Research Library

2017
Managing Universities: Policy and Organizational Change from a Western European Comparative Perspective
Bleiklie, Ivar, Jürgen Enders, and Benedetto Lepori, ed. 2017. Managing Universities: Policy and Organizational Change from a Western European Comparative Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan. Publisher's Version Abstract
This book asks how modern universities are organized and managed, and questions whether thirty years of university reforms have resulted in stronger managerial structures and leadership control. It further asks whether current organisational and decision-making structures can be explained by public reform policies. The book offers a coherent, empirically grounded and theoretically driven presentation of data and core ideas behind a large scale comparative study of twenty-six universities across eight European countries. It focuses on the strength of university managerial structures, the role of academics, and how universities relate to and depend on their environment: to governments and other actors; to funders; to evaluators; and to external stakeholders. It further explores how higher education policies are shaped by and affect universities. Written by a cross-disciplinary team of European scholars, this book is unique both in its wide coverage and the depth of its analyses. It will be of great interest to scholars, graduate students and advanced undergraduates in the fields of organisation theory and sociology, policy studies, comparative public policy and administration, and higher education studies. It will also be of interest to higher education policy makers and administrators
Illusions of Democracy: Malaysian Politics and People Volume II
Bringing together a group of both international and Malaysian scholars, Illusions of Democracy: Malaysian Politics and People Volume II offers an up-to-date and broad analysis of the contemporary state of Malaysian politics and society. Transcending disciplinary boundaries, it offers a look at Malaysian politics not only through the lens of political science but also anthropology, cultural studies, international relations, political economy and legal studies touching on both overlooked topics in Malaysian political life as well as the emerging trends which will shape Malaysia’s future. Covering silat martial arts, Malaysia’s constitutional identity, emergency legislation, the South China Sea dilemma, ISIS discourse, zakat payment, the fallout from the 1MDB scandal and Malaysia’s green movement, Illusions of Democracy charts the complex and multi-faceted nature of political life in a semi-authoritarian state, breaking down the illusions which keep it functioning, to uncover the mechanisms which really underlie the paradoxical longevity of Malaysia’s political, economic and social system.
Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution

Red at Heart conjures a tale of cross-cultural romance from a topic that is normally seen in geopolitical or ideological terms—and thereby offers a new interpretation of twentieth century communism's most crucial alliance.

This is the multigenerational history of people who experienced Sino-Soviet affairs most intimately: prominent Chinese revolutionaries who traveled to Russia in their youths to study, often falling in love and having children there. Their deeply personal memoirs, interviews with their children, and a vivid collection of documents from the Russian archives allow Elizabeth McGuire to reconstruct the sexually-charged, physically difficult, and politically dangerous lives of Chinese communists in the Soviet Union. The choices they made shaped not only the lives of their children, but also the postwar alliance between the People's Republic of China and Soviet Russia.

Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank

In 1991, the Israeli government introduced emergency legislation canceling the general exit permit that allowed Palestinians to enter Israel. The directive, effective for one year, has been reissued annually ever since, turning the Occupied Territories into a closed military zone. Today, Israel's permit regime for Palestinians is one of the world's most extreme and complex apparatuses for population management. Yael Berda worked as a human rights lawyer in Jerusalem and represented more than two hundred Palestinian clients trying to obtain labor permits to enter Israel from the West Bank. With Living Emergency, she brings readers inside the permit regime, offering a first-hand account of how the Israeli secret service, government, and military civil administration control the Palestinian population.

Through interviews with Palestinian laborers and their families, conversations with Israeli clerks and officials, and research into the archives and correspondence of governmental organizations, Berda reconstructs the institutional framework of the labyrinthine permit regime, illuminating both its overarching principles and its administrative practices. In an age where terrorism, crime, and immigration are perceived as intertwined security threats, she reveals how the Israeli example informs global homeland security and border control practices, creating a living emergency for targeted populations worldwide.

