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Asian Power and Politics
The Cultural Dimensions of Authority
Lucian W. Pye
Harvard University Press, 1985

In a major new book, Lucian W. Pye reconceptualizes Asian political development as a product of cultural attitudes about power and authority. He contrasts the great traditions of Confucian East Asia with the Southeast Asian cultures and the South Asian traditions of Hinduism and Islam, and explores the national differences within these larger civilizations.

Breaking with modern political theory, Pye believes that power differs profoundly from one culture to another. In Asia the masses of the people are group-oriented and respectful of authority, while their leaders are more concerned with dignity and upholding collective pride than with problem-solving. As culture decides the course of political development, Pye shows how Asian societies, confronted with the task of setting up modern nation-states, respond by fashioning paternalistic forms of power that satisfy their deep psychological craving for security. This new paternalism may appear essentially authoritarian to Western eyes, but Pye maintains that it is a valid response to the people’s needs and will ensure community solidarity and strong group loyalties. He predicts that we are certain to see emerging from Asia’s accelerating transformation some new version of modern society that may avoid many of the forms of tension common to Western civilization but may also produce a whole new set of problems.

This book revitalizes Asian political studies on a plane that comprehends the large differences between Asia and the West and at the same time is sensitive to the subtle variations among the many Asian cultures. Its comparative perspective will provide indispensable insights to anyone who wishes to think more deeply about the modern Asian states.

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Battle for Allegiance
Governments, Terrorist Groups, and Constituencies in Conflict
Seden Akcinaroglu and Efe Tokdemir
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Domestic terrorist groups, like all violent nonstate actors, compete with governments for their monopoly on violence and their legitimacy in representing the citizenry. Battle for Allegiance shows violence is neither the only nor the most effective way in which nonstate actors and governments work to achieve their goals. As much as nonviolent strategies are a rarely considered piece of the puzzle, the role of the audience is another crucial piece often downplayed in the literature. Many studies emphasize the interactions between the government and the terrorist group at the expense of the constituency, but the constituency is the common cluster for both actors to gain legitimacy and to demand its allegiance. In fact, the competition between the two actors goes far beyond who is superior in terms of military force and tactics. The hardest battles are fought over the allegiance of the citizens.

Using a multimethod approach based on exclusive interviews and focus groups from Turkey and large N original data from around the world, Seden Akcinaroglu and Efe Tokdemir present the first systematic empirical analysis of the ways in which terrorist groups, the government, and the citizens relate to each other in a triadic web of action. They study the nonviolent actions of terrorist groups toward their constituencies, the nonviolent actions of governments toward terrorists, and the nonviolent actions of governments toward the terrorist group’s constituencies. By investigating the causes, targets, and consequences of accommodative actions, this book sheds light on an important, but generally ignored, aspect of terrorism: interactive nonviolent strategies.
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The Byzantine Republic
People and Power in New Rome
Anthony Kaldellis
Harvard University Press, 2015

Although Byzantium is known to history as the Eastern Roman Empire, scholars have long claimed that this Greek Christian theocracy bore little resemblance to Rome. Here, in a revolutionary model of Byzantine politics and society, Anthony Kaldellis reconnects Byzantium to its Roman roots, arguing that from the fifth to the twelfth centuries CE the Eastern Roman Empire was essentially a republic, with power exercised on behalf of the people and sometimes by them too. The Byzantine Republic recovers for the historical record a less autocratic, more populist Byzantium whose Greek-speaking citizens considered themselves as fully Roman as their Latin-speaking “ancestors.”

Kaldellis shows that the idea of Byzantium as a rigid imperial theocracy is a misleading construct of Western historians since the Enlightenment. With court proclamations often draped in Christian rhetoric, the notion of divine kingship emerged as a way to disguise the inherent vulnerability of each regime. The legitimacy of the emperors was not predicated on an absolute right to the throne but on the popularity of individual emperors, whose grip on power was tenuous despite the stability of the imperial institution itself. Kaldellis examines the overlooked Byzantine concept of the polity, along with the complex relationship of emperors to the law and the ways they bolstered their popular acceptance and avoided challenges. The rebellions that periodically rocked the empire were not aberrations, he shows, but an essential part of the functioning of the republican monarchy.

