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Getting Primaried
The Changing Politics of Congressional Primary Challenges
Robert G. Boatright
University of Michigan Press, 2014

Each of the past few election cycles has featured at least one instance of "primarying," a challenge to an incumbent on the grounds that he or she is not sufficiently partisan. For many observers, such races signify an increasingly polarized electorate and an increasing threat to moderates of both parties.

In Getting Primaried, Robert G. Boatright shows that primary challenges are not becoming more frequent; they wax and wane in accordance with partisan turnover in Congress. The recent rise of primarying corresponds to the rise of national fundraising bases and new types of partisan organizations supporting candidates around the country. National fundraising efforts and interest group–supported primary challenges have garnered media attention disproportionate to their success in winning elections. Such challenges can work only if groups focus on a small number of incumbents.

Getting Primaried makes several key contributions to congressional scholarship. It presents a history of congressional primary challenges over the past forty years, measuring the frequency of competitive challenges and distinguishing among types of challenges. It provides a correction to accounts of the link between primary competition and political polarization. Further, this study offers a new theoretical understanding of the role of interest groups in congressional elections.

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Getting to War
Predicting International Conflict with Mass Media Indicators
W. Ben Hunt
University of Michigan Press, 1997
This book shows how to predict wars. More specifically, it tells us how to anticipate in a timely fashion the scope and extent of interstate conflict. By focusing on how all governments--democratic or not--seek to secure public support before undertaking risky moves such as starting a war, Getting to War provides a methodology for identifying a regime's intention to launch a conflict well in advance of the actual initiation.
The goal here is the identification of leading indicators of war. Getting to War develops such a leading political indicator by a systematic examination of the ways in which governments influence domestic and international information flows. Regardless of the relative openness of the media system in question, we can accurately gauge the underlying intentions of those governments by a systematic analysis of opinion-leading articles in the mass media. This analysis allows us to predict both the likelihood of conflict and what form of conflict--military or diplomatic/economic--will occur.
Theoretically, this book builds on a forty-year-old insight by Karl Deutsch--that all governments seek to mobilize public opinion through mass media and that careful analysis of such domestic media activity could provide an "early warning network" of international conflict. By showing how to tap the link between conflict initiation and public support, this book provides both a useful tool for understanding crisis behavior as well as new theoretical insights on how domestic politics help drive foreign policy.
Getting to War will be of interest to political scientists who study international disputes and national security as well as social scientists interested in media studies and political communication. General readers with an interest in military or diplomatic history--particularly U.S. history--will find that Getting to War provides an entirely new perspective on how to understand wars and international crises.
W. Ben Hunt is Assistant Professor of Politics, New York University
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Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence
A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal
Tithi Bhattacharya
Duke University Press, 2024
In Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence, Tithi Bhattacharya maps the role that Bengali ghosts and ghost stories played in constituting the modern Indian nation, and the religious ideas seeded therein, as it emerged in dialogue with European science. Bhattacharya introduces readers to the multifarious habits and personalities of Bengal’s traditional ghosts and investigates and mourns their eventual extermination. For Bhattacharya, British colonization marked a transition from the older, multifaith folk world of traditional ghosts to newer and more frightening specters. These ‘modern’ Bengali ghosts, borne out of a new Rationality, were homogenous specters amenable to ‘scientific’ speculation and invoked at séance sessions in elite drawing rooms. Reading literature alongside the colonial archive, she uncovers a new reordering of science and faith from the middle of the nineteenth century. Bhattacharya argues that these shifts cemented the authority of a rising upper caste colonial elite who expelled the older ghosts in order to recast Hinduism as the conscience of the Indian nation. In so doing, Bhattacharya reveals how capitalism necessarily reshaped Bengal as part of the global colonial project.
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Ghosts in the Neighborhood
Why Japan Is Haunted by Its Past and Germany Is Not
Walter F. Hatch
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Germany, which brutalized its neighbors in Europe for centuries, has mostly escaped the ghosts of the past, while Japan remains haunted in Asia. The most common explanation for this difference is that Germany knows better how to apologize; Japan is viewed as “impenitent.” Walter F. Hatch rejects the conventional wisdom and argues that Germany has achieved reconciliation with neighbors by showing that it can be a trustworthy partner in regional institutions like the European Union and NATO; Japan has never been given that opportunity (by its dominant partner, the U.S.) to demonstrate such an ability to cooperate. This book rigorously defends the argument that political cooperation—not discourse or economic exchange—best explains Germany’s relative success and Japan’s relative failure in achieving reconciliation with neighbors brutalized by each regional power in the past. It uses paired case studies (Germany-France and Japan-South Korea; Germany-Poland and Japan-China) to gauge the effect of these competing variables on public opinion over time. With numerous charts, each of the four empirical chapters illustrates the powerful causal relationship between institution building and interstate reconciliation.

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The Ghosts of Berlin
Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape
Brian Ladd
University of Chicago Press, 1997
In this compelling work, Brian Ladd examines the ongoing conflicts radiating from the remarkable fusion of architecture, history, and national identity in Berlin. Ladd surveys the urban landscape, excavating its ruins, contemplating its buildings and memorials, and carefully deconstructing the public debates and political controversies emerging from its past.

"Written in a clear and elegant style, The Ghosts of Berlin is not just another colorless architectural history of the German capital. . . . Mr. Ladd's book is a superb guide to this process of urban self-definition, both past and present."—Katharina Thote, Wall Street Journal

"If a book can have the power to change a public debate, then The Ghosts of Berlin is such a book. Among the many new books about Berlin that I have read, Brian Ladd's is certainly the most impressive. . . . Ladd's approach also owes its success to the fact that he is a good storyteller. His history of Berlin's architectural successes and failures reads entertainingly like a detective novel."—Peter Schneider, New Republic

"[Ladd's] well-written and well-illustrated book amounts to a brief history of the city as well as a guide to its landscape."—Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books
 
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Ghosts of Organizations Past
Communities of Organizations as Settings for Change
Dan Ryan
Temple University Press, 2015
In Ghosts of Organizations Past, Dan Ryan asks, “Why are urban communities such hard places to implement community improvement programs?” Looking at New Haven, Connecticut, and a now-defunct program called Fighting Back, which was created to build community coalitions against the abuse of alcohol and other drugs, Ryan shows how the normal properties of organizations generate apparent pathologies. He shows how the “ghosts,” or artifacts, of past organizations, both inhibited and enhanced Fighting Back's chances of success.

Ryan draws on concepts from the study of organizations, social capital, and social networks to re-think questions such as “What kind of thing is a community?” and “Why is it so difficult to build community initiatives out of organizations?” He provides a social organizational explanation for problems familiar to anyone who has been involved in community programs, issues that are usually understood as personal incompetence, turf wars, greed, or corruption.

Ghosts of Organizations Past describes the challenges of using organizations to create change in places in dire need of it.
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The Giant’s Rival
The USSR and Latin America, Revised Edition
Cole Blasier
University of Pittsburgh Press
The Giant's Rival is an authoritative survey of Soviet relations with Latin America. Blasier provides a concise account of Soviet diplomatic, economic, and political-military involvement in the region, focusing on the post-1970 period.

This revised edition includes chapters analyzing developments since 1983. Blasier views the origins of the Sandinista revolution, and its relation to international Communism, and how the Nicaraguan government has grown dependent on Soviet oil, arms, and economic and political assistance.  He also describes the growing relations between the New Jewel Movement in Grenada and Moscow before it was toppled by the U.S. invasion. Blasier explains how U.S. policies have affected Soviet outcomes and makes proposals for protecting and advancing U.S. interests.
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The Gift of Science
Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition
Roger Berkowitz
Harvard University Press, 2005

The front pages of our newspapers and the lead stories on the evening news bear witness to the divorce of law from justice. The rich and famous get away with murder; Fortune 500 corporations operate sweatshops with impunity; blue-chip energy companies that spoil the environment and sicken communities face mere fines that don't dent profits. In The Gift of Science, a bold, revisionist account of 300 years of jurisprudence, Roger Berkowitz looks beyond these headlines to explore the historical and philosophical roots of our current legal and ethical crisis.

Moving from the scientific revolution to the nineteenth-century rise of legal codes, Berkowitz tells the story of how lawyers and philosophers invented legal science to preserve law's claim to moral authority. The "gift" of science, however, proved bittersweet. Instead of strengthening the bond between law and justice, the subordination of law to science transformed law from an ethical order into a tool for social and economic ends. Drawing on major figures from the traditions of law, philosophy, and history, The Gift of Science is not only a mesmerizing and original intellectual history of law; it shows how modern law remains imprisoned by a failed scientific metaphysics.

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The Girls Next Door
Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines
Kara Dixon Vuic
Harvard University Press, 2019

The story of the intrepid young women who volunteered to help and entertain American servicemen fighting overseas, from World War I through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The emotional toll of war can be as debilitating to soldiers as hunger, disease, and injury. Beginning in World War I, in an effort to boost soldiers’ morale and remind them of the stakes of victory, the American military formalized a recreation program that sent respectable young women and famous entertainers overseas.

Kara Dixon Vuic builds her narrative around the young women from across the United States, many of whom had never traveled far from home, who volunteered to serve in one of the nation’s most brutal work environments. From the “Lassies” in France and mini-skirted coeds in Vietnam to Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe, Vuic provides a fascinating glimpse into wartime gender roles and the tensions that continue to complicate American women’s involvement in the military arena. The recreation-program volunteers heightened the passions of troops but also domesticated everyday life on the bases. Their presence mobilized support for the war back home, while exporting American culture abroad. Carefully recruited and selected as symbols of conventional femininity, these adventurous young women saw in the theater of war a bridge between public service and private ambition.

This story of the women who talked and listened, danced and sang, adds an intimate chapter to the history of war and its ties to life in peacetime.

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Girls of Liberty
The Struggle for Suffrage in Mandatory Palestine
Margalit Shilo
Brandeis University Press, 2016
Following the Balfour Declaration and the British conquest of Palestine (1917–1918), the small Jewish community that lived there wanted to establish an elected assembly as its representative body. The issue that hindered this aim was whether women would be part of it. A group of feminist Zionist women from all over the country created a political party that participated in the elections, even before women’s suffrage was enacted. This unique phenomenon in Mandatory Palestine resulted in the declaration of women’s equal rights in all aspects of life by the newly founded Assembly of Representatives. Margalit Shilo examines the story of these activists to elaborate on a wide range of issues, including the Zionist roots of feminism and nationalism; the ultra-Orthodox Jewish sector’s negation of women’s equality; how traditional Jewish concepts of women fashioned rabbinical attitudes on the question of women’s suffrage; and how the fight for women’s suffrage spread throughout the country. Using current gender theories, Shilo compares the Zionist suffrage struggle to contemporaneous struggles across the globe, and connects this nearly forgotten episode, absent from Israeli historiography, with the present situation of Israeli women. This rich analysis of women’s right to vote within this specific setting will appeal to scholars and students of Israel studies, and to feminist and social historians interested in how contexts change the ways in which activism is perceived and occurs.
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Give a Man a Fish
Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution
James Ferguson
Duke University Press, 2015
In Give a Man a Fish James Ferguson examines the rise of social welfare programs in southern Africa, in which states make cash payments to their low income citizens. More than thirty percent of South Africa's population receive such payments, even as pundits elsewhere proclaim the neoliberal death of the welfare state. These programs' successes at reducing poverty under conditions of mass unemployment, Ferguson argues, provide an opportunity for rethinking contemporary capitalism and for developing new forms of political mobilization. Interested in an emerging "politics of distribution," Ferguson shows how new demands for direct income payments (including so-called "basic income") require us to reexamine the relation between production and distribution, and to ask new questions about markets, livelihoods, labor, and the future of progressive politics.
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Giving Offense
Essays on Censorship
J. M. Coetzee
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.

J. M. Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of one who has lived and worked under its shadow. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. He argues that a destructive dynamic of belligerence and escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by censorship.

From Osip Mandelstam commanded to compose an ode in praise of Stalin, to Breyten Breytenbach writing poems under and for the eyes of his prison guards, to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn engaging in a trial of wits with the organs of the Soviet state, Giving Offense focuses on the ways authors have historically responded to censorship. It also analyzes the arguments of Catharine MacKinnon for the suppression of pornography and traces the operations of the old South African censorship system.

