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How do alliances curb potential or actual cases of nuclear proliferation, if at all? Many scholars assert that alliances are effective tools for bridling the nuclear ambitions of states and that the United States can especially take credit for suppressing nuclear proliferation among its allies around the world. This book challenges this widely-held view by arguing that alliances can be most useful for preventing potential nuclear proliferation but much less useful for curbing actual nuclear proliferation. Drawing on deep archival research it shows how allied decision-makers often evaluate American security guarantees with reference to in-theater conventional military deployments. It also demonstrates the significant difficulties in mounting alliance coercion in order to extract non-proliferation commitments. The book mainly explores the three cases of supposed alliance non-proliferation success--West Germany, Japan, and South Korea—while examining in lesser detail the case of Great Britain, France, Norway, Australia, and Taiwan.

This ethnography explores the controversial plans and practices of the Maitreya Project, as they worked to build the “world's tallest statue” as a multi-million dollar “gift” to India. This effort entailed a plan to forcibly acquire hundreds of acres of occupied land for the statue park in the Kushinagar area of Uttar Pradesh. The Buddhist statue planners ran into obstacle after obstacle, including a full-scale grassroots resistance movement of Indian farmers working to “Save the Land.” In telling the “life story” of the proposed statue, the book sheds light on the aspirations, values and practices of both the Buddhists who worked to construct the statue, as well as the Indian farmer-activists who tirelessly protested against it. Since the majority of the supporters of the Maitreya Project statue are “non-heritage” practitioners to Tibetan Buddhism, the book narrates the spectacular collision of cultural values between small agriculturalists in rural India and transnational Buddhists from around the world. The book endeavors to show the cultural logics at work on both sides of the controversy. Thus, this ethnography of a future statue of the Maitreya Buddha—himself the “future Buddha”—is a story about divergent, competing visions of Kushinagar’s potential futures.

BorderlineCitizens explores the intersection of U.S. colonial power and Puerto Rican migration. It examines a series of confrontations in the early decades of the twentieth century between colonial migrants seeking work and citizenship in the metropole and various groups—employers, colonial officials, courts and labor leaders—policing the borders of the U.S. polity. At a time when U.S. colonial officials sought to reduce citizenship through the definition of Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory, Puerto Ricans tested the limits of colonial law when they migrated to California, Arizona, New York, and other states in the mainland. The incidents and legal cases created when Puerto Ricans migrated to the U.S. mainland serve as essential, if largely overlooked, evidence in understanding the nature of U.S. empire and citizenship.

This book explores a series of extended public pronouncements that British North American colonial lawyers crafted from 1761 through 1776. Most, though not all, were composed outside of the courtroom and detached from ongoing litigation. Although these writings and speeches have been long studied as political theory, they are rarely viewed as the work product of active lawyers—this despite the fact that key protagonists in the story of American independence were members of the bar with extensive practices. This book is an attempt to broaden our understanding of the role that lawyering played in framing and resolving the revolutionary crisis.

Why do some military and rebel groups commit many types of violence, creating an impression of senseless chaos, whereas others carefully control violence against civilians? A classic catch-22 faces the leaders of armed groups. Leaders need large groups of people willing to kill and maim—but to do so only under strict control. How can commanders control violence when fighters who are not under direct supervision experience extraordinary stress, fear, and anger? This book argues that discipline is not enough in wartime. Restraint occurs when fighters know why they are fighting and believe in the cause—that is, when commanders invest in political education. Drawing on evidence about state and non-state groups in El Salvador, and extending the argument to the Mano River wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the book shows that investments in political education can improve human rights outcomes even where rational incentives for restraint are weak—and that groups whose fighters lack a sense of purpose may engage in massive violence even where incentives for restraint are strong. It concludes that high levels of violence against civilians should be considered a “default setting,” not an aberration.

Why did the Stalin era, a period characterized by bureaucratic control and the reign of Socialist Realism in the arts, witness such an extraordinary upsurge of musical creativity and the prominence of musicians in the cultural elite? This is one of the questions that this book seeks to answer. The book shows how the Union of Soviet Composers established control over the music profession and negotiated the relationship between composers and the Communist Party leadership. Central to the book's argument is the institutional authority and prestige that the musical profession accrued and deployed within Soviet society, enabling musicians to withstand the postwar disciplinary campaigns that were so crippling in other artistic and literary spheres. Most accounts of Soviet musical life focus on famous individuals or the campaign against Shostakovich's ‘Lady Macbeth’ and Zhdanov's postwar attack on musical formalism. This book's approach, while not downplaying these notorious events, shows that the Union was able to develop and direct a musical profession that enjoyed enormous social prestige. The Union's leadership was able to use its expertise to determine the criteria of musical value with a degree of independence. The book reveals the complex and mutable interaction of creative intelligentsia and political elite in a period hitherto characterized as one of totalitarian control.

Over the past two decades, many states have been called on to recognize and apologize for historic wrongs. In response, some states have apologized for past crimes, while others continue to silence, deny, and relativize dark pasts. What explains this tremendous variation? When and why do states change the stories they tell about dark pasts? Based on a comparative analysis of the trajectories of Turkey’s narrative of the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide and Japan’s narrative of the 1937-8 Nanjing Massacre, Dark Pasts argues that international pressures increase the likelihood of change in official narratives of dark pasts, but domestic considerations determine the content of such change. Rather than simply changing with the passage of time, persistence, or rightness, official narratives of dark pasts are shaped by interactions between domestic and international politics. Combining historical richness and analytical rigor, Dark Pasts unravels the complex processes through which such narratives are constructed and contested, and offers an innovative way to analyze the content of and changes in historical memories. The book sheds light on the persistent presence of the past and reveals how domestic politics functions as a filter that shapes the ways in which states’ narratives change – or don’t – over time.

How do emotions become meaningful in public life? Closely examining key episodes in Japanese politics, Empire of Hope examines the varied roles that feelings play in contemporary politics. They construct the boundaries of the national body, they inform and discipline appropriate expression, and they depoliticize messy problems that could quickly produce divisive questions about winners and losers. And most important, they work because they appear to be so natural: the simple and expected expression of how the nation shares feelings, even when they paper over the extraordinary divergence in how the nation’s members experience each incident. By emphasizing the embeddedness of emotional expression in national narratives, the book challenges recent arguments in the social sciences and humanities about role that emotions should play in political analysis. A unique array of case studies — from the medical treatment of two Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange to the global promotion of Japanese popular culture, and from a tragic maritime accident involving a US Navy submarine to the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster — illustrates the myriad ways in which political expression of feelings matter even as they are divorced from the messiness of people’s emotional lives.

This book traces the efforts of a dedicated community of experts to create a policy bureaucracy that reigned until Richard Nixon implemented the Family Assistance Plan in 1969. Although they toiled in relative obscurity, this cadre of experts waged their own war on the American political establishment, creating policies that challenged the unscientific prejudices that ruled DC politics. The Experts’ War on Poverty highlights the metrics, research, and economic and social data that these social scientists employed in their day-to-day work. Huret argues that this internal “war” at a time of great disruption due to the Cold War undermined and fractured the institutional system officially intended ending poverty. What developed instead, he writes, was a group that was determined to fight poverty in ways that the federal government was unable to pursue by promoting radical policies and a more progressive government role and sweeping reforms. The Expert’s War on Poverty closely examines the intellectual, social, and political dimensions of this community of experts and social scientists and how they shaped American policy in the Cold War era.

The small, open economies of Nordic Europe are hailed as paragons of good governance, adapting flexibly to rapid, technological change and shifting patterns of economic competition. But they have also made strikingly poor policy choices and suffered devastating economic crises, as evidenced by the Finnish and Swedish banking crises of the early 1990s, Finnish dependence on Nokia, and Iceland's financial meltdown. Good Governance Gone Bad argues that the reasons for these two, seemingly contradictory phenomena is one and the same. The dense, cohesive relationships that enable these countries to adapt to economic crises with radical reform and restructuring render them vulnerable to policy overshooting and overinvestment. After examining the rise and decline of heavy industry in postwar Sweden, the emergence and disruption of the Finnish ICT industry, and Iceland's impressive but short-lived reign as a financial powerhouse, this book tests the argument against ten similar and contrasting cases in Europe and North America. In doing so, it demonstrates how small and large states alike can learn from the Nordic experience.

