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During more than twenty years of field research, Roderic Ai Camp built a monumental database of biographical information on more than 3,000 leading national figures in Mexico. In this major contribution to Mexican political history, he draws on that database to present a definitive account of the paths to power Mexican political leaders pursued during the period 1884 to 1992.

Camp’s research clarifies the patterns of political recruitment in Mexico, showing the consequences of choosing one group over another. It calls into question numerous traditional assumptions, including that upward political mobility was a cause of the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

Comparing Mexican practices with those in several East Asian countries also allows Camp to question many of the tenets of political recruitment theory. His book will be of interest to students not only of Mexican politics but also of history, comparative politics, political leadership, and Third World development.

Each of the essays in this volume addresses a particular empirical puzzle involving decisions or outcomes that, at least on the surface, seem difficult (if not impossible) to explain. In the first three essays, the authors look at the behavior of an individual or an organization such as trade union or political party that, at first blush, does not seem to make sense: Why would a political leader gamble on a vote of confidence that he didn't need to call and the failure of which would seriously harm his party's future prospects? Why would a trade union conduct a strike that it knows it can't win? Why didn't the Japanese Socialist party modify its platform to attract more voters so as to give it a chance of holding power in Japan? The authors show that behavior that appears irrational is not really so once we understand the full context in which the behavior is embedded. The fourth essay asks how a major empire--the Soviet empire--could have dissolved so quickly. Here the explanation involves an interesting new theory: the power of "decisive inaction." The final essay elaborates a formal model of equilibrium behavior in the social welfare system to consider the empirical puzzle of why increasing unemployment benefits often appear not to significantly increase the attractiveness of the unemployment option. The contributors are Miriam Golden, Kaare Strom, Masaru Kohno, Richard Anderson, George Tsebelis and Roland Stephen.

Boston Harbor served as a colonial gateway to the world, witnessed the Boston Tea Party, and helped the community transform itself from an outpost of a few hardy settlers into a bustling metropolis and self-proclaimed hub of the universe. Yet for hundreds of years Boston Harbor was also a cesspool. Long before Bostonians dumped tea into the harbor to protest English taxes, they dumped sewage there. 

As the Boston area grew and prospered, its sewage problems worsened, as did the harbor's health, to the point where in the 1980s it was considered the most polluted harbor in the country and ridiculed as the “harbor of shame.” Then, in one of the most impressive environmental comebacks in American history, Boston Harbor was dramatically cleaned up. All it took was two lawsuits, two courts, dozens of lawyers, the creation of a powerful sewage authority, thousands of workers, millions of labor hours, and billions of dollars. 

Sewage management is rarely as compelling and exciting as higher profile environmental issues such as global climate change, preserving endangered species, or protecting tropical rainforests. But it can be, as Eric Jay Dolin shows in this engaging narrative account. Boston's struggle to deal with its sewage is an epic story of failure and success, replete with colorful characters, political, bureaucratic, and legal twists and turns, engineering feats, and massive amounts of money. In the end, success hinged on the often overlooked yet monumentally important act of responsibly disposing of the waste people produce every day.

Politicized Property analyzes the under-researched phenomenon of renationalization—the return of previously privatized firms to state ownership. Highlighting the evolving relationship between political parties and firms, the book demonstrates that renationalization of newly privatized firms is influenced by varying patterns of their embeddedness in political and ownership networks operating within the context of political and institutional uncertainty. These ownership reversals underpin the construction of new political and social orders and have far-reaching consequences for democratic governance. By placing renationalization at the center of postcommunist transformation, Miloš Resimić also links it to contemporary processes of democratic backsliding.

Using Serbia as a case study, Resimić tests the argument with an original administrative dataset tracking political affiliations and ownership structures of 125 strategic Serbian firms privatized through tender sale, complemented by in-depth case studies and interviews with oligarchs, politicians, and bureaucrats. Tracing over a decade of political and ownership ties among strategic Serbian firms, the book uncovers the micro-level foundations of renationalization. To demonstrate that these dynamics are observable across the postcommunist world and beyond, comparative chapters extend the analysis to Hungary under Viktor Orbán, Poland, Montenegro, and Argentina, showing that reversals of privatization are integral to the political economy of postcommunist capitalism.

The objective of this book is to outline how a radically democratic politics can be reinvigorated in theory and practice through the use of the internet. The author argues that politics in its proper sense can be distinguished from anti-politics by analyzing the configuration of public space, subjectivity, participation, and conflict. Each of these terrains can be configured in a more or less political manner, though the contemporary status quo heavily skews them towards anti-political configuration.

Using this understanding of what exactly politics entails, this book considers how the internet can both help and hinder efforts to move each area in a more political direction. By explicitly interpreting contemporary theories of the political in terms of the internet, this analysis avoids the twin traps of both technological determinism and technological cynicism.

Raising awareness of what the word ‘politics’ means, the author develops theoretical work by Arendt, Rancière, Žižek and Mouffe to present a clear and coherent view of how in theory, politics can be digitized and alternatively how the internet can be deployed in the service of trulydemocratic politics.

Examines globalism as a social production, opening up new paths of resistance

Though presented often as an objective process, globalization is frequently analyzed from subjective perspectives that are closed to their own historical and geographical specificity. Refusing the false choice between objectivity and subjectivity, Himadeep Muppidi considers the production of the global as an intersubjective process involving the interplay of meanings, identities, and practices from historically different locations.

Between 1980 and 1994, Peru endured a bloody internal armed conflict, with some 69,000 people killed in clashes involving two insurgent movements, state forces, and local armed groups. In 2003, a government-sponsored “Truth and Reconciliation Committee” reported that the conflict lasted longer, affected broader swaths of the national territory, and inflicted higher costs in both human and economic terms than any other conflict in Peru’s history. Of those killed, 75 percent were speakers of an indigenous language, and almost 40 percent were among the poorest and most rural members of Peruvian society. These unequal impacts of the violence on the Peruvian people revealed deep and historical disparities within the country.

This collection of original essays by leading international experts on Peruvian politics, society, and institutions explores the political and institutional consequences of Peru’s internal armed conflict in the long 1980s. The essays are grouped into sections that cover the conflict itself in historical, comparative, and theoretical perspectives; its consequences for Peru’s political institutions; its effects on political parties across the ideological spectrum; and its impact on public opinion and civil society. This research provides the first systematic and nuanced investigation of the extent to which recent and contemporary Peruvian politics, civil society, and institutions have been shaped by the country’s 1980s violence.

As Southeast Asia’s cities continue to swell, this timely volume analyzes urban politics in the region.

Why have some Southeast Asian cities become laboratories of reform while others remain mired in old patterns of patronage politics and substandard public services? This has become an important question now that over half of Southeast Asia’s population lives in urban areas, transforming the politics of the region. Quintessentially urban problems—traffic congestion, sanitation, public transport, housing, and the like—increasingly preoccupy policymakers, while the region’s swelling urban middle classes expect their mayors and city governments to provide ever-better infrastructure and amenities.

Drawing on close case studies of a diverse set of seventeen urban areas across four Southeast Asian countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand—this volume offers fresh insights into how the region’s urban politics are changing. It provides a new framework for understanding why some cities are flourishing and others are not. Exploring the factors that shape distinct local governance regimes in these cities, Politics and Governance in Urban Southeast Asia also throws light on how urban residents use community associations, informal networks, and other political mechanisms to access the public services they want and need.

Establishes the airport as a crucial site in the rise of the surveillance state

Few sites are more symbolic of both the opportunities and vulnerabilities of contemporary globalization than the international airport.