"The most impressive feature of Coetzee's essays, besides his ear for language, is his coolheadedness. He can dissect repugnant notions and analyze volatile emotions with enviable poise."—Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"Those looking for simple, ringing denunciations of censorship's evils will be disappointed. Coetzee explicitly rejects such noble tritenesses. Instead . . . he pursues censorship's deeper, more fickle meanings and unmeanings."—Kirkus Reviews

"These erudite essays form a powerful, bracing criticism of censorship in its many guises."—Publishers Weekly

"Giving Offense gets its incisive message across clearly, even when Coetzee is dealing with such murky theorists as Bakhtin, Lacan, Foucault, and René; Girard. Coetzee has a light, wry sense of humor."—Bill Marx, Hungry Mind Review

"An extraordinary collection of essays."—Martha Bayles, New York Times Book Review

"A disturbing and illuminating moral expedition."—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review
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Giving Voters a Voice
The Origins of the Initiative and Referendum in America
Steven L. Piott
University of Missouri Press, 2003
Giving Voters a Voice studies the origins of direct legislation, one of the most important political reforms enacted during the Progressive Era. Steven L. Piott begins with the source of the idea in the United States and proceeds to the earliest efforts aimed at generating a national movement to expand the parameters of popular democracy in the 1890s. He then broadens his examination to include the unique ways in which twenty-two states came to enact legislation allowing for the statewide initiative and referendum between 1898 and 1918. The book’s appendix offers the only comprehensive listing of all the ballot propositions and vote totals for the period.
Most historians of the Progressive Era have concluded that narrow self-interest prevented labor, farmers, and the middle class from working together to achieve important reforms. Giving Voters a Voice demonstrates that middle-class reformers, trade unionists, and farm organizers formed loose political coalitions and directed grass-roots campaigns to gain passage of initiative and referendum statutes because direct legislation offered the best means to correct political, economic, and social abuses. But there was more than just a shared sense of common interest that brought these seemingly oppositional groups together. What really made them willing to speak, lobby, and work together was quite simply the frustration felt by voters who sensed that they had become economically dependent and politically powerless.
Each state in which proponents conducted an active campaign to win adoption of direct legislation is studied in detail. The book analyzes the crucial roles played by individuals who led the movement to empower voters by enabling them to enact or veto legislation directly, and reveals the arguments, the stumbling blocks, and political compromises that are often slighted in generalized overviews. Each state possessed its own political dynamic. Giving Voters a Voice offers the reader a richness of detail and a completeness of coverage not found elsewhere.
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The Glassworkers of Carmaux
French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth-Century City
Joan W. Scott
Harvard University Press, 1974
This award-winning study analyzes in close detail the experiences of glassworkers as mechanization transformed their trade from a highly skilled art to a semiskilled occupation. Arguing that changes in the organization of work altered the lifestyle and political outlook of the glassworker, Joan Scott uses local archival materials and demographic records to reconstruct the experience of ordinary workingmen.
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Gleanings of Freedom
Free and Slave Labor along the Mason-Dixon Line, 1790-1860
Max Grivno
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landowners in the hinterlands of Baltimore, Maryland, cobbled together workforces from a diverse labor population of black and white apprentices, indentured servants, slaves, and hired workers. This book examines the intertwined lives of the poor whites, slaves, and free blacks who lived and worked in this wheat-producing region along the Mason–Dixon Line. Drawing from court records, the diaries, letters, and ledgers of farmers and small planters, and other archival sources, Max Grivno reconstructs how these poorest of southerners eked out their livings and struggled to maintain their families and their freedom in the often unforgiving rural economy.
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A Global Approach to National Policy
Richard A. Falk
Harvard University Press, 1975

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Global Bioethics
Building on the Leopold Legacy
Van Rensselaer Potter
Michigan State University Press, 1988

Van Rensselaer Potter created and defined the term "bioethics" in 1970, to describe a new philosophy that sought to integrate biology, ecology, medicine, and human values. Bioethics is often linked to environmental ethics and stands in sharp contrast to biomedical ethics. Because of this confusion (and appropriation of the term in medicine), Potter chose to use the term "Global Bioethics" in 1988. Potter's definition of bioethics from Global Bioethics is, "Biology combined with diverse humanistic knowledge forging a science that sets a system of medical and environmental priorities for acceptable survival."

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Global Child
Children and Families Affected by War, Displacement, and Migration
Myriam Denov
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Armed conflicts continue to wreak havoc on children and families around the world with profound effects. In 2017, 420 million children—nearly one in five—were living in conflict-affected areas, an increase in 30 million from the previous year. The recent surge in war-induced migration, referred to as a “global refugee crisis” has made migration a highly politicized issue, with refugee populations and host countries facing unique challenges. We know from research related to asylum seeking families that it is vital to think about children and families in relation to what it means to stay together, what it means for parents to be separated from their children, and the kinds of everyday tensions that emerge in living in dangerous, insecure, and precarious circumstances. In Global Child, the authors draw on what they have learned through their collaborative undertakings, and highlight the unique features of participatory, arts-based, and socio-ecological approaches to studying war-affected children and families, demonstrating the collective strength as well as the limitations and ethical implications of such research. Building on work across the Global South and the Global North, this book aims to deepen an understanding of their tri-pillared approach, and the potential of this methodology for contributing to improved practices in working with war-affected children and their families.
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Global Cinderellas
Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan
Pei-Chia Lan
Duke University Press, 2006
Migrant women are the primary source of paid domestic labor around the world. Since the 1980s, the newly prosperous countries of East Asia have recruited foreign household workers at a rapidly increasing rate. Many come from the Philippines and Indonesia. Pei-Chia Lan interviewed and spent time with dozens of Filipina and Indonesian domestics working in and around Taipei as well as many of their Taiwanese employers. On the basis of the vivid ethnographic detail she collected, Lan provides a nuanced look at how boundaries between worker and employer are maintained and negotiated in private households. She also sheds light on the fate of the workers, “global Cinderellas” who seek an escape from poverty at home only to find themselves treated as disposable labor abroad.

Lan demonstrates how economic disparities, immigration policies, race, ethnicity, and gender intersect in the relationship between the migrant workers and their Taiwanese employers. The employers are eager to flex their recently acquired financial muscle; many are first-generation career women as well as first-generation employers. The domestics are recruited from abroad as contract and “guest” workers; restrictive immigration policies prohibit them from seeking permanent residence or transferring from one employer to another. They care for Taiwanese families’ children, often having left their own behind. Throughout Global Cinderellas, Lan pays particular attention to how the women she studied identify themselves in relation to “others”—whether they be of different classes, nationalities, ethnicities, or education levels. In so doing, she offers a framework for thinking about how migrant workers and their employers understand themselves in the midst of dynamic transnational labor flows.

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Global City-Twinning in the Digital Age
Michel S. Laguerre
University of Michigan Press, 2019

For many years, cities throughout the globe have developed ties with each other to process and nurture friendship, solidarity, and collaboration. These city relationships constitute a mode of governance distinct from those of cities that are not involved in such cross-border arrangements, with influence that expands far beyond region.

In this light, Global City-Twinning in the Digital Age unveils an analysis of intercity relationships both on a global scale and as a global phenomenon with digital communication technologies that play key roles in upgrading traditional practices, enhancing cross-border cooperation, and facilitating the production of digital sister cities. This book analyzes the deployment of sister-city formations and operations throughout the world with a focus on cities of North America, Latin America, North Africa, Europe, and the Mediterranean region. Using a global approach, it discusses friendship, entrepreneurship, urban development, cooperative management, municipal policy, and digital entanglements. It expands the scope of study of sister cities by unveiling the role of immigrants, diaspora, and post-diaspora in the making and functioning of the digital model of sister cities.

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The Global Commons
An Introduction
Susan J. Buck; Foreword by Elinor Ostrom
Island Press, 1998

Vast areas of valuable resources unfettered by legal rights have, for centuries, been the central target of human exploitation and appropriation. The global commons -- Antarctica, the high seas and deep seabed minerals, the atmosphere, and space -- have remained exceptions only because access has been difficult or impossible, and the technology for successful extraction has been lacking. Now, technology has caught up with desire, and management regimes are needed to guide human use of these important resource domains.

In The Global Commons, Susan Buck considers the history of human interactions with each of the global commons areas and provides a concise yet thorough account of the evolution of management regimes for each area. She explains historical underpinnings of international law, examines the stakeholders involved, and discusses current policy and problems associated with it.

Buck applies key analytical concepts drawn from institutional analysis and regime theory to examine how legal and political concerns have affected the evolution of management regimes for the global commons. She presents in-depth case studies of each of the four regimes, outlining the historical evolution of the commons -- development of interest in exploiting the resource domain; conflicts among nations over the use of the commons; and efforts to design institutions to control access to the domains and to regulate their use -- and concluding with a description of the management regime that eventually emerged from the informal and formal negotiations.

The Global Commons provides a clear, useful introduction to the subject that will be of interest to general readers as well as to students in international relations and international environmental law, and in environmental law and policy generally.

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Global Dawn
The Cultural Foundation of American Internationalism, 1865–1890
Frank Ninkovich
Harvard University Press, 2009

Why did the United States become a global power? Frank Ninkovich shows that a cultural predisposition for thinking in global terms blossomed in the late nineteenth century, making possible the rise to world power as American liberals of the time took a wide-ranging interest in the world. At the center of their attention was the historical process they called “civilization,” whose most prominent features—a global economy, political democracy, and a global culture—anticipated what would later come to be known as globalization.

The continued spread of civilization, they believed, provided the answer to worrisome contemporary problems such as the faltering progress of democracy, a burgeoning arms race in Europe, and a dangerous imperialist competition. In addition to transforming international politics, a global civilization quickened by commercial and cultural exchanges would advance human equality and introduce the modern industrial way of life to traditional societies. Consistent with their universalist outlook, liberal internationalists also took issue with scientific racism by refusing to acknowledge racial hierarchy as a permanent feature of relations with nonwhite peoples.

Of little practical significance during a period when isolationism reigned supreme in U.S. foreign policy, this rich body of thought would become the cultural foundation of twentieth-century American internationalism.

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Global Diffusion of Protest
Riding the Protest Wave in the Neoliberal Crisis
Edited by Donatella della Porta
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Recent years have seen a new development in the growth and spread of popular protest: protests that began as local, homogeneous events-such as Occupy Wall Street or the protests of the Arab Spring-quickly left their original locations and local specificity behind and became global. This book looks at the development of this wave of protests, with an eye on protests against austerity and neoliberal economic policies, and offers a global view, covering events in Turkey, Brazil, Venezuela, South Africa, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and other locations.
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The Global Economy and Democracy in South Africa
Koelble, Thomas A.
Rutgers University Press, 1998
Democracy differs dramatically in First and Third World countries. Academic debate in the West focuses on democractic institutional arrangements and concepts such as elections, freedom of association, and freedom of speech, and little attention is paid to the content of emancipatory policy. In the Third World and especially in South Africa, emancipation and socio-economic redistribution are more important aspects in the popular perception of what democracy means than considerations of how political institutions function. These variations put regimes such as the ANC-led government on a collision course with the West.
Arguing that a consolidation of democratic institutions depends on a redistribution of resources, Thomas Koelble analyzes two crucial policy arenas-housing and education-to clarify the enormous problems facing the current South African government. For successful consolidation of institutional democracy in South Africa, Western political and financial institutions must provide support for that redistribution. Without their support, the ANC constituency's expectations that democracy will improve the quality of life will go unrealized, and the government may fail.
Koelble also posits that while the new South African constitution encompasses aspects of a consensus oriented system in terms of its federal structures and various rights to minorities, it is a system dominated by one large political party that is not constitutionally required to share power. He suggests that the ANC would have better served the cause of democracy had it included rather than excluded their opposition from political power. This majoritarian rule may deteriorate into another version of "race politics". Such race politics will have deleterious effects on both South Africa's polity and economy.
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Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3
A Hitchhiker's Guide to Informal Problem-Solving in human life
Edited by Alena Ledeneva
University College London, 2024
A journey through the informal and taken-for-granted ways of getting things done across the world.

For a post-human hitchhiker, human life–with its anxiety, aging, illness, and constant need for problem-solving–may look unviable. Yet, for humans, the life struggle is softened by human touch, human emotion, and human cooperation.

The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3 continues the journey of the two previous volumes into the world’s open secrets, unwritten rules, and hidden practices. It focuses on issues of emotional ambivalence and pressures of the digital age. The informal practices presented in this volume demonstrate the urgency of alleviating tensions between continuity and all-too-rapid change and the need to tackle the central problem of modern societies—uncertainty.

The volume takes the reader on a biographical journey through elusive, taken-for-granted, or banal ways of getting things done from over seventy countries and world regions. It offers an innovative understanding of the significance of fringes and challenges the assumption that informality is associated exclusively with poverty, underdevelopment, the Global South, oppressive regimes, or the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It also maps the patterns of informality around the globe, identifies specific informal practices in a context-sensitive way, and documents their ambivalent impact on people engaged in problem-solving, on societies in which these problems arise, and on humanity overall.
 
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The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume I
Towards Understanding of Social and Cultural Complexity
Edited by Alena Ledeneva
University College London, 2018
Broadly defined as “ways of getting things done,” the invisible yet powerful concepts of “informal practices” tend to escape articulation in official discourse. These practices include emotion-driven exchanges of gifts or favours and tributes for services, interest-driven know-how (from informal welfare to informal employment), identity-driven practices of solidarity, and power-driven forms of co-optation and control. Yet, the possible paradox of the indiscernibility of these informal practices is their ubiquity. Alena Ledeneva’s wholly unique two-volume work collaborates with over two hundred scholars across five continents, illustrating how informal practices are deeply embedded across the globe yet still remain underestimated in policy-making procedures.      
 
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The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume II
Understanding Social and Cultural Complexity
Edited by Alena Ledeneva
University College London, 2018
Broadly defined as “ways of getting things done,” the invisible yet powerful concepts of “informal practices” tend to escape articulation in official discourse. These practices include emotion-driven exchanges of gifts or favours and tributes for services, interest-driven know-how (from informal welfare to informal employment), identity-driven practices of solidarity, and power-driven forms of co-optation and control. Yet, the possible paradox of the indiscernibility of these informal practices is their ubiquity. Alena Ledeneva’s wholly unique two-volume work collaborates with over two hundred scholars across five continents, illustrating how informal practices are deeply embedded across the globe yet still remain underestimated in policy-making procedures.      
 
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Global Energy Shifts
Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age
Bruce Podobnik
Temple University Press, 2005
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the citizens of Great Britain faced a formidable challenge: coal resources seemed destined to run out and commentators were unable to foresee a viable alternative fuel. To address the crisis, military strategists were urged to seize control of coal in foreign lands, and companies were encouraged to increase domestic production of the resource.

In Global Energy Shifts, Bruce Podobnik draws intriguing parallels between the "coal panics" that once swept through Britain and the "oil panics" that grip the world today. His concise history of global energy use contextualizes the coal and oil scares, demonstrating how the convergence of specific geopolitical, commercial, and social conditions can generate rapid and far-reaching transformations in the energy foundations of our world.

Ultimately, Podobnik informs readers on how a "crisis" of one fuel system is quickly averted with the introduction of another, and describes opportunities for shifting our problematic, oil-based system toward a renewable energy system.
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Global Environmental Governance
Foundations of Contemporary Environmental Studies
James Gustave Speth and Peter M. Haas
Island Press, 2006
Today's most pressing environmental problems are planetary in scope, confounding the political will of any one nation. How can we solve them?

Global Environmental Governance offers the essential information, theory, and practical insight needed to tackle this critical challenge. It examines ten major environmental threats-climate disruption, biodiversity loss, acid rain, ozone depletion, deforestation, desertification, freshwater degradation and shortages, marine fisheries decline, toxic pollutants, and excess nitrogen-and explores how they can be addressed through treaties, governance regimes, and new forms of international cooperation.

Written by Gus Speth, one of the architects of the international environmental movement, and accomplished political scientist Peter M. Haas, Global Environmental Governance tells the story of how the community of nations, nongovernmental organizations, scientists, and multinational corporations have in recent decades created an unprecedented set of laws and institutions intended to help solve large-scale environmental problems. The book critically examines the serious shortcomings of current efforts and the underlying reasons why disturbing trends persist. It presents key concepts in international law and regime formation in simple, accessible language, and describes the current institutional landscape as well as lessons learned and new directions needed in international governance. Global Environmental Governance is a concise guide, with lists of key terms, study questions, and other features designed to help readers think about and understand the concepts discussed.
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Global Europe
The External Relations of the European Union
Otto Holman
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
The European Union is facing the worst existential crisis in its history. At the same time, it is confronted with old and new challenges in its environment that call for joint action. But how do matters stand with the EU's capacity to act? Does the EU manage to effectively combine the different components of its external relations -- such as trade, development aid, and security policy -- better than it did in the past? How is the EU's external action determined by the internal socio-economic and political crises in its member states? These questions and more are answered in Global Europe in the context of the current impasse in the integration process. A clear analysis of the history of the EU's external relations up to now provides us with a better insight into the feasibility of EU strategies directed at the outside world.
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The Global Farms Race
Land Grabs, Agricultural Investment, and the Scramble for Food Security
Michael Kugelman and Susan Levenstein
Island Press, 2013
As we struggle to feed a global population speeding toward 9 billion, we have entered a new phase of the food crisis. Wealthy countries that import much of their food, along with private investors, are racing to buy or lease huge swaths of farmland abroad. The Global Farms Race is the first book to examine this burgeoning trend in all its complexity, considering the implications for investors, host countries, and the world as a whole.
 
The debate over large-scale land acquisition is typically polarized, with critics lambasting it as a form of “neocolonialism,” and proponents lauding it as an elixir for the poor yields, inefficient technology, and unemployment plaguing global agriculture. The Global Farms Race instead offers diverse perspectives, featuring contributions from agricultural investment consultants, farmers’ organizations, international NGOs, and academics. The book addresses historical context, environmental impacts, and social effects, and covers all the major geographic areas of investment. 
 
Nearly 230 million hectares of farmland—an area equivalent to the size of Western Europe—have been sold or leased since 2001, with most of these transactions occurring since 2008. As the deals continue to increase, it is imperative for anyone concerned with food security to understand them and their consequences. The Global Farms Race is a critical resource to develop that understanding.
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Global Fever
How to Treat Climate Change
William H. Calvin
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Every decade since 1950 has seen more floods and more wildfires on every continent. Deserts are expanding, coral reefs are dying, fisheries are declining, hurricanes are strengthening. The debate about climate change is over: there’s no question that global warming has made the Earth sick, and the outlook for the future calls for ever-warmer temperatures and deadlier results. Something must be done—but how quickly?
            With Global Fever, William H. Calvin delivers both a clear-eyed diagnosis and a strongly worded prescription. In striking, straightforward language, he first clearly sets out the current state of the Earth’s warming climate and the disastrous possibilities ahead should we continue on our current path. Increasing temperatures will kill off vegetation and dry up water resources, and their loss will lead, in an increasingly destructive feedback loop, to even more warming. Resource depletion, drought, and disease will follow, leading to socioeconomic upheaval—and accompanying violence—on a scale barely conceivable.
            It is still possible, Calvin argues, to avoid such a dire fate. But we must act now, aggressively funneling resources into jump-starting what would amount to a third industrial revolution, this one of clean technologies—while simultaneously expanding our use of existing low-emission technologies, from nuclear power to plug-in hybrid vehicles, until we achieve the necessary scientific breakthroughs.
            Passionately written, yet thoroughly grounded in the latest climate science, Global Fever delivers both a stark warning and an ambitious blueprint for saving the future of our planet.
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Global Health Challenges for Human Security
Lincoln C. Chen
Harvard University Press, 2003

The goals of health and human security are fundamentally valued in all societies, yet the breadth of their interconnections are not properly understood. This volume explores the evolving relationship between health and security in today's interdependent world, and offers policy guidelines for global health action.

This volume underscores three basic principles. First, recent developments in the changing security landscape present enormous challenges for human security and global health. Second, although the connections between health and security are long-standing, the current context of new conflicts, pervasive poverty, and accelerating global flows has brought the fields closer together. Finally, a human security approach dependent upon individual and collective action can identify new strategies for meeting the goals of global health and security.

The distinguished contributions to this volume were commissioned by Harvard University's Global Equity Initiative, a research unit supporting the work of the International Commission on Human Security.

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Global Homophobia
States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression
Edited by Meredith L. Weiss and Michael J. Bosia
University of Illinois Press, 2013
While homophobia is commonly characterized as individual and personal prejudice, this collection of essays instead explores homophobia as a transnational political phenomenon. Editors Meredith L. Weiss and Michael J. Bosia theorize homophobia as a distinct configuration of repressive state-sponsored policies and practices with their own causes, explanations, and effects on how sexualities are understood and experienced in a variety of national contexts. The essays cover a broad range of geographic cases, including France, Ecuador, Iran, Lebanon, Poland, Singapore, and the United States.

Combining rich empirical analysis with theoretical synthesis, these studies examine how homophobia travels across complex and ambiguous transnational networks, how it achieves and exerts decisive power, and how it shapes the collective identities and strategies of those groups it targets. The first comparative volume to focus specifically on the global diffusion of homophobia and its implications for an emerging worldwide LGBT movement, Global Homophobia opens new avenues of debate and dialogue for scholars, students, and activists.

Contributors are Mark Blasius, Michael J. Bosia, David K. Johnson, Kapya J. Kaoma, Christine (Cricket) Keating, Katarzyna Korycki, Amy Lind, Abouzar Nasirzadeh, Conor O'Dwyer, Meredith L. Weiss, and Sami Zeidan.

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The Global Hunger Crisis
Tackling Food Insecurity in Developing Countries
Majda Bne Saad
Pluto Press, 2013

Millions across the world face the daily challenge to find enough food to survive. Hunger is on the rise globally, with more than 1.2 billion people suffering from food insecurity. Rising prices are further restricting food access.

In this deeply informative study, Majda Bne Saad identifies the causes for global hunger embedded in the current global political and economic system and highlights the key challenges facing food deficit countries. She shows how Western countries share the blame for global hunger through their support for subsidies to agricultural production and biofuels, which have created new challenges to food security worldwide.

Bne Saad argues that, as world population rises from 7 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050, there needs to be a ‘second green revolution’ to grow more food. She looks at the factors constraining low-income nations from achieving food security and considers policies which could generate income and enhance individuals' entitlement to food.

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Global Impact, Local Action
New Environmental Policy in Latin America
Edited by Anthony Hall
University of London Press, 2005

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The Global in the Local
A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China
Xin Zhang
Harvard University Press, 2023

The story of globalization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as experienced by ordinary people in the Chinese river town of Zhenjiang.

Fear swept Zhenjiang as British soldiers gathered outside the city walls in the summer of 1842. Already suspicious of foreigners, locals had also heard of the suffering the British inflicted two months earlier, in Zhapu. A wave of suicides and mercy killings ensued: rather than leave their families to the invaders, hundreds of women killed themselves and their children or died at the hands of male family members. British observers decried an “Asian culture” of ritual suicide. In reality, the event was sui generis—a tragic result of colliding local and global forces in nineteenth-century China.

Xin Zhang’s groundbreaking history examines the intense negotiations between local societies and global changes that created modern China. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, world-historic political, economic, and technological developments transformed the textures of everyday life in places like Zhenjiang, a midsize river town in China’s prosperous Lower Yangzi region. Drawing on rare primary sources, including handwritten diaries and other personal writings, Zhang offers a ground-level view of globalization in the city. We see civilians coping with the traumatic international encounters of the Opium War; Zhenjiang brokers bankrolling Shanghai’s ascendance as a cosmopolitan commercial hub; and merchants shipping goods to market, for the first time, on steamships.

Far from passive recipients, the Chinese leveraged, resisted, and made change for themselves. Indeed, The Global in the Local argues that globalization is inevitably refracted through local particularities.

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Global Indigenous Health
Reconciling the Past, Engaging the Present, Animating the Future
Edited by Robert Henry, Amanda LaVallee, Nancy Van Styvendale, and Robert Alexander Innes
University of Arizona Press
Indigenous peoples globally have a keen understanding of their health and wellness through traditional knowledge systems. In the past, traditional understandings of health often intersected with individual, community, and environmental relationships of well-being, creating an equilibrium of living well. However, colonization and the imposition of colonial policies regarding health, justice, and the environment have dramatically impacted Indigenous peoples’ health.

Building on Indigenous knowledge systems of health and critical decolonial theories, the volume’s contributors—who are academic and community researchers from Canada, the United States, Sweden, and New Zealand—weave a narrative to explore issues of Indigenous health within four broad themes: ethics and history, environmental and ecological health, impacts of colonial violence on kinship, and Indigenous knowledge and health activism. Chapters also explore how Indigenous peoples are responding to both the health crises in their communities and the ways for non-Indigenous people to engage in building positive health outcomes with Indigenous communities.

Global Indigenous Health is unique and timely as it deals with the historical and ongoing traumas associated with colonization and colonialism, understanding Indigenous concepts of health and healing, and ways of moving forward for health equity.

