New Books

Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective

By Hicham Alaoui

This book provides a new theory for how democracy can materialize in the Middle East, and the broader Muslim world. It shows that one pathway to democratization lays not in resolving important, but often irreconcilable, debates about the role of religion in politics. Rather, it requires that Islamists and their secular opponents focus on the concerns of pragmatic survival—that is, compromise through pacting, rather than battling through difficult philosophical issues about faith. This is the only book-length treatment of this topic, and one that aims to redefine the boundaries of an urgent problem that continues to haunt struggles for democracy in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. (Read more at Palgrave Macmillan)

Advisory Committee Member Hicham Alaoui is the founder and director of the Hicham Alaoui Foundation.

Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship: Legacies of Race and Emergency in the Former British Empire

By Yael Berda

Book cover for Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary CitizenshipColonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship examines how the legacies of colonial bureaucracy continue to shape political life after empire. Focusing on the former British colonies of India, Cyprus, and Israel/Palestine, the book explores how postcolonial states use their inherited administrative legacies to classify and distinguish between loyal and suspicious subjects and manage the movement of populations, thus shaping the practical meaning of citizenship and belonging within their new boundaries. The book offers a novel institutional theory of 'hybrid bureaucracy' to explain how racialized bureaucratic practices were used by powerful administrators in state organizations to shape the making of political identity and belonging in the new states. Combining sociology and anthropology of the state with the study of institutions, this book offers new knowledge to overturn conventional understandings of bureaucracy, demonstrating that routine bureaucratic practices and persistent colonial logics continue to shape unequal political status to this day. (Read more at Cambridge University Press)

Former Academy Scholar Yael Berda is an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at Hebrew University.

The Climate Book: Chapter 5.10 People Power

Chapter by Erica Chenoweth; Book by Greta Thunberg

Book cover for The Climate BookAround the world, geophysicists and mathematicians, oceanographers and meteorologists, engineers, economists, psychologists and philosophers have been using their expertise to develop a deep understanding of the crises we face. Greta Thunberg has created The Climate Book in partnership with over one hundred of these experts in order to equip us all with this knowledge. Alongside them, Greta shares her own stories of learning, demonstrating, and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing the extent to which we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest problems, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, we will be able to act—and if a school child’s strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried? (Read more at Penguin Random House)

Faculty Associate Erica Chenoweth is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t

By Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev

Book cover for Getting to DiversityEvery year America becomes more diverse, but change in the makeup of the management ranks has stalled. The problem has become an urgent matter of national debate. How do we fix it? Bestselling books preach moral reformation. Employers, however well intentioned, follow guesswork and whatever their peers happen to be doing. Arguing that it’s time to focus on changing systems rather than individuals, two of the world’s leading experts on workplace diversity show us a better way in the first comprehensive, data-driven analysis of what succeeds and what fails. The surprising results will change how America works. (Read more at Harvard University Press)

Faculty Associate Frank Dobbin is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.

Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s

By Julian Gewirtz

Book cover for Never Turn BackOn a hike in Guangdong Province in January 1984, Deng Xiaoping was warned that his path was a steep and treacherous one. “Never turn back,” the Chinese leader replied. That became a mantra as the government forged ahead with reforms in the face of heated contestation over the nation’s future. For a time, everything was on the table, including democratization and China’s version of socialism. But deliberation came to a sudden halt in spring 1989, with protests and purges, massacre and repression. Since then, Beijing has worked intensively to suppress the memory of this era of openness. (Read more at Harvard University Press)

Former Academy Scholar Julian Gewirtz is currently working in the Biden Administration on China matters.

Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China

By William C. Kirby

Book cover for Empire of IdeasToday American institutions dominate nearly every major ranking of global universities. Yet in historical terms, America’s preeminence is relatively new, and there is no reason to assume that US schools will continue to lead the world a century from now. Indeed, America’s supremacy in higher education is under great stress, particularly at its public universities. At the same time Chinese universities are on the ascent. Thirty years ago, Chinese institutions were reopening after the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution; today they are some of the most innovative educational centers in the world. Will China threaten American primacy? (Read more at Harvard University Press)

Faculty Associate William C. Kirby is the T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and the Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Cultures of Resistance in the Hellenistic East

Edited by Paul J. Kosmin and Ian S. Moyer

Book cover for Cultures of Resistance in the Hellenistic EastThis collaborative volume examines revolts and resistance to the successor states, formed after Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persian empire, as a transregional phenomenon. The editors have assembled an array of specialists in the study of the various regions and cultures of the Hellenistic world—Judea, Egypt, Babylonia, Central Asia, and Asia Minor—in an effort to trace comparisons and connections between episodes and modes of resistance. The volume seeks to unite the currently dominant social-scientific orientation to ancient resistance and revolt with perspectives, often coming from religious studies, that are more attentive to local cultural, religious, and moral frameworks. In re-assessing these frameworks, contributors move beyond Greek/non-Greek binaries to examine resistance as complex and entangled: acts and articulations of resistance are not purely nativistic or 'nationalist', but conditioned by local traditions of government, historical memories of prior periods, as well as emergent transregional Hellenistic political and cultural idioms. (Read more at Oxford University Press)

Faculty Associate Paul Kosmin is the Philip J. King Professor of Ancient History at Harvard University.

Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism

By Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way

Book cover for Revolution and DictatorshipRevolution and Dictatorship explores why dictatorships born of social revolution—such as those in China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam—are extraordinarily durable, even in the face of economic crisis, large-scale policy failure, mass discontent, and intense external pressure. Few other modern autocracies have survived in the face of such extreme challenges. Drawing on comparative historical analysis, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that radical efforts to transform the social and geopolitical order trigger intense counterrevolutionary conflict, which initially threatens regime survival, but ultimately fosters the unity and state building that supports authoritarianism. (Read more at Princeton University Press)

Faculty Associate Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

Democracy in Hard Places

Edited by Scott Mainwaring and Tarek Masoud

Book cover for Democracy in Hard PlacesThe last fifteen years have witnessed a "democratic recession." Democracies previously thought to be well-established—Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and even the United States—have been threatened by the rise of ultra-nationalist and populist leaders who pay lip-service to the will of the people while daily undermining the freedom and pluralism that are the foundations of democratic governance. The possibility of democratic collapse where we least expected it has added new urgency to the age-old inquiry into how democracy, once attained, can be made to last. (Read more at Oxford University Press)

Faculty Associate Tarek Masoud is the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance at Harvard Kennedy School. Former Faculty Associate Scott Mainwaring is the Eugene and Helen Conley Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. 

Enemies Within: The Global Politics of Fifth Columns

Edited by Harris Mylonas and Scott Radnitz 

Book cover for Enemies WithinThe invocation of fifth columns in the political arena—whether contrived or based on real fears—has historically recurred periodically and is experiencing an upsurge in our era of democratic erosion and geopolitical uncertainty. Fifth-column accusations can have baleful effects on governance and trust, as they call into question the loyalty and belonging of the targeted populations. Enemies Within is the first book to systematically investigate the roots and implications of the politics of fifth columns. In this volume, a multidisciplinary group of leading scholars addresses several related questions: When are actors likely to employ fifth-column claims and against whom? What accounts for changes in fifth-column framing over time? How do the claims and rhetoric of governments differ from those of societal groups? How do accusations against ethnically or ideologically defined groups differ? Finally, how do actors labeled as fifth columns respond? To answer these questions, the contributors apply a common theoretical framework and work within the tradition of qualitative social science to analyze cases from three continents, oftentimes challenging conventional wisdom. Enemies Within offers a unique perspective to better understand contemporary challenges including the return of chauvinistic nationalism, the weakening of democratic norms, and the persecution of minorities and political dissidents. (Read more at Oxford Academic)

Former Academy Scholar Harris Mylonas is an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. 

In Praise of Skepticism: Trust but Verify

By Pippa Norris

Book cover for In Praise of SkepticismA culture of trust is usually claimed to have many public benefits—by lubricating markets, managing organizations, legitimating governments, and facilitating collective action. Any signs of its decline are, and should be, a matter of serious concern. Yet, In Praise of Skepticism recognizes that trust has two faces. Confidence in anti-vax theories has weakened herd immunity. Faith in Q-Anon conspiracy theories triggered insurrection. Disasters flow from gullible beliefs in fake COVID-19 cures, Madoff pyramid schemes, Russian claims of Ukrainian Nazis, and the Big Lie denying President Biden's legitimate election. (Read more at Oxford University Press)

Faculty Associate Pippa Norris is the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at Harvard Kennedy School.

Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China

By Lynette H. Ong

Book cover for Outsourcing RepressionHow do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash? In Outsourcing Repression, Lynette H. Ong examines how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors, from violent street gangsters to nonviolent grassroots brokers, to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits, while reducing costs and minimizing resistance. She draws on ethnographic research conducted annually from 2011 to 2019—the years from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, a unique and original event dataset, and a collection of government regulations in a study of everyday land grabs and housing demolition in China. Theorizing a counterintuitive form of repression that reduces resistance and backlash, Ong invites the reader to reimagine the new ground state power credibly occupies. Everyday state power is quotidian power acquired through society by penetrating nonstate territories and mobilizing the masses within. Ong uses China's urbanization scheme as a window of observation to explain how the arguments can be generalized to other country contexts. (Read more at Oxford University Press)

Former Visiting Scholar Lynette H. Ong is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto.

The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development

By Yuhua Wang

Book cover for the Rise and Fall of Imperial ChinaChina was the world’s leading superpower for almost two millennia, falling behind only in the last two centuries and now rising to dominance again. What factors led to imperial China’s decline? The Rise and Fall of Imperial China offers a systematic look at the Chinese state from the seventh century through to the twentieth. Focusing on how short-lived emperors often ruled a strong state while long-lasting emperors governed a weak one, Yuhua Wang shows why lessons from China’s history can help us better understand state building. (Read more at Princeton University Press)

Faculty Associate Yuhua Wang is a professor of government at Harvard University.