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A wide-ranging comparative analysis of the effects of pension reforms on health outcomes among retirees.

Pension reforms enacted in many developed economies since the late 1990s have raised statutory retirement ages and reduced benefit generosity, prompting concerns that working longer, especially in physically demanding jobs, could widen health disparities among retirees. Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World: Pension Reforms and the Health Distribution of Retirees examines whether these reforms have altered the distribution of health outcomes in nine countries—Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States. Drawing on harmonized longitudinal data spanning roughly two decades and measuring health along five dimensions—functional, diagnosed, comprehensive, mental, and cognitive—the country studies find a remarkably consistent picture: in every country but the United States, health inequality among retirees has not increased significantly over the period in which benefits fell and retirement ages rose. The United States, in contrast to the other nations, shows rising inequality in functional and comprehensive health, particularly among women. The findings suggest that in most countries, pension reforms have not so far come at the cost of a widening health gap between richer and poorer retirees, although noisy data and the still-short observation window admit the possibility of effects that have yet to fully emerge.

A wide-ranging comparative analysis of the effects of pension reforms on the income distribution among retirees.

Pension reforms enacted in many developed economies since the late 1990s increased labor force participation among older workers. Did they also generate greater inequality in retirement income? Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World: The Effects of Pension Reforms on the Income Distribution of Retirees examines whether these reforms redistributed social security wealth in ways that disproportionately benefited or harmed retirees at different points in the income distribution. The chapters present country-specific analyses for Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Using microdata and counterfactual simulations, they find a quite varied picture: in six of the ten countries studied, pension reform reduced income inequality among retirees, while in three countries the reforms expanded it. Across countries, benefit-level changes, rather than behavioral responses to altered retirement incentives, account for most of the redistributive impact. In countries that cut benefits uniformly, lower-income retirees suffered more than higher-income retirees due to shorter life expectancies. When new programs supplemented across-the-board cuts with support for lower earners, however, inequality declined.

A global analysis of the effects of social security reforms on the retirement incentives and labor force trends of older workers.

Employment among older men and women has increased dramatically in recent years, reversing a downward trend in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World examines how changing retirement incentives have reshaped labor force participation trends among older workers. The chapters feature country-specific analyses for Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They find that while there is significant heterogeneity across countries, the reforms of recent decades have generally reduced the implicit tax on work at older ages. These changes correlate positively with labor force participation. The studies exploit the variation in the timing and extent of reforms of retirement incentives and employ microeconometric methods to investigate whether this correlation reflects a causal relationship. Policy changes appear to have contributed to rising labor force activity, but other factors like the role of women in the labor force, improved health, and changes in private pensions likely also play important roles.

In Aztec and colonial Central Mexico, every individual was destined for lifelong placement in a legally defined social stratum or estate. Social mobility became possible after independence from Spain in 1821 and increased after the 1910–1920 Revolution. By 2000, the landed aristocracy that was for long Mexico's ruling class had been replaced by a plutocracy whose wealth derives from manufacturing, commerce, and finance—but rapid growth of the urban lower classes reveals the failure of the Mexican Revolution and subsequent agrarian reform to produce a middle-class majority. These evolutionary changes in Mexico's class system form the subject of Social Stratification in Central Mexico, 1500–2000, the first long-term, comprehensive overview of social stratification from the eve of the Spanish Conquest to the end of the twentieth century.

The book is divided into two parts. Part One concerns the period from the Spanish Conquest of 1521 to the Revolution of 1910. The authors depict the main features of the estate system that existed both before and after the Spanish Conquest, the nature of stratification on the haciendas that dominated the countryside for roughly four centuries, and the importance of race and ethnicity in both the estate system and the class structures that accompanied and followed it. Part Two portrays the class structure of the post-revolutionary period (1920 onward), emphasizing the demise of the landed aristocracy, the formation of new upper and middle classes, the explosive growth of the urban lower classes, and the final phase of the Indian-mestizo transition in the countryside.

By landmass, Russia is the world’s largest country, due largely to centuries of military expansion, imperial rule, and colonization. As a result, it contains people of many ethnicities, nationalities, religions, and languages. Yet Russia’s non-Russian, Indigenous, and minority communities have often been marginalized by state policy and underrepresented in scholarship. Soil and Soul explores how these communities sustain distinct forms of identity and belonging not only through discourse or state institutions but also through embodied relations with land, nature, and animals. These local practices complicate and unsettle state-centered narratives of Russian cultural superiority by showing how meaning and identity are created through relationships with the nonhuman world. Drawing on decolonial, anthropological, environmental, sociological, linguistic, and geographic approaches, this volume reframes minority agency as ecosocial practice embedded in local ecologies, everyday life, and postimperial power asymmetries.

Contributors: Megan Dixon, Yana Hashamova, Kristina Kovalskaya, Jesko Schmoller, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Laura Siragusa, Zoia Tarasova, Baasanjav Terbish

Evaluates Burma at a pivotal tipping point after the 2021 military coup.