Contributors:

Sharon Leslie Acoose
Seth Adema
Peter Butt
John E. Charlton
Colleen Anne Dell
Debra Dell
Paul DePasquale
Judy A. Dow
C. Randy Duncan
Carina Fiedeldey-Van Dijk
Barbara Fornssler
Chelsea Gabel
Eleanor Louise Hadden
Laura Hall
Robert Henry
Carol Hopkins
Robert Alexander Innes
Simon Lambert
Amanda LaVallee
Josh Levy
Rachel Loewen Walker
David B. MacDonald
Peter Menzies
Christopher Mushquash
David Mykota
Nancy Poole
Alicia Powell
Ioana Radu
Margo Rowan
Mark F. Ruml
Caroline L. Tait
Lisa Tatonetti
Margaretha Uttjek
Nancy Van Styvendale
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Global Inequality
A New Approach for the Age of Globalization
Branko Milanovic
Harvard University Press, 2016

Winner of the Bruno Kreisky Prize, Karl Renner Institut
A Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year
An Economist Best Book of the Year
A Livemint Best Book of the Year


One of the world’s leading economists of inequality, Branko Milanovic presents a bold new account of the dynamics that drive inequality on a global scale. Drawing on vast data sets and cutting-edge research, he explains the benign and malign forces that make inequality rise and fall within and among nations. He also reveals who has been helped the most by globalization, who has been held back, and what policies might tilt the balance toward economic justice.

“The data [Milanovic] provides offer a clearer picture of great economic puzzles, and his bold theorizing chips away at tired economic orthodoxies.”
The Economist

“Milanovic has written an outstanding book…Informative, wide-ranging, scholarly, imaginative and commendably brief. As you would expect from one of the world’s leading experts on this topic, Milanovic has added significantly to important recent works by Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson and François Bourguignon…Ever-rising inequality looks a highly unlikely combination with any genuine democracy. It is to the credit of Milanovic’s book that it brings out these dangers so clearly, along with the important global successes of the past few decades.
—Martin Wolf, Financial Times

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The Global Interior
Mineral Frontiers and American Power
Megan Black
Harvard University Press, 2018

Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize
Winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Prize
Winner of the W. Turrentine Jackson Award
Winner of the British Association of American Studies Prize


“Extraordinary…Deftly rearranges the last century and a half of American history in fresh and useful ways.”
Los Angeles Review of Books

“A smart, original, and ambitious book. Black demonstrates that the Interior Department has had a far larger, more invasive, and more consequential role in the world than one would expect.”
—Brian DeLay, author of War of a Thousand Deserts

When considering the story of American power, the Department of the Interior rarely comes to mind. Yet it turns out that a government agency best known for managing natural resources and operating national parks has constantly supported America’s imperial aspirations.

Megan Black’s pathbreaking book brings to light the surprising role Interior has played in pursuing minerals around the world—on Indigenous lands, in foreign nations, across the oceans, even in outer space. Black shows how the department touted its credentials as an innocuous environmental-management organization while quietly satisfying America’s insatiable demand for raw materials. As presidents trumpeted the value of self-determination, this almost invisible outreach gave the country many of the benefits of empire without the burden of a heavy footprint. Under the guise of sharing expertise with the underdeveloped world, Interior scouted tin sources in Bolivia and led lithium surveys in Afghanistan. Today, it promotes offshore drilling and even manages a satellite that prospects for Earth’s resources from outer space.

“Offers unprecedented insights into the depth and staying power of American exceptionalism…as generations of policymakers sought to extend the reach of U.S. power globally while emphatically denying that the United States was an empire.”
—Penny Von Eschen, author of Satchmo Blows Up the World

“Succeeds in showing both the central importance of minerals in the development of American power and how the realities of empire could be obscured through a focus on modernization and the mantra of conservation.”
—Ian Tyrrell, author of Crisis of the Wasteful Nation

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Global Labor Migration
New Directions
Edited by Eileen Boris, Heidi Gottfried, Julie Greene, and Joo-Cheong Tham
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Around the world, hundreds of millions of labor migrants endure exploitation, lack of basic rights, and institutionalized discrimination and marginalization. What dynamics and drivers have created a world in which such a huge--and rapidly growing--group toils as marginalized men and women, existing as a lower caste institutionally and juridically? In what ways did labor migrants shape their living and working conditions in the past, and what opportunities exist for them today?

Global Labor Migration presents new multidisciplinary, transregional perspectives on issues surrounding global labor migration. The essays go beyond disciplinary boundaries, with sociologists, ethnographers, legal scholars, and historians contributing research that extends comparison among and within world regions. Looking at migrant workers from the late nineteenth century to the present day, the contributors illustrate the need for broader perspectives that study labor migration over longer timeframes and from wider geographic areas. The result is a unique, much-needed collection that delves into one of the world’s most pressing issues, generates scholarly dialogue, and proposes cutting-edge research agendas and methods.

Contributors: Bridget Anderson, Rutvica Andrijasevic, Katie Bales, Jenny Chan, Penelope Ciancanelli, Felipe Barradas Correia Castro Bastos, Eileen Boris, Charlie Fanning, Judy Fudge, Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres, Heidi Gottfried, Julie Greene, Justin Jackson, Radhika Natarajan, Pun Ngai, Bastiaan Nugteren, Nicola Piper, Jessica R. Pliley, Devi Sacchetto, Helen Sampson, Yael Schacher, Joo-Cheong Tham, and Matt Withers

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Global Matrix
Nationalism, Globalism and State-Terrorism
Tom Nairn and Paul James
Pluto Press, 2005

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Global Modernity from Coloniality to Pandemic
A Cross-disciplinary Perspective
Hatem Akil
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Global Modernity from Coloniality to Pandemic explores issues related to the global crises of our time: reason, science, and the environment by revisiting the notions of modernity, modernism, and modernization, which can no longer be considered purely Western or strictly secular. The book poses questions about viewing modernity today from the vantage point of traditionally disparate disciplines – engaging scholars from sociology to science, philosophy to robotics, medicine to visual culture, mathematics to cultural theory, biology to environmental studies. Leading sociologist Alain Touraine contributes a new text in which he reflects on the role of women, refugees and migrants, and the future of democracy. In their conclusion, the editors posit a fundamental ethical distinction between modernization and modernity and call for a new understanding of modernity that is globally distributed, informed by the voices of many, and concerned with crises that threaten all of us at the level of the species – a modernity-to-come.
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Global Perspectives on China's Belt and Road Initiative
Asserting Agency through Regional Connectivity
Florian Schneider
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
2013 saw the launch of the largest, most influential investment initiative in recent memory: China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This globe-spanning strategy has reshaped local economies and regionals networks, and it has become a contested subject for scholars and practitioners alike. How should we make sense of the complex interactions that the BRI has enabled? Understanding these processes requires truly global perspectives alongside careful attention to the role that local actors play in giving shape to individual BRI projects. The contributions in this volume provide both 'big picture' assessments of China's role in regional and global interactions and detailed case studies that home in on the role agency plays in BRI dynamics. Written by leading area studies scholars with diverse disciplinary expertise, this book reveals how Chinese efforts to recalibrate the world are taken up, challenged, revamped, and reworked in diverse contexts around the world.
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Global Perspectives on the United States
Pro-Americanism, Anti-Americanism, and the Discourses Between
Edited by Virginia R. Dominguez and Jane C. Desmond
University of Illinois Press, 2017
This daring collaborative effort showcases dialogues between international scholars engaged with the United States from abroad. The writers investigate the analytic methods and choices that label certain talk, images, behaviors, and allusions as "American" and how to read the data on such material. The editors present the essays in pairs that overlap in theme or region. Each author subsequently comments on the other's work. A third scholar or team of scholars from a different discipline or geographic location then provides another level of analysis. Contributors: Andrzej Antoszek, Sophia Balakian, Zsófia Bán, Sabine Bröck, Ian Condry, Kate Delaney, Jane C. Desmond, Virginia R. Dominguez, Ira Dworkin, Richard Ellis, Guillermo Ibarra, Seyed Mohammad Marandi, Giorgio Mariani, Ana Mauad, Loes Nas, Edward Schatz, Manar Shorbagy, Kristin Solli, Amy Spellacy, and Michael Titlestad.
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Global Political Economy
A Marxist Critique
Bill Dunn
Pluto Press, 2008

This is an ambitious survey of the history and state of the world economy, covering the major upheavals of the capitalist system over the last 100 years.

Bill Dunn provides an original and enlightening explanation of the state of the world economy. He covers all the main aspects of global political economy explaining the theories behind production, trade, finance and relations between rich and poor countries. He also tackles the question of the origin of capitalism, a debate that always proves popular among students and academics. Dunn also includes a critique of alternative perspectives, showing that Marxism still provides the best analytical tools for understanding the global economy.

This comprehensive text is a must for students of politics and economics who are keen to understand how the economy reached its current stage and what the future is likely to bring.

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The Global Political Economy of Israel
Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler
Pluto Press, 2002

Over the past century, Israel has been transformed from an agricultural colony, to a welfare-warfare state, to a globally integrated "market economy" characterised by great income disparities. What lies behind this transformation? In order to understand capitalist development, argue Bichler and Nitzan, we need to break the artificial separation between "economics" and "politics", and think of accumulation itself as "capitalisation of power". Applying this concept to Israel, they reveal the big picture that never makes it to the news. Diverse processes – such as regional conflicts and energy crises, ruling class formation and dominant ideology, militarism and dependency, inflation and recession, the politics of high-technology and the transnationalisation of ownership – are all woven into a single story. The result is a fascinating account of one of the world’s most volatile regions.

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The Global Republic
America's Inadvertent Rise to World Power
Frank Ninkovich
University of Chicago Press, 2014
For decades the United States has been the most dominant player on the world’s stage. The country’s economic authority, its globally forceful foreign policy, and its leading position in international institutions tend to be seen as the result of a long-standing, deliberate drive to become a major global force. Furthermore, it has become widely accepted that American exceptionalism—the belief that America is a country like no other in history—has been at the root of many of the country’s political, military, and global moves. Frank Ninkovich disagrees.  

One of the preeminent intellectual historians of our time, Ninkovich delivers here his most ambitious and sweeping book to date. He argues that historically the United States has been driven not by a belief in its destiny or its special character but rather by a need to survive the forces of globalization. He builds the powerful case that American foreign policy has long been based on and entangled in questions of global engagement, while also showing that globalization itself has always been distinct from—and sometimes in direct conflict with—what we call international society. 

In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States unexpectedly stumbled into the role of global policeman and was forced to find ways to resolve international conflicts that did not entail nuclear warfare. The United States's decisions were based less in notions of exceptionalism and more in a need to preserve and expand a flourishing global society that had become essential to the American way of life.

Sure to be controversial, The Global Republic compellingly and provocatively counters some of the deepest and most common misconceptions about America’s history and its place in the world.
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Global Rivalries From the Cold War to Iraq
Kees van der Pijl
Pluto Press, 2006
This book offers a highly original analysis of world events in the light of the Iraq War. It explores the history and development of relations between major countries in the international community and the impact that successive wars and changes in the global political economy have had on the way states relate to each other today.

Tracing the liberal state structure back to the closing stages of the English Civil War and settlement in North America, it argues that the rise of the English-speaking West has created rivalries between contender states that are never entirely put to rest. With each round of Western expansion, new rivalries are created.

Offering a truly global analysis that covers every area of the world - from Europe and America to China, the Middle East, Latin America and Russia -- he analyses the development of international relations post WWII, and questions whether the neoliberal project and its human rights ideology have collapsed back into authoritarianism under the guise of the 'war on terror'.
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Global Rivalries
Standards Wars and the Transnational Cotton Trade
Amy A. Quark
University of Chicago Press, 2013
As the economies of China, India, and other Asian nations continue to grow, these countries are seeking greater control over the rules that govern international trade. Setting the rules carries with it the power to establish advantage, so it’s no surprise that everyone wants a seat at the table—or that negotiations over rules often result in stalemates at meeting of the World Trade Organization.

Nowhere is the conflict over rule setting more evident than in the simmering “standards wars” over the rules that define quality and enable the adjudication of disputes. In Global Rivalries, Amy A. Quark explores the questions of how rules are made, who makes them, and how they are enforced, using the lens of cotton—a simple commodity that has become a poignant symbol of both the crisis of Western rule making power and the potential for powerful new rivals to supplant it. Quark traces the strategies for influencing rule making processes employed not only by national governments but also by transnational corporations, fiber scientists, and trade associations from around the globe. Quark analyzes the efficacy of their approaches and the implications for more marginal actors in the cotton trade, including producers in West Africa.

By placing the current contest within the historical development of the global capitalist system, Global Rivalries highlights a fascinating interaction of politics and economics.

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Global Russian Cultures
Edited by Kevin M. F. Platt
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
Is there an essential Russian identity? What happens when "Russian" literature is written in English, by such authors as Gary Shteyngart or Lara Vapnyar? What is the geographic "home" of Russian culture created and shared via the internet? Global Russian Cultures innovatively considers these and many related questions about the literary and cultural life of Russians who in successive waves of migration have dispersed to the United States, Europe, and Israel, or who remained after the collapse of the USSR in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Central Asian states.

