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Rethinking Sovereign Debt: Politics, Reputation, And Legitimacy In Modern Finance
by Odette LienauConventional wisdom holds that all nations must repay debt. Regardless of the legitimacy of the regime that signs the contract, a country that fails to honor its obligations damages its reputation. Yet should today's South Africa be responsible for apartheid-era debt? Is it reasonable to tether postwar Iraq with Saddam Hussein's excesses? Rethinking Sovereign Debt is a probing analysis of how sovereign debt continuity--the rule that nations should repay loans even after a major regime change, or else expect consequences--became dominant. Odette Lienau contends that the practice is not essential for functioning capital markets, and demonstrates its reliance on absolutist ideas that have come under fire over the last century. Lienau traces debt continuity from World War I to the present, emphasizing the role of government officials, the World Bank, and private markets in shaping our existing framework. Challenging previous accounts, she argues that Soviet Russia's repudiation of Tsarist debt and Great Britain's 1923 arbitration with Costa Rica hint at the feasibility of selective debt cancellation. Rethinking Sovereign Debt calls on scholars and policymakers to recognize political choice and historical precedent in sovereign debt and reputation, in order to move beyond an impasse when a government is overthrown.
The Broken Compass: Parental Involvement With Children's Education
by Keith RobinsonIt seems like common sense that children do better when parents are actively involved in their schooling. But how well does the evidence stack up? The Broken Compass puts this question to the test in the most thorough scientific investigation to date of how parents across socioeconomic and ethnic groups contribute to the academic performance of K-12 children. The surprising discovery is that no clear connection exists between parental involvement and student performance. Keith Robinson and Angel Harris assessed over sixty measures of parental participation, at home and in school. While some of the associations they found were consistent with past studies, others ran contrary to previous research and popular perceptions. It is not the case that Hispanic and African American parents are less concerned about education--or that "Tiger parenting" among Asian Americans gets the desired results. Many low-income parents want to be involved in their children's school lives but often receive little support from school systems. For immigrant families, language barriers only worsen the problem. In this provocative work, Robinson and Harris believe that the time has come to reconsider whether parental involvement can make much of a dent in the basic problems facing American schools today.
The Army and Democracy: Military Politics In Pakistan
by Aqil ShahIn sharp contrast to neighboring India, the Muslim nation of Pakistan has been ruled by its military for over three decades. The Army and Democracy identifies steps for reforming Pakistan's armed forces and reducing its interference in politics, and sees lessons for fragile democracies striving to bring the military under civilian control.
Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins Of Racist Immigration Policy In The Americas
by David Scott FitzGeraldCulling the Masses questions the view that democracy and racism cannot coexist. Based on records from 22 countries 1790-2010, it offers a history of the rise and fall of racial selection in the Western Hemisphere, showing that democracies were first to select immigrants by race, and undemocratic states first to outlaw discrimination.
The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency In The Arab World
by Marwan M. KraidyAcross the Arab world, protesters voiced dissent through slogans, graffiti, puppetry, videos, and satire that called for the overthrow of dictatorial regimes. Investigating what drives people to risk everything to express themselves in rebellious art, Marwan M. Kraidy uncovers the creative insurgency at the heart of the Arab uprisings of 2010–2012.
Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America
by Nathaniel FrankSome of the most divisive contests shaping the quest for marriage equality occurred not on the culture-war front lines but within the ranks of LGBTQ advocates. Nathaniel Frank tells the dramatic story of how an idea that once seemed unfathomable—and for many gays and lesbians undesirable—became a legal and moral right in just half a century.
The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts
by Amber D. MoultonThough Massachusetts banned slavery in 1780, prior to the Civil War a law prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks reinforced the state’s racial caste system. Amber Moulton recreates an unlikely collaboration of reformers who sought to rectify what they saw as an indefensible injustice, leading to the legalization of interracial marriage.
Cycles of Invention and Discovery: Rethinking The Endless Frontier
by Venkatesh NarayanamurtiUsing Nobel Prize–winning examples like the transistor, laser, and magnetic resonance imaging, Venky Narayanamurti and Tolu Odumosu explore the daily micro-practices of research and show that distinctions between the search for knowledge and creative problem solving break down when one pays attention to how pathbreaking research actually happens.
Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, And The Making Of Global China
by Julian GewirtzWith Deng Xiaoping’s blessing, Mao’s successors scoured the globe for fresh ideas to launch domestic prosperity and global economic power. Yet China’s government did not publicize its engagement with Western-style innovations, claiming instead that economic reinvention was the Party’s achievement alone. Julian Gewirtz sets forth the truer story.
Karl Marx: Greatness And Illusion
by Gareth Stedman JonesGareth Stedman Jones returns Karl Marx to his nineteenth-century world, before later inventions transformed him into Communism’s patriarch and fierce lawgiver. He shows how Marx adapted the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and others into ideas that would have—in ways inconceivable to Marx—an overwhelming impact in the twentieth century.
France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic
by Herrick ChapmanPostwar recovery required a transformation of France, but what form it should take remained a question. Herrick Chapman charts the course of France’s reconstruction from 1944 to 1962, offering insights into the ways the expansion of state power produced fierce controversies at home and unintended consequences abroad in France’s crumbling empire.
Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization
by Branko MilanovicWinner 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
Governing Future Emergencies: Lived Relations to Risk in the UK Fire and Rescue Service
by Nathaniel O'GradyThe 21st century has born witness to myriad changes in the way the world is secured from the many emergencies that continually threaten to disrupt it. This book concentrates on two such changes. First, it takes stock of the ever-increasing development and diversification of data and digital technologies that security organisations have at their disposal. Secondly, it examines how these digital devices have fostered a new direction in which security agencies primarily conceive of emergencies as so many risks of the future. Emergency governance has undergone what might be called an anticipatory turn here, with digitally rendered and imagined scenes of future contingency becoming cause and justification for intervention in the here and now. Rather than scrutinising this turn at its most spectacular heights in the domains, for instance, of warfare or counter-terrorism, the book explores the facilitation of risk governance through digital technologies in a more quotidian incarnation; namely by tracing the steps that the United Kingdom’s Fire and Rescue Service (FRS) take to govern fire emergencies whose potential has been identified but have yet to unfold. Delving into the FRS, the book maps out a digital infrastructure that includes various software, institutional processes, multiple forms of risk calculation but also human beings, relations and consciousness and an array of material spaces in which these things exist. Accentuated here is how these components assemble to produce projections of future emergencies on a number of sensorial registers. This infrastructure is shown, in turn, to inform and shape a catalogue of refined modes of action through which interventions on future emergencies are made in the present. Engaging in depth with this infrastructure, the FRS provides an understanding of risk as a lived relation, risk as an organisational ethos whose liveliness is founded upon and reverberates through the relations existing between those people and things operating in the FRS to make sense of potential fire emergencies. Using the concept of lived relation as a foundation, the book develops a critical understanding of anticipatory governance by grasping its resonance with issues emanating in the wider field of security, showing how security figures as a set of practices that rely upon and cultivates affective conditions, that enrols the force of elements like fire into its institutional arrangement, that draw on an array of knowledges to exercise power and, in the process, that instantiate new forms of subjectivity.
Governing Future Emergencies: Lived Relations to Risk in the UK Fire and Rescue Service
by Nathaniel O'GradyThe 21st century has born witness to myriad changes in the way the world is secured from the many emergencies that continually threaten to disrupt it. This book concentrates on two such changes. First, it takes stock of the ever-increasing development and diversification of data and digital technologies that security organisations have at their disposal. Secondly, it examines how these digital devices have fostered a new direction in which security agencies primarily conceive of emergencies as so many risks of the future. Emergency governance has undergone what might be called an anticipatory turn here, with digitally rendered and imagined scenes of future contingency becoming cause and justification for intervention in the here and now. Rather than scrutinising this turn at its most spectacular heights in the domains, for instance, of warfare or counter-terrorism, the book explores the facilitation of risk governance through digital technologies in a more quotidian incarnation; namely by tracing the steps that the United Kingdom’s Fire and Rescue Service (FRS) take to govern fire emergencies whose potential has been identified but have yet to unfold. Delving into the FRS, the book maps out a digital infrastructure that includes various software, institutional processes, multiple forms of risk calculation but also human beings, relations and consciousness and an array of material spaces in which these things exist. Accentuated here is how these components assemble to produce projections of future emergencies on a number of sensorial registers. This infrastructure is shown, in turn, to inform and shape a catalogue of refined modes of action through which interventions on future emergencies are made in the present. Engaging in depth with this infrastructure, the FRS provides an understanding of risk as a lived relation, risk as an organisational ethos whose liveliness is founded upon and reverberates through the relations existing between those people and things operating in the FRS to make sense of potential fire emergencies. Using the concept of lived relation as a foundation, the book develops a critical understanding of anticipatory governance by grasping its resonance with issues emanating in the wider field of security, showing how security figures as a set of practices that rely upon and cultivates affective conditions, that enrols the force of elements like fire into its institutional arrangement, that draw on an array of knowledges to exercise power and, in the process, that instantiate new forms of subjectivity.