The 2021 military coup in Burma/Myanmar triggered popular resistance and a spreading civil war, reigniting long-standing struggles for ethnic self-determination. The chaos has enabled a huge rise in transnational criminal activities, including drug trafficking and the emergence of scam centers. The country's geopolitical importance, not least as a source of rare earths, is also heightening the struggle for power. At the same time, accelerating climate change is destabilizing local ecologies and livelihoods, driving food production, socio-economic systems, and civil society towards collapse or massive change. Together, these forces have undermined the coherence of Burma as a centralized state. However, new forms of resistance and political organization have emerged in liberated areas across the country. At this critical juncture, rather than “state failure,” Burma demonstrates novel forms of complex, asymmetrical, and sometimes messy state-building, a “bottom-up” federalism based on the agency and resilience of Indigenous communities and anti-junta forces.

The story of Spain during World War II has largely been viewed as the story of dictator Francisco Franco’s foreign diplomacy in the aftermath of civil war. Wayne H. Bowen now goes behind the scenes of fascism to reveal less-studied dimensions of Spanish history. By examining the conflicts within the Franco regime and the daily lives of Spaniards, he has written the first book-length assessment of the regime’s formative years and the struggle of its citizens to survive. 

Bowen argues that the emphasis of previous scholars on Spain’s foreign affairs is misplaced—that even the most pro-Axis elements of Franco’s regime were more concerned with domestic politics, the potential for civil unrest, and poverty than with events in Europe. Synthesizing a wide range of Spanish-language scholarship and recently declassified government documents, Bowen reveals how Franco’s government stumbled in the face of world war, inexperienced leaders, contradictory political ideology, and a divided populace. His book tells the dramatic story of a six-year argument among the general, the politicians, and the clerics on nothing less than what should be the nature of the new Spain, touching on issues as diverse as whether the monarchy should be restored and how women should dress.

Examining the effects of World War II years on key facets of Spanish life—Catholicism, the economy, women, leisure, culture, opposition to Franco, and domestic politics—Bowen explores a wide range of topics: the grinding poverty following the civil war, exacerbated by poor economic decisions; restrictions on employment for women versus the relative autonomy enjoyed by female members of the Falange; the efforts of the Church to recover from near decimation; and methods of repression practiced by the regime against leftists, separatists, and Freemasons.  He also shows that the lives of most Spaniards remained apolitical and centered on work, family, and leisure marked by the popularity of American movies and the resurgence of loyalty to regional sports teams.

            Unlike other studies that have focused exclusively on Spain’s foreign affairs during the Second World War, Bowen’s work stresses the importance of the home front not only in keeping Spain out of the war but also in keeping Franco in power. He shows that in spite of internal problems and external distractions, Franco’s government managed to achieve its goals of state survival and internal peace. As the only single-volume survey of this era available in English, Spain during World War II is a masterful synthesis that offers a much-needed alternative view of the Franco regime during crucial times as it provides a testament to the Spanish people’s will to survive.

From ancient Egyptian archery and medieval Japanese football to contemporary American baseball, every sport has been shaped by—and in turn has helped shape—the culture of which it is part. Yet as Allen Guttmann shows in this far-ranging study, for all their differences sports have followed a similar historical trajectory from traditional to modern forms. 

In Sports: The First Five Millennia, Guttmann traces this evolution across continents, cultures, and historical epochs to construct a single comprehensive narrative of the world's sports.

Bureaucrats play a critical role in managing governance and delivering public services, whether in democratic and authoritarian contexts. Leaders are responsible for managing bureaucrats—from assigning posts to evaluating performance—to ensure that state resources and services are directed to key constituencies. Focusing on Pakistan, a hybrid regime where military interventions often disrupt electoral politics and civilian governance, Staffing the State shows how controlling bureaucratic appointments allows politicians and civil servants to manage political uncertainty. At the same time, such control entrenches arbitrary patterns of governance such that democratic transitions stall and hybrid regimes persist.

Drawing on interviews, semi-participant observation, and newspaper archives, this book’s analysis reveals the significance of bureaucratic politics to political power, public sector performance and reform, and in determining democratic or autocratic trajectories. The findings extend discussions around indicators of democratic decay into more nuanced, complex explorations of the consequences of these politics for the permanent institutions of the state. Staffing the State will interest political scientists, scholars of South Asian politics and especially Pakistan, and those working at the intersection of politics and public administration.

An exploration of the fundamental bond between cinema and the cosmos
 

The advent of cinema occurred alongside pivotal developments in astronomy and astrophysics, including Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, all of which dramatically altered our conception of time and provided new means of envisioning the limits of our world. Tracing the many aesthetic, philosophical, and technological parallels between these fields, Stardust explores how cinema has routinely looked toward the cosmos to reflect our collective anxiety about a universe without us.

Employing a “cosmocinematic gaze,” Hannah Goodwin uses the metaphorical frameworks from astronomy to posit new understandings of cinematic time and underscore the role of light in generating archives for an uncertain future. Surveying a broad range of works, including silent-era educational films, avant-garde experimental works, and contemporary blockbusters, she carves out a distinctive area of film analysis that extends its reach far beyond mainstream science fiction to explore films that reckon with a future in which humans are absent.