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Constitutionalism, Identity, Difference, and Legitimacy
Theoretical Perspectives
Michel Rosenfeld
Duke University Press, 1994
Interest in constitutionalism and in the relationship among constitutions, national identity, and ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity has soared since the collapse of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Since World War II there has also been a proliferation of new constitutions that differ in several essential respects from the American constitution. These two developments raise many important questions concerning the nature and scope of constitutionalism. The essays in this volume—written by an international group of prominent legal scholars, philosophers, political scientists, and social theorists—investigate the theoretical implications of recent constitutional developments and bring useful new perspectives to bear on some of the longest enduring questions confronting constitutionalism and constitutional theory.
Sharing a common focus on the interplay between constitutional identity and individual or group diversity, these essays offer challenging new insights on subjects ranging from universal constitutional norms and whether constitutional norms can be successfully transplanted between cultures to a consideration of whether constitutionalism affords the means to reconcile a diverse society’s quest for identity with its need to properly account for its differences; from the relation between constitution-making and revolution to that between collective interests and constitutional liberty and equality.
This collection’s broad scope and nontechnical style will engage scholars from the fields of political theory, social theory, international studies, and law.

Contributors. Andrew Arato, Aharon Barak, Jon Elster, George P. Fletcher, Louis Henkin, Arthur J. Jacobson, Carlos Santiago Nino, Ulrich K. Preuss, David A. J. Richards, Michel Rosenfeld, Dominique Rousseau, András Sajó, Frederick Schauer, Bernhard Schlink, M. M. Slaughter, Cass R. Sunstein, Ruti G. Teitel, Robin West

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Democracy in China
The Coming Crisis
Jiwei Ci
Harvard University Press, 2019

A respected Chinese political philosopher calls for the Communist Party to take the lead in moving China along the path to democracy before it is too late.

With Xi Jinping potentially set as president for life, China’s move toward political democracy may appear stalled. But Jiwei Ci argues that four decades of reform have created a mentality in the Chinese people that is just waiting for the political system to catch up, resulting in a disjunction between popular expectations and political realities. The inherent tensions in a largely democratic society without a democratic political system will trigger an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy, forcing the Communist Party to act or die.

Two crises loom for the government. First is the waning of the Communist Party’s revolutionary legacy, which the party itself sees as a grave threat. Second is the fragility of the next leadership transition. No amount of economic success will compensate for the party’s legitimacy deficit when the time comes. The only effective response, Ci argues, will be an orderly transition to democracy. To that end, the Chinese government needs to start priming its citizens for democracy, preparing them for new civil rights and civic responsibilities. Embracing this pragmatic role offers the Communist Party a chance to survive. Its leaders therefore have good reason to initiate democratic change.

Sure to challenge the Communist Party and stir debate, Democracy in China brings an original and important voice to an issue with far-reaching consequences for China and the world.

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The Descent of Icarus
Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy
Yaron Ezrahi
Harvard University Press, 1990

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Exiting the Fragility Trap
Rethinking Our Approach to the World’s Most Fragile States
David Carment
Ohio University Press, 2019

State fragility is a much-debated yet underinvestigated concept in the development and international security worlds. Based on years of research as part of the Country Indicators for Foreign Policy project at Carleton University, Exiting the Fragility Trap marks a major step toward remedying the lack of research into the so-called fragility trap. In examining the nature and dynamics of state transitions in fragile contexts, with a special emphasis on states that are trapped in fragility, David Carment and Yiagadeesen Samy ask three questions: Why do some states remain stuck in a fragility trap? What lessons can we learn from those states that have successfully transitioned from fragility to stability and resilience? And how can third-party interventions support fragile state transitions toward resilience?

