Best of
Political-Science

2016

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People


Thomas Frank - 2016
    Drawing on years of research and first-hand reporting, Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal. Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages keep falling, and the free-trade deals keep coming.With his trademark sardonic wit and lacerating logic, Frank's Listen, Liberal lays bare the essence of the Democratic Party's philosophy and how it has changed over the years. A form of corporate and cultural elitism has largely eclipsed the party's old working-class commitment, he finds. For certain favored groups, this has meant prosperity. But for the nation as a whole, it is a one-way ticket into the abyss of inequality. In this critical election year, Frank recalls the Democrats to their historic goals-the only way to reverse the ever-deepening rift between the rich and the poor in America.

Hillary's America


Dinesh D'Souza - 2016
    After eight years of Obama, four years—or possibly eight years—of Hillary Clinton as president of the United States would so utterly transform America as to make it unrecognizable.No more will America be a land of opportunity. Instead, it will be a land of rapacious crony capitalism, run solely for the benefit of friends of the Obamas and the Clintons and the Democratic Party. It will, in fact, be the fulfillment of a dream the Democratic Party has had from the beginning…a dream of stealing America for the politically favored few.In Hillary's America, D’Souza reveals the sordid truth about Hillary and the secret history of the Democratic Party, including: how Democrats transitioned from pro-slavery to pro-enslavement; the long-standing Democratic political war against women; how Hillary Clinton’s political mentor was, literally, a cold-blooded gangster; how the Clintons and other Democrats see foreign policy not in terms of national interest, but in terms of personal profit; how Democratically controlled cities have turned into hotbeds of crime and corruption; and much, much more.Not only is Hillary Clinton a liar and a criminal—who would have been indicted for mishandling classified information on her secret email sever had the Democratic Party not closed ranks around her—she is also the culmination of her party's deliberate and stunning plot to redistribute wealth and political power to the liberal elite.Find out how Hillary and Bill used the Clinton Foundation to ruthlessly sell State Department influence to the highest foreign bidder. Find out what shady backroom Democrat dealers taught Hillary Clinton her particular brand of corrupt party politics. And most importantly, find out whether America can stop her from destroying the country once and for all.

The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech


Kimberley Strassel - 2016
    For nearly 40 years, Washington and much of the American public have held up disclosure and campaign finance laws as ideals, and the path to cleaner and freer elections. This book will show, through first-hand accounts, how both have been hijacked by the Left as weapons against free speech and free association, becoming the most powerful tools of those intent on silencing their political opposition. THE INTIMIDATION GAME provides a chilling expose of political scare tactics and overreach, including:How Citizens United set off a wave of liberal harassment against conservative politiciansThe targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRSHow Wisconsin prosecutors, state AGs, and a Democratic Congress shut down political activists and businessesThe politicization by the Obama administration of a host of government agencies including the FEC, FCC and the SECTimed to arrive at the height of the 2016 presidential season, THE INTIMIDATION GAME will shine a much-needed light on how liberal governance and the Democratic machine bullies the political process.

Wake Up America: The Nine Virtues That Made Our Nation Great--and Why We Need Them More Than Ever


Eric Bolling - 2016
    Grit, manliness, individualism, merit, profit and providence, dominion over our environment, thrift, and above all pride in our country—these qualities define us, and are the reason that hundreds of millions of people worldwide look to America for hope, inspiration, and opportunity.But it’s precisely these virtues that now are under attack by the radical Left of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and their followers. America as we know it is eroding before our eyes and becoming what Fox News Channel personality and co-host of “The Five” Eric Bolling calls a “politically correct nanny state.” The rewards for individual achievement and hard work, our basic constitutional rights, religious faith, national identity, and capitalism itself, are being replaced by a dangerous socialistic ideology that is the polar opposite of what our Founding Fathers intended America to be. It’s time for us to wake up and heed the clear-cut warning signs that America is heading in the wrong direction--before we’re too far gone. Eric Bolling knows firsthand what makes America great. Raised in a struggling blue-collar family in Chicago, his parents showed him that hard work and firm values can get you far in life. Those values drove him as a young baseball player to being drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates, then success as a New York Mercantile Exchange trader, and now his daily role on Fox News Channel. A celebration of America that is informed by Bolling’s personal story, Wake Up America is a much-needed call to arms for America’s citizens to preserve and protect our country's present and future.

Unspeakable


Chris Hedges - 2016
    He is an intellectual bomb thrower, who continues to confront American empire in the most incisive, challenging ways. The kinds of insights he provides into the deeply troubled state of our democracy cannot be found anywhere else. Like many of our most important thinkers, he has been relegated to the margins because of ideas deemed too radical—or true—for public consumption. Whether it is covering the dissolution of former Soviet states or embedding in the Middle East to understand the post-9/11 world, he has been a singular voice pushing against mainstream media disinformation and the amnesia of establishment received wisdom. He is an intellectual heir to American radical heroes such as Thomas Paine and Noam Chomsky, and is dedicated to reigniting a shared commitment to radical equality and honesty.Hedges here speaks up about the most pressing issues that currently face our nation. He tackles the rise of a fascist right in support of Donald Trump, which advocates xenophobia and violence in a push for American totalitarianism. He rails against the posturing of inclusivity from establishment elites on both sides of the aisle, who post-Occupy-Wall-Street continue to advocate for policies that make America uninhabitable for all but the ultra-rich and, as lackeys for corporate interests, continue to expand income inequality in all directions. He tears into the contemporary glamorization of the military and the unchecked, unchallenged hawkishness that defines contemporary American foreign policy. Moreover, he shows his support for contemporary revolts against this twisted order—such as Black Lives Matter—that represent Americans refusing to take the destruction of their country lying down. And that’s just the start.He possesses a clear understanding of the challenges that lie before us, and has proven to be ahead of the curve time and again. All of which is to say, Chris Hedges is unafraid to say what is necessary and true—and has always been. If we are to combat the intellectual and moral decay that have come to grip American life, we must listen to him and the urgent message he brings in this book.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World


Ruchir Sharma - 2016
    Narrowing the thousands of factors that can shape a country’s fortunes to ten clear rules, Sharma explains how to spot political, economic, and social changes in real time. He shows how to read political headlines, black markets, the price of onions, and billionaire rankings as signals of booms, busts, and protests. Set in a post-crisis age that has turned the world upside down, replacing fast growth with slow growth and political calm with revolt, Sharma’s pioneering book is an entertaining field guide to understanding change in this era or any era.A Library Journal Best Book of 2016

1962: The War That Wasn't


Kunal Verma - 2016
    Over the course of the next month, nearly 4,000 soldiers were killed on both sides and the Indian Army experienced its worst defeat ever. The conflict (war was never formally declared) ended because China announced a unilateral ceasefire on 21 November and halted its hitherto unhindered advance across NEFA and Ladakh. To add to India’s lasting shame, neither Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru nor the Indian Army was even aware that the ‘war’ had ended until they heard the announcement on the radio—despite the Indian embassy having been given the information two days earlier.This conflict continues to be one of our least understood episodes. Many books have been written on the events of the time, usually by those who were involved in some way, anxious to provide justification for their actions. These accounts have only succeeded in muddying the picture further. What is clear is that 1962 was an unmitigated disaster. The terrain on which most of the battles were fought (or not fought) was remote and inaccessible; the troops were sorely underequipped, lacking even warm clothing; and the men and officers who tried to make a stand were repeatedly let down by their political and military superiors. Time and again, in Nam Ka Chu, Bum-la, Tawang, Se-la, Thembang, Bomdila—all in the Kameng Frontier Division of NEFA in the Eastern Sector—and in Ladakh and Chusul in the Western Sector, our forces were mismanaged, misdirected or left to fend for themselves. If the Chinese Army hadn’t decided to stop its victorious campaign, the damage would have been far worse.In this definitive account of the conflict, based on dozens of interviews with soldiers and numerous others who had a first-hand view of what actually happened in 1962, Shiv Kunal Verma takes us on an uncomfortable journey through one of the most disastrous episodes of independent India’s history.

Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America


David Horowitz - 2016
    It was the beginning of a major political, economic, and social revolution that will change America — and the world.One of the nation’s foremost conservative commentators, New York Times bestselling author, and a mentor to many of Donald Trump’s key advisers, David Horowitz presents a White House battle plan to halt the Democrats’ march to extinguish the values America holds dear.Big Agenda details President Trump’s likely moves, including his:• First wave of executive orders — restoring Guantanamo, Keystone XL, nixing amnesty• Surprising judicial appointments — Supreme Court and the federal judiciary• Radical changes to federal rules & regulations — Obamacare, EPA overreach, and a New Deal for black AmericaWith the White House and Senate in GOP hands, and a Supreme Court soon to follow, President Trump will have a greater opportunity than even Ronald Reagan had to reshape the American political landscape while securing the nation’s vital security interests abroad.“No president since FDR and his famed ‘100 Days’ has the chance Donald Trump has,” Horowitz argues.But he writes that the GOP and Trump must recognize they are not fighting policy ideas, but an ideology — a progressive one with a radical agenda to stop Trump in an effort to reduce America’s power and greatness.Big Agenda is a rallying cry and indispensable guide for how to claim ultimate victory for the conservative cause.Horowitz writes, “One battle is over, but there are many more to come. This book is a guide to fighting the opponents of the conservative restoration. It identifies who the adversaries are — their methods and their motivations.It describes their agenda — not merely the particular issues with which they advance their goal, but the destructive goal itself. And it lays out a strategy that can defeat them.”

American Amnesia: Business, Government, and the Forgotten Roots of Our Prosperity


Jacob S. Hacker - 2016
    Hacker and Paul Pierson explained how political elites have enabled and propelled plutocracy. They trace the economic and political history of the United States over the last century and show how a viable mixed economy has long been the dominant engine of America’s prosperity.Like every other prospering democracy, the United States developed a mixed economy that channeled the spirit of capitalism into strong growth and healthy social development. In this bargain, government and business were as much partners as rivals. Public investments in education, science, transportation, and technology laid the foundation for broadly based prosperity. Programs of economic security and progressive taxation provided a floor of protection and business focused on the pursuit of profit—and government addressed needs business could not.The mixed economy was the most important social innovation of the twentieth century. It spread a previously unimaginable level of broad prosperity. It enabled steep increases in education, health, longevity, and economic security. And yet, extraordinarily, it is anathema to many current economic and political elites. And as the advocates of anti-government free market fundamentalist have gained power, they are hell-bent on scrapping the instrument of nearly a century of unprecedented economic and social progress. In American Amnesia, Hacker and Pierson explain how—and why they must be stopped.