The volume's internationally renowned contributors treat the many different global Russian cultures not as "displaced" elements of Russian cultural life but rather as independent entities in their own right. They describe diverse forms of literature, music, film, and everyday life that transcend and defy political, geographic, and even linguistic borders. Arguing that Russian cultures today are many, this volume contends that no state or society can lay claim to be the single or authentic representative of Russianness. In so doing, it contests the conceptions of culture and identity at the root of nation-building projects in and around Russia.
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Global Sex
Dennis Altman
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Global Sex is the first major work to take on the globalization of sexuality, examining the ways in which desire and pleasure—as well as ideas about gender, political power, and public health—are framed, shaped, or commodified by a global economy in which more and more cultures move into ever-closer contact.
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Global Shadows
Africa in the Neoliberal World Order
James Ferguson
Duke University Press, 2006
Both on the continent and off, “Africa” is spoken of in terms of crisis: as a place of failure and seemingly insurmountable problems, as a moral challenge to the international community. What, though, is really at stake in discussions about Africa, its problems, and its place in the world? And what should be the response of those scholars who have sought to understand not the “Africa” portrayed in broad strokes in journalistic accounts and policy papers but rather specific places and social realities within Africa?

In Global Shadows the renowned anthropologist James Ferguson moves beyond the traditional anthropological focus on local communities to explore more general questions about Africa and its place in the contemporary world. Ferguson develops his argument through a series of provocative essays which open—as he shows they must—into interrogations of globalization, modernity, worldwide inequality, and social justice. He maintains that Africans in a variety of social and geographical locations increasingly seek to make claims of membership within a global community, claims that contest the marginalization that has so far been the principal fruit of “globalization” for Africa. Ferguson contends that such claims demand new understandings of the global, centered less on transnational flows and images of unfettered connection than on the social relations that selectively constitute global society and on the rights and obligations that characterize it.

Ferguson points out that anthropologists and others who have refused the category of Africa as empirically problematic have, in their devotion to particularity, allowed themselves to remain bystanders in the broader conversations about Africa. In Global Shadows, he urges fellow scholars into the arena, encouraging them to find a way to speak beyond the academy about Africa’s position within an egregiously imbalanced world order.

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The Global Shelter Imaginary
Ikea Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief
Andrew Herscher
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

Examines how the humanitarian order advances a message of moral triumph and care while abandoning the dispossessed

Prompted by a growing number of refugees and other displaced people, intersections of design and humanitarianism are proliferating. From the IKEA Foundation’s Better Shelter to Airbnb’s Open Homes program, the consumer economy has engaged the global refugee crisis with seemingly new tactics that normalize an institutionally sanctioned politics of evasion. Exploring “the global shelter imaginary,” this book charts the ways shelter functions as a form of rightless relief that expels recognition of the rights of the displaced and advances political paradoxes of displacement itself. 

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The Global Transformation of Time
1870–1950
Vanessa Ogle
Harvard University Press, 2015

As new networks of railways, steamships, and telegraph communications brought distant places into unprecedented proximity, previously minor discrepancies in local time-telling became a global problem. Vanessa Ogle’s chronicle of the struggle to standardize clock times and calendars from 1870 to 1950 highlights the many hurdles that proponents of uniformity faced in establishing international standards.

Time played a foundational role in nineteenth-century globalization. Growing interconnectedness prompted contemporaries to reflect on the annihilation of space and distance and to develop a global consciousness. Time—historical, evolutionary, religious, social, and legal—provided a basis for comparing the world’s nations and societies, and it established hierarchies that separated “advanced” from “backward” peoples in an age when such distinctions underwrote European imperialism.

Debates and disagreements on the varieties of time drew in a wide array of observers: German government officials, British social reformers, colonial administrators, Indian nationalists, Arab reformers, Muslim scholars, and League of Nations bureaucrats. Such exchanges often heightened national and regional disparities. The standardization of clock times therefore remained incomplete as late as the 1940s, and the sought-after unification of calendars never came to pass. The Global Transformation of Time reveals how globalization was less a relentlessly homogenizing force than a slow and uneven process of adoption and adaptation that often accentuated national differences.

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Global Trends and Global Governance
Edited by Paul Kennedy, Dirk Messner, and Franz Nuscheler
Pluto Press, 2001

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Global Value Chains
Linking Local Producers from Developing Countries to International Markets
Edited by Meine Pieter van Dijk and Jacques Trienekens
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
This book contains seven case studies of global value chains as well as a discussion of the theory behind these chains. Specifically, it examines the impact of global value chains on local upgrading strategies, as well as the role of governments, buyers, donors, and civil society in influencing value chains and the importance of partnerships as mechanisms for value chain upgrading. An impressive group of eminent scholars deliver a thorough examination of this important economic and political phenomenon. 
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The Global Village Myth
Distance, War, and the Limits of Power
Patrick Porter
Georgetown University Press, 2015

According to security elites, revolutions in information, transport, and weapons technologies have shrunk the world, leaving the United States and its allies more vulnerable than ever to violent threats like terrorism or cyberwar. As a result, they practice responses driven by fear: theories of falling dominoes, hysteria in place of sober debate, and an embrace of preemptive war to tame a chaotic world.

Patrick Porter challenges these ideas. In The Global Village Myth, he disputes globalism's claims and the outcomes that so often waste blood and treasure in the pursuit of an unattainable "total" security. Porter reexamines the notion of the endangered global village by examining Al-Qaeda's global guerilla movement, military tensions in the Taiwan Strait, and drones and cyberwar, two technologies often used by globalists to support their views. His critique exposes the folly of disastrous wars and the loss of civil liberties resulting from the globalist enterprise. Showing that technology expands rather than shrinks strategic space, Porter offers an alternative outlook to lead policymakers toward more sensible responses—and a wiser, more sustainable grand strategy.

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Global Visions of Violence
Agency and Persecution in World Christianity
Jason Bruner
Rutgers University Press, 2023
In Global Visions of Violence, the editors and contributors argue that violence creates a lens, bridge, and method for interdisciplinary collaboration that examines Christianity worldwide in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By analyzing the myriad ways violence, persecution, and suffering impact Christians and the imagination of Christian identity globally, this interdisciplinary volume integrates the perspectives of ethicists, historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers to generate new conversations. Taken together, the chapters in this book challenge scholarship on Christian growth that has not accounted for violence while analyzing persecution narratives that can wield data toward partisan ends.  This allows Global Visions of Violence to push urgent conversations forward, giving voice to projects that illuminate wide and often hidden landscapes that have been shaped by global visions of violence, and seeking solutions that end violence and turn toward the pursuit of justice, peace, and human rights among suffering Christians. 
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Global Warming and Political Intimidation
How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists as the Earth Heated Up
Raymond S. Bradley
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
Global warming is the number one environmental issue of our time, yet some prominent politicians have refused to accept scientific evidence of human responsibility and have opposed any legislation or international agreement that would limit greenhouse gas emissions. A few have gone even further and have tried to destroy the reputations of scientists researching climate change by deliberately undermining the credibility of their research. These politicians have sought to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of the public and to weaken public and political support for the control of fossil fuel use.

In this powerful book, highly respected climate scientist Raymond Bradley provides the inside story from the front lines of the debate. In clear and direct language, he describes the tactics those in power have used to intimidate him and his colleagues part of a larger pattern of governmental suppression of scientific information, politics at the expense of empirically based discourse.

Speaking from his experience, Bradley exposes the fault lines in the global warming debate, while providing a concise primer on climate change. The result is a cautionary tale of how politics and science can become fatally intertwined.
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Global Warming, Politics, and the Media
David Roberts
Island Press, 2012
On September 21, 2011, David Roberts participated in The National Climate Seminar, a series of webinars sponsored by Bard College’s Center for Environmental Policy. The online seminars provide a forum for leading scientists, writers, and other experts to talk about critical issues regarding climate change. The series also opens a public conversation, inviting participants to ask questions and contribute their own thoughts.
 
Roberts is a Senior Staff Writer at Grist, one of the web’s most popular sites for environmental news and commentary, so he is distinctively qualified to discuss the relationship between global warming, politics, and the media. In his lecture, Roberts argued that environmentalists’ traditional criticism of climate change coverage—namely that journalists describe global warming as a debatable theory rather than as fact—is no longer the issue. Most media accept the reality of climate change—but it is treated as a specialty issue, rather than as a phenomenon that affects myriad aspects of life. The seminar focused on how to change that perception—how to make climate a backdrop to the political debates that affect real change.
 
This E-ssential is an edited version of Roberts’ talk and the subsequent question and answer session. While some material has been cut and some language modified for clarity, the intention was to retain the substance of the original discussion.
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Global White Supremacy
Anti-Blackness and the University as Colonizer
Christopher S. Collins
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Knowledge is more expansive than the boundaries of the Western university model and its claim to be the dominant—or only—rigorous house of knowledge. In the former colonies of Europe (e.g., South Africa, Brazil, and Oceania), the curriculum, statues, architectures, and other aspects of the university demonstrate the way in which it is a fixture in empire maintenance. The trajectory of global White supremacy is deeply historical and contemporary—it is a global, transnational, and imperial phenomenon. White supremacy is sustained through the construction of inferiority and anti-Blackness. The context, history, and perspective offered by Collins, Newman, and Jun should serve as an introduction to the disruption of the ways in which university and academic dispositions have and continue to serve as sites of colonial and White supremacist preservation—as well as sites of resistance. 
 
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Globalists
The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
Quinn Slobodian
Harvard University Press, 2020

George Louis Beer Prize Winner
Wallace K. Ferguson Prize Finalist
A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year


“A groundbreaking contribution…Intellectual history at its best.”
—Stephen Wertheim, Foreign Affairs


Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. It was a project that changed the world, but was also undermined time and again by the relentless change and social injustice that accompanied it.

“Slobodian’s lucidly written intellectual history traces the ideas of a group of Western thinkers who sought to create, against a backdrop of anarchy, globally applicable economic rules. Their attempt, it turns out, succeeded all too well.”
—Pankaj Mishra, Bloomberg Opinion

“Fascinating, innovative…Slobodian has underlined the profound conservatism of the first generation of neoliberals and their fundamental hostility to democracy.”
—Adam Tooze, Dissent

“The definitive history of neoliberalism as a political project.”
Boston Review

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Globalization
Arjun Appadurai, ed.
Duke University Press, 2001
Edited by one of the most prominent scholars in the field and including a distinguished group of contributors, this collection of essays makes a striking intervention in the increasingly heated debates surrounding the cultural dimensions of globalization. While including discussions about what globalization is and whether it is a meaningful term, the volume focuses in particular on the way that changing sites—local, regional, diasporic—are the scenes of emergent forms of sovereignty in which matters of style, sensibility, and ethos articulate new legalities and new kinds of violence.
Seeking an alternative to the dead-end debate between those who see globalization as a phenomenon wholly without precedent and those who see it simply as modernization, imperialism, or global capitalism with a new face, the contributors seek to illuminate how space and time are transforming each other in special ways in the present era. They examine how this complex transformation involves changes in the situation of the nation, the state, and the city. While exploring distinct regions—China, Africa, South America, Europe—and representing different disciplines and genres—anthropology, literature, political science, sociology, music, cinema, photography—the contributors are concerned with both the political economy of location and the locations in which political economies are produced and transformed. A special strength of the collection is its concern with emergent styles of subjectivity, citizenship, and mobilization and with the transformations of state power through which market rationalities are distributed and embodied locally.

Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Jean François Bayart, Jérôme Bindé, Néstor García Canclini, Leo Ching, Steven Feld, Ralf D. Hotchkiss, Wu Hung, Andreas Huyssen, Boubacar Touré Mandémory, Achille Mbembe, Philipe Rekacewicz, Saskia Sassen, Fatu Kande Senghor, Seteney Shami, Anna Tsing, Zhang Zhen

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Globalization and Decentralization
Institutional Contexts, Policy Issues, and Intergovernmental Relations in Japan and the United States
Jong S. Jun and Deil S. Wright, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 1996

This book explores the effects of global socio-economic forces on the domestic policies and administrative institutions of Japan and the United States, and it explains how these global factors have shifted power and authority downward from the national government to subnational governments.

This major comparative study comprises ten pairs of essays written by leading Japanese and American scholars on parallel public policy issues, institutional patterns, and intergovernmental relations in Japan and the United States, all set in the context of globalization and its impact on decentralization in each country. The twenty contributors and the editors provide new insights into the domestic consequences of global interdependence by examining emerging strategies for dealing with environmental concerns, urban problems, infrastructure investments, financial policies, and human services issues.

An important study of the changing global setting, Globalization and Decentralization emphasizes the innovative and adaptive roles played by Japanese and American state, provincial, regional, and local governments in responding to the dramatic economic and political power shifts created by the new world order.