The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History
by Milton Leitenberg Raymond A Zilinskas Jens H KuhnThis is the first attempt to understand the full scope of the USSR’s offensive biological weapons research, from inception in the 1920s. Gorbachev tried to end the program, but the U.S. and U.K. never obtained clear evidence that he succeeded, raising the question whether the means for waging biological warfare could be present in Russia today.
A Traveled First Lady: Writings Of Louisa Catherine Adams
by Louisa Catherine AdamsLouisa Catherine Adams was daughter-in-law and wife of presidents, assisted diplomat J. Q. Adams at three European capitals, and served as a D.C. hostess for three decades. Yet she is barely remembered today. A Traveled First Lady (with Foreword by Laura Bush) corrects this oversight, by sharing Adams's remarkable story in her own words.
Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures)
by Mahmood MamdaniWhen Britain abandoned its attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance as the definition and management of difference, lines of political identity were drawn between settler and native, and between natives according to tribe. Out of this colonial experience arose a language of pluralism.
Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court (The Nathan I. Huggins lectures #17)
by Paul FinkelmanIn ruling after ruling, the three most important pre–Civil War justices—Marshall, Taney, and Story—upheld slavery. Paul Finkelman establishes an authoritative account of each justice’s proslavery position, the reasoning behind his opposition to black freedom, and the personal incentives that embedded racism ever deeper in American civic life.
First Amendment Institutions
by Paul HorwitzAddressing a host of hot-button issues, Horwitz argues that rigidly doctrinal interpretation renders First Amendment law inept in the face of messy, real-world situations. Courts should let institutions with a stake in these freedoms do more work to enforce them. Self-regulation and public criticism should be the key restraints, not judicial fiat.
The Fallacies of States' Rights
by Sotirios A. BarberBarber shows how arguments for states’ rights from John C. Calhoun to the present offend common sense, logic, and bedrock constitutional principles. The Constitution is a charter of positive benefits, not a contract among separate sovereigns whose function is to protect people from the central government, when there are greater dangers to confront.
Algerian Chronicles
by Albert CamusMore than 50 years after independence, Algerian Chronicles, with its prescient analysis of the dead end of terrorism, appears here in English for the first time. Published in France in 1958—the year the war caused the collapse of the Fourth French Republic—it is one of Albert Camus’ most political works: an exploration of his commitment to Algeria.
Legal Integration of Islam: A Transatlantic Comparison
by Christian JoppkeChristian Joppke and John Torpey show how four liberal democracies—France, Germany, Canada, and the U.S.—have responded to the challenge of integrating Muslim populations. Demonstrating the centrality of the legal system to this process, they argue that institutional barriers to integration are no greater on one side of the Atlantic than the other.
Metamorphoses of the City: On The Western Dynamic
by Pierre ManentMetamorphoses of the City is a sweeping interpretation of Europe's ambition to generate ever better forms of collective self-government, from ancient city-states and empires to a universal church and the nation-state. But the nation-state is nearing the end of its line, Pierre Manent says, and what will supplant it remains to be seen.
Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution
by Scott SowerbyThough James II is often depicted as a Catholic despot who imposed his faith, Scott Sowerby reveals a king ahead of his time who pressed for religious toleration at the expense of his throne. The Glorious Revolution was in fact a conservative counter-revolution against the movement for enlightened reform that James himself encouraged and sustained.
The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome
by Anthony KaldellisScholars have long claimed that the Eastern Roman Empire, a Christian theocracy, bore little resemblance to ancient Rome. Here, Anthony Kaldellis reconnects Byzantium to its Roman roots, arguing that it was essentially a republic, with power exercised on behalf of, and sometimes by, Greek-speaking citizens who considered themselves fully Roman.