This expansive study details the shared affinities between cinema and the stars in order to demonstrate how filmmakers have used cosmic imagery and themes to respond to the twentieth century’s moments of existential dread, from World War I to the atomic age to our current moment of environmental collapse. As our outlook on the future continues to change, Stardust illuminates the promise of cinema to bear witness to humanity’s fragile existence within the vast expanse of the universe.

Eric Fassin examines the trend of State anti-intellectualism in France using the nation as a case study to demonstrate that this tendency is not limited to ostensibly illiberal regimes. He argues that today’s world requires an examination of this phenomenon beyond Cold War geopolitical divisions and highlights a global shift towards authoritarian neoliberalism. His book is a plea for the political urgency of intellectual work in a global moment of political anti-intellectualism.
The book covers the period from President Sarkozy to Prime Minister Valls and includes both firsthand and public cases of attacks against academics, not only in France, but also in Brazil, Hungary, Russia, Turkey, and the United States, with examples of State racism and the argument of the State against antiracism. The book also considers issues of censorship and cancel culture, concluding with Fassin’s firsthand account of attacks on him from the far-right.

Streaming at the End of the World explores the pessimistic and often apocalyptic themes that have pervaded popular culture in the United States and global cinema in the new millennium. The book argues that recent films, from the art-house fare of Melancholia (2011) to the popular science fiction of Annihilation (2018), embody an ambient feeling that continually haunts people in today's capitalist world—an ineluctable impression there is no alternative to the status quo. It seems like nothing is ever really going to change; hence, we are drawn to visions of the end of everything. Written in an accessible, conversational style, this book offers a popular culture spin on the late British philosopher Mark Fisher's maxim that it’s "easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." 

A massive land-seizure movement first erupted in Peru in 1958 and spread across the Andean highlands in 1963–1964. Several hundred peasant communities in the Peruvian Andes occupied neighboring haciendas in an attempt to retake lands they felt had been stolen from them over the years. Hacienda peasants also participated in this movement, forming peasant sindicatos (unions) to improve their labor conditions.

The land-seizure movement brought with it an upsurge in community political mobilization. Throughout the highlands, village leaders banded together in regional federations, often allying themselves with progressive or radical urban groups. Radical activists from labor unions and university student groups joined with indigenous peasant leaders, breaking down the highland peasantry’s traditional isolation from the political system.

Struggle in the Andes is an analysis of the causes and consequences of extensive social and political mobilization among Peru’s peasant population in the 1960s. In addition to describing the growth of the peasant land movement, Howard Handelman investigates the social and economic conditions that contributed to rural unrest. Using data that he collected in forty-one diverse highland communities, Handelman examines the correlates of peasant political activity, concluding that land seizures in the traditional southern sierra had different origins and political implications than did unrest in the more socioeconomically modernized central highlands.

The data suggest a model of peasant mobilization that calls into question prevailing scholarly hypotheses on the relationships between modernization, peasant political mobilization, and radicalization. Handelman discusses the land-reform program and the accompanying rural mobilization that was being implemented by Peru’s reformist military regime. Using his model of peasant mobilization, he speculates on the possible effects of the government’s contemporary programs on future peasant political behavior.

Rejecting the cliché about “weak identity and underdeveloped nationalism,” Bekus argues for the co-existence of two parallel concepts of Belarusianness—the official and the alternative one—which mirrors the current state of the Belarusian people more accurately and allows for a different interpretation of the interconnection between the democratization and nationalization of Belarusian society.

The book describes how the ethno-symbolic nation of the Belarusian nationalists, based on the cultural capital of the Golden Age of the Belarusian past (17th century) competes with the “nation” institutionalized and reified by the numerous civic rituals and social practices under the auspices of the actual Belarusian state.

Comparing the two concepts not only provides understanding of the logic that dominates Belarusian society’s self-description models, but also enables us to evaluate the chances of alternative Belarusianness to win this unequal struggle over identity. 

The advent of the Arab Spring in late 2010 was a hopeful moment for partisans of progressive change throughout the Arab world. Authoritarian leaders who had long stood in the way of meaningful political reform in the countries of the region were either ousted or faced the possibility of political if not physical demise. The downfall of long-standing dictators as they faced off with strong-willed protesters was a clear sign that democratic change was within reach. Throughout the last ten years, however, the Arab world has witnessed authoritarian regimes regaining resilience, pro-democracy movements losing momentum, and struggles between the first and the latter involving regional and international powers.
     This volume explains how relevant political players in Arab countries among regimes, opposition movements, and external actors have adapted ten years after the onset of the Arab Spring. It includes contributions on Egypt, Morocco, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, and Tunisia. It also features studies on the respective roles of the United States, China, Iran, and Turkey vis-à-vis questions of political change and stability in the Arab region, and includes a study analyzing the role of Saudi Arabia and its allies in subverting revolutionary movements in other countries.