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Globalization and India's Economic Integration
Baldev Raj Nayar
Georgetown University Press, 2014

A common critique of globalization is that it causes economic segmentation and even disintegration of the national economy. Quite to the contrary, Baldev Raj Nayar provides a thorough empirical treatment of India’s political economy that challenges this critique by demonstrating that, on balance, both state and market have functioned to attenuate such a disintegrative impact and to accentuate economic integration. The active role of the Indian state in the areas of economic planning, fiscal federalism, and tax reform has resulted in improved economic integration and not increased segmentation. Similarly, his investigation of trade, investment, entrepreneurship, and migration suggests tendencies inherent in the market in favor of economic integration, especially when assisted by the state. While globalization has its benefits, such as higher economic growth, and costs, such as external shocks, Nayar’s findings show that India has benefited from globalization more than it has been victimized by it.

Globalization and India’s Economic Integration shows how globalization’s pressures favoring efficiency paradoxically induced the state to push for consolidation on a pan-Indian scale in the area of fiscal federalism and to advance the cause of the common market through reforming the indirect tax system; meanwhile, the state has pressed forward with social inclusiveness as never before in its economic planning. For another, the market, too, has been instrumental, because of its widened scope and its inherently expanding character, in strengthening economic integration through trade expansion, diffusion of industry, and increased inter-state migration. Nayar’s groundbreaking work will interest students, scholars, and specialists of India, South Asia, globalization, and political economy.

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Globalization and Inequality
Elhanan Helpman
Harvard University Press, 2018

One of the world’s leading experts on international trade explains that we must look beyond globalization to explain rising inequality.

Globalization is not the primary cause of rising inequality. This may come as a surprise. Inequality within nations has risen steadily in recent decades, at a time when countries around the world have eased restrictions on the movement of goods, capital, and labor. Many assume a causal relationship, which has motivated opposition to policies that promote freer trade. Elhanan Helpman shows, however, in this timely study that this assumption about the effects of globalization is more myth than fact.

Globalization and Inequality guides us through two decades of research about the connections among international trade, offshoring, and changes in income, and shows that the overwhelming conclusion of contemporary research is that globalization is responsible for only a small rise in inequality. The chief causes remain difficult to pin down, though technological developments favoring highly skilled workers and changes in corporate and public policies are leading suspects. As Helpman makes clear, this does not mean that globalization creates no problems. Critics may be right to raise concerns about such matters as cultural autonomy, child labor, and domestic sovereignty. But if we wish to curb inequality while protecting what is best about an interconnected world, we must start with a clear view of what globalization does and does not do and look elsewhere to understand our troubling and growing divide.

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Globalization and Its Discontents
The Rise of Postmodern Socialisms
Edited by Roger Burbach, Boris Kagarlitsky, and Orlando Nunez
Pluto Press, 1997

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Globalization and Modernity in Asia
Performative Moments
Edited by Chris Hudson and Bart Barendregt
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Much has been said regarding the global flows of information that are characteristic of modernity; it has been frequently stressed that these conduits are so deeply embedded that local or national environments may be imagined as having a global span. Thus, while we are now well aware that the imagination is integral to global cultural processes, questions still arise about how the imagination of life with a global span is made possible at the level of everyday social practices. This book examines performative interventions that can generate a re-imagining of local publics — both spatially grounded and mediatized — and help to renegotiate the connection between the local and the global. After the ‘performative turn’ of the 1960s, it has been understood that shared experience of performance as event or spectacle can transform interpretations of the global and the local and create new meanings, and this book continues in the direction of this important tradition, while also fully expanding on its consequences.
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Globalization and Race
Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness
Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas, eds.
Duke University Press, 2006
Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas argue that a firm grasp of globalization requires an understanding of how race has constituted, and been constituted by, global transformations. Focusing attention on race as an analytic category, this state-of-the-art collection of essays explores the changing meanings of blackness in the context of globalization. It illuminates the connections between contemporary global processes of racialization and transnational circulations set in motion by imperialism and slavery; between popular culture and global conceptions of blackness; and between the work of anthropologists, policymakers, religious revivalists, and activists and the solidification and globalization of racial categories.

A number of the essays bring to light the formative but not unproblematic influence of African American identity on other populations within the black diaspora. Among these are an examination of the impact of “black America” on racial identity and politics in mid-twentieth-century Liverpool and an inquiry into the distinctive experiences of blacks in Canada. Contributors investigate concepts of race and space in early-twenty-first century Harlem, the experiences of trafficked Nigerian sex workers in Italy, and the persistence of race in the purportedly non-racial language of the “New South Africa.” They highlight how blackness is consumed and expressed in Cuban timba music, in West Indian adolescent girls’ fascination with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in the incorporation of American rap music into black London culture. Connecting race to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion, these essays reveal how new class economies, ideologies of belonging, and constructions of social difference are emerging from ongoing global transformations.

Contributors. Robert L. Adams, Lee D. Baker, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Tina M. Campt, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Raymond Codrington, Grant Farred, Kesha Fikes, Isar Godreau, Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, John L. Jackson Jr., Oneka LaBennett, Naomi Pabst, Lena Sawyer, Deborah A. Thomas

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Globalization and the Circumpolar North
Edited by Lassi Heininen and Chris Southcott
University of Alaska Press, 2010
The circumpolar north has long been the subject of conflicting national aspirations and border disputes, and with the end of the cold war and the coming era of potential resource scarcity, its importance will only grow over the next several decades. Anticipating that renewed prominence, Globalization and the Circumpolar North brings together an array of scholars to explore the effects of this increased attention, from the new opportunities offered by globalization to the potential damage to long-isolated northern communities and peoples.
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Globalization and the Future of the Welfare State
Miguel Glatzer
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the global political economy has undergone a profound transformation. Democracy has swept the globe, and both rich and developing nations must compete in an increasingly integrated world economy.

How are social welfare policies being affected by this wave of economic globalization? Leading researchers explore the complex question in this new comparative study. Shifting their focus from the more commonly studied, established welfare states of northwestern Europe, the authors of Globalization and the Future of the Welfare State examine policy development in the middle-income countries of southern and eastern Europe, Latin America, Russia, and East Asia. 

Previous investigations into the effects of globalization on welfare states have generally come to one of two conclusions. The first is that a global economy undermines existing welfare states and obstructs new developments in social policy, as generous provisions place a burden on a nation's resources and its ability to compete in the international marketplace. In contrast, the second builds on the finding that economic openness is positively correlated with greater social spending, which suggests that globalization and welfare states can be mutually reinforcing.

Here the authors find that globalization and the success of the welfare state are by no means as incompatible as the first view implies. The developing countries analyzed demonstrate that although there is great variability across countries and regions, domestic political processes and institutions play key roles in managing the disruptions wrought by globalization.

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Globalization and the Politics of Pay
Policy Choices in the American States
Susan B. Hansen
Georgetown University Press, 2006

In the American federal system, states actively compete for jobs, business investment, and factory locations. Labor costs have played an important role in such interstate competition since the days of the pre-Civil War plantation economy. In recent years, however, global economic trends have put added pressures on businesses and government to reduce labor costs. At least, that is what most politicians, the media, and the business community believe.

Globalization and the Politics of Pay examines the economic, political, and social causes and consequences of declining wages in the United States. It challenges the conventional wisdom that globalization is to blame for the decline in workers' earnings. Susan B. Hansen presents a comprehensive analysis of the many factors affecting labor costs and concludes that many of them result from choices made by the states themselves through the laws and policies they enact. In addition, free-market ideologies and low voter turnout have had greater effects in keeping wages down than globalization. In fact, foreign trade and investment can actually result in higher pay in the state labor market.

In this rigorous yet surprising study, Hansen develops new measures of state and federal labor costs to test competing theories of the consequences of reducing wages and benefits. Most economists would argue that higher labor costs cause higher unemployment, and that reducing labor costs will lead to higher levels of job creation. But citizens and elected officials must weigh any employment gains in lower-wage jobs against slower state economic growth, declining personal income, and a less-competitive position in international trade. Cutting state labor costs is shown to have adverse social consequences, including family instability, high crime rates, poverty, and low voter turnouts. The book concludes with policy recommendations for state governments trying to balance their need for more jobs with policies to enhance productivity, living standards, social stability, and international competitiveness.

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Globalization and the Rural Environment
Otto T. Solbrig
Harvard University Press, 2001

As the world transitions from an industrial society to an information society, agriculture has undergone a dramatic transformation. Food production in the twentieth century was transformed by three revolutions: first mechanical, then genetic, and finally chemical. Now, in the twenty-first century, agriculture is going through at least two more revolutions: an information technology revolution leading to precision farming, and a biotechnology revolution leading to genetically engineered crops.

Organized by Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies with the collaboration of the Scientific Committee for Problems of the Environment, this interdisciplinary volume examines the impact of a variety of new technological, social, and economic trends on the rural environment.

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Globalization From Below
Transnational Activists And Protest Networks
Donatella della Porta Della Porta
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
When violence broke out at the demonstrations surrounding the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, the authors of this book were there. The protests proved to be a critical moment in the global justice movement.

Presenting the first systematic empirical research on the global justice movement, Globalization from Below analyzes a movement from the viewpoints of the activists, organizers, and demonstrators themselves. The authors traveled to Genoa with anti-G8 protesters and collected data from more than 800 participants. A year later, they surveyed 2,400 activists at the European Social Forum in Florence. To understand how this cycle of global protest emerged, they examine the interactions between challengers and elites, and discuss how these new models of activism fit into current social movement work.

Globalization from Below places the protests within larger debates, revealing and investigating the forces that led to a clash between demonstrators and the Italian government, which responded with violence.

Donatella della Porta is professor of political science; Massimiliano Andretta is a researcher in political science and sociology; Lorenzo Mosca is a researcher in information and communication technologies; Herbert Reiter is a researcher in history, all at the European University Institute.
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The Globalization of Supermax Prisons
Ross, Jeffrey Ian
Rutgers University Press, 2013

2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

“Supermax” prisons, conceived by the United States in the early 1980s, are typically reserved for convicted political criminals such as terrorists and spies and for other inmates who are considered to pose a serious ongoing threat to the wider community, to the security of correctional institutions, or to the safety of other inmates. Prisoners are usually restricted to their cells for up to twenty-three hours a day and typically have minimal contact with other inmates and correctional staff. Not only does the Federal Bureau of Prisons operate one of these facilities, but almost every state has either a supermax wing or stand-alone supermax prison.

The Globalization of Supermax Prisons examines why nine advanced industrialized countries have adopted the supermax prototype, paying particular attention to the economic, social, and political processes that have affected each state. Featuring essays that look at the U.S.-run prisons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanemo, this collection seeks to determine if the American model is the basis for the establishment of these facilities and considers such issues as the support or opposition to the building of a supermax and why opposition efforts failed; the allegation of human rights abuses within these prisons; and the extent to which the decision to build a supermax was influenced by developments in the United States. Additionally, contributors address such domestic matters as the role of crime rates, media sensationalism, and terrorism in each country’s decision to build a supermax prison.

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Globalization Under Construction
Govermentality, Law, and Identity
Richard Warren Perry
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

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Globalizations and Social Movements
Culture, Power, and the Transnational Public Sphere
John A. Guidry, Michael D. Kennedy, and Mayer N. Zald, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Globalization is a set of processes that are weakening national boundaries. Both transnational and local social movements develop to resist the processes of globalization--migration, economic interdependence, global media coverage of events and issues, and intergovernmental relations. Globalization not only spurs the creation of social movements, but affects the way many social movements are structured and work. The essays in this volume illuminate how globalization is caught up in social movement processes and question the boundaries of social movement theory.
The book builds on the modern theory of social movements that focuses upon political process and opportunity, resource mobilization and mobilization structure, and the cultural framing of grievances, utopias, ideologies, and options. Some of the essays deal with the structure of international campaigns, while others are focused upon conflicts and movements in less developed countries that have strong international components. The fourteen essays are written by both well established senior scholars and younger scholars in anthropology, political science, sociology, and history. The essays cover a range of time periods and regions of the world.
This book is relevant for anyone interested in the politics and social change processes related to globalization as well as social-movement theory.
Mayer Zald is Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan. Michael Kennedy is Vice Provost for International Programs, Associate Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Center for Russian and East European Affairs, University of Michigan. John Guidry is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Augustana College.
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Globalized Authoritarianism
Megaprojects, Slums, and Class Relations in Urban Morocco
Koenraad Bogaert
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

A rich investigation into Morocco’s urban politics

Over the past thirty years, Morocco’s cities have transformed dramatically. To take just one example, Casablanca’s medina is now obscured behind skyscrapers that are funded by global capital and encouraged by Morocco’s monarchy, which hopes to transform this city into a regional leader of finance and commerce. Such changes have occurred throughout Morocco. Megaprojects are redesigning the cityscapes of Rabat, Tangiers, and Casablanca, turning the nation’s urban centers into laboratories of capital accumulation, political dominance, and social control.