This book analyzes the ideas of a prominent twentieth century reformer, Haji Abdullah Malik Abdul Karim Amrullah, more commonly known as Hamka. It employs the term “cosmopolitan reform” to describe Hamka’s attempts at harmonizing the many streams of Islamic and Western thought and his diagnoses as well as solutions to the various challenges facing Muslims in the Malay world. Among the major themes explored in this book are questions concerning reason and revelation, moderation and extremism, social justice, the state of women in society, Sufism in the modern age as well as the importance of history in reforming the minds of modern Muslims. This book shows that Hamka demonstrated intellectual openness and inclusiveness towards a whole range of thoughts and philosophies to develop his own imaginary and vocabulary of reform. This attests to his cosmopolitan outlook and his unique ability to function as a conduit for varying Islamic and secular groups that were opposing one another in his lifetime.

This book examines the Kazakh famine of 1930-33, one of the most heinous and poorly understood crimes of the Stalinist regime. As part of a radical social engineering scheme, Josef Stalin sought to settle the Kazakh nomads and force them into collective farms. More than 1.5 million people perished as a result, a quarter of Soviet Kazakhstan’s population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Drawing upon a wide range of sources in Russian and in Kazakh, the book brings this largely unknown story to light, revealing its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. It finds that through the most violent means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan and forged a new Kazakh national identity. But the nature of this transformation was uneven. Neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves became integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. Seen from the angle of the Soviet east, a region that has not received as much scholarly attention as the Soviet Union’s west, the Stalinist regime and the disastrous results of its policies appear in a new light.

This book examines novel ways of being Muslim, where religious dispositions are achieved through techniques that have little or no precedent in classical Islamic texts or concepts. At the center of the book are rival groups of Indonesian student activists in Indonesia who are behaving in similarly experimental ways. Progressive Muslim activists are reading humanistic and social scientific books and engaging in satire to formulate an inclusive understanding of the religion, while conservative Islamists are using Western techniques of accounting and self-help to develop religious puritanism. These religious practices have been made possible by deposal of President Suharto's authoritarian New Order regime in 1998 and the subsequent adoption of democratic systems. At the same time, the Indonesian case study, which occurs in a heightened political context, brings into sharper relief processes happening in Muslim life everywhere. To be a practitioner of their religion, Muslims draw on not only their scriptures, but also the non-traditional ideas and practices that circulate in their society, which importantly include those that originate in the West. In the contemporary political discourse where Muslims are often portrayed as adversarial to the West, this story about flexible and creative Muslims is an important one to tell.

Using a risk management framework, the book discusses the landscape of U.S. higher education and faculty employment decisions. Topics include institutional differences, challenges facing colleges and universities, the erosion of academic standards, administrative bloat, changing promotion and tenure standards, sexual harassment, and Title IX concerns about campus safety. Attention is also given to the manner in which faculty members are hired and mentored and the decision-making biases that affect the way in which faculty members are granted promotion and tenure. The social psychological aspects of faculty employment decisions have been largely ignored in the literature, and we attempt to shed some light on these issues as we deconstruct promotion and tenure decisions. Traditional legal concepts of contract and employment law are examined as they pertain to hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions along with the cherished, but changing, ideals of free speech, academic freedom, and collegiality that have altered how faculty must deal with the rising tensions of political correctness on campus.

Grounded in extensive ethnographic and archival research on the Indonesian island of Bali, More Than Words challenges conventional understandings of textuality and writing as they pertain to the religious traditions of Southeast Asia. Through a nuanced study of Balinese script as employed in rites of healing, sorcery and self-defence, this book explores the aims and desires embodied in the production and use of palm-leaf manuscripts, amulets and other inscribed objects. Balinese often attribute both life and independent volition to manuscripts and copperplate inscriptions, presenting them with elaborate offerings. Commonly addressed with personal honorifics, these script-bearing objects may become partners with humans and other sentient beings in relations of exchange and mutual obligation. The question is how such practices of ‘the living letter’ may be related to more recently emergent conceptions of writing—which take Balinese letters to be a symbol of cultural heritage, and a neutral medium for the transmission of textual meaning. One of the book’s central aims is to theorize the coexistence of these seemingly contradictory sensibilities, with an eye to its wider significance for the history and practice of religion in Southeast Asia and beyond.

