancient history. This edition of Mela's geography will be of interest to map lovers, historians, classicists, and anyone interested in history of travel, geography, and education.

F.E. Romer is Professor and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, East Carolina University. He is the author of numerous articles and has received awards for both his writing and teaching.

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cover of Popular Politics and Rebellion in Mexico: Manuel Lozada and La Reforma, 1855-1876

Popular Politics and Rebellion in Mexico

Manuel Lozada and La Reforma, 1855-1876

Zachary Brittsan

Vanderbilt University Press, 2015

The political conflict during Mexico's Reform era in the mid-nineteenth century was a visceral battle between ideologies and people from every economic and social class. As Popular Politics and Rebellion in Mexico develops the story of this struggle, the role of one key rebel, Manuel Lozada, comes into focus. The willingness of rural peasants to take up arms to defend the Catholic Church and a conservative political agenda explains the bitterness of the War of Reform and the resulting financial and political toll that led to the French Intervention. Exploring the activities of rural Jalisco's residents in this turbulent era and Lozada's unique position in the drama, Brittsan reveals the deep roots of colonial religious and landholding practices, exemplified by Lozada, that stood against the dominant political current represented by Benito Juarez and liberalism.


Popular Politics and Rebellion in Mexico also explores the conditions under which a significant segment of Mexican society aligned itself with conservative interests and French interlopers, revealing this constituency to be more than a collection of reactionary traitors to the nation. To the contrary, armed rebellion--or at least the specter of force--protected local commercial interests in the short run and enhanced the long-term prospects for political autonomy. Manuel Lozada's story adds a necessary layer of complexity to our understanding of the practical and ideological priorities that informed the tumultuous conflicts of the mid-nineteenth century.

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cover of Populism in Latin America

Populism in Latin America

Michael L. Conniff

University of Alabama Press, 1999

Populism in Latin America provides a lively, accessible, and up-to- date introduction to the fascinating populist leaders who dominated much of 20th-century Latin American politics.  

From the earliest years in the La Plata region to the end of the 1990s, Latin American populists proved amazingly successful at gaining high office, holding onto power, maintaining their followings, and renewing their careers. They raised more campaign money, got more voters to the polls, and held followers' allegiances far better than traditional politicians. Certainly some populist leaders corrupted their countries, others manipulated their followers, and still others disgraced themselves. Nevertheless, populist leaders were extraordinarily effective in reaching masses of voters, and some left positive legacies for future generations. Populism in Latin America provides an in-depth and thought-provoking assessment of the most prominent of these colorful and charismatic leaders, whose impact has been profound yet not fully recognized. 

Latin American scholars here survey the populist experiences in those nations most profoundly influenced by this distinctively Latin American way of conducting the public's business--Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. Joel Horowitz, for example, examines Argentina's strong legacy of populism, beginning with the remarkable Hip-lito Yrigoyen, moving through the archetypal Juan and Evita Perón, and ending with still-active president Carlos Menem. Ximena Sosa-Buchholz provides a fascinating view of populism in Ecuador, a country often overlooked by students of modern politics. Kurt Weyland challenges the notion that neoliberal, or monetarist, economic policies are incompatible with populism. Other populist leaders profiled include Lazaro Cardenas, Romulo Betancourt, and Alberto Fujimori to name a few.  

In his epilogue and bibliographic essay, volume editor Michael Conniff suggests new directions for further research and offers a comprehensive survey of the evolution of major writings, theories, and methodologies in the field. 


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cover of Populism in Latin America: Second Edition

Populism in Latin America

Second Edition

Michael L. Conniff

University of Alabama Press, 2012

A scholarly analysis of the origins, evolution, and enduring impact of populism in Latin American political life.

This updated edition of Populism in Latin America discusses new developments in populism as a political phenomenon and the emergence of new populist political figures in Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela in particular.

For more than one hundred years—from the beginning of the twentieth to the early twenty-first century—Latin American populists proved amazingly successful at gaining high office, holding on to power, maintaining their followings, and renewing their careers.  They raised more campaign money, got more voters to the polls,and held followers’ allegiances far better than traditional politicians.  Certainly some populist leaders were corrupt, others manipulated their followers, and still others disgraced themselves. Nevertheless, populist leaders were  extraordinarily effective in reaching masses of voters, and some left positive legacies for future generations.

