In Guinea-Bissau, as elsewhere in Africa, there is a disjuncture between the central state and rural civil society. It is this significant and overlooked aspect of Guinea-Bissau's political evolution—the continuing ability of civil society to evade and thwart state power—that is at the heart of Joshua B. Forrest's Lineages of State Fragility.
Professor Forrest argues that despite European influences, the contemporary fragility of African states can be fully appreciated only by examining the indigenous social context in which these states evolved. Focusing on Guinea-Bissau, Forrest exposes the emergence of a strong and adaptable “rural civil society” that can be traced back to precolonial times.
Lineages of State Fragility analyzes the social, political, and military experiences of this rural civil society to account for the origins of Guinea-Bissau's soft state. For example, Forrest identifies interethnic social and military practices that became entrenched in rural social structures and continued to evolve through the colonial period, enabling Guinea-Bissauans to resist state predation.
Lineages of State Fragility offers an unorthodox explanation of African politics by tracing the direct social links among the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods and affirms the role of rural actors in determining present-day political outcomes.
Based on remarkably extensive research conducted in archives in Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, and Portugal, Lineages of State Fragility represents both a new approach to the region's past and present and an important synthesis of the political analysis that has come before.
How do governments choose which industries to favor? If governments are largely motivated by the national economic interest, then industrial selection would be biased in favor of picking winners. If, on the other hand, governments are motivated by an electoral and political logic, as is usually assumed in mainstream political economy approaches, then industrial choices would be skewed in favor of politically influential industries—even if they are uncompetitive or declining.
At the core of this book is a methodology that pits these competing explanations against each other, draws out their testable propositions, and then uses three different approaches—econometrics, structured data analysis, and case studies—to ascertain whether one or the other explanation prevails in the celebrated case of postwar Japan. The evidence, which ranges from Japan's earliest efforts at technology catch-up to present-day policies of indigenizing space rockets, shows that economic logic did in fact prevail across industries and over time, despite ever-present political pressures. The most important point this study uncovers is that it is not just selection but deselection that has been the hallmark of Japan's trade and industrial policies over the postwar period.
Moving from the sixteenth century to the present, and using a wide array of multi-lingual sources, The Reconstruction of Nations shows how multiple versions of national identity evolved and competed with each other in what are now Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Snyder contends that the triumph of modern ethnic nationalism in this part of Eastern Europe is very recent. Federalism and communal toleration were considered viable national ideas from the 16th through 20th centuries - only the atrocities of the Second World War buried such traditional alternatives. Snyder's original explanations for these atrocities include the first scholarly account of the Ukrainian-Polish ethnic cleansings of the 1940s. Snyder concludes with an analysis of the peaceful resolution of national tensions in the region since 1989.
The Reconstruction of Nations is a winner of the American Historical Association's George Louis Beer Prize for the best publication in European international history since 1895.
Political Topographies shows that central rulers' powers, ambitions, and strategies of control vary across subregions of the national space, even in countries reputed to be highly centralized. Boone argues that this unevenness reflects a state-building logic that is shaped by differences in the political economy of regions - that is, by relations of property, production, and authority that determine the political clout and economic needs of regional-level elites. Center-provincial bargaining, rather than the unilateral choices of the center, is what drives the politics of national integration and determines how institutions distribute power. Boone's innovative analysis speaks to scholars and policy makers who want to understand geographic unevenness in the centralization and decentralization of power, in the nature of citizenship and representation, and in patterns of core-periphery integration and breakdown in many of the world's multiethnic or regionally divided states.