Browse

How do great powers respond to decline? The conventional wisdom is preventive war or domestic dysfunction. This book argues that declining states are neither more prone to aggression nor political paralysis. Instead, it makes three main claims. First, the most common and effective response to decline is retrenchment because, in the competitive world of power politics, states need to stay strategically solvent. Second, the rate of decline is the most powerful determinant of what retrenchment policies states adopt. And third, international conditions are important modifiers of how and how much states retrench. Examining all great power ordinal transitions since 1870, it employs statistical analysis and structured, focused historical comparisons to test rival views of great power decline.

This book examines the historical development and effectiveness of US efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Drawing on hundreds of declassified documents, the first part of the book shows how the anticipation of nuclear domino effects in the 1960s and 1970s led the United States to strengthen its nonproliferation policy, moving from a selective approach—which was relatively permissive toward allies acquiring nuclear weapons—and toward a more universal policy that opposed proliferation across the board. Most notably, Washington spearheaded the establishment of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968 and adopted sanctions legislation in the late 1970s that credibly threatened to cut off support to countries seeking nuclear weapons. The second part of the book analyzes how effective these policies have been in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons. Statistical analysis suggests that a credible threat of sanctions has deterred countries dependent on the United States from even starting nuclear weapons programs over the last several decades. Meanwhile, in-depth case studies of French, Taiwanese, Pakistani, and Iranian nuclear activities illustrate the conditions under which sanctions succeed against ongoing nuclear weapons programs. The findings hold important implications for international security and nonproliferation policy.

Following independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, economic and political liberalization projects were rolled out in Latvia and across Eastern Europe. While economic liberalism was welcomed, political liberalism was contested. Many in Latvia insisted on the importance of the nation alongside individual liberties and respect for diversity. From the perspective of liberal Europe, this often led to the conclusion that Latvia’s residents exhibited too much socialist mentality or nationalist sentiment and thus required lessons in political liberalism in order to become fully European. This ethnography examines the efforts to extend lessons in political liberalism to Latvia’s residents. The book argues that, rather than viewing Eastern Europe as falling behind, it should be viewed as the laboratory for forging post-Cold War political liberalism in Europe. It shows that Europe’s liberal democratic polities are based on a fundamental tension between the need to exclude and the requirement to profess and institutionalize the value of inclusion. The book provides insight with regard to the current crisis of political liberalism from a moment in time when it was still confident and from the perspective of a place and people that were thought to have never been liberal.

Remembering the Present examines the contemporary meanings, practices, and purposes of mindfulness in the countries of Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar (Burma), which together make up a large part of what is known as the “Pali imaginaire” that spawned today’s global mindfulness movement. Drawing from the experiences of over 600 monks, psychiatrists, students, and villagers in the Buddhist monasteries, hospitals, markets, and homes in the region, Remembering the Present shows how an attention to memory informs how people live today, and how mindfulness, as understood through its Buddhist Pāli-language term of sati, is intimately tied to local constructions of time, affect, power, emotion, and selfhood. With a focus on lived experience and the practical matters of people for whom mindfulness is a central part of everyday life, the book offers an engaged ethnographic investigation of what it means to ‘remember the present’ in the meditative practices, interpersonal worlds, and psychiatric hospitals for people in a region strongly influenced by Buddhist thought. The book will speak to an increasingly global network of psychological scientists, anthropologists, Buddhist studies scholars, and religious practitioners interested in contemporary Buddhist thought and the cultural phenomenology of religious experience.

Patriotic Ayatollahs explores the contributions of the Grand Ayatollahs to the process of state and nation-building after the 2003 Iraq war. These figures, the so-called Grand Ayatollahs, the highest-ranking clerics of Shiism, took on a new and, to many observers at the time, unexpected political role after the fall of Saddam Hussein. They served as guardians of the democratic process in Iraq, regularly intervening in the process of institution building. They also served as key public intellectuals and moral guides on key domestic issues, such as the insurgency and the emergence of violent and widespread terrorism. Their brand of political activism was novel insofar as it neither sought to reproduce the Iranian form of governance, nor adhere to the quietist model normally associated with the clerics of Iraq. Together with other new social actors who competed for power, Sistani and other leading ayatollahs played a central role in public debates, as they sought to secure their own position in the new public sphere. Drawing mainly on previously unexamined Arabic-language fatwas, speeches and communiqués of Iraq’s four grand ayatollahs, this book offers an analysis of the ways in which their new discourses and narratives shaped and framed public debates after 2003.