Populism in Latin America examines the notion of populism in the political and social culture of Latin American societies as expressed through the populist leaders of several Latin American countries including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela. This second edition also includes a new preface by Kenneth M. Roberts, professor of comparative and Latin American politics and the Robert S. Harrison Director of the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University.

Contributors
Jorge Basurto / Michael L. Conniff / Paul W. Drake / Steve Ellner / Joel Horowitz /
Kenneth M. Roberts / W. Frank Robinson /Ximena Sosa / Steve Stein / Kurt Weyland

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cover of Portraits: A Gallery of Intellectuals

Portraits

A Gallery of Intellectuals

Edward Shils

University of Chicago Press, 1997

In these vivid portraits of prominent twentieth-century intellectuals, Edward Shils couples the sensitivity of a biographer with the profound knowledge of a highly respected scholar. Ranging as widely across various disciplines as Shils himself did, the essays gathered here share a distaste for faddists who "run with the intellectual mob" and a deep respect for intellectuals who maintain their integrity under great pressure.

Highlights include an affectionate treatment of Leo Szilard, the physicist whose involvement with the development of the atomic bomb led him to work ceaselessly to address its social consequences; a discussion of the educational philosophy of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the University of Chicago's fifth and most controversial president; an appreciative account of the Polish emigré Leopold Labedz's well-informed and outspoken resistance to Communism; and an essay about the extraordinary Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri.

Many of these essays have appeared in The American Scholar, edited by Joseph Epstein, who introduces this volume with his own portrait of Edward Shils.

"Though professionally a sociologist, Edward Shils was a man of wide cosmopolitan culture and experience, greatly concerned with the public problems of his time: in particular with those created by the rise of new and dangerous ideologies, the frightening possibilities of science, and the apparent abrogation of public responsibility by many Western intellectuals."—Hugh Trevor-Roper

The late Edward Shils was a member of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought for forty-five years and a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge University. His many books include The Calling of Sociology and The Intellectuals and the Powers, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
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cover of Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary

Post-Communist Mafia State

The Case of Hungary

Bálint Magyar

Central European University Press, 2016

In an article in 2001 the author analyzed the way Fidesz, the party on government for the first time then, was eliminating the institutional system of the rule of law. At that time, many readers doubted the legitimacy of the new approach, whose key categories were the 'organized over-world', the 'state employing mafia methods' and the 'adopted political family'. Critics considered these categories metaphors rather than elements of a coherent conceptual framework. Ten years later Fidesz won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections: the institutional obstacles of exerting power were thus largely removed. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. While in many post-communist systems a segment of the party and secret service became the elite in possession of not only political power but also of wealth, Fidesz, as a late-coming new political predator, was able to occupy this position through an aggressive change of elite. The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are led by the logic of power and wealth concentration in the hands of the clan. But while the classical mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of interest by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The new conceptual framework is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules.
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cover of Post-Communist Malaise: Cinematic Responses to European Integration

Post-Communist Malaise

Cinematic Responses to European Integration

Zoran Samardzija

Rutgers University Press, 2020

The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was supposed to bring about the “end of history” with capitalism and liberal democracy achieving decisive victories. Europe would now integrate and reconcile with its past. However, the aftershocks of the financial crisis of 2008—the rise in right-wing populism, austerity politics, and mass migration—have shown that the ideological divisions which haunted Europe in the twentieth century still remain. It is within this context that Post-Communist Malaise revives discourses of political modernism and revisits debates from Marxism and seventies film theory. Analyzing work of Theo Angelopoulos, Věra Chytilová, Srdjan Dragojević, Jean-Luc Godard,  Miklós Jancsó, Emir Kusturica, Dušan Makavejev, Cristi Puiu, Jan Švankmajer, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Béla Tarr, the book focuses on how select cinemas from Eastern Europe and the Balkans critique the neoliberal integration of Europe whose failures fuel the rise of nationalism and right-wing politics. By politicizing art cinema from the regions, Post-Communist Malaise asks fundamental questions about film, aesthetics, and ideology. It argues for the utopian potential of the materiality of cinematic time to imagine a new political and cultural organization for Europe.
 
