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When millions of Syrians fled civil war after 2011, international donors and humanitarian organizations mobilized to provide assistance to neighboring countries. Focusing on Jordan—one of the world’s largest refugee hosting states—Disease and Diplomacy investigates how medical aid to refugees operates as an instrument of diplomacy and control within the global refugee system. It argues that health, far from being an apolitical humanitarian good, is a bargaining tool that states commodify to extract resources and concessions.

Drawing on years of field research, interviews, and policy analysis, the book shows how the Jordanian government, international donors, and humanitarian agencies turned healthcare for refugees into a tool for negotiating power, resources, and responsibility. In these cases, refugees, caught within these negotiations, often found their access to care determined not by medical need, but by political calculation. Developing the concept of the weaponization of medical aid, the book extends theories of migration diplomacy and refugee rentierism to show how global power dynamics shape who receives healthcare. The analysis identifies a self-reinforcing “crisis loop” that privileges short-term, highly visible responses while neglecting chronic and long-term needs. Disease and Diplomacy advances an interdisciplinary framework for understanding how humanitarian practices reinforce global inequalities and argues for more equitable approaches to refugee health and responsibility-sharing in the international system.

In 1999, Venezuela became the first country in the world to constitutionally recognize the socioeconomic value of housework and enshrine homemakers’ social security. This landmark provision was part of a larger project to transform the state and expand social inclusion during Hugo Chávez’s presidency. The Bolivarian revolution opened new opportunities for poor and working-class—or popular—women’s organizing. The state recognized their unpaid labor and maternal gender role as central to the revolution. Yet even as state recognition enabled some popular women to receive public assistance, it also made their unpaid labor and organizing vulnerable to state appropriation.

Offering the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, Engendering Revolution demonstrates that the Bolivarian revolution cannot be understood without comprehending the gendered nature of its state-society relations. Showcasing field research that comprises archival analysis, observation, and extensive interviews, these thought-provoking findings underscore the ways in which popular women sustained a movement purported to exalt them, even while many could not access social security and remained socially, economically, and politically vulnerable.

Venezuela has become a huge source of hope and inspiration for the Left throughout the world. Some see it as a shining example of how to begin building a successful socialist state, but Western leaders see it as a dangerous enemy and accuse Chávez of being a dictator. This book reveals the truth by examining the country from the ground up.

Iain Bruce explores the political changes underway in Venezuela at the level of the lives of ordinary people. Through grassroots investigations and extended interviews, he explores a series of key transformations in Venezuela: a new social economy around a network of co-operatives; workplace democracy; popular education; radical agrarian reform; participatory budgets and community planning. The result is a clear picture of everyday life in Venezuela.

No other book on the country has this level of detail; it will be a key text for students of Latin American politics and social movements and of interest to anyone following the fortunes of the Bolivarian Revolution.