Publications

2007
Globalization and Business Politics in Arab North Africa: A Comparative Perspective
Cammett, Melani Claire. 2007. Globalization and Business Politics in Arab North Africa: A Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abstract

The adjustments to a global economy have produced varied industry/ state relations throughout the world, but perhaps nowhere as crucially as in the developing industrial countries. Melani Cammett's Globalization and Business Politics finds that these forms of cooperation rely on past relations of the state and industry. Her subtle comparative analysis of the textile and clothing industries in Morocco and Tunisia encompasses the social, political, economic, and historical forces that shaped - and continue to shape- these contrasting examples. Success in this new environment depends crucially, Globalization and Business Politics suggests, on new and productive ways that state, society, and industries can develop means of persistent, ongoing, and adaptive mutual support.

2006
Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary
Wittenberg, Jason. 2006. Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abstract
This book investigates one of the oldest paradoxes in political science: why do mass political loyalties persist even amid prolonged social upheaval and disruptive economic development. Drawing on extensive archival research and an original database of election results, this book explores the paradox of political persistence by examining Hungary's often tortuous path from pre- to post-communism. Wittenberg reframes the theoretical debate, and then demonstrates how despite the many depredations of communism, the Roman Catholic and Calvinist Churches transmitted loyalties to parties of the Right. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Church resistance occurred not from above, but from below. Hemmed in and harassed by communist party cadres, parish priests and pastors employed a variety of ingenious tactics to ensure the continued survival of local church institutions. These institutions insulated their adherents from pressures to assimilate into the surrounding socialist milieu. Ultimately this led to political continuity between pre- and post-communism.
Japan’s Dual Civil Society: Members without Advocates
Pekkanen, Robert. 2006. Japan’s Dual Civil Society: Members without Advocates. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Abstract

This book provides an overview of the state of Japan's civil society and a new theory, based on political institutions, to explain why Japan differs so much from other industrialized democracies. It offers a new interpretation of why Japan's civil society has developed as it has, with many small, local groups but few large, professionally managed national organizations. The book further asks what the consequences of that pattern of development are for Japan's policy and politics. The author persuasively demonstrates that political institutions—the regulatory framework, financial flows, and the political opportunity structure—are responsible for this pattern, with the result that civil groups have little chance of influencing national policy debates. The phenomenon of “members without advocates” thus has enormous implications for democratic participation in Japan.

Runaway State-Building: Patronage Politics and Democratic Development
O'Dwyer, Conor. 2006. Runaway State-Building: Patronage Politics and Democratic Development. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Abstract

Here, Conor O'Dwyer introduces the phenomenon of runaway state-building as a consequence of patronage politics in underdeveloped, noncompetitive party systems. Analyzing the cases of three newly democratized nations in Eastern Europe—Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia—O’Dwyer argues that competition among political parties constrains patronage-led state expansion.

O’Dwyer uses democratization as a starting point, examining its effects on other aspects of political development. Focusing on the link between electoral competition and state-building, he is able to draw parallels between the problems faced by these three nations and broader historical and contemporary problems of patronage politics—such as urban machines in nineteenth-century America and the Philippines after Marcos.

This timely study provides political scientists and political reformers with insights into points in the democratization process where appropriate intervention can minimize runaway state-building and cultivate efficient bureaucracy within a robust and competitive democratic system.

The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean
Ho, Engseng. 2006. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: University of California Press. Abstract

The Graves of Tarim narrates the movement of an old diaspora across the Indian Ocean over the past five hundred years. Ranging from Arabia to India and Southeast Asia, Engseng Ho explores the transcultural exchanges—in kinship and writing—that enabled Hadrami Yemeni descendants of the Muslim prophet Muhammad to become locals in each of the three regions yet remain cosmopolitans with vital connections across the ocean. At home throughout the Indian Ocean, diasporic Hadramis engaged European empires in surprising ways across its breadth, beyond the usual territorial confines of colonizer and colonized. A work of both anthropology and history, this book brilliantly demonstrates how the emerging fields of world history and transcultural studies are coming together to provide groundbreaking ways of studying religion, diaspora, and empire.

Ho interprets biographies, family histories, chronicles, pilgrimage manuals and religious law as the unified literary output of a diaspora that hybridizes both texts and persons within a genealogy of Prophetic descent. By using anthropological concepts to read Islamic texts in Arabic and Malay, he demonstrates the existence of a hitherto unidentified canon of diasporic literature. His supple conceptual framework and innovative use of documentary and field evidence are elegantly combined to present a vision of this vital world region beyond the histories of trade and European empire.