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cover of Postcolonial Studies and Beyond

Postcolonial Studies and Beyond

Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty, eds.

Duke University Press, 2005

An interdisciplinary collection of essays designed to map out a wide-ranging and productive future for postcolonial studies, this volume assesses the current state of the field and points toward its most promising new developments. In addressing questions about the definition and relevance of postcolonial scholarship, many of the essays consider its relation to the study of globalization. While some contributors offer broad reflections on the existing two-way influence between postcolonial theory and established university disciplines such as literary criticism and history, others forge ahead into some vital, if nascent, areas for postcolonial research such as media studies, environmental studies, religious studies, and linguistic and semantic analysis.

The contributors represent many of the fields altered by postcolonial studies over the past two decades, including literary studies, history, anthropology, Asian and African studies, and political science. They model diverse applications of postcolonial theory to Latin America, East Asia, the Middle East, and the United States. Postcolonial Studies and Beyond propels the field forward. It showcases scholars coming from intellectual precincts usually considered outside the purview of the postcolonial finding new ways to deploy classic techniques of postcolonial analysis, and scholars strongly associated with postcolonial studies offering substantial critiques designed to challenge the field’s most fundamental assumptions.

Contributors. Tani E. Barlow, Ali Behdad, Daniel Boyarin, Timothy Brennan, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, Laura Chrisman, Jean Comaroff, Frederick Cooper, Vilashini Cooppan, Jed Esty, James Ferguson, Peter Hulme, Suvir Kaul, Neil Lazarus, Ania Loomba, Florencia E. Mallon, Nivedita Menon, Rob Nixon, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, David Scott, Ella Shohat, Kelwyn Sole, Robert Stam, Rebecca L. Stein

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cover of Poverty and Problem-Solving under Military Rule: The Urban Poor in Lima, Peru

Poverty and Problem-Solving under Military Rule

The Urban Poor in Lima, Peru

By Henry A. Dietz

University of Texas Press, 1980

Many countries in Latin America have experienced both rapid urbanization and military involvement in politics. Yet few studies examine how military regimes react to the political pressures that wide-spread urban poverty creates or how the poor operate under authoritative rule. Henry Dietz investigates Lima’s poor during the “revolution” of General Juan Velasco (1968–1975). His study examines both the structural conditions promoting poverty and the individual consequences of being poor. The poor join together in several ways to resolve politicized communal needs; Dietz’s data indicate that the local neighborhood plays a crucial role in determining modes of involvement. Considerable attention is given to government attempts to encourage and control political activities by the poor. Dietz analyzes the failure of SINAMOS, the regime’s mobilization agency, and in so doing raises general questions about corporatist solutions to social problems. The wide range of original survey, informant, and ethnographic data provides much new information on elite-mass relationships in contemporary Latin America. Dietz’s research illuminates much that is of concern to scholars and planners dealing with urbanization, poverty, and social policy formation.
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cover of Power / Knowledge / Land: Contested Ontologies of Land and Its Governance in Africa

Power / Knowledge / Land

Contested Ontologies of Land and Its Governance in Africa

Laura A. German

University of Michigan Press, 2022

The 2008 outcry over the “global land grab” made headlines around the world, leading to a sustained interest in the dynamics and fate of customary land among both academics and development practitioners. In Power/Knowledge/Land, author Laura German profiles the consolidation of a global knowledge regime surrounding land and its governance within international development circles in the decade following this outcry, and the growing enrollment of previously antagonistic actors within it. Drawing theoretical insights on the inseparability of power and knowledge, German reveals the dynamics of knowledge practices that have enabled the longstanding project of commodifying customary land – and the more contemporary interests in acquiring and financializing it – to be advanced and legitimated by capturing the energies of socially progressive forces. By bringing theories of change from the emergent land governance orthodoxy into dialogue with the ethnographic evidence from across the African continent and beyond, concepts masquerading as universal and self-evident truths are provincialized, and their role in commodifying customary land and entrenching colonial futurities put on display. In doing so, the volume brings wider academic debates surrounding productive forms of power into the heart of the land grab debate, while enhancing their accessibility to a wider audience.