The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies


John R. Lott Jr. - 2016
    In The War on Guns, economist and gun rights advocate John Lott turns a skeptical eye to well-funded anti-gun studies and stories that perpetuate false statistics to frighten Americans into giving up their guns.

Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America


Amy Goodman - 2016
    Today it is the largest public media collaboration in the US. This important book looks back over the past twenty years of Democracy Now! and the powerful movements and charismatic leaders who are re-shaping our world. Goodman takes us along as she goes to where the silence is, bringing out voices from the streets of Ferguson to Staten Island, Wall Street, and South Carolina to East Timor—and other places where people are rising up to demand justice. Giving voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful, Democracy Now! pays tribute to those progressive heroes—the whistleblowers, the organizers, the protestors—who have brought about remarkable, often invisible change over the last couple of decades in seismic ways. This is “an impassioned book aiming to fuel informed participation, outrage, and dissent” (Kirkus Reviews).

Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War


Sebastian Gorka - 2016
    The fight against global jihad has cost 7,000 American lives and almost $2 trillion, and yet, most Americans do not understand what is at stake. The public lacks knowledge and safety because two presidents and their administrations neglected the most basic strategic question: who is the enemy?Presidents Bush and Obama both named the global jihadi movement—a movement with an intent to destroy the West—“violent extremism.” Their tidy term was an attempt to maintain peace with the Muslim community. But when they failed to appropriately name the enemy, they failed to fully understand Islamic extremism. This failure is why the U.S. has been in Afghanistan for sixteen years with no end in sight.But this war is eminently winnable if we remove our ideological blinders, accurately name our enemy, and draw up a strategy to defeat the ideas that inspire terrorism. So says Dr. Sebastian Gorka, one of the most experienced and sought-after authorities on counterterrorism.Dr. Gorka has been one of the intelligence community’s go-to experts on counterterrorism since 9/11. He’s been called to brief Congress and the Marine Corps and was asked to analyze the Patriot’s Day Boston Marathon Bombing for the US government. Dr. Gorka’s report for the trial of Dzhokhar "Jahar" Tsarnaev was widely circulated in counterterrorism circles and the media because it accurately painted a picture, not of a teenager on the cover of Rolling Stone, but of a terrorist.Dr. Gorka is respected by peers because he understands our enemy is not "terror" or "violent extremism." Our enemy is the global jihadi movement, a modern totalitarian ideology rooted in the doctrines and martial history of Islam whose goals are to build an empire, suppress “false Muslims,” and engage in guerilla warfare against infidels.Taking his cue from the formerly top-secret analyses that shaped the U.S. response to the communist threat, Dr. Gorka has produced a compelling profile of the jihadi movement—its mind and motivation—and a plan to defeat it.

The Problem with Socialism


Thomas J. DiLorenzo - 2016
    DiLorenzo, sets the record straight in this concise primer on an economic theory that’s gaining popularity. DiLorenzo reveals how socialism inevitably makes inequality worse, why socialism was behind the worst government-sponsored mass murders in history, the myth of “successful” Scandinavian socialism; how socialism is worse—far worse—for the environment than capitalism, and more.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality


Don Watkins - 2016
    The rich are getting richer by rigging the system in their favor, leaving the rest of us to struggle just to keep our heads above water. To save the American Dream, we’re told that we need to fight inequality through tax hikes, wealth redistribution schemes, and a far higher minimum wage.But what if that narrative is wrong? What if the real threat to the American Dream isn’t rising income inequality—but an all-out war on success?In Equal is Unfair, a timely and thought-provoking work, Don Watkins and Yaron Brook reveal that almost everything we’ve been taught about inequality is wrong. You’ll discover:• why successful CEOs make so much money—and deserve to• how the minimum wage hurts the very people it claims to help• why middle-class stagnation is a myth• how the little-known history of Sweden reveals the dangers of forced equality• the disturbing philosophy behind Obama’s economic agenda.The critics of inequality are right about one thing: the American Dream is under attack. But instead of fighting to make America a place where anyone can achieve success, they are fighting to tear down those who already have. The real key to making America a freer, fairer, more prosperous nation is to protect and celebrate the pursuit of success—not pull down the high fliers in the name of equality.

Hillary the Other Woman: A Political Memoir


Dolly Kyle - 2016
    After all, they have been in the public eye—from Arkansas to the White House and beyond—for over forty years. Dolly Kyle met former president Clinton (Billy as she calls him) on a Hot Springs golf course when she was eleven and he was almost thirteen. It was colpo de fulmine (the thunderbolt) at first sight. Their friendship grew throughout high school and college. It became a decades-long affair that lasted despite marriages and politics all the way to the threshold of the White House—when she became a political liability, and he threatened to destroy her, as Hillary had done to so many of his other women over the years. What you know about the Clintons is probably limited to the pleasantries that the mainstream media have chosen to share with you. Hillary the Other Woman pulls no punches in describing the way “media magic” makes Clinton stories disappear. Have you heard about • The RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) federal lawsuit that Kyle filed against Clinton and cronies while he and co-president Hillary were in the White House? • The racial discrimination lawsuits filed by African-Americans against Clinton as governor of Arkansas? • Cinton’s orders for the Arkansas State Police to “stop and search” vehicles driven by Hispanics? • Thousands of young African-American men given long prison sentences under the “three strikes” laws pushed by co-presidents Bill and Hillary? • The co-president Clintons pandering to minorities with a subtle form of race baiting with their welfare agenda? • The racist names they call Jesse Jackson behind his back? Hillary the Other Woman is not only about the politics of the Arkansas gubernatorial years and the famous “two for the price of one” presidency. It also provides a perspective on Arkansas life that formed the backdrop and training ground for the Clintons in their later crimes, their gangster-like threats and intimidation of political enemies, and their arrogant belief that they are above the law. You will see the connection between Hillary’s current email scandal and her shredding of documents when they left the Arkansas governor’s mansion. You will realize that the Clinton Foundation is the new international version of the money laundering and bribes that you glossed over as “Cattlegate.” You will read clear, concise, entertaining accounts that put the multitude of Clinton scandals into everyday perspective. Finally, you will be privy to the Clinton “truth suppression” techniques that allowed them to get away with all of it. Until now…

Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority


Steve Phillips - 2016
    population has fundamentally changed, many progressives and Democrats continue to waste millions of dollars chasing white swing voters. Explosive population growth of people of color in America over the past fifty years has laid the foundation for a New American Majority consisting of progressive people of color (23 percent of all eligible voters) and progressive whites (28 percent of all eligible voters). These two groups make up 51 percent of all eligible voters in America right now, and that majority is growing larger every day. Failing to properly appreciate this reality, progressives are at risk of missing this moment in history—and losing.A leader in national politics for thirty years, Steve Phillips has had a front-row seat to these extraordinary political changes. A civil rights lawyer and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Phillips draws on his extensive political experience to unveil exactly how people of color and progressive whites add up to a new majority, and what this means for U.S. politics and policy. A book brimming with urgency and hope, Brown Is the New White exposes how far behind the curve Democrats are in investing in communities of color—while illuminating a path forward to seize the opportunity created by the demographic revolution

Netaji: Living Dangerously


Kingshuk Nag - 2016
    Did Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose die in an air crash in Taihoku (Taipei, Taiwan) on 18 August 1945? Was he sent off to Siberia by Joseph Stalin? Did he die there? Or did he escape? Or was he let off, eventually to make his way back to India? Was he the mysterious Gumnami Baba of Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh? If so, how did he find his way back? Why did Bose leave India when he did? Was it on account of his political approach, which was opposed by the then high command of the Congress party that wanted a quick transfer of power from the British?The past comes alive as journalist and author Kingshuk Nag seeks answers to these and related questions at a time when there is a considerable renewal of interest in Netaji’s fate with old records tumbling out, the latest being the declassification of files by the government.Netaji: Living Dangerously is a riveting account of the life of one of India’s most charismatic leaders and an in-depth analysis of one of the world’s best kept secrets.

Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle for the Middle East


Christopher Davidson - 2016
    Highly recommended." --CHOICE Magazine"Who are these people? Where did they come from? What do they want? SHADOW WARS makes the answers painfully, damningly clear... if some future solution is discovered, it'll be thanks to the path-clearing of books like this one." --The Christian Science Monitor"Davidson is especially dogged at 'following the money'--e.g., the rise of crony-capitalist networks in the Gulf monarchies and the financing of al-Qaida and Islamic State... An exhaustively researched account."--Kirkus Reviews The brief euphoria that followed the 'Arab Spring' of 2011 quickly gave way to religious politics, sectarian war, and the most brutal incarnations of Islamic extremism ever seen. In the aftermath, people around the world once more lamented the Middle East's inability to build functioning modern states. However, the reality is that this turn of events fits firmly into a centuries-old pattern of uprisings and reactions involving not only the region's elites and their opponents but also the interests of foreign powers.Middle East expert Christopher M. Davidson makes the argument that the primary blame for the failure of the Arab Spring and the rise of Islamic extremists, including al-Qaeda and Islamic State, must rest with successive U.S. and U.K. governments. A systematic dissection of ongoing Western manipulations of the most powerful forces in the Middle East, Shadow Wars is a shocking book that demands to be read.

Dealing with an Ambiguous World


Bilahari Kausikan - 2016
    This book contains edited versions of the five public IPS-Nathan Lectures he gave between January and May 2016, and highlights of his dialogue with the audience. Kausikan gives a frank and dispassionate assessment of the international environment in the post-Cold War era and the geopolitical uncertainties that have emerged. In particular, he analyses the nature of US-China relations, the broad underlying factors in the South China Sea disputes and ASEAN's attempts to maintain order, and the role that human rights and democracy have played in international relations. He concludes by suggesting what Singapore needs to do to cope with the complexities that lie ahead, in this age without definition. The IPS-Nathan Lectures series was launched in 2014 as part of the S R Nathan Fellowship for the Study of Singapore. The S R Nathan Fellow, who is appointed annually, delivers between four and six lectures each year to advance public understanding and discussion of issues of critical national interest.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics: An Essay: from The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Kindle Single) (A Vintage Short)


Richard Hofstadter - 2016
    First published in 1964 and no less relevant half a century later, The Paranoid Style in American Politics scrutinizes the conditions that gave rise to the extreme right of the 1950s and the 1960s, and presages the ascendancy of the Tea Party movement and, now, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.   Fringe groups can and do both influence and derail American politics, and Hofstadter remains indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand why paranoia, a persistent psychic phenomenon with an outsize role in American public life, refuses to abate.   An ebook short.

