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The thirteen authors of this collective work undertook to articulate matter-of-fact critiques of the dominant narrative about communism in Poland while offering new analyses of the concept, and also examining the manifestations of anticommunism. Approaching communist ideas and practices, programs and their implementations, as an inseparable whole, they examine the issues of emancipation, upward social mobility, and changes in the cultural canon.

The authors refuse to treat communism in Poland in simplistic categories of totalitarianism, absolute evil and Soviet colonization, and similarly refuse to equate communism and fascism. Nor do they adopt the neoliberal view of communism as a project doomed to failure. While wholly exempt from nostalgia, these essays show that beyond oppression and bad governance, communism was also a regime in which people pursued a variety of goals and sincerely attempted to build a better world for themselves.

The book is interdisciplinary and applies the tools of social history, intellectual history, political philosophy, anthropology, literature, cultural studies, and gender studies to provide a nuanced view of the communist regimes in east-central Europe.

A theoretical exploration of how human potential can be liberated by reevaluating our relationship with the environment and work. 

We stand at a point of crisis for human society and life on Earth, with sustainability a constant theme in global discourse. Governments, industries, and individuals attempt to take constructive action, but their steps are everywhere countered by the habits and relationships built over three hundred years of capitalism, while right-wing populism and climate denial openly hold them back. Rebellion and Reconnection for Sustainable Futures proposes an urgent change of direction.

Grounded in the critical and theoretical tradition of political ecology, the book calls for a practical politics that rebels against the dominance of nature, resists fascist populism, and reconnects with human tradition. Robert Biel argues that two forms of “remembering” are needed: first, that we embrace humanity’s past connection with socio-ecological change through deep time, and second, that we assimilate still valuable socialist traditions such as dignity and creativity of work. From this basis, he proposes a novel synthesis between complex systems research, Indigenous approaches to human-environment relations, the “good Anthropocene,” and Marxist perspectives on nature. This unlocks a broad interrogation of the COVID experience by drawing on notions of biopolitics and queer theory, while also reframing theories of imperialism to critique the central role of racism. Written in an engaging style, the book builds a compelling case for a new practical and actionable politics based on reclaiming what we have lost.

For most of the past century, urban America was dominated by top-down policies serving the white business and cultural elite, the suburbs, and the automobile. At times these approaches were fiercely challenged by reformers such as Jane Addams and Jane Jacobs. Yet by the 1980s, mainstream policies had resulted in a nation of ravaged central cities, sprawling suburbs, social and economic polarization, and incalculable environmental damage.

In the 1990s, this entrenched model finally yielded to change as local citizens, neighborhood groups, and other stakeholders, empowered by a spate of new laws and policies, began asserting their own needs and priorities. Though hampered by fiscal crises and internal disagreements, these popular initiatives launched what the author terms a new era of “humane urbanism” marked by a determination to make cities and suburbs greener, healthier, safer, more equitable, more efficient, and generally more people-friendly. In the process, the mayors, architects, engineers, and bureaucrats who had previously dominated urban policy found themselves relegated to supporting roles.

As Rutherford H. Platt points out, humane urbanism can take many forms, from affordable housing and networks of bike paths to refurbished waterfronts and urban farms. Often spontaneous, low-tech, and self-sustaining programs, their shared goal is to connect people to one another and to bring nature back into the city. Reclaiming American Cities examines both sides of this historic transformation: the long struggle against patricians and technocrats of earlier decades and the recent sprouting of grassroots efforts to make metropolitan America more humane and sustainable.

Winner of the 2024 Annual Book Award from the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (SLACA)

Co-winner of the Isis Duarte Book Prize from the Latin American Studies Association 

Haiti was once a beacon of Black liberatory futures, but now it is often depicted as a place with no future where emigration is the only way out for most of its population. But Reclaiming Haiti's Futures tells a different story. It is a story about two generations of Haitian scholars who returned home after particular crises to partake in social change. The first generation, called jenerasyon 86, were intellectuals who fled Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship (1957–1986). They returned after the regime fell to participate in the democratic transition through their political leadership and activism. The younger generation, dubbed the jenn doktè, returned after the 2010 earthquake to partake in national reconstruction through public higher education reform. An ethnography of the future, the book explores how these returned scholars resisted coloniality's fractures and displacements by working toward and creating inhabitability or future-oriented places of belonging through improvisation, rasanblaj (assembly), and radical imagination. By centering on Haiti and the Caribbean, the book offers insights not just into the Haitian experience but also into how fractures have come to typify more aspects of life globally and what we might do about it.

This book compares the trajectories of states and societies in Africa, Asia and Latin America under neoliberalism, a time marked by serial economic crises, escalating social conflicts, the re-militarisation of North-South relations and the radicalisation of social and nationalist forces.

Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros bring together researchers and activists from the three continents to assess the state of national sovereignty and the challenges faced by popular movements today. They show that global integration has widened social and regional inequalities within countries, exacerbated ethnic, caste, and racial conflicts, and generally reduced the bureaucratic capacities of states to intervene in a defensive way. Moreover, inequalities between the countries of the South have also widened. These structural tensions have all contributed to several distinct political trajectories among states: from fracture and foreign occupation, to radicalisation and uncertain re-stabilisation.

This book re-draws the debate on the political economy of the contemporary South and provides students of international studies with an important collection of readings.

Imagining equitable streets for all

For the past century, our roadways have been engineered as pipes for cars, but they offer vast potential as public spaces. From New York and Boston to Portland and Los Angeles, cities are rethinking their streets, going beyond sidewalks and bike lanes to welcome nonmotorists to share the asphalt roadway. Reclaiming the Road traces the historical evolution of America’s streets and explores contemporary movements to retake them from cars—temporarily and permanently—for diverse forms of mobility and community life. To share the street raises important questions of equity, in transportation and beyond. David L. Prytherch proposes a bold, intersectional vision of a more just street.

Reclaiming the Road connects cutting-edge theory, policy analysis, and firsthand accounts from those leading the charge in transforming our streets to advocate for changing how we think about and design roads. Prytherch features case studies of nine major cities in the United States to show how experiments in reclaiming streets accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic to become lasting changes. Through in-depth interviews, he shares stories of how planners, transportation advocates, and community leaders have implemented innovative programs for slowing neighborhood streets, opening roads for walking and biking, and reconstructing roadways with public parklets and street plazas as social spaces for curbside conversation.

Examining movements to transform streets through the lenses of equity and justice, Reclaiming the Road tackles the conceptual challenge of defining mobility justice and the practicalities of planning a more just public street, offering a compelling vision for the future of America’s public spaces.

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• How conditional party government seems to work in this highly partisan era
• How donors and pressure groups have taken ownership over campaigns
• How independents are often undercover partisans, but who also feel repelled by the existing parties—even the one they typically support
• How various identities converge to produce partisan affection (when that exists)
• How partisanship relates to ideology.

The battle for democracy in reconstruction-era Alabama.

Following the end of the Civil War, white Southerners were forced to concede equal rights to those who had been enslaved, ushering in a new and ruthless brand of politics. Suddenly, the status and place of some four million former slaves dominated the national and regional political dialogue. In Alabama, the Republican Party established itself quickly and powerfully with the participation of a newly freed constituency, firmly aligned against the Democratic Party that had long dictated the governance of the state. Well-heeled planters, merchants, and bankers, joined by yeoman farmers, staged a counterrevolution by gravitating strongly to the Democratic Party and its unabashedly white supremacist measures. The ensuing power struggle in the birthplace of the Confederacy is at the heart of Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, 1865–1874.

What emerges in William Warren Rogers Jr.’s comprehensive study of the era is a detailed examination of Reconstruction politics, particularly in Alabama. This book explores an explosive and unpredictable political environment that a few years earlier would have been inconceivable. A vivid picture emerges of courthouse rallies and bitter infighting in legislative circles. Rogers’s narrative ventures into darker places as well: to the Tennessee Valley and the Black Belt regions of Alabama, where Klan nightriders used violence against an enemy and ideology they could not abide.

The attempt to capture and account for the unforgiving political landscape created by the extraordinary circumstances of Reconstruction constitutes this study’s most central contribution. Rogers often quotes black and white citizens, Democrats and Republicans. Drawn from newspapers, correspondence, and various federal investigations, these firsthand voices are passionate, unvarnished, and filled with conviction. They offer a startling immediacy and illustrate the temper—or distemper—of the times. Readers are treated to a panoramic unveiling of Reconstruction Alabama politics that provides a sense of what was truly at stake: the values by which a region and the nation as a whole would chart its future for the century to come.

 

Is the language of rights enough to foster real social and political change? Nivedita Menon explores the relationship between law and feminist politics by examining the contemporary Indian women's movement with comparisons to France and the United States. She argues that the intersection of feminist politics, law, and the state often paradoxically and severely distorts important ethical and emancipatory impulses of feminism.

Menon reviews historical challenges to the liberal notion of rights from Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and critical legal scholars, and analyzes current Indian debates on topics including abortion, sexual violence, and Parliamentary quotas for women. Far from being a call to withdraw from the arena of law, Recovering Subversion instead urges feminists everywhere to recognize the limits of "rights discourse" and pleads for a politics that goes beyond its boundaries.

A landmark study of Liberalism, political conflict, and nation-building in Colombia.

Red Against Blue: The Liberal Party in Colombian Politics, 1863–1899 is a seminal study of the political forces that shaped modern Colombia during the nineteenth century. In this carefully researched work, historian Helen Delpar traces the rise, dominance, decline, and transformation of the Colombian Liberal Party, offering readers a deeper understanding of one of Latin America's most influential political movements. Through extensive use of political writings, personal papers, electoral records, and contemporary sources, Delpar reconstructs the complex world of Colombian politics during an era marked by ideological conflict, regional division, constitutional experimentation, and recurring civil unrest.

The book examines the period from the adoption of the federal Constitution of 1863 through the end of the nineteenth century, when Liberal leaders sought to shape Colombia's political future while confronting growing opposition from Conservative rivals. Delpar explores the origins of Colombian Liberalism, the development of party ideology, the regional bases of political support, and the personalities who guided the party through both triumph and defeat. Her analysis reveals a political movement that was far more diverse and dynamic than conventional interpretations have suggested.

As Liberal influence declined in the 1880s and Conservatives consolidated power under the Regeneration movement, political tensions intensified. Delpar shows how these struggles helped lay the groundwork for the devastating War of the Thousand Days at the century's close, one of the most significant conflicts in Colombian history.

Combining narrative history with insightful political analysis, Red Against Blue remains an indispensable resource for students and scholars of Latin American history, political development, democracy, and nation-building. It offers a compelling portrait of a society grappling with questions of power, ideology, regional identity, and the meaning of political participation in a rapidly changing world.

Chinese president Xi Jinping is most famously associated with his “Chinese Dream” campaign, envisioning a great rejuvenation of the nation. Many observers, though, view China’s pursuit of this dream as alarming. They see a global power ready to abandon its low-profile diplomacy and eager to throw its weight around.
 
Red Chamber, World Dream represents an interdisciplinary effort of deciphering the Chinese Dream and its global impact. Jing Sun employs methods from political science and journalism and concepts from literature, sociology, psychology and drama studies, to offer a multilevel analysis of various actors’ roles in Chinese foreign policy making: the leaders, the bureaucrats, and its increasingly diversified public. This book rejects a simple dichotomy of an omnipotent, authoritarian state versus a suppressed society. Instead, it examines how Chinese foreign policy is constantly being forged and contested by interactions among its leaders, bureaucrats, and people. The competition for shaping China’s foreign policy also happens on multiple arenas: intraparty fighting, inter-ministerial feuding, social media, TV dramas and movies, among others. This book presents vast amounts of historical detail, many unearthed the first time in the English language. Meanwhile, it also examines China’s diplomatic responses to ongoing issues like the Covid-19 crisis. The result is a study multidisciplinary in nature, rich in historical nuance, and timely in contemporary significance.

Reassessing the Cambodian genocide through the lens of global capitalist development.

James Tyner reinterprets the place of agriculture under the Khmer Rouge, positioning it in new ways relative to Marxism, capitalism, and genocide. The Cambodian revolutionaries’ agricultural management is widely viewed by critics as irrational and dangerous, and it is invoked as part of wider efforts to discredit leftist movements. Researching the specific functioning of Cambodia’s transition from farms to agriculture within the context of the global economy, Tyner comes to a different conclusion. He finds that analysis of “actually existing political economy”—as opposed to the Marxist identification the Khmer Rouge claimed—points to overlap between Cambodian practice and agrarian capitalism.

Tyner argues that dissolution of the traditional Khmer family farm under the aegis of state capitalism is central to any understanding of the mass violence unleashed by the Khmer Rouge. Seen less as a radical outlier than as part of a global shift in farming and food politics, the Cambodian tragedy imparts new lessons to our understanding of the political economy of genocide.

In November 1960, the Democratic party dominated Texas. The newly elected vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was a Texan. Democrats held all thirty statewide elective positions. The state legislature had 181 Democrats and no Republicans or anyone else. Then fast forward fifty years to November 2010. Texas has not voted for a Democratic president since 1976. Every statewide elective office is held by Republicans. Representing Texas in Washington is a congressional delegation of twenty-five Republicans and nine Democrats. Republicans control the Texas Senate by a margin of nineteen to twelve and the Texas House of Representatives by 101 to 49.

Red State explores why this transformation of Texas politics took place and what these changes imply for the future. As both a political scientist and a Republican party insider, Wayne Thorburn is especially qualified to explain how a solidly one-party Democratic state has become a Republican stronghold. He analyzes a wealth of data to show how changes in the state’s demographics—including an influx of new residents, the shift from rural to urban, and the growth of the Mexican American population—have moved Texas through three stages of party competition, from two-tiered politics, to two-party competition between Democrats and Republicans, and then to the return to one-party dominance, this time by Republicans. His findings reveal that the shift from Democratic to Republican governance has been driven not by any change in Texans’ ideological perspective or public policy orientation—even when Texans were voting Democrat, conservatives outnumbered liberals or moderates—but by the Republican party’s increasing identification with conservatism since 1960.

The Cold War forced scientists to reconcile their values of internationalism and objectivity with the increasingly militaristic uses of scientific knowledge. For decades, antinuclear scientists pursued nuclear disarmament in a variety of ways, from grassroots activism to transnational diplomacy and government science advising. The U.S. government ultimately withstood these efforts, redefining science as a strictly technical endeavor that enhanced national security and deeming science that challenged nuclear weapons on moral grounds “emotional” and patently unscientific. In response, many activist scientists restricted themselves to purely technical arguments for arms control. When antinuclear protest erupted in the 1980s, grassroots activists had moved beyond scientific and technical arguments for disarmament. Grounding their stance in the idea that nuclear weapons were immoral, they used the “emotional” arguments that most scientists had abandoned.

Redefining Science shows that the government achieved its Cold War “consensus” only by active opposition to powerful dissenters and helps explain the current and uneasy relationship between scientists, the public, and government in debates over issues such as security, energy, and climate change.