Power/Knowledge/Land takes current scholarly debates surrounding land grabs beyond their theoretical moorings in critical agrarian studies, political economy and globalization into contemporary debates surrounding the politics of knowledge—from theories of coloniality to ontological anthropology, thereby enabling new dynamics of the phenomenon to be revealed. The book deploys a pioneering epistemology integrating deconstructionist approaches (to reveal the tactics, truth claims and ontological assumptions of global knowledge brokers), with systematic qualitative reviews and comparative study (to contrast these dominant constructs with the evidence and reveal alternative ways of knowing “land” and practicing “security” from the ethnographic literature). This helps to reveal the Western and modernist biases in the narratives that have been advanced about women, custom, and security, revealing how the coloniality of knowledge works to grease the wheels of land takings by advancing highly provincialized constructs aligned with western interests as universal truths.

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cover of Power Of Prayer Around The World

Power Of Prayer Around The World

Glenn Mosley

Templeton Press, 2005

 

Universally, the power of prayer has been recognized by many cultures for immeasurable time. Whether it be a part of a formal service recited with a congregation of worshipers or an individual, quiet moment, prayer is part of the lives of people from a variety of religions.

There seems to be an innate urge among humanity to connect with a higher source of energy and love when we need guidance or direction, and this is called prayer. By reading the prayers from religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, from cultures in Africa, India, Egypt, and China, we begin to share the sense of a common experience.

The deepest inner feelings and longings are similar—concern for family, assistance in healing, a longing for peace, or a wish for greater wisdom. For some people, prayer can be thought of as a way to ask for specific goals or special favors. This type of prayer may or may not be effective. Another type of prayer exists when all selfish desire is put aside and we feel ourselves in communion with God. At this point, our greatest wish is that God's will be done.

There may be pressing concerns that make us turn our sights upward, but we learn to let go of the end result. At this point, prayer becomes a way of opening up to the universal, loving, creative energy that exists and is far greater than any person could imagine. This is the source of miracles, of faith and unconditional love. Prayer then becomes more than a means to an end; it becomes a state of humility and of awe. It can exist whether we are washing the floor or composing a symphony. Prayer is communion with the Divine, a universal loving creative force that exists in a variety of ways for people around the world.

This book brings together an inspirational collection of prayer suitable for all ages and traditions. In addition, it offers insight and guidance about the nature of prayer that will be useful for the serious seeker.

 

 

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cover of Power Politics: How China and Russia Reshape the World

Power Politics

How China and Russia Reshape the World

Rob de Wijk

Amsterdam University Press, 2015

We tend to think of ourselves as living in a time when nations, for the most part, obey the rule of law - and where they certainly don't engage in the violent grabs for territory that have characterised so much of human history. But as Rob de Wijk shows in this book, power politics very much remains a force on the international scene. Offering analyses of such actions as Putin's annexation of the Crimea and China's attempts to claim large parts of the South China Sea, de Wijk explains why power politics never truly went away-and why, as the West's position weakens, it's likely to play a bigger and bigger role on the global stage in the coming years.
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cover of Power in Concert: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance

Power in Concert

The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance

Jennifer Mitzen

University of Chicago Press, 2013

How states cooperate in the absence of a sovereign power is a perennial question in international relations. With Power in Concert, Jennifer Mitzen argues that global governance is more than just the cooperation of states under anarchy: it is the formation and maintenance of collective intentions, or joint commitments among states to address problems together. The key mechanism through which these intentions are sustained is face-to-face diplomacy, which keeps states’ obligations to one another salient and helps them solve problems on a day-to-day basis.

Mitzen argues that the origins of this practice lie in the Concert of Europe, an informal agreement among five European states in the wake of the Napoleonic wars to reduce the possibility of recurrence, which first institutionalized the practice of jointly managing the balance of power. Through the Concert’s many successes, she shows that the words and actions of state leaders in public forums contributed to collective self-restraint and a commitment to problem solving—and at a time when communication was considerably more difficult than it is today. Despite the Concert’s eventual breakdown, the practice it introduced—of face to face diplomacy as a mode of joint problem solving—survived and is the basis of global governance today.