Can't We All Disagree More Constructively?: from The Righteous Mind (Kindle Single) (A Vintage Short)


Jonathan Haidt - 2016
      Drawing on twenty-five years of groundbreaking research, Haidt shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and why we need the insights of each if we are to flourish as a nation. Here is the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation and the eternal curse of moralistic aggression, across the political divide and around the world.   An ebook short.

Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Free Speech Under the Indian Constitution


Gautam Bhatia - 2016
    It explores Indian free speech jurisprudence from a doctrinal, comparative, and philosophical perspective. Taking as its point of departure the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of speech and expression-Articles 19(1)(a) and 19(2) of the Constitution of India-the book discusses, clause by clause, the development of law from colonial times to present-day controversies. Issues relating to public order, sedition, obscenity and pornography, hate speech, film and online censorship, privacy and defamation, the contempt of court, the nature of speech and the relationship between free speech and economic structure, and the inter-relationships between them have been comprehensively examined. As free speech campaigns gain intensity by the day, the book presents the myriad understandings and limitations of the free speech law, and suggests possible pathways for the future.

Ages of Discord


Peter Turchin - 2016
    The inflation-adjusted wage of a US worker today is less than 40 years ago—but there are four times as many multimillionaires. As inequality grows, the infrastructure frays and the politics become more poisonous. Every year, more and more Americans go on shooting sprees, killing strangers and passers-by—and now, increasingly, the representatives of the state.Troubling trends of this kind are endlessly discussed by politicians, public intellectuals, and social scientists. But mostly, they talk about only a small slice of the overall problem. After all, how on earth can yet another murderous rampage have anything to do with polarization in Congress? And is there really a connection between too many multimillionaires and government gridlock?Historical analysis shows that long spells of equitable prosperity and internal peace are succeeded by protracted periods of inequity, increasing misery, and political instability. These crisis periods—“Ages of Discord”—tend to share characteristic features, identifiable in many societies throughout history. Modern Americans, for example, may be disconcerted to learn that the US right now has much in common with the Antebellum 1850s and, even more surprisingly, with ancien régime France on the eve of the French Revolution. Can it really be true that our troubled age is nothing new, and that it arises periodically for similar underlying reasons? It can. Ages of Discord marshals a cohesive theory and detailed historical data to show that this is, indeed, the case. The book takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through American history, from the Era of Good Feelings of the 1820s to our first Age of Discord, which culminated in the American Civil War, to post-WW2 prosperity and, finally, to our present, second Age of Discord.Unlike societies in the past, however, we are in a unique position to take steps to escape the worst. Societal breakdown and the ensuing wave of violence can be avoided by taking collective, cooperative action. The structural-demographic theory, explained in this book, helps us understand why demographic, social, and political trends changed direction from favorable to unfavorable in America around the 1970s. Such understanding is the key to developing reforms that would reverse these negative trends and move us to a more equitable, prosperous, and peaceful society.

Political Church: The Local Assembly as Embassy of Christ's Rule


Jonathan Leeman - 2016
    Theologians have been debating this claim for years. Liberationists, Anabaptists, Augustinians, neo-Calvinists, Radical Orthodox and others continue to discuss the matter. What do we mean by politics and the political? What are the limits of the church's political reach? What is the nature of the church as an institution? How do we establish these claims theologically? Jonathan Leeman sets out to address these questions in this significant work. Drawing on covenant theology and the "new institutionalism" in political science, Leeman critiques political liberalism and explores how the biblical canon informs an account of the local church as an embassy of Christ's kingdom. Political Church heralds a new era in political theology.

Neoclassical Realist Theory of International Politics


Norrin M. Ripsman - 2016
    Proponents of neoclassical realism claim that it is the logical extension of the Kenneth Waltz's structural realism into the realm of foreign policy. In Neoclassical Realist Theory of International Relations, Norrin M. Ripsman, Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, andSteven E. Lobell argue that neoclassical realism is far more than an extension of Waltz's structural realism or an effort to update the classical realism of Hans Morgenthau, E.H. Carr, and Henry Kissinger with the language of modern social science. Rejecting the artificial distinction that Waltzdraws between theories of international politics and theories of foreign policy, the authors contend neoclassical realism can explain and predict phenomena ranging from short-term crisis-behavior, to foreign policy, to patterns of grand strategic adjustment by individual states up to long-termpatterns of international outcomes. It is, therefore, a more powerful theory of international politics than structural realism. Yet it is also a more intuitively satisfying approach than liberal Innenpolitik theories or constructivism. The authors detail the variables and assumptions ofneoclassical realist theory, address various aspects of theory construction and methodology, lay out the areas of convergence and sharp disagreement with other leading theoretical approaches -- liberalism, constructivism, analytic eclecticism, and foreign policy analysis (FPA) --- and demonstratehow neoclassical realist theory can be used to resolve longstanding puzzles and debates in international relations theory.

Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community


Max Bergholz - 2016
    This frenzy--in which victims were butchered with farm tools, drowned in rivers, and thrown into deep vertical caves--was the culmination of a chain of local massacres that began earlier in the summer. In Violence as a Generative Force, Max Bergholz tells the story of the sudden and perplexing descent of this once peaceful multiethnic community into extreme violence. This deeply researched microhistory provides provocative insights to questions of global significance: What causes intercommunal violence? How does such violence between neighbors affect their identities and relations?Contrary to a widely held view that sees nationalism leading to violence, Bergholz reveals how the upheavals wrought by local killing actually created dramatically new perceptions of ethnicity--of oneself, supposed "brothers," and those perceived as "others." As a consequence, the violence forged new communities, new forms and configurations of power, and new practices of nationalism. The history of this community was marked by an unexpected explosion of locally executed violence by the few, which functioned as a generative force in transforming the identities, relations, and lives of the many. The story of this largely unknown Balkan community in 1941 provides a powerful means through which to rethink fundamental assumptions about the interrelationships among ethnicity, nationalism, and violence, both during World War II and more broadly throughout the world.

Rampage Nation: Securing America from Mass Shootings


Louis Klarevas - 2016
    This well-researched, forcefully argued book answers some of the most pressing questions facing our society: Why do people go on killing sprees? Are gun-free zones magnets for deadly rampages? What can we do to curb the carnage of this disturbing form of firearm violence? Contrary to conventional wisdom, the author shows that gun possession often prods aggrieved, mentally unstable individuals to go on shooting sprees; these attacks largely occur in places where guns are not prohibited by law; and sensible gun control measures like the federal assault weapons ban—which helped drastically reduce rampage violence when it was in effect—are instrumental to keeping Americans safe from mass shootings in the future. To stem gun massacres, the author proposes several original policy prescriptions, including a high-capacity magazine ban and buy-back program, the establishment of multi-jurisdictional task forces to assess active shooter threats, and an overhaul of the way the justice system investigates and prosecutes violent crimes. Calling attention to the unique security threat of mass shootings, Rampage Nation demonstrates that there are practical ways to stem this growing form of gun violence through smart, creative solutions.

The Yankee Problem: An American Dilemma (The Wilson Files Book 1)


Clyde N. Wilson - 2016
    It began as soon as they dropped their anchor in Plymouth Bay. Since that time, they have meddled, cheated, and lied their way into every nook and cranny of American life. The Southern people warned others about the radical utopians of New England, and even went to war to get away from them, but to no avail. Now all Americans, not just Southerners, are subject to the whims of “those people” and their never ending mission to recreate, not only America, but the entire world in their bizarre, sanctimonious image. Dr. Clyde Wilson, in this first installment of The Wilson Files, takes the Yankee problem head-on. After decades of historical research and personal observation, he exposes and explains these pesky purveyors of mischief and mayhem! If you want to understand America, American History, and the upside-down dystopian nightmare in which we all live, you have to understand the problem. We do not have an economic problem, a race problem, a class problem, a gender problem, a toilet access problem, a drug problem, a gun problem, or any other ideological or social problem at the root of America’s dysfunctional anti-culture – we have a Yankee problem! This title is enrolled in Kindle MatchBook. FREE if print edition is purchased on Amazon.

Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving through Deep Difference


John D. Inazu - 2016
    This fissure is evident across the nation in conflict over LGBTQ rights; in challenges to religious liberty; in clashes over abortion; in tensions between law enforcement and minority communities. With all of this physical and emotional violence enacted by our legal system and such seemingly irresolvable differences in beliefs, values, and identities across the country, we are forced to ask—how can the people of this nation ever live in peace together? In Confident Pluralism, John D. Inazu analyzes the current state of the country, orients the contemporary United States within its broader history, and explores the ways that Americans can—and must—live together peaceably in the future despite these deeply engrained differences. Pluralism is one of the founding creeds of the United States—yet America’s society and legal system continues to face deep, unsolved structural problems in dealing with differing cultural anxieties, and minority viewpoints.  Inazu not only argues that it is possible to cohabitate peacefully in this country, but he also lays out realistic guidelines for our society and legal system to achieve the new American dream through civic practices that value toleration over protest, humility over defensiveness, and persuasion over coercion. An essential clarion call during one of the most troubled times in US history, Confident Pluralism offers a refreshing argument for how the legal system can protect peoples’ personal beliefs and inherent right to differ and shows how we can build towards a healthier future of tolerance, patience, and empathy.

A Black Man in the White House: Barack Obama and the Triggering of America's Racial-Aversion Crisis


Cornell Belcher - 2016
    He has surveyed battleground voters from 2008 through the 2016 primary season tracking racial aversion and its impact over the course of the Obama presidency. Given the heightened racial aversion as a consequence of the first non-white male living in the White House, the rise of Trump was a predictable backlash. The election of the nation's first Black president does not mean that we live in a post-racial society; it means that we are now at a critical historical tipping point demographically and culturally in America--and this tipping point is indeed the wolf at the door for many anxious white Americans who are now politically behaving accordingly given this perceived threat.The panicked response of the waning white majority to what they perceive as the catastrophe of a Black president can be heard in every cry to "take back our country." This panic has resulted in the elevation of an overt and unapologetic racist as the nominee of one of America's major political parties.

Bill Davis: Nation Builder, and not so Bland After All


Steve Paikin - 2016
    As premier, he went on to lead Ontario through buoyant and recessionary economic times, leaving a legacy Ontarians continue to enjoy. Now 87, Davis still lives on Main Street in his beloved Brampton.

Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign


Frances E. Lee - 2016
    That the last two decades have seen some of the least productive Congresses in recent history is usually explained by the growing ideological gulf between the parties, but this explanation misses another fundamental factor influencing the dynamic. In contrast to politics through most of the twentieth century, the contemporary Democratic and Republican parties compete for control of Congress at relative parity, and this has dramatically changed the parties’ incentives and strategies in ways that have driven the contentious partisanship characteristic of contemporary American politics.             With Insecure Majorities, Frances E. Lee offers a controversial new perspective on the rise of congressional party conflict, showing how the shift in competitive circumstances has had a profound impact on how Democrats and Republicans interact. For nearly half a century, Democrats were the majority party, usually maintaining control of the presidency, the House, and the Senate. Republicans did not stand much chance of winning majority status, and Democrats could not conceive of losing it. Under such uncompetitive conditions, scant collective action was exerted by either party toward building or preserving a majority. Beginning in the 1980s, that changed, and most elections since have offered the prospect of a change of party control. Lee shows, through an impressive range of interviews and analysis, how competition for control of the government drives members of both parties to participate in actions that promote their own party’s image and undercut that of the opposition, including the perpetual hunt for issues that can score political points by putting the opposing party on the wrong side of public opinion. More often than not, this strategy stands in the way of productive bipartisan cooperation—and it is also unlikely to change as long as control of the government remains within reach for both parties.

The Fight to Vote


Michael Waldman - 2016
    Now in The Fight to Vote, Michael Waldman takes a succinct and comprehensive look at a crucial American struggle: the drive to define and defend government based on “the consent of the governed.” From the beginning, and at every step along the way, as Americans sought to right to vote, others have fought to stop them. This is the first book to trace the full story from the founders’ debates to today’s challenges: a wave of restrictive voting laws, partisan gerrymanders, the flood of campaign money unleashed by Citizens United. Americans are proud of our democracy. But today that system seems to be under siege, and the right to vote has become the fight to vote. In fact, that fight has always been at the heart of our national story, and raucous debates over how to expand democracy have always been at the center of American politics. At first only a few property owners could vote. Over two centuries, working class white men, former slaves, women, and finally all Americans won the right to vote. The story goes well beyond voting rules to issues of class, race, political parties, and campaign corruption. It's been raw, rowdy, a fierce, and often rollicking struggle for power. Waldman’s The Fight to Vote is a compelling story of our struggle to uphold our most fundamental democratic ideals.

When Women Win: EMILY’s List and the Rise of Women in American Politics


Ellen Malcolm - 2016
    Malcolm launched EMILY’s List, a powerhouse political organization that seeks to ignite change by getting women elected to office. The rest is riveting history: Between 1986 — when there were only 12 Democratic women in the House and none in the Senate — and now, EMILY’s List has helped elect 19 women Senators, 11 governors, and 110 Democratic women to the House.    Incorporating exclusive interviews with Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Tammy Baldwin, and others, When Women Win delivers stories of some of the toughest political contests of the past three decades, including the historic victory of Barbara Mikulski as the first Democratic woman elected to the Senate in her own right; the defeat of Todd Akin (“legitimate rape”) by Claire McCaskill; and Elizabeth Warren’s dramatic win over incumbent Massachusetts senator Scott Brown.   When Women Win includes Malcolm's own story — the high drama of Anita Hill’s sexual harassment testimony against Clarence Thomas and its explosive effects on women’s engagement in electoral politics; the long nights spent watching the polls after months of dogged campaigning; the heartbreaking losses and unprecedented victories — but it’s also a page-turning political saga that may well lead up to the election of the first woman president of the United States.

Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.–Saudi Connection


Medea Benjamin - 2016
    Sometimes, she does so in person—as during President Obama’s speech at the National Defense University, or during a reception for drone manufacturers and members of Congress, or in Cairo, where she was assaulted by police. Here, she’s researching the sinister nature of the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.In seven succinct chapters followed by a meditation on prospects for change, Benjamin—cited by the L.A. Times as “one of the high-profile members of the peace movement”—shines a light on one of the most perplexing elements of American foreign policy. What is the origin of this strange alliance between two countries that seemingly have very little in common? Why does it persist, and what are its consequences? Why, over a period of decades and across various presidential administrations, has the United States consistently supported a regime shown time and again to be one of the most powerful forces working against American interests? Saudi Arabia is perhaps the single most important source of funds for terrorists worldwide, promoting an extreme interpretation of Islam along with anti-Western sentiment, while brutally repressing non-violent dissidents at home.With extremism spreading across the globe, a reduced U.S. need for Saudi oil, and a thawing of U.S. relations with Iran, the time is right for a re-evaluation of our close ties with the Saudi regime.

Milton Friedman: The Essential Collection


Milton Friedman - 2016
    Friedman showed how free markets and human freedom are inextricable, and how government intervention often hinders human progress despite its best intentions. Topics include: • morality in relation to economics • is America getting better or worse • the real nature of freedom • is greed good? • how much government do we need • what the example of Hong Kong teaches us • myth of the robber barron • what really caused the great depression • Reaganomics and more.

Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism


George Hawley - 2016
    It is the American conservatism that we don't know that concerns George Hawley in this book. During its ascendancy, leaders within the conservative establishment have energetically policed the movement's boundaries, effectively keeping alternative versions of conservatism out of view. Returning those neglected voices to the story, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism offers a more complete, complex, and nuanced account of the American right in all its dissonance in history and in our day.The right-wing intellectual movements considered here differ both from mainstream conservatism and from each other when it comes to fundamental premises, such as the value of equality, the proper role of the state, the importance of free markets, the place of religion in politics, and attitudes toward race. In clear and dispassionate terms, Hawley examines localists who exhibit equal skepticism toward big business and big government, paleoconservatives who look to the distant past for guidance and wish to turn back the clock, radical libertarians who are not content to be junior partners in the conservative movement, and various strains of white supremacy and the radical right in America.In the Internet age, where access is no longer determined by the select few, the independent right has far greater opportunities to make its many voices heard. This timely work puts those voices into context and historical perspective, clarifying our understanding of the American right--past, present, and future.

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government


Christopher H. Achen - 2016
    They demonstrate that voters even those who are well informed and politically engaged mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control; the outcomes are essentially random. Thus, voters do not control the course of public policy, even indirectly.Achen and Bartels argue that democratic theory needs to be founded on identity groups and political parties, not on the preferences of individual voters. "Democracy for Realists" provides a powerful challenge to conventional thinking, pointing the way toward a fundamentally different understanding of the realities and potential of democratic government."

Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography


Vlad Tarko - 2016
    She has been at the forefront of New Institutional Economics and Public Choice revolutions, discovering surprising ways in which communities around the world have succeed in solving difficult collective problems. She first rose to prominence by studying the police in metropolitan areas in the United States, and showing that, contrary to the prevailing view at the time, community policing and smaller departments worked better than centralized and large police departments. Together with her husband, Vincent, they have set up the Bloomington Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, which has grown into a global network of scholars and practitioners. Throughout her career, she was interested in studying ecological problems, and understanding how people manage communal properties. Her most famous discovery is that communities often find ingenious ways of escaping the "tragedy of the commons." Analysing a wide-variety of successes and failures, and working together with many other scholars, she was able to uncover a series of institutional "design principles" a set of criteria which, if followed, societies are more likely to be productive and resilient to shocks. Some of her most important theoretical insights, about polycentricity and institutional evolution, arose from this synthesizing effort. Furthermore, this led her to develop a framework for the study of the relationship between societies and their natural environment which brought institutional insights into the field of environmental studies.

Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives, and Local Placemaking


Faranak Miraftab - 2016
    The meat processing plant that is the town’s main employer replaced its white, native-born workforce by recruiting laborers from Mexico, West Africa, and Detroit, and the newcomers transformed and revitalized this former “sundown town.” Faranak Miraftab draws on ethnographic research in Beardstown, Mexico, and Togo to analyze a space that is often overlooked in scholarship on globalization. Tracing the global processes that produce displaced workers and the social relationships that maintain them, she offers a fresh perspective on place and placemaking.

Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought


James T. Kloppenberg - 2016
    Kloppenberg presents the history of democracy from the perspective of those who struggled to envision and achieve it. The story of democracy remains one without an ending, a dynamic of progress and regress that continues to our own day. In the classical age "democracy" was seen as the failure rather than the ideal of good governance. Democracies were deemed chaotic and bloody, indicative of rule by the rabble rather than by enlightened minds. Beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries, however, first in Europe and then in England's North American colonies, the reputation of democracy began to rise, resulting in changes that were sometimes revolutionary and dramatic, sometimes gradual and incremental.Kloppenberg offers a fresh look at how concepts and institutions of representative government developed and how understandings of self-rule changed over time on both sides of the Atlantic. Notions about what constituted true democracy preoccupied many of the most influential thinkers of the Western world, from Montaigne and Roger Williams to Milton and John Locke; from Rousseau and Jefferson to Wollstonecraft and Madison; and from de Tocqueville and J. S. Mill to Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Over three centuries, explosive ideas and practices of democracy sparked revolutions--English, American, and French--that again and again culminated in civil wars, disastrous failures of democracy that impeded further progress.Comprehensive, provocative, and authoritative, Toward Democracy traces self-government through three pivotal centuries. The product of twenty years of research and reflection, this momentous work reveals how nations have repeatedly fallen short in their attempts to construct democratic societies based on the principles of autonomy, equality, deliberation, and reciprocity that they have claimed to prize. Underlying this exploration lies Kloppenberg's compelling conviction that democracy was and remains an ethical ideal rather than merely a set of institutions, a goal toward which we continue to struggle.

The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do about It


Timothy Sandefur - 2016
    Yet these freedoms were really only permissions handed down from on high. The American Revolution inaugurated a new vision: people have basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and government must ask permission from them. Sadly, today’s increasingly bureaucratic society is beginning to turn back the clock and to transform America into a nation where our freedoms—the right to speak freely, to earn a living, to own a gun, to use private property, even the right to take medicine to save one’s own life—are again treated as privileges the government may grant or withhold at will. Timothy Sandefur examines the history of the distinction between rights and privileges that played such an important role in the American experiment, and how we can fight to retain our freedoms against the growing power of government. Illustrated with dozens of real-life examples—including many cases he litigated himself—Sandefur shows how treating freedoms as government-created privileges undermines our Constitution and betrays the basic principles of human dignity.

Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University


Jon A. Shields - 2016
    While the left fears an invasion of their citadel by conservatives marching to orders from the Koch brothers, the right steers young conservatives away from a professorial vocation by lampooning its leftism. Shields and Dunn quiet thesefears by shedding light on the hidden world of conservative professors through 153 interviews. Most conservative professors told them that the university is a far more tolerant place than its right-wing critics imagine. Many, in fact, first turned right in the university itself, while others saythey feel more at home in academia than in the Republican Party. Even so, being a conservative in the progressive university can be challenging. Many professors admit to closeting themselves prior to tenure by passing as liberals. Some openly conservative professors even say they were badlymistreated on account of their politics, especially those who ventured into politicized disciplines or expressed culturally conservative views. Despite real challenges, the many successful professors interviewed by Shields and Dunn show that conservatives can survive and sometimes thrive in one ofAmerica's most progressive professions. And this means that liberals and conservatives need to rethink the place of conservatives in academia. Liberals should take the high road by becoming more principled advocates of diversity, especially since conservative professors are rarely close-minded orcombatants in a right-wing war against the university. Movement conservatives, meanwhile, should de-escalate its polemical war against the university, especially since it inadvertently helps cement progressives' troubled rule over academia.

The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century


Stein Ringen - 2016
    This book explains how the system works and where it may be moving.Drawing on Chinese and international sources, on extensive collaboration with Chinese scholars, and on the political science of state analysis, Stein Ringen concludes that under the new leadership of Xi Jinping, the system of government has been transformed into a new regime radically harder and more ideological than the legacy of Deng Xiaoping. China is less strong economically and more dictatorial politically than the world has wanted to believe.By analyzing the leadership of Xi Jinping, the meaning of "socialist market economy," corruption, the party-state apparatus, the reach of the party, the mechanisms of repression, taxation and public services, and state-society relations, "The Perfect Dictatorship" broadens the field of China studies, as well as the fields of political economy, comparative politics, development, and welfare state studies.

Where's Your Argument?


Helen Cooper - 2016
    From planning a logical structure to conveying your ideas in precise language, this book takes you through every stage of assignment writing with the argument firmly in focus.

The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution


Oxford University Press - 2016
    Its birth, over six decades ago, signalled the arrival of the first major post-colonial constitution and the world's largest and arguably most daring democratic experiment. Apart from greater domestic focus on the Constitution and the institutional role of the Supreme Court within India's democratic framework, recent years have also witnessed enormous comparative interest in India's constitutional experiment.The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution is a wide-ranging, analytical reflection on the major themes and debates that surround India's Constitution. The Handbook provides a comprehensive account of the developments and doctrinal features of India's Constitution, as well as articulating frameworks and methodological approaches through which studies of Indian constitutionalism, and constitutionalism more generally, might proceed. Its contributions range from rigorous, legal studies of provisions within the text to reflections upon historical trends and social practices. As such the Handbook is an essential reference point not merely for Indian and comparative constitutional scholars, but for students of Indian democracy more generally.

The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society


Gerald F. Gaus - 2016
    Gaus shows how free and equal people, faced with intractable struggles and irreconcilable conflicts, might share a common moral life shaped by a just framework. He argues that if we are to take diversity seriously and if moral inquiry is sincere about shaping the world, then the pursuit of idealized and perfect theories of justice--essentially, the entire production of theories of justice that has dominated political philosophy for the past forty years--needs to change.Drawing on recent work in social science and philosophy, Gaus points to an important paradox: only those in a heterogeneous society--with its various religious, moral, and political perspectives--have a reasonable hope of understanding what an ideally just society would be like. However, due to its very nature, this world could never be collectively devoted to any single ideal. Gaus defends the moral constitution of this pluralistic, open society, where the very clash and disagreement of ideals spurs all to better understand what their personal ideals of justice happen to be.Presenting an original framework for how we should think about morality, The Tyranny of the Ideal rigorously analyzes a theory of ideal justice more suitable for contemporary times.

Crashing the Party: An American Reporter in China


Scott Savitt - 2016
    Scott Savitt, one of the first American exchange students in Beijing, picks up his guitar and begins strumming Blackbird. He’s soon surrounded by Chinese students who know every word to every Beatles song he plays. Scott stays on in Beijing, working as a reporter for Asiaweek Magazine. The city’s first nightclubs open; rock ‘n’ roll promises democracy. Promoted to foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times then United Press International, Scott finds himself drawn into China’s political heart.Later, at 25 years old, Scott is the youngest accredited foreign correspondent in China with an intimate knowledge of Beijing’s backstreets. But as the seven week occupation of Tiananmen Square ends in bloodshed on June 4, 1989, his greatest asset is his flame-red 500 cc. Honda motorcycle—giving Scott the freedom to witness first-hand what the Chinese government still denies ever took place. After Tiananmen, Scott founds the first independent English language newspaper in China, Beijing Scene. He knows that it’s only a matter of time before the authorities move in, and sure enough, in 2000 he’s arrested, flung into solitary confinement and, after a month in jail, deported.Scott Savitt’s memoir turns this complex political-historical subject into an extraordinary adventure story.

Clean House: Exposing Our Government's Secrets and Lies


Tom Fitton - 2016
    Simon & Schuster has a great book for every listener.

The Master Plan: ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory


Brian Fishman - 2016
    In fact, al-Qaeda’s operations chief, Sayf al-Adl, devised a seven-stage plan for jihadis to conquer the world by 2020 that included reestablishing the Caliphate in Syria between 2013 and 2016. Despite a massive schism between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, al-Adl’s plan has proved remarkably prescient. In summer 2014, ISIS declared itself the Caliphate after capturing Mosul, Iraq—part of stage five in al-Adl’s plan. Drawing on large troves of recently declassified documents captured from the Islamic State and its predecessors, counterterrorism expert Brian Fishman tells the story of this organization’s complex and largely hidden past—and what the master plan suggests about its future. Only by understanding the Islamic State’s full history—and the strategy that drove it—can we understand the contradictions that may ultimately tear it apart.

Stella: The Road to Freedom - Joseph's Story


Yecheilyah Ysrayl - 2016
    Deeply concerned about the state of Black America, a fight with his brother compels a young Joseph to leave his mother’s house and join his friends for a trip to Atlanta for SNCC’s (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) second conference. Excited to live life on their own, Jo and his friends have left school and the lives they were living for a chance to become part of the movement. With no money and essentially no plan the seven friends, three black and four white, set out for the road when they are stopped by a racist cop who makes them exit the car. The teens are unaware that a mob of Klansmen also await them at the New Orleans bus terminal.

Becoming Legal: Immigration Law and Mixed-Status Families


Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz - 2016
    citizens. There is a common perception that marriage to a U.S. citizen puts undocumented immigrants on a quick-and-easy path to U.S. citizenship. But forpeople who have entered the U.S. unlawfully and live here without papers, the line to legal status is neither short nor easy, even for those with spouses who are U.S. citizens.Becoming Legal: Immigration Law and Mixed-Status Families follows mixed-status couples down the long and bumpy road of immigration processing. It explores how they navigate every step along the way, from the decision to undertake legalization, to the immigration interview in Ciudad Ju�rez, Mexico, to the effort to put together a case of extreme hardship so that the undocumented family member can return. Author Ruth Gomberg-Mu�oz also discusses families' efforts to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of immigration processing--both for those who are successful and those who are not.

Radicalized: New Jihadists and the Threat to the West


Peter R. Neumann - 2016
    Thousands of young people from the West, primarily from Europe, have travelled to join ISIS, re-emerging as hardened fighters with military training and a network of international contacts. Many of these have now returned to their homelands, where it is feared they are planning a new series of brutal attacks. Peter R. Neumann here explains the phenomenon of the 'new jihadis', and shows why the threat of terrorism in the West is greater than ever before. Based on interviews and previously-unseen material, Neumann provides an essential introduction to one of the greatest crises of our time."

New World Order: A Strategy of Imperialism


Sean Stone - 2016
    Sean found that Elliott had created a kindergarten of Anglo-American imperialists amongst his students, who included Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel P. Huntington, and McGeorge Bundy. Upon further investigation, Sean came to understand Elliott’s own integral role, connecting the modern national-security establishment with the British Round Table Movement’s design to re-incorporate America into the British ‘empire’. Whether that goal was achieved will be left to the reader to decide. However, it cannot be denied that W.Y. Elliott’s life and intellectual history serves to demonstrate the interlocking relationship between academia, government, and big business.

Zionism: A Very Short Introduction


Michael Stanislawski - 2016
    It is one of the most controversial ideologies in the world. Its supporters laud its success at liberating the Jewish people after millennia of persecution and at securing the creation of Israel. But to its opponents, Zionism relies on a racist ideology culminating in Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories and is one of the last manifestations of colonial oppression in the world. Since the late 1990s, the centrality of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the world news has sharpened this controversy, dramatically politicizing any attempt to understand Zionism and its significance as an intellectual and cultural movement.In this Very Short Introduction, Michael Stanislawski presents an impartial and disinterested history of Zionist ideology from its origins to the present. Sharp and accessible, this book charts the crucial moments in the ideological development of Zionism, including the emergence of modern Jewish nationalism in early nineteenth century Europe, the founding of the Zionist movement by Theodor Herzl in 1897, the Balfour Declaration, the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion, the Six Day War in 1967, the rise of the "Peace Now" movement, and the election of conservative prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Stanislawski's balanced analysis of these controversial events illuminates why, despite the undeniable success in its goal of creating a Jewish state, profound questions remain today about the long-term viability of Zionist ideology in a rapidly destabilizing Middle East.