Carment and Samy consider fragility’s evolution in three state types: countries that are trapped, countries that move in and out of fragility, and countries that have exited fragility. Large-sample empirical analysis and six comparative case studies—Pakistan and Yemen (trapped countries), Mali and Laos (in-and-out countries), and Bangladesh and Mozambique (exited countries)—drive their investigation, which breaks ground toward a new understanding of why some countries fail to see sustained progress over time.

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Fabricating the People
Politics and Administration in the Biopolitical State
Thomas J. Catlaw
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Since the 1960s, hostility and mistrust toward the U.S. government has risen precipitously. At the same time, the field of public administration has wrestled with its own crisis of legitimacy. What is at the root of current antigovernment sentiment? Conventionally, two explanations for this problem persist. Some see it primarily in moral terms, a deficit of Constitutional or democratic values in government. Others emphasize government’s performance failures and managerial inefficiency.
 
Thomas J. Catlaw departs from both explanations in this groundbreaking study and demonstrates that the current crisis of government originates in the uncritical manner in which we have accepted the idea of “the People.” He contends that this unifying, foundational concept—and the notion of political representation it entails—have failed. While illuminating some of our most pressing social and political problems, Catlaw shows how the idea of the People, far from serving to unify, relies in fact on a distinctive logic of exclusion. True political power is the power to determine what constitutes the normal, natural life of the electorate. Today, the exclusionary practices that once made up or fabricated the People are increasingly contested. In turn, government and political power now appear more invasive, less legitimate, and our shared reality appears more fragmented and disconnected.
 
In order to address this crisis and reinvigorate democracy, Catlaw argues, we must accept as bankrupt the premise of the People and the idea of representation itself. Fabricating the People boldly proposes post-representational governance that reframes the practice of modern democracy and reinvents the role of public administration.
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The Glorious Revolution and the Continuity of Law
Richard S. Kay
Catholic University of America Press, 2014
The Glorious Revolution and the Continuity of Law explores the relationship between law and revolution. Revolt - armed or not - is often viewed as the overthrow of legitimate rulers. Historical experience, however, shows that revolutions are frequently accompanied by the invocation rather than the repudiation of law. No example is clearer than that of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. At that time the unpopular but lawful Catholic king, James II, lost his throne and was replaced by his Protestant son-in-law and daughter, William of Orange and Mary, with James's attempt to recapture the throne thwarted at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland. The revolutionaries had to negotiate two contradictory but intensely held convictions. The first was that the essential role of law in defining and regulating the activity of the state must be maintained. The second was that constitutional arrangements to limit the unilateral authority of the monarch and preserve an indispensable role for the houses of parliament in public decision-making had to be established. In the circumstances of 1688-89, the revolutionaries could not be faithful to the second without betraying the first. Their attempts to reconcile these conflicting objectives involved the frequent employment of legal rhetoric to justify their actions. In so doing, they necessarily used the word "law" in different ways. It could denote the specific rules of positive law; it could simply express devotion to the large political and social values that underlay the legal system; or it could do something in between. In 1688-89 it meant all those things to different participants at different times. This study adds a new dimension to the literature of the Glorious Revolution by describing, analyzing and elaborating this central paradox: the revolutionaries tried to break the rules of the constitution and, at the same time, be true to them.
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Identity, Ritual, and Power in Colonial Puebla
Frances L. Ramos
University of Arizona Press, 2012
Located between Mexico City and Veracruz, Puebla has been a political hub since its founding as Puebla de los Ángeles in 1531. Frances L. Ramos’s dynamic and meticulously researched study exposes and explains the many (and often surprising) ways that politics and political culture were forged, tested, and demonstrated through public ceremonies in eighteenth-century Puebla, colonial Mexico’s “second city.”

With Ramos as a guide, we are not only dazzled by the trappings of power—the silk canopies, brocaded robes, and exploding fireworks—but are also witnesses to the public spectacles through which municipal councilmen consolidated local and imperial rule. By sponsoring a wide variety of carefully choreographed rituals, the municipal council made locals into audience, participants, and judges of the city’s tumultuous political life. Public rituals encouraged residents to identify with the Roman Catholic Church, their respective corporations, the Spanish Empire, and their city, but also provided arenas where individuals and groups could vie for power.