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cover of Power, Institutions, and Leadership in War and Peace: Lessons from Peru and Ecuador, 1995–1998

Power, Institutions, and Leadership in War and Peace

Lessons from Peru and Ecuador, 1995–1998

By David R. Mares and David Scott Palmer

University of Texas Press, 2012

In January 1995, fighting broke out between Ecuadorian and Peruvian military forces in a remote section of the Amazon. It took more than three years and the interplay of multiple actors and factors to achieve a definitive peace agreement, thus ending what had been the region's oldest unresolved border dispute. This conflict and its resolution provide insights about other unresolved and/or disputed land and sea boundaries which involve almost every country in the Western Hemisphere.

Drawing on extensive field research at the time of the dispute and during its aftermath, including interviews with high-ranking diplomats and military officials, Power, Institutions, and Leadership in War and Peace is the first book-length study to relate this complex border dispute and its resolution to broader theories of conflict. The findings emphasize an emerging leadership approach in which individuals are not mere captives of power and institutions. In addition, the authors illuminate an overlap in national and international arenas in shaping effective articulation, perception, and selection of policy.

In the “new” democratic Latin America that emerged in the late 1970s through the early 1990s, historical memory remains influential in shaping the context of disputes, in spite of presumed U.S. post–Cold War influence. This study offers important, broader perspectives on a hemisphere still rife with boundary disputes as a rising number of people and products (including arms) pass through these borderlands.

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cover of Power, Resistance, Ideology and the State: Charles Tripp and the Comparative Politics of the Middle East

Power, Resistance, Ideology and the State

Charles Tripp and the Comparative Politics of the Middle East

Edited by Daniel Neep, Toby Dodge, and Ali M. Ansari

Gingko, 2025

A wide-ranging, innovative, and essential exploration of the politics of today’s Middle East.

Power, Resistance, Ideology and the State: Charles Tripp and the Comparative Politics of the Middle East seeks to present a new understanding of a region of unprecedented volatility, where postcolonial projects of state-driven development have now expired, old ruling elites have been delegitimized, and political Islam discredited. The work of Charles Tripp, professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) for over three decades, has shaped a distinct approach to the study of Middle East politics with an analytical sensibility that is empirically rich, theoretically insightful, and historically sensitive. This volume brings together contributions from ten political scientists and historians from across Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, each of which takes Tripp’s work as an intellectual point of departure for studying Middle East politics. 

Against this background, the contributors explore the contemporary developments that have emerged to fill the intellectual and material shortcomings created by the systemic failures of economics and politics in the region. 

The contributions focus on four themes that are central to an understanding of Middle East politics—power, resistance, ideology, and the state—to examine political trends in cases ranging from Iran and Iraq to Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Each chapter combines extensive field research and a knowledge of regional politics with methodological and philosophical reflexivity to produce a collection of papers at the cutting edge of contemporary Middle East Studies.
 
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Practicing Electoral Assistance

A Critical Ethnography

Eva Johais

University of Michigan Press, 2027

Electoral assistance is the prototypical tool to promote democracy and the related goals of peace and development. Rather than assessing whether this tool achieves its intentions, Practicing Electoral Assistance explains how international support for election processes has become normal practice. For this practice-theoretical approach to world politics, Eva Johais combines theories and methods from anthropology, international relations, political science, and sociology. Based on multisited ethnographic fieldwork, she presents detailed empirical knowledge of the relevant institutions, organizations, actors, and actions. Practicing Electoral Assistance takes readers to hotel rooftops, embassies, government buildings, and offices in Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Conakry (Guinea), and to the United Nations headquarters in New York. Through this journey, readers come to understand that electoral assistance means different things: it is a mission for democracy promoters, an intervention tool for peacebuilders, a work for election experts, and a business line for managers of development organizations.  While the practice is anchored in the aid system, it has gained independence from the system’s structural constraints through the professionalization of election administration and the establishment of the transnational election profession.

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cover of Precarious Democracy: Ethnographies of Hope, Despair, and Resistance in Brazil

Precarious Democracy

Ethnographies of Hope, Despair, and Resistance in Brazil

Benjamin Junge

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Brazil changed drastically in the 21st century’s second decade. In 2010, the country’s outgoing president Lula left office with almost 90% approval. As the presidency passed to his Workers' Party successor, Dilma Rousseff, many across the world hailed Brazil as a model of progressive governance in the Global South. Yet, by 2019, those progressive gains were being dismantled as the far right-wing politician Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency of a bitterly divided country. Digging beneath this pendulum swing of policy and politics, and drawing on rich ethnographic portraits, Precarious Democracy shows how these transformations were made and experienced by Brazilians far from the halls of power. Bringing together powerful and intimate stories and portraits from Brazil's megacities to rural Amazonia, this volume demonstrates the necessity of ethnography for understanding social and political change, and provides crucial insights on one of the most epochal periods of change in Brazilian history.
 