In Globalized Authoritarianism, Koenraad Bogaert links more abstract questions of government, globalization, and neoliberalism with concrete changes in the city. Bogaert goes deep beneath the surface of Morocco’s urban prosperity to reveal how neoliberal government and the increased connectivity engendered by global capitalism transformed Morocco’s leading urban spaces, opening up new sites for capital accumulation, creating enormous class divisions, and enabling new innovations in state authoritarianism. Analyzing these transformations, he argues that economic globalization does not necessarily lead to increased democratization but to authoritarianism with a different face, to a form of authoritarian government that becomes more and more a globalized affair.

Showing how Morocco’s experiences have helped produce new forms of globalization, Bogaert offers a bridge between in-depth issues of Middle Eastern studies and broader questions of power, class, and capital as they continue to evolve in the twenty-first century.

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Globalizing Aids
Cindy Patton
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
A long-awaited look at responses to the AIDS epidemic in relation to globalization. As AIDS began to appear around the "global village" in the early 1980s, the closeness brought by new technologies no longer promised wondrous cultural exchange; instead it made possible the transmission of a frightening new kind of disease. International scientific institutions and news organizations quickly constructed a "place" for AIDS in the global imaginary: from the heart of Africa and gay bathhouses in San Francisco to the back streets of Southeast Asia and poverty-stricken neighborhoods in the United States. Such simplistic accounts helped recycle racist ideas about Africans and Asians, intensified homophobic visions of irresponsible gay sexuality, and ignored the scientific and human reality of local experiences of the epidemic. In Globalizing AIDS, pioneering cultural critic Cindy Patton looks at the complex interaction between modern science, media coverage, and local activism during the first decade of the epidemic. Patton's critique of both the production of scientific credibility and the implementation of public health policy at the local level offers a bold reevaluation of how we think about AIDS and an innovative approach to the reality of the disease. Cindy Patton is a Winship Distinguished Researcher at Emory University. She is the author of Fatal Advice (1996) and Inventing AIDS (1990).
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Globalizing Family Values
The Christian Right In International Politics
Doris Buss
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
A timely exposé of the efforts of the religious right to influence global policy. With little fanfare and profound effect, "family values" have gone global, and the influence of the Christian Right is increasingly felt internationally. This is the first comprehensive study of the Christian Right's global reach and its impact on international law and politics. Doris Buss and Didi Herman explore tensions, contradictions, victories, and defeats for the Christian Right's global project, particularly in the United Nations. The authors consult Christian Right materials, from pamphlets to novels; conduct interviews with people in the movement; and provide a firsthand account of the World Congress of Families II in 1999, a key event in formulating Christian Right global policy and strategy. The result is a detailed look at a new global player-its campaigns against women's rights, population policy, and gay and lesbian rights; its efforts to build an alliance of orthodox faiths with non-Christians; and the tensions and strains as it seeks to negotiate a role for conservative Christianity in a changing global order. Doris Buss is assistant professor of law at Carleton University in Ottawa. Didi Herman is professor of law at Keele University in the United Kingdom.
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Globalizing the Caribbean
Political Economy, Social Change, and the Transnational Capitalist Class
Jeb Sprague
Temple University Press, 2019

The beautiful Caribbean basin is fertile ground for a study of capitalism past and present. Transnational corporations move money and labor around the region, as national regulations are reworked to promote conditions benefiting private capital. Globalizing the Caribbean offers a probing account of the region’s experience of economic globalization while considering gendered and racialized social relations and the frequent exploitation of workers.

Jeb Sprague focuses on the social and material nature of this new era in the history of world capitalism. He combines an historical overview of capitalism in the region with theoretical analysis backed by case studies. Sprague elaborates upon the role of class formation and the restructuring of local states. He considers both U.S. hegemony, and how various upsurges from below and crises occur. He examines the globalization of the cruise ship and mining businesses, looks at the growth of migrant labor and reverse flow of remittances, and describes the evolving role of export processing and supranational associations. In doing so, Sprague shows how transnationally oriented elites have come to rule the Caribbean, and how capitalist globalization in the region occurs alongside shifting political, institutional, and organizational dynamics.

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Global/Local
Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary
Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds.
Duke University Press, 1996
This groundbreaking collection focuses on what may be, for cultural studies, the most intriguing aspect of contemporary globalization—the ways in which the postnational restructuring of the world in an era of transnational capitalism has altered how we must think about cultural production. Mapping a "new world space" that is simultaneously more globalized and localized than before, these essays examine the dynamic between the movement of capital, images, and technologies without regard to national borders and the tendency toward fragmentation of the world into increasingly contentious enclaves of difference, ethnicity, and resistance.
Ranging across issues involving film, literature, and theory, as well as history, politics, economics, sociology, and anthropology, these deeply interdisciplinary essays explore the interwoven forces of globalism and localism in a variety of cultural settings, with a particular emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region. Powerful readings of the new image culture, transnational film genre, and the politics of spectacle are offered as is a critique of globalization as the latest guise of colonization. Articles that unravel the complex links between the global and local in terms of the unfolding narrative of capital are joined by work that illuminates phenomena as diverse as "yellow cab" interracial sex in Japan, machinic desire in Robocop movies, and the Pacific Rim city. An interview with Fredric Jameson by Paik Nak-Chung on globalization and Pacific Rim responses is also featured, as is a critical afterword by Paul Bové.
Positioned at the crossroads of an altered global terrain, this volume, the first of its kind, analyzes the evolving transnational imaginary—the full scope of contemporary cultural production by which national identities of political allegiance and economic regulation are being undone, and in which imagined communities are being reshaped at both the global and local levels of everyday existence.
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God and Government in the Ghetto
The Politics of Church-State Collaboration in Black America
Michael Leo Owens
University of Chicago Press, 2007
In recent years, as government agencies have encouraged faith-based organizations to help ensure social welfare, many black churches have received grants to provide services to their neighborhoods’ poorest residents. This collaboration, activist churches explain, is a way of enacting their faith and helping their neighborhoods.

But as Michael Leo Owens demonstrates in God and Government in the Ghetto, this alliance also serves as a means for black clergy to reaffirm their political leadership and reposition moral authority in black civil society. Drawing on both survey data and fieldwork in New York City, Owens reveals that African American churches can use these newly forged connections with public agencies to influence policy and government responsiveness in a way that reaches beyond traditional electoral or protest politics. The churches and neighborhoods, Owens argues, can see a real benefit from that influence—but it may come at the expense of less involvement at the grassroots.

Anyone with a stake in the changing strategies employed by churches as they fight for social justice will find God and Government in the Ghetto compelling reading.
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God Land
Reflections on Religion and Nationalism
Conor Cruise O'Brien
Harvard University Press, 1988

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God Talk
Experimenting With the Religious Causes of Public Opinion
Paul Djupe
Temple University Press, 2013
Religion’s influence on public opinion, politics, and candidates has been widely discussed in political science for a generation. God Talk isthe first volume that uses experimental methodology to establish whether and how that influence works.
 
Paul Djupe and Brian Calfano provide an unprecedented look at how religious cues, values, and identity-driven appeals impact candidate selection, trust, interest group support, and U.S. public opinion about tolerance, the environment, foreign policy, and related issues.
 
By situating their disparate, randomly assigned interventions within the broader framework of elite-based influence, the authors apply their new methodology to three questions: How do clergy affect congregation members? How are religious elites and groups and their public arguments evaluated? With what effect do political elites use religion? The results of their research provide a compelling framework for understanding the links between religion and politics.

In the series The Social Logic of Politics, edited by Scott McClurg
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God's Economy
Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State
Lew Daly
University of Chicago Press, 2009

President Obama has signaled a sharp break from many Bush Administration policies, but he remains committed to federal support for religious social service providers. Like George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative, though, Obama’s version of the policy has generated loud criticism—from both sides of the aisle—even as the communities that stand to benefit suffer through an ailing economy. God’s Economy reveals that virtually all of the critics, as well as many supporters, have long misunderstood both the true implications of faith-based partnerships and their unique potential for advancing social justice.

Unearthing the intellectual history of the faith-based initiative, Lew Daly locates its roots in the pluralist tradition of Europe’s Christian democracies, in which the state shares sovereignty with social institutions. He argues that Catholic and Dutch Calvinist ideas played a crucial role in the evolution of this tradition, as churches across nineteenth-century Europe developed philosophical and legal defenses to protect their education and social programs against ascendant governments. Tracing the influence of this heritageon the past three decades of American social policy and church-state law, Daly finally untangles the radical beginnings of the faith-based initiative. In the process, he frees it from the narrow culture-war framework that has limited debate on the subject since Bush opened the White House Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001.

A major contribution from an important new voice at the intersection of religion and politics, God’s Economy points the way toward policymaking that combines strong social support with a new moral focus on the protection of families and communities.

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Gods of the Blood
The Pagan Revival and White Separatism
Mattias Gardell
Duke University Press, 2003
Racist paganism is a thriving but understudied element of the American religious and cultural landscape. Gods of the Blood is the first in-depth survey of the people, ideologies, and practices that make up this fragmented yet increasingly radical and militant milieu. Over a five-year period during the 1990s Mattias Gardell observed and participated in pagan ceremonies and interviewed pagan activists across the United States. His unprecedented entree into this previously obscure realm is the basis for this firsthand account of the proliferating web of organizations and belief systems combining pre-Christian pagan mythologies with Aryan separatism. Gardell outlines the historical development of the different strands of racist paganism—including Wotanism, Odinism and Darkside Asatrú—and situates them on the spectrum of pagan belief ranging from Wicca and goddess worship to Satanism.

Gods of the Blood details the trends that have converged to fuel militant paganism in the United States: anti-government sentiments inflamed by such events as Ruby Ridge and Waco, the rise of the white power music industry (including whitenoise, dark ambient, and hatecore), the extraordinary reach of modern communications technologies, and feelings of economic and cultural marginalization in the face of globalization and increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the American population. Gardell elucidates how racist pagan beliefs are formed out of various combinations of conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, warrior ideology, populism, beliefs in racial separatism, Klandom, skinhead culture, and tenets of national socialism. He shows how these convictions are further animated by an array of thought selectively derived from thinkers including Nietzche, historian Oswald Spengler, Carl Jung, and racist mystics. Scrupulously attentive to the complexities of racist paganism as it is lived and practiced, Gods of the Blood is a fascinating, disturbing, and important portrait of the virulent undercurrents of certain kinds of violence in America today.

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God's Waiting Room
Racial Reckoning at Life's End
Casey Golomski
Rutgers University Press, 2025
Can older racists change their tune, or will they haunt us further once they're gone? Rich in mystery and life’s lessons, God’s Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life’s End considers what matters in the end for older white adults and the younger Black nurses who care for them. An innovation in creative nonfiction, Casey Golomski’s years of immersive research at a nursing home in South Africa, thirty years after the end of apartheid, are narrated as a one-day, room-by-room tour. Told in breathtakingly intimate and witty conversations with the home’s residents and nurses, including the untold story of Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island prison nurse, readers learn how ageism, sexism, and racism intersect and impact health care both in South Africa and in the United States, as well as create conditions in which people primed to be enemies find grace despite the odds.

For copyright reasons, this edition is not available in the South African Development Community and Kenya.
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Going Home
Black Representatives and Their Constituents
Richard F. Fenno
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Thirty years ago there were nine African Americans in the U.S. House of Representatives. Today there are four times that number. In Going Home, the dean of congressional studies, Richard F. Fenno, explores what representation has meant—and means today—to black voters and to the politicians they have elected to office.

Fenno follows the careers of four black representatives—Louis Stokes, Barbara Jordan, Chaka Fattah, and Stephanie Tubbs Jones—from their home districts to the halls of the Capitol. He finds that while these politicians had different visions of how they should represent their districts (in part based on their individual preferences, and in part based on the history of black politics in America), they shared crucial organizational and symbolic connections to their constituents. These connections, which draw on a sense of "linked fates," are ones that only black representatives can provide to black constituents.