Oceanic Histories
Armitage, David, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram, ed. 2017. Oceanic Histories. Cambridge University Press. Publisher's Version Abstract
Oceanic Histories is the first comprehensive account of world history focused not on the land but viewed through the 70% of the Earth's surface covered by water. Leading historians trace the history of the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans and seas, from the Arctic and the Baltic to the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan/Korea's East Sea, over the longue durée. Individual chapters trace the histories and the historiographies of the various oceanic regions, with special attention given to the histories of circulation and particularity, the links between human and non-human history and the connections and comparisons between parts of the World Ocean. Showcasing oceanic history as a field with a long past and a vibrant future, these authoritative surveys, original arguments and guides to research make this volume an indispensable resource for students and scholars alike.
Empowering All Students At Scale
Reimers, Fernando M., ed. 2017. Empowering All Students At Scale. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Publisher's Version Abstract
The global movement to educate all children has produced one of the most remarkable silent revolutions experienced by humanity, integrating most children and youth into institutions invented to pass on to them what each generation considers valuable, and to help them develop the competencies to improve the world. Changes in a range of domains, from technology to politics, from the ways in which we communicate and associate, to the ways in which we produce goods and services, continue to expand our aspirations for how schools should prepare the young to invent the future. There is much innovation worldwide responding to this aspiration, and the need to bring such innovations to scale so they benefit all children. The contributors to this book explain what the opportunities and challenges are to scale educational change to make schools relevant to the demands of our times. Based on a Think Tank convened by the Global Education Innovation Initiative at Harvard University, this book aims to stimulate broad social dialogue on how to support students and teachers to live fulfilling lives in the volatility and complexity of our times.
Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa

In the 1880s, Europeans descended on Africa and grabbed vast swaths of the continent, using documents, not guns, as their weapon of choice. Rogue Empires follows a paper trail of questionable contracts to discover the confidence men whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa. Many of them were would-be kings who sought to establish their own autonomous empires across the African continent—often at odds with traditional European governments which competed for control.

From 1882 to 1885, independent European businessmen and firms (many of doubtful legitimacy) produced hundreds of deeds purporting to buy political rights from indigenous African leaders whose understanding of these agreements was usually deemed irrelevant. A system of privately governed empires, some spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles, promptly sprang up in the heart of Africa. Steven Press traces the notion of empire by purchase to an unlikely place: the Southeast Asian island of Borneo, where the English adventurer James Brooke bought his own kingdom in the 1840s. Brooke’s example inspired imitators in Africa, as speculators exploited a loophole in international law in order to assert sovereignty and legal ownership of lands which they then plundered for profit.

The success of these experiments in governance attracted notice in European capitals. Press shows how the whole dubious enterprise came to a head at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when King Leopold of Belgium and the German Chancellor Bismarck embraced rogue empires as legal precedents for new colonial agendas in the Congo, Namibia, and Cameroon.

Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China

Unlikely Partners recounts the story of how Chinese politicians and intellectuals looked beyond their country’s borders for economic guidance at a key crossroads in the nation’s tumultuous twentieth century. Julian Gewirtz offers a dramatic tale of competition for influence between reformers and hardline conservatives during the Deng Xiaoping era, bringing to light China’s productive exchanges with the West.

When Mao Zedong died in 1976, his successors seized the opportunity to reassess the wisdom of China’s rigid commitment to Marxist doctrine. With Deng Xiaoping’s blessing, China’s economic gurus scoured the globe for fresh ideas that would put China on the path to domestic prosperity and ultimately global economic power. Leading foreign economists accepted invitations to visit China to share their expertise, while Chinese delegations traveled to the United States, Hungary, Great Britain, West Germany, Brazil, and other countries to examine new ideas. Chinese economists partnered with an array of brilliant thinkers, including Nobel Prize winners, World Bank officials, battle-scarred veterans of Eastern Europe’s economic struggles, and blunt-speaking free-market fundamentalists.

Nevertheless, the push from China’s senior leadership to implement economic reforms did not go unchallenged, nor has the Chinese government been eager to publicize its engagement with Western-style innovations. Even today, Chinese Communists decry dangerous Western influences and officially maintain that China’s economic reinvention was the Party’s achievement alone. Unlikely Partners sets forth the truer story, which has continuing relevance for China’s complex and far-reaching relationship with the West.

Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption After Empire
How do contemporary generations come to terms with losses inflicted by imperialism, colonialism, and war that took place decades ago? How do descendants of perpetrators and victims establish new relations in today’s globalized economy? With Inheritance of Loss, Yukiko Koga approaches these questions through the unique lens of inheritance, focusing on Northeast China, the former site of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo, where municipal governments now court Japanese as investors and tourists. As China transitions to a market-oriented society, this region is restoring long-neglected colonial-era structures to boost tourism and inviting former colonial industries to create special economic zones, all while inadvertently unearthing chemical weapons abandoned by the Imperial Japanese Army at the end of World War II.
 
Inheritance of Loss chronicles these sites of colonial inheritance––tourist destinations, corporate zones, and mustard gas exposure sites––to illustrate attempts by ordinary Chinese and Japanese to reckon with their shared yet contested pasts. In her explorations of everyday life, Koga directs us to see how the violence and injustice that occurred after the demise of the Japanese Empire compound the losses that later generations must account for, and inevitably inherit.
El caso de Sacco y Vanzetti. Los Estados Unidos a juicio (The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: The United States on Trial)
The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: The United States on Trial is a book that analyzes the enormous national and international impact of the trial and subsequent execution of the anarchist militants Nicolás Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. It only contributes to understanding the dramatic social and political struggles that accompanied the famous case, but the divisions and conflicts that continue to manifest in the United States today.
The Man with the Poison Gun
Plokhy, Serhii. 2017. The Man with the Poison Gun. London: Oneworld Publications. Publisher's Version Abstract
1961. The height of the Cold War. Just hours before work begins on the Berlin Wall, a KGB assassin and his young wife flee for the West before the Iron Curtain comes down and traps them in the East forever.

This gripping story of real-life espionage and intrigue began when the Soviets invented a special weapon that killed without leaving a trace and put it in the hands of Bogdan Stashinsky. It is a tale of exploding parcels, fake identities, forbidden love and a man who knew the truth about the USSR's most classified programme. By the time Stashinsky had his day in court, the whole world was watching.
On the Move: Changing Mechanisms of Mexico-U.S. Migration
Garip, Filiz. 2017. On the Move: Changing Mechanisms of Mexico-U.S. Migration. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Publisher's Version Abstract

Why do Mexicans migrate to the United States? Is there a typical Mexican migrant? Beginning in the 1970s, survey data indicated that the average migrant was a young, unmarried man who was poor, undereducated, and in search of better employment opportunities. This is the general view that most Americans still hold of immigrants from Mexico. On the Move argues that not only does this view of Mexican migrants reinforce the stereotype of their undesirability, but it also fails to capture the true diversity of migrants from Mexico and their evolving migration patterns over time.

Using survey data from over 145,000 Mexicans and in-depth interviews with nearly 140 Mexicans, Filiz Garip reveals a more accurate picture of Mexico-U.S migration. In the last fifty years there have been four primary waves: a male-dominated migration from rural areas in the 1960s and '70s, a second migration of young men from socioeconomically more well-off families during the 1980s, a migration of women joining spouses already in the United States in the late 1980s and ’90s, and a generation of more educated, urban migrants in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For each of these four stages, Garip examines the changing variety of reasons for why people migrate and migrants’ perceptions of their opportunities in Mexico and the United States.

Looking at Mexico-U.S. migration during the last half century, On the Move uncovers the vast mechanisms underlying the flow of people moving between nations.

Insider Threats
Bunn, Matthew, and Scott D. Sagan, ed. 2017. Insider Threats. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Publisher's Version Abstract

High-security organizations around the world face devastating threats from insiders—trusted employees with access to sensitive information, facilities, and materials. From Edward Snowden to the Fort Hood shooter to the theft of nuclear materials, the threat from insiders is on the front page and at the top of the policy agenda. Insider Threats offers detailed case studies of insider disasters across a range of different types of institutions, from biological research laboratories, to nuclear power plants, to the U.S. Army. Matthew Bunn and Scott D. Sagan outline cognitive and organizational biases that lead organizations to downplay the insider threat, and they synthesize "worst practices" from these past mistakes, offering lessons that will be valuable for any organization with high security and a lot to lose.

Insider threats pose dangers to anyone who handles information that is secret or proprietary, material that is highly valuable or hazardous, people who must be protected, or facilities that might be sabotaged. This is the first book to offer in-depth case studies across a range of industries and contexts, allowing entities such as nuclear facilities and casinos to learn from each other. It also offers an unprecedented analysis of terrorist thinking about using insiders to get fissile material or sabotage nuclear facilities.

Demanding Justice in the Global South: Claiming Rights
Fontana, Lorenza, Jean Grugel, Jewellord Nem Singh, and Anders Uhlin, ed. 2017. Demanding Justice in the Global South: Claiming Rights. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Publisher's Version Abstract
The politics of claiming rights and strategies of mobilisation exhibited by marginalised social groups lie at the heart of this volume. Theoretically, the authors aims to foster a holistic and multi-faceted understanding of how social and economic justice is claimed, either through formal, corporatist or organised mechanisms, or through ad hoc, informal, or individualised practices, as well as the implications of these distinctive activist strategies. The collection emphasises both the difficulties of political mobilisation and the distinctive methods employed by various social groups across a variety of contexts to respond and overcome these challenges. Crucially, the authors’ approach involves a conceptualisation of social movements and local mobilisation in terms of the language of rights and justice claims-making through more organised as well as everyday political practices. In so doing, the book bridges the literature on contentious politics, the politics of claiming social justice, and everyday politics of resistance.
Civil Wars: A History in Ideas
Armitage, David. 2017. Civil Wars: A History in Ideas. New York: Penguin Random House. Publisher's Version Abstract

We think we know civil war when we see it. Yet ideas of what it is, and what it isn’t, have a long and contested history, from its fraught origins in republican Rome to debates in early modern Europe to our present day. Defining the term is acutely political, for ideas about what makes a war “civil” often depend on whether one is a ruler or a rebel, victor or vanquished, sufferer or outsider. Calling a conflict a civil war can shape its outcome by determining whether outside powers choose to get involved or stand aside: from the American Revolution to the war in Iraq, pivotal decisions have depended on such shifts of perspective. 

The age of civil war in the West may be over, but elsewhere in the last two decades it has exploded–from the Balkans to Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Sri Lanka, and most recently Syria. And the language of civil war has burgeoned as democratic politics has become more violently fought. This book’s unique perspective on the roots and dynamics of civil war, and on its shaping force in our conflict-ridden world, will be essential to the ongoing effort to grapple with this seemingly interminable problem.

Russia: What Everyone Needs to Know
Colton, Timothy J. 2017. Russia: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Publisher's Version Abstract
Russia: What Everyone Needs to Know® provides fundamental information about the origins, evolution, and current affairs of the Russian state and society. The story begins with Russia's geographic endowment, proceeds through its experiences as a kingdom and empire, and continues through the USSR's three-quarters of a century, and finally the shocking breakup of that regime a generation ago.

Chapters on the failed attempt to reform Communism under Mikhail Gorbachev, the halting steps toward democratization under Boris Yeltsin, and the entrenchment of central controls under Vladimir Putin bring the reader into the contemporary scene and to headline-grabbing events such as Russia's annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine and its military intervention in Syria. Drawing on trends within Russia and on ratings and rankings compiled by international organizations, Colton discusses the challenges facing the country—ranging from economic recession to demographic stress, political stagnation, and overextension in foreign policy—and to the realistic options for coping with them.

The book shows that, although Russia is not imprisoned by its history, it is heavily influenced by it. Colton illustrates Russia's greatest strength and, ironically, its greatest weakness: the ability of its people to adapt themselves to difficult circumstances beyond their immediate control. Russia, as Putin has asserted, will not soon be a second edition of the United States or Britain. But, Colton shows, there are ways in which it could become a better version of itself.