Free Speech Isn't Free: How 90 Men Stood Up Against The Globalist Establishment – And Won


Roosh V. - 2016
    That is the message of Free Speech Isn't Free, which chronicles how organizing a lecture tour for masculine men inserted Roosh Valizadeh into an unexpected free speech fight spanning several continents, putting both him and his family in danger from the globalist establishment and their mob of deranged social justice warriors. After becoming activated by mass-scale media distortions and mayoral denouncements, the SJW mob in Canada rose up against Roosh and his followers to halt his tour. Roosh refused to cancel and set out to hold the lectures in secret. He shares how he fought back against the mob while trying to come to terms with the globalist agenda that they're controlled by. The well-informed men he met throughout the tour were critical in sharing hidden knowledge that put the agenda's puzzle pieces into place. Even after the lecture, when Roosh tried to conduct happy hour meetings for his followers, a bigger worldwide outrage befell him, leading to the doxing of his family and threats to burn their house to the ground. Free Speech Isn't Free shares that story for the first time in a special epilogue, and what was going through the mind of a man who was the number one target for a 1984-inspired "two minutes of hate" that took place worldwide. How far will you go if the establishment attacks you for what you believe in? Are you ready to defend yourself if they come after your reputation, your job, and your family? Free Speech Isn't Free shows what one man did when powerful groups tried to silence him, along with everything he learned during the most momentous months of his life that will help others be able to identify and defend against attacks within their own lives. Bonuses included are the transcript of the "dangerous" speech that started it all, The State Of Man, and an important new article explaining how to keep yourself safe from social justice attacks.

Resistance and Decolonization


Amilcar Cabral - 2016
    These texts demonstrate his frank and insightful directives to his comrades in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde's party for independence, as well as reflections on culture and combat written the year prior to his assassination by the Portuguese secret police. As one of the most important and profound African revolutionary leaders in the 20th century, and justly compared in importance to Frantz Fanon, Cabral's thoughts and instructions as articulated here help us to rethink important issues concerning nationalism, culture, vanguardism, revolution, liberation, colonialism, race, and history. The volume also includes two introductory essays: the first introduces Cabral's work within the context of Africana critical theory, and the second situates these texts in the context their historical-political context and analyzes their relevance for contemporary anti-imperialism.

Political Economy for Public Policy


Ethan Bueno De Mesquita - 2016
    The book's distinct political economy approach has two virtues. By developing general principles for thinking about policymaking, it can be applied across a range of issue areas. It also unifies the policy curriculum, offering coherence to standard methods for teaching economics and statistics, and drawing connections between fields.The book begins by exploring the normative foundations of policymaking--political theory, social choice theory, and the Paretian and utilitarian underpinnings of policy analysis. It then introduces game theoretic models of social dilemmas--externalities, coordination problems, and commitment problems--that create opportunities for policy to improve social welfare. Finally, it shows how the political process creates technological and incentive constraints on government that shape policy outcomes. Throughout, concepts and models are illustrated and reinforced with discussions of empirical evidence and case studies.This textbook is essential for all students of public policy and for anyone interested in the most current methods influencing policymaking today.Comprehensive approach to politics and policy suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate studentsModels unify policy curriculum through methodological coherenceExercises at the end of every chapterSelf-contained appendices cover necessary game theoryExtensive discussion of cases and applications

Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest After Apartheid


Antina Von Schnitzler - 2016
    Less visibly, the post-apartheid period has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure, including the nonpayment of service charges, the bypassing of metering devices, and illegal connections to services. Democracy’s Infrastructure shows how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the post-apartheid present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters, Antina von Schnitzler examines the techno-political forms through which democracy takes shape.Von Schnitzler explores a controversial project to install prepaid water meters in Soweto—one of many efforts to curb the nonpayment of service charges that began during the antiapartheid struggle—and she traces how infrastructure, payment, and technical procedures become sites where citizenship is mediated and contested. She follows engineers, utility officials, and local bureaucrats as they consider ways to prompt Sowetans to pay for water, and she shows how local residents and activists wrestle with the constraints imposed by meters. This investigation of democracy from the perspective of infrastructure reframes the conventional story of South Africa’s transition, foregrounding the less visible remainders of apartheid and challenging readers to think in more material terms about citizenship and activism in the postcolonial world.Democracy’s Infrastructure examines how seemingly mundane technological domains become charged territory for struggles over South Africa’s political transformation.

Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s


Risa Goluboff - 2016
    The criminal justice system-and especially the age-old law of vagrancy-played a key role not only in maintaining safety and order but also in enforcing conventional standards of morality andpropriety. A person could be arrested for sporting a beard, making a speech, or working too little. Yet by the end of the 1960s, vagrancy laws were discredited and American society was fundamentally transformed. What happened? In Vagrant Nation, Risa Goluboff provides a groundbreaking account ofthis transformation. By reading into the history of the 1960s through the lens of vagrancy laws, Goluboff shows how constitutional challenges to long-standing police practices were at the center of the multiple movements that made the 1960s. Vagrancy laws were so broad and flexible that they madeit possible for the police to arrest anyone out of place in any way: Beats and hippies; Communists and Vietnam War protestors; racial minorities, civil rights activists, and interracial couples; prostitutes, single women, and gay men, lesbians, and other sexual minorities. As hundreds of thesevagrants and their lawyers claimed that vagrancy laws were unconstitutional, the laws became a flashpoint for debates about radically different visions of order and freedom. In Goluboff's compelling portrayal, the legal campaign against vagrancy laws becomes a sweeping legal and social history ofthe 1960s. Touching on movements advocating civil rights, peace, gay rights, welfare rights, and cultural revolution, Vagrant Nation provides insight relevant to this battle, as well as the battle over the legacy of the 1960s' transformations themselves.

Charlie Foxtrot: Fixing Defence Procurement in Canada


Kim Richard Nossal - 2016
    New equipment is desperately needed for the Canadian Armed Forces, but most projects are behind schedule, over budget, or both. Not only has mismanagement cost Canadian taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, it has also deprived Canada and the CAF of much-needed military capacity.Successive governments — both Liberal and Conservative — have managed the complexities of defence procurement so poorly that it will take years before the Royal Canadian Navy, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and the Canadian Army regain the capabilities they need. While new prime ministers invariably come to power promising to fix problems inherited from their predecessors, getting it right has remained frustratingly elusive.Charlie Foxtrot offers a fresh take on this important policy issue. It shows why governments have found it so difficult to equip the CAF efficiently, and offers a set of political prescriptions for fixing defence procurement in Canada.

Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans


Corey Fields - 2016
    Drawing on vivid first-person accounts, the book sheds light on the different ways black identity structures African Americans' membership in the Republican Party. Moving past rhetoric and politics, we begin to see the everyday people working to reconcile their commitment to black identity with their belief in Republican principles. And at the end, we learn the importance of understanding both the meanings African Americans attach to racial identity and the political contexts in which those meanings are developed and expressed.

Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats


Matt Grossmann - 2016
    Republican leaders prize conservatism and attract support by pledging loyalty to broad values. Democratic leaders insteadseek concrete government action, appealing to voters' group identities and interests by endorsing specific policies.This fresh and comprehensive investigation reveals how Democrats and Republicans think differently about politics, rely on distinct sources of information, argue past one another, and pursue divergent goals in government. It provides a rigorous new understanding of contemporary polarization andgoverning dysfunction while demonstrating how longstanding features of American politics and public policy reflect our asymmetric party system.

C. S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law


Justin Buckley Dyer - 2016
    S. Lewis was uninterested in politics and public affairs. The conventional wisdom is wrong. As Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson show in this groundbreaking work, Lewis was deeply interested in the fundamental truths and falsehoods about human nature and how these conceptions manifest themselves in the contested and turbulent public square. Ranging from the depths of Lewis' philosophical treatments of epistemology and moral pedagogy to practical considerations of morals legislation and responsible citizenship, this book explores the contours of Lewis' multi-faceted Christian engagement with political philosophy generally and the natural-law tradition in particular. Drawing from the full range of Lewis' corpus and situating his thought in relationship to both ancient and modern seminal thinkers, C. S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law offers an unprecedented look at politics and political thought from the perspective of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers.

America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited


Sheldon Richman - 2016
    Instead, Sheldon Richman argues, it was the product of a counter-revolution, a setback for the radicalism represented by America's break with the British empire. Drawing on careful, credible historical scholarship and contemporary political analysis, Richman suggests that this counter-revolution was the work of conservatives who sought a nation of "power, consequence, and grandeur." America's Counter-Revolution makes a persuasive case that the Constitution was a victory not for liberty but for the agendas and interests of a militaristic, aristocratic, privilege-seeking ruling class.The Anti-Federalists were right: The pursuit of "national greatness" inevitably diminishes liberty and centralizes government. The U.S. Constitution did both, as Sheldon Richman demonstrates in this powerfully argued anarchist case against the blueprint for empire known as the U.S. Constitution. --Bill Kauffman, author, Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther MartinThe libertarian movement has long suffered from a constitutional fetishism that embraces an ahistorical reverence for the U.S. Constitution. Far too many are unaware of the extent to which the framing and adoption of the Constitution was in fact a setback for the cause of liberty. Sheldon Richman, in a compilation of readable, well researched, and compelling essays, exposes the historical, theoretical, and strategic errors in the widespread reification of a purely political document. With no single correct interpretation, the Constitution has been predictably unable to halt the growth of the modern welfare-warfare American State. I urge all proponents of a free society to give his book their diligent attention. --Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Professor, San Jose State University; author, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War"No state or government can limit itself through a written constitution, no matter how fine the words or how noble the sentiments they express. It is one of the many virtues of Sheldon Richman's book that it shows how this is true even of the American Constitution, which despite the promises of its designers and the insistence of its defenders down the years, made limited government less and not more likely." --Chandran Kukathas, London School of Economics"Richman delivers an accessible, incisive, and well-grounded argument that the Constitution centralized power and undid some of the Revolution's liberating gains. He rebuts patriotic platitudes but avoids the crude contrarianism so common in libertarian revisionism written for popular consumption. He does not romanticize America's past or overstate his case. Radical and nuanced, deferential to freedom and historical truth, Richman rises above hagiography or demonization of either the Federalists or anti-Federalists to produce an unsurpassed libertarian exploration of the subject." - Anthony Gregory, Independent Institute"[A]fter reading this book, you will never think about the U.S. Constitution and America's founding the same way again. Sheldon Richman's revealing and remarkably well-argued narrative will permanently change your outlook. . . . Richman . . . [is] one of this country's most treasured thinkers and writers . . . . [H]e draws on the most contemporary and important scholarly research, while putting the evidence in prose that is accessible and compelling." - Jeffrey A. Tucker, Liberty.me and Foundation for Economic Education

The Religious Right and the Talibanization of America


Masood Ashraf Raja - 2016
    

Two concepts of freedom


Open University - 2016
    This 20-hour free course explored concepts of freedom, how freedom is restricted by our place in society and how it can vary from state to state.