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cover of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship

Precarity and Belonging

Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship

Catherine S. Ramírez

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Precarity and Belonging examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion, under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity affecting both citizens and noncitizens, have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage. This collection brings mobility, precarity, and citizenship together in order to explore the points of contact and friction, and, thus, the spaces for a possible politics of commonality between citizens and noncitizens.The editors ask: What does modern citizenship mean in a world of citizens, denizens, and noncitizens, such as undocumented migrants, guest workers, permanent residents, refugees, detainees, and stateless people? How is the concept of citizenship, based on assumptions of deservingness, legality, and productivity, challenged when people of various and competing statuses and differential citizenship practices interact with each other, revealing their co-constitutive connections? How is citizenship valued or revalued when labor and social precarity impact those who seemingly have formal rights and those who seemingly or effectively do not? This book interrogates such binaries as citizen/noncitizen, insider/outsider, entitled/unentitled, “legal”/“illegal,” and deserving/undeserving in order to explore the fluidity--that is, the dynamism and malleability--of the spectra of belonging.
 
 
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cover of Pride, Not Prejudice: National Identity as a Pacifying Force in East Asia

Pride, Not Prejudice

National Identity as a Pacifying Force in East Asia

Eunbin Chung

University of Michigan Press, 2022

As shown by China’s relationship to Japan, and Japan’s relationship to South Korea, even growing regional economic interdependencies are not enough to overcome bitter memories grounded in earlier wars, invasions, and periods of colonial domination. Although efforts to ease historical animosity have been made, few have proven to be successful in Northeast Asia. In previous research scholars anticipated an improvement in relations through thick economic interdependence or increased societal contact. In economic terms, however, Japan and China already trade heavily: Japan has emerged as China’s largest trading partner and China as second largest to Japan. Societal contact is already intense, as millions of Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese visit one another’s countries annually as students, tourists, and on business trips. But these developments have not alleviated international distrust and negative perception, or resolved disagreement on what constitutes “adequate reparation” regarding the countries’ painful history.

Noticing clashes of strong nationalisms around the world in areas like Northeast Asia, numerous studies have suggested that more peaceful relations are likely only if countries submerge or paper over existing national identities by promoting universalism. Pride, Not Prejudice argues, to the contrary, that affirmation of national identities may be a more effective way to build international cooperation. If each national population reflects on the values of their national identity, trust and positive perception can increase between countries. This idea is consistent with the theoretical foundation that those who have a clear, secure, and content sense of self, in turn, can be more open, evenhanded, and less defensive toward others. In addition, this reduced defensiveness also enhances guilt admission by past “inflictors” of conflict and colonialism. Eunbin Chung borrows the social psychological theory of self-affirmation and applies it to an international context to argue that affirmation of a national identity, or reflecting on what it means to be part of one’s country, can increase trust, guilt recognition, and positive perception between countries.

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cover of Principles of Catholic Theology, Book 5: No One is More Human Than God: On the Trinitarian Presence of God in the World

Principles of Catholic Theology, Book 5

No One is More Human Than God: On the Trinitarian Presence of God in the World

Thomas Joseph White

Catholic University of America Press, 2026

This work explores a Christian understanding of God’s presence in the world. As the Creator of all that exists, the Creator-Trinity is mysteriously present to all things, and truly but imperfectly knowable as such. In addition to this creative presence, however, there is also the manifestation of God’s presence as a gift of grace. By supernatural faith, the trinitarian life of God is made known to us as an object of the Christian mystical life. This life is centered especially upon God’s unique presence by way of Incarnation, human life, death, and resurrection, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This work ex­plores these notions in comparison with other religious traditions, in a Cath­olic as well as ecumenical perspective. Original considerations are offered re­garding the nature of scriptural inspiration, the Church as the mystical body of Christ, and the sacraments as instrumental expressions of the Incarnation, all with a view to the notion of mystical experience, and union with God. Principles of Catholic Theology, Book 5 is a continuation of Fr. Thomas Joseph White’s collection of essays, extending over a range of fundamental topics in Catholic dogmatic theology.
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cover of Private Aid, Political Activism: American Medical Relief to Spain and China, 1936–1949