This book analyzes worker organizing and union revitalization following the decline of neocorporatism, the transformation of industrial relations and the rise of neoliberalism. Given labor’s critical role in the Zionist state-building project, it also discusses organized labor’s relationship to the political community in light of Israel’s complex relations with the Palestinians. The book asserts that despite the weakening of trade unions and the Histadrut, undermined by political and economic elites, the fragmentation of labor representation has created opportunities for those previously excluded from the neocorporatist regime. Moreover, workers are taking advantage of vestigial neocorporatist frameworks and new liberal legislation to impede neoliberal policies and renegotiate union democracy. However, the common political framework between labor and capital, the nation-state, has been subverted: capital has spread beyond “national” borders and labor has been brought into them from outside, entirely annulling labor Zionism’s premise in which “the (Hebrew) worker” was almost synonymous with “citizen.” Organized labor has lost its legitimacy. As even the right to organize is challenged, labor fights a rearguard battle, renegotiating its status vis-à-vis “old” social partners and a public which, for the most part, does not identify itself as “workers” and does not accept labor’s claim to represent it.

This book explores connections between the practices of reading and magic during the realist and modernist periods in German literature and thought, with a particular focus on divination. Divination, historically long associated with the reading of literature, engages an issue of critical importance to this cultural moment, that of futurity: both the different ways that the future figured in the reading of texts at this time, and the evident (or apparently evident) fading of its force as a narrative determinant or article of historical faith. In case studies of works by Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, and Walter Benjamin, this study investigates divinatory readings not just of texts but of the world, its things, their forces, and their relations to the human. It approaches both the texts and the world that supports such readings against the background of the notion of “sympathy” that, in both ancient and pre-modern times, allowed for future reading and that, it argues, persists in the realist and modernist periods in the form of “Stimmung.” And it traces the significant transformations of “sympathy” and “Stimmung” that accompany the changing shape of reading, magic, and the future in German art and thought during this period.

The book examines two contrasting housing policy approaches to achieving racial justice. Integration initiatives and community development efforts have for decades constituted contrasting means of achieving racial equity through housing policy. The book traces the tensions between these two approaches as they have been manifest in different ways since the 1940s. The core argument is that fair housing advocates have adopted a spatial strategy of advocacy that has increasingly brought it into conflict with community development efforts. The book presents a critique of integration efforts of fair housing for targeting settlement patterns while ignoring underlying racism and issues of economic and political power. In the pursuit of regional equity and racial justice, causes that both sides of the integration / community development dispute claim as important, it is the community development movement that has the greatest potential for connecting to social change and social justice efforts.

Feeding wild birds in gardens and backyards is one of the most popular forms of interaction between humans and wild animals. Yet despite the enormous scale of this activity and the millions of people involved throughout the world, remarkably little is known about the practice or the potential implications associated with the provisioning of vast amounts of food, all of which is additional to the bird’s natural diet. Many questions arise: Does bird feeding change wildlife communities? Does it aid the spread of disease? Is it essential for the conservation of many struggling species, especially in urban areas? And why are so many people passionately engaged, and willing to spend considerable sums on this practice? This is the first book to attempt to address these and many other questions associated with this global activity, exploring many complex issues through both science and the personal experience of bird feeders themselves.

This book argues that the civic duty to perform paid work in contemporary society undermines freedom and justice. While workplace flexibility and the unconditional basic income (UBI) both offer prospects for greater freedom and justice, they also harbor the risk of shoring up the work society. To avert this danger, we must therefore reconfigure the value and place of paid work in our lives. Moreover, we need to rethink the meaning of community at a deeper level, and in particular, abandon the view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not. This task raises significant challenges, but Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on the “inoperative community” provides key philosophical guidance. Since the relational ontology of this alternative view of community stands in stark tension with capitalism, a liberal-reformist approach to lessening the burden of paid work that fails to tackle the underlying economic and social structure offers only limited gains in terms of freedom and justice. Moving beyond the work society and more fully realizing freedom and justice therefore entails nothing short of a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism.