The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism
Edited by Erica Chenoweth, Richard English, Andreas Gofas, and Stathis N. Kalyvas
The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism systematically integrates the substantial body of scholarship on terrorism and counterterrorism before and after 9/11. In doing so, it introduces scholars and practitioners to state of the art approaches, methods, and issues in studying and teaching these vital phenomena. This handbook goes further than most existing collections by giving structure and direction to the fast-growing but somewhat disjointed field of terrorism studies. (Read more at Oxford University Press)
Weatherhead Center Faculty Associate Erica Chenoweth is a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Globalization and Inequality
By Elhanan Helpman
Globalization and Inequality guides us through two decades of research about the connections among international trade, offshoring, and changes in income, and shows that the overwhelming conclusion of contemporary research is that globalization is responsible for only a small rise in inequality. The chief causes remain difficult to pin down, though technological developments favoring highly skilled workers and changes in corporate and public policies are leading suspects. As Helpman makes clear, this does not mean that globalization creates no problems. Critics may be right to raise concerns about such matters as cultural autonomy, child labor, and domestic sovereignty. But if we wish to curb inequality while protecting what is best about an interconnected world, we must start with a clear view of what globalization does and does not do and look elsewhere to understand our troubling and growing divide. (Read more at Harvard University Press)
Weatherhead Center Faculty Associate Elhanan Helpman is the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade at Harvard University.
A Short History of European Law: The Last Two And A Half Millennia
By Tamar Herzog
To many observers, European law seems like the endpoint of a mostly random walk through history. Certainly the trajectory of legal systems in the West over the past 2,500 years is far from self-evident. In A Short History of European Law, Tamar Herzog offers a new road map that reveals underlying patterns and unexpected connections. By identifying what European law was, where its iterations could be found, who was allowed to make and implement it, and what the results were, she ties legal norms to their historical circumstances, and allows readers to grasp their malleability and fragility. (Read more at Harvard University Press)
Weatherhead Center Faculty Associate Tamar Herzog is the Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs and professor of history at Harvard University. She is also a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism
By Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
Authoritarian populist parties have advanced in many countries, and entered government in states as diverse as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. Even small parties can still shift the policy agenda, as demonstrated by UKIP's role in catalyzing Brexit. Drawing on new evidence, this book advances a general theory why the silent revolution in values triggered a backlash fuelling support for authoritarian-populist parties and leaders in the US and Europe. The conclusion highlights the dangers of this development and what could be done to mitigate the risks to liberal democracy. (Read more at Cambridge University Press)
Weatherhead Center Faculty Associate Pippa Norris is the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at Harvard Kennedy School and professor of government and international relations at the University of Sydney.
Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, with a New Preface
By Orlando Patterson
Distinctions abound in this work. Beyond the reconceptualization of the basic master–slave relationship and the redefinition of slavery as an institution with universal attributes, Patterson rejects the legalistic Roman concept that places the “slave as property” at the core of the system. Rather, he emphasizes the centrality of sociological, symbolic, and ideological factors interwoven within the slavery system. Along the whole continuum of slavery, the cultural milieu is stressed, as well as political and psychological elements. Materialistic and racial factors are deemphasized. The author is thus able, for example, to deal with “elite” slaves, or even eunuchs, in the same framework of understanding as fieldhands; to uncover previously hidden principles of inheritance of slave and free status; and to show the tight relationship between slavery and freedom. (Read more at Harvard University Press)
Weatherhead Center Faculty Associate Orlando Patterson is the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.
Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?
Edited by Mark A. Graber, Sanford Levinson, and Mark Tushnet
Is the world facing a serious threat to the protection of constitutional democracy? There is a genuine debate about the meaning of the various political events that have, for many scholars and observers, generated a feeling of deep foreboding about our collective futures all over the world. Do these events represent simply the normal ebb and flow of political possibilities, or do they instead portend a more permanent move away from constitutional democracy that had been thought triumphant after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989? (Read more at Oxford University Press)
Weatherhead Center Faculty Associate Mark Tushnet is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard School.
News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945
By Heidi J. S. Tworek
Information warfare may seem like a new feature of our contemporary digital world. But it was just as crucial a century ago, when the great powers competed to control and expand their empires. In News from Germany, Heidi Tworek uncovers how Germans fought to regulate information at home and used the innovation of wireless technology to magnify their power abroad.
Tworek reveals how for nearly fifty years, across three different political regimes, Germany tried to control world communications—and nearly succeeded. From the turn of the twentieth century, German political and business elites worried that their British and French rivals dominated global news networks. Many Germans even blamed foreign media for Germany’s defeat in World War I. The key to the British and French advantage was their news agencies—companies whose power over the content and distribution of news was arguably greater than that wielded by Google or Facebook today. Communications networks became a crucial battleground for interwar domestic democracy and international influence everywhere from Latin America to East Asia. Imperial leaders, and their Weimar and Nazi successors, nurtured wireless technology to make news from Germany a major source of information across the globe. The Nazi mastery of global propaganda by the 1930s was built on decades of Germany’s obsession with the news. (Read more at Harvard University Press)
Former Visiting Fellow Heidi J.S. Tworek is an assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia.
Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire
By Jeffrey S. Kahn
In Islands of Sovereignty, anthropologist and legal scholar Jeffrey S. Kahn offers a new interpretation of the transformation of US borders during the late twentieth century and its implications for our understanding of the nation-state as a legal and political form. Kahn takes us on a voyage into the immigration tribunals of South Florida, the Coast Guard vessels patrolling the northern Caribbean, and the camps of Guantánamo Bay—once the world’s largest US-operated migrant detention facility—to explore how litigation concerning the fate of Haitian asylum seekers gave birth to a novel paradigm of offshore oceanic migration policing. Combining ethnography—in Haiti, at Guantánamo, and alongside US migration patrols in the Caribbean—with in-depth archival research, Kahn expounds a nuanced theory of liberal empire’s dynamic tensions and its racialized geographies of securitization. An innovative historical anthropology of the modern legal imagination, Islands of Sovereignty forces us to reconsider the significance of the rise of the current US immigration border and its relation to broader shifts in the legal infrastructure of contemporary nation-states across the globe. (Read more at University of Chicago Press)
Former Harvard Academy Scholar Jeffrey S. Kahn is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis.
Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire
By Paul J. Kosmin
In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests, the Seleucid kings ruled a vast territory stretching from Central Asia to Anatolia, Armenia to the Persian Gulf. In a radical move to impose unity and regulate behavior, this Graeco-Macedonian imperial power introduced a linear and transcendent conception of time. Under Seleucid rule, time no longer restarted with each new monarch. Instead, progressively numbered years, identical to the system we use today—continuous, irreversible, accumulating—became the de facto measure of historical duration. This new temporality, propagated throughout the empire, changed how people did business, recorded events, and oriented themselves to the larger world. Challenging this order, however, were rebellious subjects who resurrected their pre-Hellenistic pasts and created apocalyptic time frames that predicted the total end of history. The interaction of these complex and competing temporalities, Kosmin argues, led to far-reaching religious, intellectual, and political developments. (Read more at Harvard University Press)
Weatherhead Center Faculty Associate Paul J. Kosmin is an assistant professor of the classics at Harvard University.
Votes for Survival: Relational Clientelism in Latin America
By Simeon Nichter
Across the world, many politicians deliver benefits to citizens in direct exchange for their votes. Scholars often predict the demise of this phenomenon, as it is threatened by economic development, ballot secrecy and other daunting challenges. To explain its resilience, this book shifts attention to the demand side of exchanges. Nichter contends that citizens play a crucial but underappreciated role in the survival of relational clientelism—ongoing exchange relationships that extend beyond election campaigns. Citizens often undertake key actions, including declared support and requesting benefits, to sustain these relationships. As most of the world's population remains vulnerable to adverse shocks, citizens often depend on such relationships when the state fails to provide an adequate social safety net. Nichter demonstrates the critical role of citizens with fieldwork and original surveys in Brazil, as well as with comparative evidence from Argentina, Mexico, and other continents. (Read more at Cambridge University Press)
Former Academy Scholar Simeon Richter is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego.