Private Aid, Political Activism

American Medical Relief to Spain and China, 1936–1949

Aelwen D. Wetherby

University of Missouri Press, 2017

This book explores American medical relief to Spain and China in the 1930s and 1940s as responses to the Spanish Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War. Although serving vastly different peoples in strikingly distant landscapes, the three aid organizations focused on here illustrate a transition in how Americans responded to foreign conflict and how humanitarian aid was used as a political tool. The story of these small and relatively unknown organizations can help refine historical understanding of the development of humanitarianism and the evolution of global citizenship in the twentieth century.

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cover of Privileged Precarities: An Organizational Ethnography of Early Career Workers at the United Nations

Privileged Precarities

An Organizational Ethnography of Early Career Workers at the United Nations

Linda M. Mülli

Campus Verlag, 2021

An ethnography on early-career workers facing job insecurity at the United Nations.

This ethnography focuses on the work and lifeworld at the United Nations in Geneva and Vienna. By emphasizing the perspectives of entry-level workers, this book addresses the increasing flexibility and job insecurity for those at the beginning of their potential UN careers. It explores questions such as: How do career aspirants reconcile their narratives with the organization’s image built over the past decades? How can we understand institutional power and individual agency through the lens of ritual theory and the theory of social orders? This study finally examines the entangled discourses around privilege and prestige on the one hand and the precarity and vulnerability of a growing number of UN workers on the other hand. It shows that these phenomena are not contractionary but two sides of the coin. Using the UN as an example, the study considers mechanisms of flexible and unstable work environments in times of cognitive and affective capitalism.
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cover of Progress: Fact or Illusion?

Progress

Fact or Illusion?

Leo Marx and Bruce Mazlish, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1996

Progress, perhaps the fundamental secular belief of modern Western society, has come under heavy fire recently because, after three centuries, advances in science and technology seem increasingly to bring problems in their wake: alienation, environmental degradation, the threat of nuclear destruction. The idea of progress is brought into question by postmodern critique, attacking the notion of science as truth. Yet no other meaningful organization of humankind's sense of time looms on the horizon. This volume seeks to reassess the meaning and prospects of the idea of progress. Looking toward the millennium, the volume seeks to evaluate the idea's worth both in theory--is it intellectually viable and defensible today?--and practice--even if theoretically defensible, is the idea undermined in actual life? Approaching these questions from the perspectives of science, anthropology, economics, religion, political philosophy, feminism, medicine, environmental studies, and the Third World, the contributors, all distinguished scholars, provide a unique and critical balance. Ultimately, the contributors find that progress is both a fact and an illusion: it does occur in certain areas, but it does not sweep all before it as its Enlightenment votaries thought it would. This foundational idea permeates discourse in the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities and will engage historians, students of the history of science and technology, sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, literary scholars, and art critics, as well as those interested in civilization in general. Contributors include: Jill Ker Conway, Zhiyuan Cui, Leon Eisenberg, Robert Heilbroner, Gerald Holton, Leo Marx, Bruce Mazlish, Ali A. Mazrui, Alan Ryan, John M. Staudenmaier, George W. Stocking, Jr., and Richard White. "A discerning reconsideration of the idea of 'progress' in a variety of carefully defined theoretical and empirical-historical contexts." --David Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley Leo Marx is Professor of American Cultural History, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bruce Mazlish is Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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cover of Projecting the Nation: History and Ideology on the Israeli Screen

Projecting the Nation

History and Ideology on the Israeli Screen

Eran Kaplan

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Projecting the Nation: History and Ideology on the Israeli Screen is a wide-ranging history of over seven decades of Israeli cinema.  The only book in English to offer this type of historical scope was Ella Shohat’s Israeli Cinema: East West and the Politics of Representation from 1989.  Since 1989, however, Israeli cinema and Israeli society have undergone some crucial transformations and, moreover, Shohat’s book offered a single framework through which to judge Israeli cinema: a critique of orientalism. Projecting the Nation contends that Israeli cinema offers much richer historical and ideological perspectives that expose the complexity of the Israeli project.  By analyzing Israeli films which address such issues as the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi divide, the kibbutz and urban life, the rise of religion in Israeli public life and more, the book explores the way cinema has represented and also shaped our understanding of the history of modern Israel as it evolved from a collectivist society to a society where individualism and adherence to local identities is the dominant ideology. 
 