An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi'i Lebanon
Deeb, Lara. 2006. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi'i Lebanon. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Abstract

Lara Deeb's An Enchanted Modern concerns the many ways religious piety has been reborn and reshaped in the Shi'i neighborhood of Al-Dahiyya in Beirut. She presents an engrossing anthropological account of a community fashioning a creative and rich religious modernity. Deeb encounters a vibrant, redirected, Islamic life, reshaped by the politics of the recent past, creatively re-imagined and lived in the present, with no sign of losing its centrality to individuals, communities and states in the future. Most notably, it is an Islamic life that is expressed in especially creative ways in the public and private lives of women. The modern pious includes women involved, educated, outspoken and part of a community, at odds at points with Western notions of modernity, and equally powerful and attractive.

2005
Courts under Constraints: Judges, Generals, and Presidents in Argentina
Helmke, Gretchen. 2005. Courts under Constraints: Judges, Generals, and Presidents in Argentina. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abstract

This study offers a theoretical framework for understanding how institutional instability affects judicial behavior under dictatorship and democracy. In stark contrast to conventional wisdom, the central findings of the book contradict some assumptions that only independent judges rule against the government of the day. Set in the context of Argentina, the study uses the tools of positive political theory to explore the conditions under which courts rule against the government. In addition to shedding light on the dynamics of court-executive relations in Argentina, the study provides general lessons about institutions, instability, and the rule of law. In the process, the study builds a set of connections among diverse bodies of scholarship, including US judicial politics, comparative institutional analysis, positive political theory, and Latin American politics.

2004
Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
Mahmood, Saba. 2004. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Abstract

Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.

Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension of the Islamic revival, it is also an unflinching critique of the secular-liberal assumptions by which some people hold such movements to account. The book addresses three central questions: How do movements of moral reform help us rethink the normative liberal account of politics? How does the adherence of women to the patriarchal norms at the core of such movements parochialize key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject? How does a consideration of debates about embodied religious rituals among Islamists and their secular critics help us understand the conceptual relationship between bodily form and political imaginaries? Politics of Piety is essential reading for anyone interested in issues at the nexus of ethics and politics, embodiment and gender, and liberalism and postcolonialism.

Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India
Chandra, Kanchan. 2004. Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abstract

Why do some ethnic parties succeed in attracting the support of their target ethnic group while others fail? In a world in which ethnic parties flourish in both established and emerging democracies alike, understanding the conditions under which such parties rise and fall is of critical importance to both political scientists and policy makers. Drawing on a study of variation in the performance of ethnic parties in India, this book builds a theory of ethnic party performance in 'patronage democracies'. Chandra shows why individual voters and political entrepreneurs in such democracies condition their strategies not on party ideologies or policy platforms, but on a headcount of co-ethnics and others across party personnel and among the electorate.

Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History

This book explores the history of the Dominican Republic as it evolved from the first European colony in the Americas into a modern nation under the rule of Rafael Trujillo. Turits reveals how the seemingly unilateral imposition of power by Trujillo in fact depended on the regime's mediation of profound social and economic transformations, especially through agrarian policies that assisted the nation's large independent peasantry. Most of the existing literature casts the Trujillo dictatorship as the paradigm of despotic rule through coercion and terror alone. This book elucidates instead the hidden foundations of the regime, portraying everyday life and economy in the Dominican countryside and the exchanges between state and society under Trujillo. Winner of the American Historical Association's John Edwin Fagg Prize for the best publication in Latin American history.

2003
Lineages of State Fragility: Rural Civil Society in Guinea-Bissau
Forrest, Joshua B. 2003. Lineages of State Fragility: Rural Civil Society in Guinea-Bissau. Athens: Ohio University Press. Abstract

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.

Picking Winners? From Technology Catch-up to the Space Race in Japan
Pekkanen, Saadia M. 2003. Picking Winners? From Technology Catch-up to the Space Race in Japan. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Abstract

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.

The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus, 1569-1999

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 of the African State
Boone, Catherine. 2003. Political Topographies of the African State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abstract

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.

2002
Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Parties in East Central Europe
Grzymala-Busse, Anna M. 2002. Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Parties in East Central Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abstract
This major study examines one of the most surprising developments in East Central European politics after the democratic transitions of 1989: the completely unexpected regeneration of the former communist parties. After the collapse of the communist regimes in 1989, these ruling communist parties seemed consigned to oblivion. However, confounding scholarly and popular expectations, all of these parties survived. Some have even returned to power. This in-depth, comparative study systematically analyzes the trajectories of four cases: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary (with additional examination of other communist party successors). Relying on extensive, and unprecedented, primary research, this analysis employs a consistent analytical framework that combines the peculiarities of the post-socialist cases with broad theoretical concerns of institutional analysis, democratic transitions and consolidation, and party politics.
Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Power, Perceptions, and Pacts

The establishment of electoral systems in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan presents both a complex set of empirical puzzles and a theoretical challenge. Why did three states with similar cultural, historical, and structural legacies establish such different electoral systems? How did these distinct outcomes result from strikingly similar institutional design processes? Explaining these puzzles requires understanding not only the outcome of institutional design but also the intricacies of the process that led to this outcome. Moreover, the transitional context in which these three states designed new electoral rules necessitates an approach that explicitly links process and outcome in a dynamic setting. This book provides such an approach. Finally, it both builds on the key insights of the dominant approaches to explaining institutional origin and change and transcends these approaches by moving beyond the structure versus agency debate.

Back-Alley Banking: Private Entrepreneurs in China
Tsai, Kellee S. 2002. Back-Alley Banking: Private Entrepreneurs in China. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Abstract

Chinese entrepreneurs have founded more than thirty million private businesses since Beijing instituted economic reforms in the late 1970s. Most of these private ventures, however, have been denied access to official sources of credit. State banks continue to serve state-owned enterprises, yet most private financing remains illegal. How have Chinese entrepreneurs managed to fund their operations? In defiance of the national banking laws, small business owners have created a dizzying variety of informal financing mechanisms, including rotating credit associations and private banks disguised as other types of organizations. Back-Alley Banking includes lively biographical sketches of individual entrepreneurs; telling quotations from official documents, policy statements, and newspaper accounts; and interviews with a wide variety of women and men who give vivid narratives of their daily struggles, accomplishments, and hopes for future prosperity. Kellee S. Tsai's book draws upon her unparalleled fieldwork in China's world of shadow finance to challenge conventional ideas about the political economy of development. Business owners in China, she shows, have mobilized local social and political resources in innovative ways despite the absence of state-directed credit or a well-defined system of private property rights. Entrepreneurs and local officials have been able to draw on the uncertainty of formal political and economic institutions to enhance local prosperity.

2001
Politics after Neoliberalism: Reregulation in Mexico
Snyder, Richard. 2001. Politics after Neoliberalism: Reregulation in Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abstract

During the past two decades, virtually all developing countries shifted from state-led to market-oriented neoliberal economic policies. This book analyzes fresh evidence from Southern Mexico about the effects of this global wave of policy reforms. The evidence challenges the widely held view that these reforms have set countries on a convergent path toward unregulated markets. The analysis shows that free-market reforms, rather than unleashing market forces, trigger the construction of different types of new regulatory institutions with contrasting consequences for economic efficiency and social justice.

Smokestack Diplomacy: Cooperation and Conflict in East-West Environmental Politics

Many environmental problems cross national boundaries and can be addressed only through international cooperation. In this book Robert Darst examines transnational efforts to promote environmental protection in the USSR and in five of its successor states--Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania--from the late 1960s to the present. The core of the book is a comparative study of three key issues: nuclear power safety, transboundary air pollution, and Baltic Sea pollution.Although expectations were high that the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union would lead to increased East-West environmental cooperation, the opposite has been true. Russia and the other successor states have generally agreed to address such problems only when paid to do so. Darst finds that post-Cold War environmental cooperation has been most successful when there is an overlap between the environmental and economic interests of the successor states and those of their Western neighbors, and when the foundation for cooperation was laid during the Cold War period.The book is based on extensive original field research, including interviews with diplomats, government officials, scientists, and environmental activists in the successor states and Western Europe. Its findings underscore the importance of the domestic and international political context in which international environmental policy making occurs. It also deepens our understanding of the opportunities and dangers of positive inducements as a tool of international environmental policy.

Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress
Harrison, Lawrence E., and Samuel Huntington. 2001. Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress. New York: Basic Books. Abstract

The 2000-2001 academic year saw the release of a major publication from the Academy's Global Cultures Program. Arising from a 1999 Harvard Academy symposium, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress was published in 2001 by Basic Books. The book is edited by Lawrence Harrison (an Academy affiliate and author of Underdevelopment is a State of Mind) and Academy Chairman Samuel Huntington.

Culture Matters examines the question of why some countries and ethnic groups are better off than others, and the role that cultural values play in driving political, economic, and social development. A distinguished group of scholars, journalists, and practitioners looks at the role of culture in developmental contexts across the globe. Among this diverse group of contributors are Francis Fukuyama, Nathan Glazer, Ronald Inglehart, Seymour Martin Lipset, Orlando Patterson, Michael Porter, Jeffrey Sachs, and Richard Shweder. Most of these contributors but not all conclude that cultural values are a powerful factor in promoting development and value change is indispensable to future progress in underdeveloped countries.

Described as "stunning" by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Culture Matters was favorably reviewed in such diverse publications as Time, The Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Affairs. It has stimulated extensive discussion in the United States and other countries, been the subject of a long story in The New York Times, and is being translated or has been translated into seven foreign languages.

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