Nation-States: Consciousness and Competition


Neil Davidson - 2016
    Through probing inquiry, Davidson draws out how nationalist ideology and consciousness is used to bind the subordinate classes to “the nation,” while simultaneously using “the state” as a means of conducting geopolitical competition for capital.

From Washington to Moscow: US-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR


Louis Sell - 2016
    Less than twenty years later the Soviet Union had collapsed, confounding experts who never expected it to happen during their lifetimes. In From Washington to Moscow veteran US Foreign Service officer Louis Sell traces the history of US–Soviet relations between 1972 and 1991 and explains why the Cold War came to an abrupt end. Drawing heavily on archival sources and memoirs—many in Russian—as well as his own experiences, Sell vividly describes events from the perspectives of American and Soviet participants. He attributes the USSR's fall not to one specific cause but to a combination of the Soviet system's inherent weaknesses, mistakes by Mikhail Gorbachev, and challenges by Ronald Reagan and other US leaders. He shows how the USSR's rapid and humiliating collapse and the inability of the West and Russia to find a way to cooperate respectfully and collegially helped set the foundation for Vladimir Putin’s rise.

The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership


Cedric J. Robinson - 2016
    Robinson contends that our perception of political order is an illusion, maintained in part by Western political and social theorists who depend on the idea of leadership as a basis for describing and prescribing social order.Using a variety of critical approaches in his analysis, Robinson synthesizes elements of psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, classical and neoclassical political philosophy, and cultural anthropology in order to argue that Western thought on leadership is mythological rather than rational. He then presents examples of historically developed "stateless" societies with social organizations that suggest conceptual alternatives to the ways political order has been conceived in the West. Examining Western thought from the vantage point of a people only marginally integrated into Western institutions and intellectual traditions, Robinson's perspective radically critiques fundamental ideas of leadership and order.

Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965


Eric Schickler - 2016
    The story of this partisan realignment on race is often told as one in which political elites--such as Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater--set in motion a dramatic and sudden reshuffling of party positioning on racial issues during the 1960s. Racial Realignment instead argues that top party leaders were actually among the last to move, and that their choices were dictated by changes that had already occurred beneath them. Drawing upon rich data sources and original historical research, Eric Schickler shows that the two parties' transformation on civil rights took place gradually over decades.Schickler reveals that Democratic partisanship, economic liberalism, and support for civil rights had crystallized in public opinion, state parties, and Congress by the mid-1940s. This trend was propelled forward by the incorporation of African Americans and the pro-civil-rights Congress of Industrial Organizations into the Democratic coalition. Meanwhile, Republican partisanship became aligned with economic and racial conservatism. Scrambling to maintain existing power bases, national party elites refused to acknowledge these changes for as long as they could, but the civil rights movement finally forced them to choose where their respective parties would stand.Presenting original ideas about political change, Racial Realignment sheds new light on twentieth and twenty-first century racial politics.

Failure to Adjust: How Americans Got Left Behind in the Global Economy (A Council on Foreign Relations Book)


Edward Alden - 2016
    This book is the story of what went wrong, and how to correct the course. It is a compelling history of the last four decades of U.S. economic and trade policies that have left Americans unable to adapt to or compete in the current global marketplace. Failure to Adjust argues that, despite the deep partisan divisions over how best to respond to America's competitive challenges, there is achievable common ground on such issues as fostering innovation, overhauling tax rules to encourage investment in the United States, boosting graduation rates, investing in infrastructure, and streamlining regulations. The federal government needs to become more like U.S. state governments in embracing economic competitiveness as a central function of government.The book presents an especially timely analysis of the trade policies of the Obama administration, and discusses how America can reassert itself as the leader in setting rules for international economic competition that would spread the benefits of global trade and investment more broadly.

The Statebuilder's Dilemma: On the Limits of Foreign Intervention


David A. Lake - 2016
    This is a necessary condition for stable, effective governance. States sufficiently motivated to bear the costs of building a state in some distant land are likely to have interests in the future policies of that country, and will therefore seek to promote loyal leaders who are sympathetic to their interests and willing to implement their preferred policies. In The Statebuilder's Dilemma, David A. Lake addresses the key tradeoff between legitimacy and loyalty common to all international statebuilding attempts. Except in rare cases where the policy preferences of the statebuilder and the population of the country whose state is to be built coincide, as in the famous success cases of West Germany and Japan after 1945, promoting a leader who will remain loyal to the statebuilder undermines that leader's legitimacy at home.In Iraq, thrust into a statebuilding role it neither anticipated nor wanted, the United States eventually backed Nouri al-Malaki as the most favorable of a bad lot of alternative leaders. Malaki then used the support of the Bush administration to govern as a Shiite partisan, undermining the statebuilding effort and ultimately leading to the second failure of the Iraqi state in 2014. Ethiopia faced the same tradeoff in Somalia after the rise of a promising but irredentist government in 2006, invading to put its own puppet in power in Mogadishu. But the resulting government has not been able to build significant local support and legitimacy. Lake uses these cases to demonstrate that the greater the interests of the statebuilder in the target country, the more difficult it is to build a legitimate state that can survive on its own.

Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites, and Regime Change


Stephan Haggard - 2016
    What drove these changes and what determined whether the emerging democracies would stabilize or revert to authoritarian rule? Dictators and Democrats takes a comprehensive look at the transitions to and from democracy in recent decades. Deploying both statistical and qualitative analysis, Stephen Haggard and Robert Kaufman engage with theories of democratic change and advocate approaches that emphasize political and institutional factors. While inequality has been a prominent explanation for democratic transitions, the authors argue that its role has been limited, and elites as well as masses can drive regime change.Examining seventy-eight cases of democratic transition and twenty-five reversions since 1980, Haggard and Kaufman show how differences in authoritarian regimes and organizational capabilities shape popular protest and elite initiatives in transitions to democracy, and how institutional weaknesses cause some democracies to fail. The determinants of democracy lie in the strength of existing institutions and the public's capacity to engage in collective action. There are multiple routes to democracy, but those growing out of mass mobilization may provide more checks on incumbents than those emerging from intra-elite bargains.Moving beyond well-known beliefs regarding regime changes, Dictators and Democrats explores the conditions under which transitions to democracy are likely to arise.

The Problem of Social Cost


R.H. Coase - 2016
    It draws from a number of English legal cases and statutes to illustrate Coase's belief that legal rules are only justified by reference to a cost-benefit analysis, and that nuisances that are often regarded as being the fault of one party are more symmetric conflicts between the interests of the two parties.

Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow


Steven B. Smith - 2016
    Smith examines the concept of modernity, not as the end product of historical developments but as a state of mind. He explores modernism as a source of both pride and anxiety, suggesting that its most distinctive characteristics are the self-criticisms and doubts that accompany social and political progress. Providing profiles of the modern project’s most powerful defenders and critics—from Machiavelli and Spinoza to Saul Bellow and Isaiah Berlin—this provocative work of philosophy and political science offers a novel perspective on what it means to be modern and why discontent and sometimes radical rejection are its inevitable by-products.

Powerplay: The Origins of the American Alliance System in Asia


Victor Cha - 2016
    How was the American alliance system originally established in Asia, and is it currently under threat? How are competing security designs being influenced by the United States and China? In Powerplay, Victor Cha draws from theories about alliances, unipolarity, and regime complexity to examine the evolution of the U.S. alliance system and the reasons for its continued importance in Asia and the world.Cha delves into the fears, motivations, and aspirations of the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies as they contemplated alliances with the Republic of China, Republic of Korea, and Japan at the outset of the Cold War. Their choice of a bilateral "hub and spokes" security design for Asia was entirely different from the system created in Europe, but it was essential for its time. Cha argues that the alliance system's innovations in the twenty-first century contribute to its resiliency in the face of China's increasing prominence, and that the task for the world is not to choose between American and Chinese institutions, but to maximize stability and economic progress amid Asia's increasingly complex political landscape.Exploring U.S. bilateral relations in Asia after World War II, Powerplay takes an original look at how global alliances are achieved and maintained.

Against the Fascist Creep


Alexander Reid Ross - 2016
    A terrifying tour of the history and influence of the forces that helped bring the forty-fifth president to power, Against the Fascist Creep maps the connections and names the names. It traces today’s often-disguised forms of rightwing extremism through the decades and across the globe to show how infiltration is a conscious and clandestine program for neofascist groups that seek to co-opt and undermine both mainstream and left-wing institutions in order to win elections, take political power, and create a new racist and authoritarian society.

The Other Bourgeoisie: Industrialized Information: Its Complicity in the Death of American Democracy


Douglas LeMaster - 2016
    Douglas LeMaster explains why the stakes are so high in this detailed, academic work. Democracy, he says, is the only form of social organization that is not exploitive by design. To prove his point, he examines how human history has been dominated by monopolies, such as the priestly monopolies of the great religions, the land monopolies of kings and aristocracies, the marketplace monopolies of capitalists, and most recently-a reinvented and secular information monopoly. While this latest monopoly is still in its formative stage, it's founded on corporate control of expressive rights, copyright, and patent-and it should concern all of us. Join LeMaster as he takes a close look at the latest form of an insidious disease and reveals how these latest

Unraveled: Obamacare, Religious Liberty, and Executive Power


Josh Blackman - 2016
    In this much-anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed Unprecedented: The Constitutional Challenge to Obamacare (2013), Josh Blackman argues that, to implement the law, President Obama has broken promises about cancelled insurance policies, exceeded the traditional bounds of executive power, and infringed on religious liberty. At the same time, conservative opponents have stopped at nothing to unravel Obamacare, including a three-week government shutdown, four Supreme Court cases, and fifty repeal votes. This legal thriller provides the definitive account of the battle to stop Obamacare from being 'woven into the fabric of America'. Unraveled is essential reading to understand the future of the Affordable Care Act in America's gridlocked government in 2016, and beyond.

The Art of the Bribe: Corruption under Stalin, 1943–1953


James Heinzen - 2016
    James Heinzen’s innovative and compelling study examines corruption under Stalin’s dictatorship in the wake of World War II, focusing on bribery as an enduring and important presence in many areas of Soviet life. Based on extensive research in recently declassified Soviet archives, The Art of the Bribe offers revealing insights into the Soviet state, its system of law and repression, and everyday life during the years of postwar Stalinism.