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cover of Promise and Despair: The First Struggle for a Non-Racial South Africa

Promise and Despair

The First Struggle for a Non-Racial South Africa

Martin Plaut

Ohio University Press, 2016

The struggle for freedom in South Africa goes back a long way. In 1909, a remarkable interracial delegation of South Africans traveled to London to lobby for a non-racialized constitution and franchise for all. Among their allies was Mahatma Gandhi, who later encapsulated lessons from the experience in his most important book, Hind Swaraj. Though the mission failed, the London debates were critical to the formation of the African National Congress in 1912.

With impeccable storytelling and rich character depictions, Martin Plaut describes the early quest for black franchise and the seeds it planted for a new South Africa. While most people believe that black South Africans obtained the vote in 1994, men of all races voted in the Cape Colony for almost a century, sometimes deciding election outcomes. The London mission was part of a long history of nonwhite political agency.

Taking as its centerpiece the 1909 delegation, Promise and Despair covers the twelve years between the South African War and the First World War, during which the major forces that would shape twentieth-century South Africa were forged. Plaut reveals new details of the close collaboration between Gandhi and the ANC leadership during the Indian-South African community’s struggle for their rights, the influence of the American South on South African racial practices, and the workings of the Imperial system.

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cover of Proprietors for a Democratic City: Space and Political Voice in Italy

Proprietors for a Democratic City

Space and Political Voice in Italy

Robin M. LeBlanc

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

Lessons from Bologna on how ordinary people take charge of urban spaces and make their cities more democratic

Proprietors for a Democratic City examines how nonelite individuals politically engage with urban spaces—even when they do not formally own them. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork throughout Bologna, Italy, Robin M. LeBlanc presents valuable models of democratic community-making through imaginative occupation, curation, and coalition-building projects, with critical implications for the study of cities and democracy.

Once a standard-bearer of progressive governance, contemporary Bologna now faces globally emergent challenges to its democratic functioning, from a lack of affordable housing to the rise of an authoritarian and xenophobic Far Right. But amid this precarity, everyday citizens employ the spaces around them to influence the political life of the city. Through interviews with a wide range of Bolognese, from urban planners and real estate developers to housing office staff, retirees in public gardening plots, and members of immigrant and youth squatter collectives, LeBlanc illuminates the humble origins of coalitional work that can meaningfully address today’s urban economic, environmental, and demographic crises.

Challenging both capitalistic and Marxist conventional wisdom, Proprietors for a Democratic City is a vivid portrait of the urban landscape and an inspiring call to empower regular people to create vibrant democratic spaces.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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cover of Putting Federalism in Its Place: The Territorial Politics of Social Policy Revisited

Putting Federalism in Its Place

The Territorial Politics of Social Policy Revisited

Scott L. Greer, Daniel Béland, André Lecours, and Kenneth A. Dubin

University of Michigan Press, 2023

What does federalism do to welfare states? This question arises in scholarly debates about policy design as well as in discussions about the right political institutions for a country. It has frustrated many, with federalism seeming to matter in all sorts of combinations with all sorts of issues, from nationalism to racism to intergovernmental competition. The diffuse federalism literature has not come to compelling answers for very basic questions.

Scott L. Greer, Daniel Béland, André Lecours, and Kenneth A. Dubin argue for a new approach—one methodologically focused on configurations of variables within cases rather than a fruitless attempt to isolate “the” effect of federalism; and one that is substantively engaged with identifying key elements in configurations as well as with when and how their interactions matter. Born out of their work on a multi-year, eleven-country project (published as Federalism and Social Policy: Patterns of Redistribution in Eleven Countries, University of Michigan Press, 2019), this book comprises a methodological and substantive agenda. Methodologically, the authors shift to studies that embraced and understood the complexity within which federal political institutions operate. Substantively, they make an argument for the importance of plurinationalism, changing economic interests, and institutional legacies.

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