Synthetic: How Life Got Made
Roosth, Sophia. 2017. Synthetic: How Life Got Made. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Publisher's Version Abstract
In the final years of the twentieth century, émigrés from engineering and computer science devoted themselves to biology and resolved that if the aim of biology is to understand life, then making life would yield better theories than experimentation. Armed with the latest biotechnology techniques, these scientists treated biological media as elements for design and manufacture: viruses named for computers, bacterial genomes encoding passages from James Joyce, chimeric yeast buckling under the metabolic strain of genes harvested from wormwood, petunias, and microbes from Icelandic thermal pools.
 
In Synthetic: How Life Got Made, cultural anthropologist Sophia Roosth reveals how synthetic biologists make new living things in order to understand better how life works. The first book-length ethnographic study of this discipline, Synthetic documents the social, cultural, rhetorical, economic, and imaginative transformations biology has undergone in the post-genomic age. Roosth traces this new science from its origins at MIT to start-ups, laboratories, conferences, and hackers’ garages across the United States—even to contemporary efforts to resurrect extinct species. Her careful research reveals that rather than opening up a limitless new field, these biologists’ own experimental tactics circularly determine the biological features, theories, and limits they fasten upon. Exploring the life sciences emblematic of our time, Synthetic tells the origin story of the astonishing claim that biological making fosters biological knowing.
The Truth about Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order
COmaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2017. The Truth about Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Publisher's Version Abstract
In this book, renowned anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff make a startling but absolutely convincing claim about our modern era: it is not by our arts, our politics, or our science that we understand ourselves—it is by our crimes. Surveying an astonishing range of forms of crime and policing—from petty thefts to the multibillion-dollar scams of too-big-to-fail financial institutions to the collateral damage of war—they take readers into the disorder of the late modern world. Looking at recent transformations in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance that have led to an era where crime and policing are ever more complicit, they offer a powerful meditation on the new forms of sovereignty, citizenship, class, race, law, and political economy of representation that have arisen.
           
To do so, the Comaroffs draw on their vast knowledge of South Africa, especially, and its struggle to build a democracy founded on the rule of law out of the wreckage of long years of violence and oppression. There they explore everything from the fascination with the supernatural in policing to the extreme measures people take to prevent home invasion, drawing illuminating comparisons to the United States and United Kingdom. Going beyond South Africa, they offer a global criminal anthropology that attests to criminality as the constitutive fact of contemporary life, the vernacular by which politics are conducted, moral panics voiced, and populations ruled.  
           
The result is a disturbing but necessary portrait of the modern era, one that asks critical new questions about how we see ourselves, how we think about morality, and how we are going to proceed as a global society.
Herbert C. Kelman: A Pioneer in the Social Psychology of Conflict Analysis and Resolution
This edited volume presents selected papers capturing Herbert Kelman’s unique and seminal contributions to the social psychology of conflict analysis and resolution, with a special emphasis on the utility of concepts for understanding and constructively addressing violent and intractable conflicts. Central concepts covered include perceptual processes, basic human needs, group and normative processes, social identity, and intergroup trust, which form the basis for developing interactive methods of conflict resolution.
Social Policy Expansion in Latin America
Garay, Candelaria. 2017. Social Policy Expansion in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Publisher's Version Abstract
Throughout the twentieth century, much of the population in Latin America lacked access to social protection. Since the 1990s, however, social policy for millions of outsiders - rural, informal, and unemployed workers and dependents - has been expanded dramatically. Social Policy Expansion in Latin America shows that the critical factors driving expansion are electoral competition for the vote of outsiders and social mobilization for policy change. The balance of partisan power and the involvement of social movements in policy design explain cross-national variation in policy models, in terms of benefit levels, coverage, and civil society participation in implementation. The book draws on in-depth case studies of policy making in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico over several administrations and across three policy areas: health care, pensions, and income support. Secondary case studies illustrate how the theory applies to other developing countries.

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