His detailed portraits and incisive analyses will be important for anyone interested in the workings of Congress or in black politics.
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Going to War in Iraq
When Citizens and the Press Matter
Stanley Feldman, Leonie Huddy, and George E. Marcus
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Conventional wisdom holds that the Bush administration was able to convince the American public to support a war in Iraq on the basis of specious claims and a shifting rationale because Democratic politicians decided not to voice opposition and the press simply failed to do its job.
            Drawing on the most comprehensive survey of public reactions to the war, Stanley Feldman, Leonie Huddy, and George E. Marcus revisit this critical period and come back with a very different story. Polling data from that critical period shows that the Bush administration’s carefully orchestrated campaign not only failed to raise Republican support for the war but, surprisingly, led Democrats and political independents to increasingly oppose the war at odds with most prominent Democratic leaders. More importantly, the research shows that what constitutes the news matters. People who read the newspaper were more likely to reject the claims coming out of Washington because they were exposed to the sort of high-quality investigative journalism still being written at traditional newspapers. That was not the case for those who got their news from television. Making a case for the crucial role of a press that lives up to the best norms and practices of print journalism, the book lays bare what is at stake for the functioning of democracy—especially in times of crisis—as newspapers increasingly become an endangered species.
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Gold Metal Waters
The Animas River and the Gold King Mine Spill
Brad T. Clark
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Gold Metal Waters presents a uniquely inter- and transdisciplinary examination into the August 2015 Gold King Mine spill in Silverton, Colorado, when more than three million gallons of subterranean mine water, carrying 880,000 pounds of heavy metals, spilled into a tributary of the Animas River. The book illuminates the ongoing ecological, economic, political, social, and cultural significance of a regional event with far-reaching implications, showing how this natural and technical disaster has affected and continues to affect local and national communities, including Native American reservations, as well as agriculture and wildlife in the region.
 
This singular event is surveyed and interpreted from multiple diverse perspectives—college professors, students, and scientists and activists from a range of academic and epistemological backgrounds—with each chapter reflecting unique professional and personal experiences. Contributors examine both the context for this event and responses to it, embedding this discussion within the broader context of the tens of thousands of mines leaking pollutants into waterways and soils throughout Colorado and the failure to adequately mitigate the larger ongoing crisis.
 
The Gold King Mine spill was the catalyst that finally brought Superfund listing to the Silverton area; it was a truly sensational event in many respects. Gold Metal Waters will be of interest to students and scholars in all disciplines, but especially in environmental history, western history, mining history, politics, and communication, as well as general readers concerned with human relationships with the environment.

Contributors: Alane Brown, Brian L. Burke, Karletta Chief, Steven Chischilly, Becky Clausen, Michael A. Dichio, Betty Carter Dorr, Cynthia Dott, Gary Gianniny, David Gonzales, Andrew Gulliford, Lisa Marie Jacobs, Ashley Merchant, Teresa Montoya, Scott W. Roberts, Lorraine L. Taylor, Jack Turner, Keith D. Winchester, Megan C. Wrona, Janene Yazzie
 
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The Golden Dream
Seekers Of El Dorado
Robert Silverberg
Ohio University Press, 1996

One of the most persistent legends in the annals of New World exploration is that of the Land of Gold. This mythical site was located over vast areas of South America (and later, North America); the search for it drove some men mad with greed and, as often as not, to their untimely deaths.

In this history of quest and adventure, Robert Silverberg traces the fate of Old World explorers lured westward by the myth of El Dorado. From the German conquistadores licensed by the Spanish king to operate out of Venezuela, to the journeys of Gonzalo Pizarro in the Amazon basin, and to the nearly miraculous voyage of Francisco Orellana to the mouth of the Amazon River, encountering the warlike women who gave the river its name, violence and bloodshed accompanied the determined adventurers. Sir Walter Raleigh and a host of other explorers spent small fortunes and many lives trying to locate Manoa, a city that was rumored to be El Dorado—City of Gold. Celebrated science fiction author Robert Silverberg recreates these legendary quests in The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado.

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The Golden Horde
Revolutionary Italy, 1960–1977
Edited by Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni
Seagull Books, 2021
The Golden Horde is a definitive work on the Italian revolutionary movements of the 1960s and ’70s.

An anthology of texts and fragments woven together with an original commentary, The Golden Horde widens our understanding of the full complexity and richness of radical thought and practice in Italy during the 1960s and ’70s. The book covers the generational turbulence of Italy’s postwar period, the transformations of Italian capitalism, the new analyses by worker-focused intellectuals, the student movement of 1968, the Hot Autumn of 1969, the extra-parliamentary groups of the early 1970s, the Red Brigades, the formation of a radical women’s movement, the development of Autonomia, and the build-up to the watershed moment of the spontaneous political movement of 1977. Far from being merely a handbook of political history, The Golden Horde also sheds light on two decades of Italian culture, including the newspapers, songs, journals, festivals, comics, and philosophy that these movements produced. The book features writings by Sergio Bologna, Umberto Eco, Elvio Fachinelli, Lea Melandri, Danilo Montaldi, Toni Negri, Raniero Panzieri, Franco Piperno, Rossana Rossanda, Paolo Virno, and others, as well as an in-depth introduction by translator Richard Braude outlining the work’s composition and development.
 
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The Golden Passport
Global Mobility for Millionaires
Kristin Surak
Harvard University Press, 2023

"[A] fascinating study of how people―and their capital―seek to move around a world that is at once hugely interconnected and driven by inequities…definitive, detailed, and unusually nuanced.”
―Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Foreign Affairs

The first comprehensive on-the-ground investigation of the global market for citizenship, examining the wealthy elites who buy passports, the states and brokers who sell them, and the normalization of a once shadowy practice.

Our lives are in countless ways defined by our citizenship. The country we belong to affects our rights, our travel possibilities, and ultimately our chances in life. Obtaining a new citizenship is rarely easy. But for those with the means—billionaires like Peter Thiel and Jho Low, but also countless unknown multimillionaires—it’s just a question of price.

More than a dozen countries, many of them small islands in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and South Pacific, sell citizenship to 50,000 people annually. Through six years of fieldwork on four continents, Kristin Surak discovered how the initially dubious sale of passports has transformed into a full-blown citizenship industry that thrives on global inequalities. Some “investor citizens” hope to parlay their new passport into visa-free travel—or use it as a stepping stone to residence in countries like the United States. Other buyers take out a new citizenship as an insurance policy or to escape state control at home. Almost none, though, intend to move to their selected country and live among their new compatriots, whose relationship with these global elites is complex.

A groundbreaking study of a contentious practice that has become popular among the nouveaux riches, The Golden Passport takes readers from the details of the application process to the geopolitical hydraulics of the citizenship industry. It’s a business that thrives on uncertainty and imbalances of power between big, globalized economies and tiny states desperate for investment. In between are the fascinating stories of buyers, brokers, and sellers, all ready to profit from the citizenship trade.

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Golden Rule
The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems
Thomas Ferguson
University of Chicago Press, 1995
"To discover who rules, follow the gold." This is the argument of Golden Rule, a provocative, pungent history of modern American politics. Although the role big money plays in defining political outcomes has long been obvious to ordinary Americans, most pundits and scholars have virtually dismissed this assumption. Even in light of skyrocketing campaign costs, the belief that major financial interests primarily determine who parties nominate and where they stand on the issues—that, in effect, Democrats and Republicans are merely the left and right wings of the "Property Party"—has been ignored by most political scientists. Offering evidence ranging from the nineteenth century to the 1994 mid-term elections, Golden Rule shows that voters are "right on the money."

Thomas Ferguson breaks completely with traditional voter centered accounts of party politics. In its place he outlines an "investment approach," in which powerful investors, not unorganized voters, dominate campaigns and elections. Because businesses "invest" in political parties and their candidates, changes in industrial structures—between large firms and sectors—can alter the agenda of party politics and the shape of public policy.

Golden Rule presents revised versions of widely read essays in which Ferguson advanced and tested his theory, including his seminal study of the role played by capital intensive multinationals and international financiers in the New Deal. The chapter "Studies in Money Driven Politics" brings this aspect of American politics into better focus, along with other studies of Federal Reserve policy making and campaign finance in the 1936 election. Ferguson analyzes how a changing world economy and other social developments broke up the New Deal system in our own time, through careful studies of the 1988 and 1992 elections. The essay on 1992 contains an extended analysis of the emergence of the Clinton coalition and Ross Perot's dramatic independent insurgency. A postscript on the 1994 elections demonstrates the controlling impact of money on several key campaigns.

This controversial work by a theorist of money and politics in the U.S. relates to issues in campaign finance reform, PACs, policymaking, public financing, and how today's elections work.
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Gone Dollywood
Dolly Parton’s Mountain Dream
Graham Hoppe
Ohio University Press, 2018

Dolly Parton isn’t just a country music superstar. She has built an empire. At the heart of that empire is Dollywood, a 150-acre fantasy land that hosts three million people a year. Parton’s prodigious talent and incredible celebrity have allowed her to turn her hometown into one of the most popular tourist destinations in America. The crux of Dollywood’s allure is its precisely calibrated Appalachian image, itself drawn from Parton’s very real hardscrabble childhood in the mountains of east Tennessee.

What does Dollywood have to offer besides entertainment? What do we find if we take this remarkable place seriously? How does it both confirm and subvert outsiders’ expectations of Appalachia? What does it tell us about the modern South, and in turn what does that tell us about America at large? How is regional identity molded in service of commerce, and what is the interplay of race, gender, and class when that happens?

In Gone Dollywood, Graham Hoppe blends tourism studies, celebrity studies, cultural analysis, folklore, and the acute observations and personal reflections of longform journalism into an unforgettable interrogation of Southern and American identity.

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Good Apples
Behind Every Bite
Susan Futrell
University of Iowa Press, 2017
Apples are so ordinary and so ubiquitous that we often take them for granted. Yet it is surprisingly challenging to grow and sell such a common fruit. In fact, producing diverse, tasty apples for the market requires almost as much ingenuity and interdependence as building and maintaining a vibrant democracy. Understanding the geographic, ecological, and economic forces shaping the choices of apple growers, apple pickers, and apple buyers illuminates what’s at stake in the way we organize our food system.

Good Apples is for anyone who wants to go beyond the kitchen and backyard into the orchards, packing sheds, and cold storage rooms; into the laboratories and experiment stations; and into the warehouses, stockrooms, and marketing meetings, to better understand how we as citizens and eaters can sustain the farms that provide food for our communities. Susan Futrell has spent years working in sustainable food distribution, including more than a decade with apple growers. She shows us why sustaining family orchards, like family farms, may be essential to the soul of our nation. 
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Good Company
Economic Policy after Shareholder Primacy
Lenore Palladino
University of Chicago Press, 2024

On the faulty intellectual origins of shareholder primacy—and how policy can win back what’s been lost.

In an era of shareholder primacy, share price is king. Businesses operate with short-term goals to deliver profits to shareholders, enjoying stability (and bonuses) in the process. While the public bemoans the doctrine for its insularity and wealth-consolidating effects, its influence over corporate governance persists. Good Company offers an exacting argument for why shareholder primacy was never the right model to follow for truly understanding how corporations operate.

Lenore Palladino shows that corporations draw power from public charters—agreements that allow corporations to enjoy all manner of operational benefits. In return, companies are meant to innovate for the betterment of the societies that support them. However, that debt—increasingly wielded for stock buybacks and shareholder bonuses—is not being repaid. Palladino theorizes a modern corporation that plays its intended role while delivering social and economic good in the process and offers tangible policy solutions to make this a reality. Good Company is both an expert introduction to the political economy of the firm—as it was, as it is, as it can be—and a calibrating examination of how public policy can shape companies, and societies, for the better.

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A Good Drink
In Pursuit of Sustainable Spirits
Shanna Farrell
Island Press, 2021

“Insightful tour de force… Farrell’s writing is as informative as it is intoxicating”  -- Publishers Weekly


Shanna Farrell loves a good drink. As a bartender, she not only poured spirits, but learned their stories—who made them and how. Living in San Francisco, surrounded by farm-to-table restaurants and high-end bars, she wondered why the eco-consciousness devoted to food didn’t extend to drinks.   

The short answer is that we don’t think of spirits as food. But whether it's rum, brandy, whiskey, or tequila, drinks are distilled from the same crops that end up on our tables. Most are grown with chemicals that cause pesticide resistance and pollute waterways, and distilling itself requires huge volumes of water. Even bars are notorious for generating mountains of trash. The good news is that while the good drink movement is far behind the good food movement, it is emerging.
 
In A Good Drink, Farrell goes in search of the bars, distillers, and farmers who are driving a transformation to sustainable spirits. She meets mezcaleros in Guadalajara who are working to preserve traditional ways of producing mezcal, for the health of the local land, the wallets of the local farmers, and the culture of the community. She visits distillers in South Carolina who are bringing a rare variety of corn back from near extinction to make one of the most sought-after bourbons in the world. She meets a London bar owner who has eliminated individual bottles and ice, acculturating drinkers to a new definition of luxury.
 
These individuals are part of a growing trend to recognize spirits for what they are—part of our food system. For readers who have ever wondered who grew the pears that went into their brandy or why their cocktail is an unnatural shade of red, A Good Drink will be an eye-opening tour of the spirits industry. For anyone who cares about the future of the planet, it offers a hopeful vision of change, one pour at a time.

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