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We elect officials in hopes that they will make our communities safer, yet their widely-endorsed law enforcement strategies have little effect on crime rates. Active crime prevention must take into account the diversity of crimes and criminals. High-quality evaluation research designs are needed to convince scholars, policy makers, and practitioners about the effectiveness of crime prevention techniques. Building a Safer Society, the most comprehensive exposition of research and experience concerning crime prevention ever published, offers a new conceptualization of the subject incorporating developmental, community, situational and law enforcement approaches. This timely collection will especially interest scholars in law, criminal justice, public policy and public administration.

Cultures of Democracy, a special issue of Public Culture, proposes that democratic strategies and practices pursued by different countries, and the relative successes of those strategies and practices, are deeply affected by the countries’ cultures, histories, and reception of, or resistance to, modernity. The collection suggests that a commitment to normative models of democracy prevents recognition of democratic practices in societies not usually seen as democratic or proto-democratic from a Western vantage point. Offering accounts of practices of democracy in Egypt, Yemen, Argentina, and India, these cultural theorists—drawing on work in anthropology, political theory, and postcolonial studies—revise notions of what might be regarded as a democratic practice.

The essays look at examples of democracy in a variety of spheres. One examines how the chewing of khat leaves in public gatherings in Yemen acts as a democratic practice by creating spontaneous forums for political discussion. Another considers the events of the 2003 municipal elections in Buenos Aires, when the center Right secured a record number of votes from an electorate jaded by political corruption by forming strategic alliances with local football clubs, ultimately leading to the election of the president of one popular club. And another essay explores the Indian government’s reaction when the political methods used to achieve the nation’s independence—defiance of the law, hunger strikes, demonstrations, and the destruction of public property—were used to challenge the government in the postcolonial period. Taken as a whole, the essays argue that democracy might be productively viewed as a cultural system inclusive of many cultures of democracy.

Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Craig Calhoun, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Jean Comaroff, Carlos Forment, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Claudio Lomnitz , Manar Shorbagy, Charles Taylor, Lisa Wedeen

September 11, the subway bombings in Europe, and Hurricane Katrina occurred in rapid succession. The outsized relationship between their historical significance and chronological span also marked these episodes as “events.” Focusing on the recent rise of “the event” as a form of experience and its simultaneous reemergence as a central term in critical theory, this special issue of differences links contemporary critical discourse on the event—Badiou, Sewell, Derrida—to long-standing conversations in philosophy, history, literary studies, media studies, and cultural theory. It also indicates how event analysis might begin to provide an analytic framework different from the conventional modes of historicism currently dominating cultural studies.

One essay identifies flash points when “the event” has preoccupied Western thought from Plato to Freud. Others show how particular events—Hurricane Katrina, the Algerian War, the Haitian Revolution—betray the inadequacy of traditional nation-based frameworks for understanding the course of history. Media representations also are a central concern, as in one contributor’s analysis of how child abductions turn some (white girls’) bodies into events while other (brown girls’) bodies are denied that status. The final essay is a meditation on the end of the world that explores how the idea of the end as event transforms everyday language into cryptic signs.

Contributors: Andrew Aisenberg, Wai Chee Dimock, Jonathan Elmer, Akira Lippit, Lloyd Pratt,Rebecca Wanzo, Hayden White

Japanese and Korean are typologically similar languages, and a linguistic phenomenon in the former often has a counterpart in the latter. The papers in this volume are from the nineteenth Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, which was held at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. The collections in this volume include essays on the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, and psycholinguistics of both languages. Such comparative studies deepen our understanding of both languages and will be a useful reference for students and scholars in either field.

Published in cooperation with the International Ocean Institute and Dalhousie University Law School, Ocean Yearbook,Volume 19 presents original, peer-reviewed articles, reviews, and reference materials from experts in such diverse fields as governance and sustainable development, integrated coastal and ocean management, global and regional cooperation, and international law and environmental policy.

Bringing together historians of science and medicine with environmental historians, and adding more contemporary vantage points from geography, anthropology, and sociology, Osiris Volume 19: Landscapes of Exposure offers an unprecedented interdisciplinary depiction of how, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientists and lay people have generated methods for connecting health and place, disease and ecology, calculation and risk.

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.