Preparing Teachers to Educate Whole Students: An International Comparative Study
Edited by Fernando M. Reimers and Connie K. Chung
Preparing Teachers to Educate Whole Students offers a wide-ranging comparative account of how innovative professional development programs in a number of countries guide and support teachers in their efforts to promote cognitive and socio-emotional growth in their students. The book focuses on holistic educational outcomes in an effort to better serve students in the twenty-first century and examines seven programs in all—in Chile, China, Colombia, India, Mexico, the United States, and Singapore. (Read more at Harvard Education Press)
Weatherhead Center Faculty Associate Fernando M. Reimers is the Ford Foundation Professor of International Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Sentinel: The Unlikely Origins of the Statue of Liberty
By Francesca Lidia Viano
The Statue of Liberty is an icon of freedom, a monument to America’s multiethnic democracy, and a memorial to Franco-American friendship. That much we know. But the lofty ideals we associate with the statue today can obscure its turbulent origins and layers of meaning. Francesca Lidia Viano reveals that history in the fullest account yet of the people and ideas that brought the lady of the harbor to life.
Our protagonists are the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and his collaborator, the politician and intellectual Édouard de Laboulaye. Viano draws on an unprecedented range of sources to follow the pair as they chase their artistic and political ambitions across a global stage dominated by imperial rivalry and ideological ferment. The tale stretches from the cobblestones of northeastern France, through the hallways of international exhibitions in London and Paris, to the copper mines of Norway and Chile, the battlegrounds of the Franco-Prussian War, the deserts of Egypt, and the streets of New York. It features profound technical challenges, hot air balloon rides, secret “magnetic” séances, and grand visions of a Franco-American partnership in the coming world order. The irrepressible collaborators bring to their project the high ideals of liberalism and republicanism, but also crude calculations of national advantage and eccentric notions adopted from orientalism, freemasonry, and Saint-Simonianism. (Read more at Harvard University Press)
Francesca Viano is a Visiting Fellow at the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations (WIGH). She recently completed her PhD in history of political thought at the University of Perugia.
From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico
By Casey Marina Lurtz
In the late nineteenth century, Latin American exports boomed. From Chihuahua to Patagonia, producers sent industrial fibers, tropical fruits, and staple goods across oceans to satisfy the ever-increasing demand from foreign markets. In southern Mexico's Soconusco district, the coffee trade would transform rural life. A regional history of the Soconusco as well as a study in commodity capitalism, From the Grounds Up places indigenous and mestizo villagers, migrant workers, and local politicians at the center of our understanding of the export boom. (Read more at Stanford University Press)
Former Academy Scholar Casey Marina Lurtz is an assistant professor of history at Johns Hopkins University.
Coping with Caveats in Coalition Warfare: An Empirical Research Program
By Gunnar Fermann
This book develops a framework for analysis, and a set of research strategies, to better understand the conditions and mechanisms involved in the considerable use of caveats by states contributing militarily to coalition operations. In the professional language of military servicemen, security analysts and decision-makers, “caveats” refers to the reservations on the use of force states put on their military contingents as a precondition to participate in particular multinational enforcement operations. Such understood caveats are an instrument of statecraft and foreign policy. However, caveats also are a potential threat to the integrity and military effectiveness of the coalition force in question, and, further down the road, an erosion on the fabric of security alliances. This volume is ideal for audiences interested in military and defence studies, security studies and coalition warfare. (Read more at Palgrave Macmillan)
Former Weatherhead-SCANCOR Partnership Visiting Scholar Gunnar Fermann is an associate professor of sociology and political science at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism through a Turbulent Century
By Torben Iversen and David Soskice
It is a widespread view that democracy and the advanced nation-state are in crisis, weakened by globalization and undermined by global capitalism, in turn explaining rising inequality and mounting populism. This book, written by two of the world’s leading political economists, argues this view is wrong: advanced democracies are resilient, and their enduring historical relationship with capitalism has been mutually beneficial. (Read more at Princeton University Press)
Weatherhead Center Faculty Associate Torben Iversen is the Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University.