National Secession asks which projects for new nation-states give rise to campaigns that cause discord—and sometimes mayhem—in the politics of existing states. This has been explained by identities, grievances, greed, and tactical-logistical opportunities. Yet, under the strategic constraints faced by most national-secession campaigns, the essential element in almost all campaigns is the ability of the campaign’s program to coordinate expectations within a platform population on a common goal so that independence becomes the only viable option. In their strategy of programmatic coordination, which has guided the most important national-secession campaigns, the critical task of campaign leaders is propagating an authentic and realistic nation-state project. This explains which campaigns are most likely to draw attention in the capitals of the great powers that control admission to the international community, bring their disputes with their central governments to an intractable deadlock, and engage in protracted intense struggles to convince the international community that independence is the only viable option.

On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus explores the idea of the Russian and Soviet “East” as a political, aesthetic and scientific system of ideas that contributed to the construction of Soviet discourses of ethnicity, empire, and literary modernity during the tumultuous first two decades of the twentieth century, from 1905 to 1929. It exposes connections between literary works, political essays, and orientalist history, geography, and ethnology written by Russian and Azeri Turkic Muslim writers and thinkers, many of whom have been unknown to Anglophone readers until now. Tracing translations and intertextual engagements across Russia, the Caucasus and western Europe, this book offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity and anti-imperialism from the vantage point of cosmopolitan centers in the Russian empire and Soviet Union. In this way, On the Threshold of Eurasia illustrates the pivotal impact of the literature of the Caucasus and the former Soviet periphery more broadly on the monumental aesthetic and political shifts of the early twentieth century.

The book re-examines Carl Schmitt’s late work, which until fairly recently received less attention because of its seemingly non-systematic nature. The study focuses on Schmitt’s major post-war publications, among them The Nomos of the Earth, Theory of the Partisan, Political Theology II as well as his diaries. It emphasizes formal and structural aspects, deliberately resisting a systematic approach, focusing instead on tensions and contradictions within Schmitt’s writings. The book explores Schmitt’s shift from a German nationalist position to a defence of an imperial European tradition, leading up to an international agenda that modifies Schmitt’s older position without giving up conceptual and theoretical continuities. Because of these modifications--that is the thesis of the study--Schmitt’s late work could gain international attention after the fall of the Berlin Wall, since it resonates with greater global instability and increasing doubts about the viability of international liberalism. Finally, Schmitt’s wide but controversial reception, both on the political Right and the Left, becomes the object of scrutiny against the backdrop of Schmitt’s precarious biographical situation and the global political development after World War II. It is the tension between this specific historical context and the later international appropriation that motivates and energizes this study. It aims at a critique of recent Schmitt enthusiasm.

Through the story of the Perraults, a family of literary and scientific authors active in seventeenth-century Paris, the book argues that kinship networks played a crucial yet unexamined role in shaping the cultural and intellectual ferment of seventeenth-century France, while showing how culture in its turn shaped kinship and the social history of the family. The book examines the world of letters as means of social mobility and revises our understanding of prominent early modern institutions, such as the Academy of Sciences, Versailles, and the salons, as well as authorship and court capitalism. Put together, this project serves as a catalyst for rethinking early modern cultural and intellectual institutions more broadly. In this view, institutions no longer appear as rigid entities that embody or define intellectual or literary styles, such as “Cartesianism,” “empiricism” or “the purity of the French language.” Rather, they emerge as nodes that connect actors, intellectual projects, family strategies and practices of writing, thereby reframing their relation to the state.

The book argues that Shakespeare’s representations of imagination—the many hallucinations, illusions, and dreams in his works—draw their complexity from the interdiscursive confrontations between early modern faculty psychology and the history of science. During the Renaissance, imagination (also called the fantasy or fancy) was understood as a faculty of the soul, that which creates the phantasms or images needed by the mind to perceive, reason, and recall. The book explores how this psychology of imagination, developed by ancient and medieval philosophers, was disrupted in the sixteenth century by developments in proto-scientific fields such as anatomy, medicine, mathematics, and natural history. Guided by Shakespeare’s plays and poems, different chapters consider different aspects of imagination destabilized during this time—its place in the brain; its legitimacy as a form of knowledge; its pathologies; its relation to matter, light, and nature. In giving aesthetic expression to the epistemological problems surrounding the idea of imagination, Shakespeare made this element of cognitive theory the property of literary art.