As Ramos portrays the royal oath ceremonies, funerary rites, feast-day celebrations, viceregal entrance ceremonies, and Holy Week processions, we have to wonder who paid for these elaborate rituals—and why. Ramos discovers and decodes the intense debates over expenditures for public rituals and finds them to be a central part of ongoing efforts of councilmen to negotiate political relationships. Even with the Spanish Crown’s increasing disapproval of costly public ritual and a worsening economy, Puebla’s councilmen consistently defied all attempts to diminish their importance.

Ramos innovatively employs a wealth of source materials, including council minutes, judicial cases, official correspondence, and printed sermons, to illustrate how public rituals became pivotal in the shaping of Puebla’s complex political culture.
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Legality and Legitimacy
Carl Schmitt
Duke University Press, 2004
Carl Schmitt ranks among the most original and controversial political thinkers of the twentieth century. His incisive criticisms of Enlightenment political thought and liberal political practice remain as shocking and significant today as when they first appeared in Weimar Germany. Unavailable in English until now, Legality and Legitimacy was composed in 1932, in the midst of the crisis that would lead to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and only a matter of months before Schmitt’s collaboration with the Nazis. In this important work, Schmitt questions the political viability of liberal constitutionalism, parliamentary government, and the rule of law. Liberal governments, he argues, cannot respond effectively to challenges by radical groups like the Nazis or Communists. Only a presidential regime subject to few, if any, practical limitations can ensure domestic security in a highly pluralistic society.

Legality and Legitimacy is sure to provide a compelling reference point in contemporary debates over the challenges facing constitutional democracies today. In addition to Jeffrey Seitzer’s translation of the 1932 text itself, this volume contains his translation of Schmitt’s 1958 commentary on the work, extensive explanatory notes, and an appendix including selected articles of the Weimar constitution. John P. McCormick’s introduction places Legality and Legitimacy in its historical context, clarifies some of the intricacies of the argument, and ultimately contests Schmitt’s claims regarding the inherent weakness of parliamentarism, constitutionalism, and the rule of law.

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Legitimacy
The Right to Rule in a Wanton World
Arthur Isak Applbaum
Harvard University Press, 2019

At an unsettled time for liberal democracy, with global eruptions of authoritarian and arbitrary rule, here is one of the first full-fledged philosophical accounts of what makes governments legitimate.

What makes a government legitimate? The dominant view is that public officials have the right to rule us, even if they are unfair or unfit, as long as they gain power through procedures traceable to the consent of the governed. In this rigorous and timely study, Arthur Isak Applbaum argues that adherence to procedure is not enough: even a properly chosen government does not rule legitimately if it fails to protect basic rights, to treat its citizens as political equals, or to act coherently.

How are we to reconcile every person’s entitlement to freedom with the necessity of coercive law? Applbaum’s answer is that a government legitimately governs its citizens only if the government is a free group agent constituted by free citizens. To be a such a group agent, a government must uphold three principles. The liberty principle, requiring that the basic rights of citizens be secured, is necessary to protect against inhumanity, a tyranny in practice. The equality principle, requiring that citizens have equal say in selecting who governs, is necessary to protect against despotism, a tyranny in title. The agency principle, requiring that a government’s actions reflect its decisions and its decisions reflect its reasons, is necessary to protect against wantonism, a tyranny of unreason.

Today, Applbaum writes, the greatest threat to the established democracies is neither inhumanity nor despotism but wantonism, the domination of citizens by incoherent, inconstant, and incontinent rulers. A government that cannot govern itself cannot legitimately govern others.

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Lineages Of State Fragility
Rural Civil Society In Guinea-Bissau
Joshua B. Forrest
Ohio University Press, 2003

In Guinea-Bissau, as elsewhere in Africa, there is a disjuncture between the central state and rural civil society. It is this significant and overlooked aspect of Guinea-Bissau’s political evolution—the continuing ability of civil society to evade and thwart state power—that is at the heart of Joshua B. Forrest’s Lineages of State Fragility.

Professor Forrest argues that despite European influences, the contemporary fragility of African states can be fully appreciated only by examining the indigenous social context in which these states evolved. Focusing on Guinea-Bissau, Forrest exposes the emergence of a strong and adaptable “rural civil society” that can be traced back to precolonial times.

Lineages of State Fragility analyzes the social, political, and military experiences of this rural civil society to account for the origins of Guinea-Bissau’s soft state. For example, Forrest identifies interethnic social and military practices that became entrenched in rural social structures and continued to evolve through the colonial period, enabling Guinea-Bissauans to resist state predation.

Lineages of State Fragility offers an unorthodox explanation of African politics by tracing the direct social links among the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods and affirms the role of rural actors in determining present-day political outcomes.

Based on remarkably extensive research conducted in archives in Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, and Portugal, Lineages of State Fragility represents both a new approach to the region’s past and present and an important synthesis of the political analysis that has come before.

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Political Support in Canada
The Crisis Years
Allan Kornberg and Harold D. Clarke, editors
Duke University Press, 1983
All governments require popular support, and in democracies this support must be maintained by noncoercive means. This book analyzes the question of political support in Canada, a country in which the maintenance of the integrity of the political community has been and continues to be, in the words of the editors, "the single most salient aspect of the country's political life."
The nature of popular support is first considered in broad, theoretical terms, then from the standpoint of those agents most responsible for maintaining support in Canadian democracy, then as influenced by particular issues and policies, and finally as it affects and is affected by the separatist movement in Quebec.
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Politics and Ambiguity
William E. Connolly
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987

In a series of stimulating essays, William E. Connolly explores the element of ambiguity in politics. He argues that democratic politics in a modern society requires, if it is to flourish, an appreciation of the ambiguous character of the standards and principles we cherish the most. Connolly’s work, lucidly, presented and intellectually challenging, will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, philosophy, rhetoric, and law, and to all whose interests include the connections between contemporary epistemological arguments and politics and, more broadly, between thought and language.
    Connolly criticizes the ways in which contemporary politics extends normalization into various areas of modern existence. He argues, against this trend, for an approach that would provide relief from the rigid identity formations that result from normalization.
    In supporting his thesis, Connolly shows how the imperative for growth must be relaxed if normalizing pressures are to be obviated. His, however, is not the familiar antigrowth argument; rather, he ties his thesis to his general antinormalization argument, asking how one could create an ethic that would sustain itself when the growth imperatives are relaxed. Connolly’s chapters on the work of other thinkers (including Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor) are linked with his main theme, as he shows how various tendencies in the philosophy of the social sciences and in political theory aid and abed the normalizing tendency.
    His analyses of Rorty and Taylor are especially important. Connolly shows the significance of antifoundationalism (Rorty’s contribution to the debate on epistemology), while providing a compelling critique both of Rorty’s stance and Taylor's alternative to it.
    Especially important to Connolly’s thesis is the ontology on which it rests. He shows how the endorsement of an ontology of discordance within concord—a view that all systems of meaning impose order on that which was not designed to fit neatly within them—can support a more democratizing process. His final chapter, “Where the Word Breaks Off,” vindicates the ontology of discordance, which has governed the argument throughout the text.
    Throughout these essays, Connolly builds a consistent argument for the politicalization of normalization, disclosing forms of normalization where others have seen unproblematic modes of communication and problem solving. Original in concept and bold in presentation, Connolly’s work will form the basis for considerable debate in the several disciplines it serves.
 

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Power without Force
The Political Capacity of Nation-States
Robert W. Jackman
University of Michigan Press, 1993

Decolonization after World War II led to a significant global increase in the number of states. Each new nation was born with high expectations. But these hopes were soon eroded by the ineffectiveness and capriciousness of many of the new regimes. In many states military juntas have become the order of the day, and even where juntas have not taken power, political differences have repeatedly degenerated into violent exchanges that do not readily lend themselves to political settlement. Not only the new states have suffered from these problems; indeed, political solutions to conflict have become depressingly conspicuous by their absence.

Against this background, the last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in evaluating the political capacity or strength of modern nation-states. In Power without Force, Robert Jackman argues that political capacity has two broad components: organizational age and legitimacy. Thus, it is essential to focus both on institutions conceived in organizational terms and the amount of compliance and consent that leaders are able to engender. The emphasis on each reflects the view that political life centers on the exercise of power, and that, unlike physical force, power is intrinsically relational. Although all states have he capability to inflict physical sanctions, their ability to exercise power is the key element of their political capacity.

Drawing on a wide range of studies from political science, sociology, and political economy, Power without Force redirects attention to the central issues of political capacity. By stressing that effective conflict resolution must be addressed in political terms, this volume underscores perennial issues of governance and politics that form the heart of comparative politics and political sociology.

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Royal Apologetic in the Ancient Near East
Andrew Knapp
SBL Press, 2015

A fresh exploration of apologetic material that pushes beyond form criticism

Andrew Knapp applies modern genre theory to seven ancient Near Eastern royal apologies that served to defend the legitimacy of kings who came to power under irregular circumstances. Knapp examines texts and inscriptions related to Telipinu, Hattusili III, David, Solomon, Hazael, Esarhaddon, and Nabonidus to identify transhistorical common issues that unite each discourse.

Features:

  • Compares Hittite, Israelite, Aramean, Assyrian, and Babylonian apologies
  • Examination of apologetic as a mode instead of a genre
  • Charts and illustrations
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Ruling Oneself Out
A Theory of Collective Abdications
Ivan Ermakoff
Duke University Press, 2008
What induces groups to commit political suicide? This book explores the decisions to surrender power and to legitimate this surrender: collective abdications. Commonsensical explanations impute such actions to coercive pressures, actors’ miscalculations, or their contamination by ideologies at odds with group interests. Ivan Ermakoff argues that these explanations are either incomplete or misleading. Focusing on two paradigmatic cases of voluntary and unconditional surrender of power—the passing of an enabling bill granting Hitler the right to amend the Weimar constitution without parliamentary supervision (March 1933), and the transfer of full executive, legislative, and constitutional powers to Marshal Pétain (Vichy, France, July 1940)—Ruling Oneself Out recasts abdication as the outcome of a process of collective alignment.

Ermakoff distinguishes several mechanisms of alignment in troubled and uncertain times and assesses their significance through a fine-grained examination of actors’ beliefs, shifts in perceptions, and subjective states. To this end, he draws on the analytical and methodological resources of perspectives that usually stand apart: primary historical research, formal decision theory, the phenomenology of group processes, quantitative analyses, and the hermeneutics of testimonies. In elaborating this dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, Ruling Oneself Out restores the complexity and indeterminate character of pivotal collective decisions and demonstrates that an in-depth historical exploration can lay bare processes of crucial importance for understanding the formation of political preferences, the paradox of self-deception, and the makeup of historical events as highly consequential.

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Succession to High Office in Botswana
Three Case Studies
Jack Parson
Ohio University Press, 1990
This book examines the process through which the mantle of leadership passed from one leader to another in Botswana. It concerns the succession to high office in Botswana over the course of more than half a century from the colonial time to the present. Three case studies explore the relationship between the British colonial authorities and the tribal leaders in affirming the legitimacy of the tribal chiefs of the Bangwato tribe in the former Bechuanaland protectorate. The studies examine the succession crises of the Bangwato first in 1925 and again between 1948 to 1953 and the political changes from the Botswana National Archives contained in the appendices fully support the text.
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To Swim with Crocodiles
Land, Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800-1996
Jill E Kelly
Michigan State University Press, 2018
To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800–1996 offers a fresh perspective on the history of rural politics in South Africa, from the rise of the Zulu kingdom to the civil war at the dawn of democracy in KwaZulu-Natal. The book shows how Africans in the Table Mountain region drew on the cultural inheritance of ukukhonza—a practice of affiliation that binds together chiefs and subjects—to seek social and physical security in times of war and upheaval. Grounded in a rich combination of archival sources and oral interviews, this book examines relations within and between chiefdoms to bring wider concerns of African studies into focus, including land, violence, chieftaincy, ethnic and nationalist politics, and development. Colonial indirect rule, segregation, and apartheid attempted to fix formerly fluid polities into territorial “tribes” and ethnic identities, but the Zulu practice of ukukhonza maintained its flexibility and endured. By exploring what Zulu men and women knew about and how they remembered ukukhonza, Kelly reveals how Africans envisioned and defined relationships with the land, their chiefs, and their neighbors as white minority rule transformed the countryside and local institutions of governance. 
 
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Underglobalization
Beijing's Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy
Joshua Neves
Duke University Press, 2020
Despite China's recent emergence as a major global economic and geopolitical power, its association with counterfeit goods and intellectual property piracy has led many in the West to dismiss its urbanization and globalization as suspect or inauthentic. In Underglobalization Joshua Neves examines the cultural politics of the “fake” and how frictions between legality and legitimacy propel dominant models of economic development and political life in contemporary China. Focusing on a wide range of media technologies and practices in Beijing, Neves shows how piracy and fakes are manifestations of what he calls underglobalization—the ways social actors undermine and refuse to implement the specific procedures and protocols required by globalization at different scales. By tracking the rise of fake politics and transformations in political society, in China and globally, Neves demonstrates that they are alternate outcomes of globalizing processes rather than anathema to them.
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Viable Polity
Edward Lehman
Temple University Press, 1992
"A well-written, intelligent discussion of an important issue." --Edward Portis, Texas A&M University Viewing the rapid changes in our political landscape, Edward W. Lehman observes that understanding political processes has become increasingly critical, and he suggests new criteria for evaluating the interaction of state and society. The Viable Polity challenges the customary ways that political successes and failures have been treated. Lehman concentrates on the fundamental assumptions needed to assess a democratic system's viability and explores the legitimation-crisis paradigm, insisting that we must move beyond its hollow rhetoric. Lehman then begins the conscious building of the viability paradigm. He contends that political viability must be judged along three interdependent dimensions: a state's capacity to pursue its goals effectively; the polity's ability to elicit citizen participation efficiently; and the possible legitimacy of prevailing political game rules. Armed with this framework, the author delves into three pivotal anomalies of modern democratic life. First, he considers how enhancing capacities in one sector can actually undermine the overall effectiveness of the state as well as foster inefficient involvement and erode legitimacy. Second, he examines the apparent contradiction implicit in the coexistence of extensive public apathy and widespread moralistic participation in democratic polities. Third, he investigates the circumstances that presently permit high political legitimacy to co-exist with growing distrust of government leaders. Finally, Lehman contrasts the impediments to viability that are unique to the American political system with those that are more widely shared by liberal democracies.
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World Rule
Accountability, Legitimacy, and the Design of Global Governance
Jonathan GS Koppell
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Dilemmas from climate change to financial meltdowns make it clear that global interconnectedness is the norm in the twenty-first century. As a result, global governance organizations (GGOs)—from the World Trade Organization to the Forest Stewardship Council—have taken on prominent roles in the management of international affairs. These GGOs create and promulgate rules to address a host of pressing problems. But as World Rule reveals, they struggle to meet two challenges: building authority despite limited ability to impose sanctions and maintaining legitimacy while satisfying the demands of key constituencies whose support is essential to a global rulemaking regime.

Through a novel empirical study of twenty-five GGOs, Jonathan GS Koppell provides a clearer picture of the compromises within and the competition among these influential institutions by focusing attention on their organizational design. Analyzing four aspects of GGO organization in depth—representation and administration, the rulemaking process, adherence and enforcement, and interest group participation—Koppell describes variation systemically, identifies patterns, and offers explanations that link GGO design to the fundamental challenge of accountability in global governance.

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