Mass Shootings: Media, Myths, and Realities: Media, Myths, and Realities (Crime, Media, and Popular Culture)


Jaclyn Schildkraut - 2016
    This book provides readers and researchers with a critical examination of mass shootings as told by the media, offering research-based, factual answers to oft-asked questions and investigating common myths about these tragic events.• Tackles common misconceptions about mass shootings perpetrated by and through the media and provides information that grounds the realities of such events in empirical evidence• Explores the history of mass shootings, both before and after the infamous 1999 Columbine High School event and shootings that occurred in and out of schools• Addresses common myths associated with mass shooting events by the media, such as how often and where they occur and the absence of any warning signs• Helps readers understand the realities of these events, including their international reach, the potential warning signs, and how evidence associated with the events can provide clues into why they occurred

Trickle-down Censorship: An Outsider’s Account of Life Inside China’s Censorship Machine


J.F.K. Miller - 2016
    In this wry memoir, he offers a view of that regime, as he saw it, as an outsider from the bottom up.Trickle-Down Censorship explores how censorship affected him, a Westerner who took free speech for granted. It is about how he learned censorship in a system where the rules are kept secret; it is about how he became his own Thought Police through self-censorship; it is about the peculiar relationship he developed with his censors, and the moral choices he made as a result of censorship and how, having made those choices, he viewed others.This is also the story of a re-emerging colossus – China, the world’s most populous nation and one of its oldest civilizations – and how the Chinese relate to foreigners and the outside world. The so-called “clash of civilizations” is played out in the microcosm of JFK Miller’s experience working under Chinese state censorship.

Air Power: A Global History


Jeremy Black - 2016
    Leading military historian Jeremy Black traces the rapid evolution of technology over time, creating new parameters for effectiveness. Throughout, he assesses governmental and societal dimensions of the response to air power, and how attitudes have changed. He vividly shows how public and state senses of opportunity and fear are key drivers to understand the development and use of air power. He also assesses the value of air power as opposed to the use of ground and naval forces.

Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea


Johan Mathew - 2016
    How did this happen, and what role does trafficking play in capitalism? To answer these questions, Johan Mathew traces the hidden networks that operated across the Arabian Sea in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following the entangled history of trafficking and capitalism, he explores how the Arabian Sea reveals the gaps that haunt political borders and undermine economic models. Ultimately, he shows how capitalism was forged at the margins of the free market, where governments intervened, and traffickers turned a profit.

Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon's Party of God


Joseph Daher - 2016
    With this book, Joseph Daher presents a new way of looking at Hezbollah: through the lens of political economy.             By discarding more common approaches to the party that focus on religious discourse or military questions, Daher is freed up to analyze what the party actually is: an organization that is operating within a specific political and socio-economic context, one that simultaneously offers it a rich ground of support and limits its range of action. Daher clearly and carefully positions Hezbollah within that context, focusing on its historic ties with its main sponsor, Iran, its media and cultural wings, its relationship with Western economic policies, and the impact of the Shi’a population on the sectarian politics of Lebanon. Offering additional attention to the party’s positions on worker’s rights and women’s issues, this fresh take on Hezbollah will be incredibly useful for understanding the world’s most tumultuous region.

Father Lincoln: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and His Boys--Robert, Eddy, Willie, and Tad


Alan Manning - 2016
    But that was not how his sons knew him. Presidential historian Alan Manning invites readers to see not the thoughtful, burdened president delivering the Gettysburg Address to a war-torn nation, but a man quietly reading bedtime stories to his sleepy-eyed sons; and not the resolute commander-in-chief seeking out winning generals and forming war policy, but a man wrestling with his own grown son s desire to join the army and go off to war. A combination of history, biography, and family culture, this book follows Lincoln from his growing law practice in Springfield through the turbulent war years in the White House, highlighting the same challenges that many fathers face today: balancing a successful career with paternal responsibilities a perspective largely ignored by previous Lincoln biographers, thus helping to complete the portrait of one of the most popular, significant, and complex figures in American history.

The World in 2017


The Economist - 2016
    The World in 2017 features leading figures from politics, business, finance, science, technology and the arts alongside prominent journalists from The Economist and other leading news publications.The World In 2017 looks ahead to a new American presidency, a Chinese Communist Party Congress, elections in France and Germany and the political and economic challenges of Brexit, and marks a number of poignant global anniversaries—500 years since Martin Luther published his 95 theses, 100 years since Lenin launched the Russian revolution and 10 years since Steve jobs unveiled the iPhone. In our 31st edition, we include a special section featuring forecasts from 14 globally-minded millennials, ranging from a Syrian refugee-turned-photographer, an iconoclastic Chilean reggaeton artist, one of ballet’s biggest emerging names and leading online voices for young Africans and Muslim American women.Read articles on world news, finance, technology, politics and the arts from:Sadiq Khan, mayor of London; Maria Alyokhina, member of Pussy Riot; George Clooney, actor; Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada; Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP; Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube; Jin Liqun, president, Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank; Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten; Tsai Ing-wen, president of Taiwan; Yvonne Chaka Chaka, singer; Yuri Milner, entrepreneur and physicist; and Ray Dalio, Founder of Bridgewater Associates.

Post-Racial or Most-Racial?: Race and Politics in the Obama Era


Michael Tesler - 2016
    Regrettably, the reality hasn’t lived up to that expectation. Instead, Americans’ political beliefs have become significantly more polarized by racial considerations than they had been before Obama’s presidency—in spite of his administration’s considerable efforts to neutralize the political impact of race.             Michael Tesler shows how, in the years that followed the 2008 election—a presidential election more polarized by racial attitudes than any other in modern times—racial considerations have come increasingly to influence many aspects of political decision making. These range from people’s evaluations of prominent politicians and the parties to issues seemingly unrelated to race like assessments of public policy or objective economic conditions. Some people even displayed more positive feelings toward Obama’s dog, Bo, when they were told he belonged to Ted Kennedy. More broadly, Tesler argues that the rapidly intensifying influence of race in American politics is driving the polarizing partisan divide and the vitriolic atmosphere that has come to characterize American politics. One of the most important books on American racial politics in recent years, Post-Racial or Most-Racial? is required reading for anyone wishing to understand what has happened in the United States during Obama’s presidency and how it might shape the country long after he leaves office.

From Resilience to Revolution: How Foreign Interventions Destabilize the Middle East


Sean L. Yom - 2016
    Some proved durable despite economic challenges and devastating wars, such as the Sabah regime of Kuwait, which faced little opposition and enjoyed mass support. Others such as the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan barely survived the twentieth century, tested repeatedly by uprisings from within and pressures from beyond. Still others were deposed through revolutionary upheavals as popular forces mobilized to overthrow their despotic reign, as with the Pahlavi dynasty of Iran. Why did equally ambitious authoritarians meet such unequal fates? Sean L. Yom makes a bold, singular claim: the durability of Middle Eastern regimes stems from their geopolitical origins. At the dawn of the postcolonial era, many autocratic states across the region had little support from their own societies and struggled to overcome widespread opposition. When foreign powers intervened to prop these regimes up, they unwittingly sabotaged the prospects for long-term stability by discouraging triumphant leaders from reaching out to their people and bargaining for mass support--early coalitional decisions that created repressive institutions and planted the seeds for future unrest. Only when they were secluded from larger geopolitical machinations did Middle Eastern regimes come to grips with their weaknesses and build broader coalitions. Based on comparative historical analyses of Iran, Jordan, and Kuwait, Yom examines the foreign interventions, coalitional choices, and state outcomes that characterize the modern Middle East. A key text for foreign policy scholars, From Resilience to Revolution shows how outside interference can corrupt the most basic choices of governance: who to reward, who to punish, who to compensate, and who to manipulate.

The Continent of International Law


Barbara Koremenos - 2016
    Koremenos argues that the detailed design provisions of such agreements matter for phenomena that scholars, policymakers, and the public care about: when and how international cooperation occurs and is maintained. Theoretically, Koremenos develops hypotheses regarding how cooperation problems like incentives to cheat can be confronted and moderated through law's detailed design provisions. Empirically, she exploits her data set composed of a random sample of international agreements in economics, the environment, human rights and security. Her theory and testing lead to a consequential discovery: considering the vagaries of international politics, international cooperation looks more law-like than anarchical, with the detailed provisions of international law chosen in ways that increase the prospects and robustness of cooperation. This nuanced and sophisticated 'continent of international law' can speak to scholars in any discipline where institutions, and thus institutional design, matter.

Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan


Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili - 2016
    Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan explores the rules governing these organizations to explain why they can provide public goods. Instead of withering during decades of conflict, customary authority adapted to become more responsive and deliberative. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and observations from dozens of villages across Afghanistan, and statistical analysis of nationally representative surveys, Jennifer Murtazashvili demonstrates that such authority enhances citizen support for democracy, enabling the rule of law by providing citizens with a bulwark of defence against predatory state officials. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it shows that 'traditional' order does not impede the development of the state because even the most independent minded communities see a need for a central government - but question its effectiveness when it attempts to rule them directly and without substantive consultation.

The Mission and the Kingdom: Wahhabi Power Behind the Saudi Throne


David Commins - 2016
    Muslim critics have dismissed this conservative interpretation of Islam that is the official creed of Saudi Arabia as an unorthodox innovation that manipulated a suggestible people to gain political influence. David Commins' book questions this assumption. He examines the debate on the nature of Wahhabism, and offers original findings on its ascendance in Saudi Arabia and spread throughout other parts of the Muslim world such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. He also assesses the challenge that radical militants within Saudi Arabia pose to the region, and draws conclusions which will concern all those who follow events in the Kingdom. The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia is essential reading for anyone interested in the Middle East and Islamic radicalism today.

The Age of Thrivability: Vital Perspectives and Practices for a Better World


Michelle Holliday - 2016
    With this knowledge, you can step into wise stewardship of life wherever you find it—and you find it everywhere.As real-life stories throughout the book demonstrate, viewing our businesses and communities through this lens reveals tremendous new possibilities for success and sustainability. And with mounting threats to the continued existence of life on Earth, nothing could be more important.In all, The Age of Thrivability offers profound insights, practical guidance, and plenty of inspiration for organizational and community leaders—and for anyone who is deeply concerned about the future of humanity.

Power and International Relations: A Conceptual Approach


David Allen Baldwin - 2016
    During the 1920s and 30s, power was often ignored or vilified by international relations scholars--especially in America. Power and International Relations explores how this changed in later decades by tracing how power emerged as an important social science concept in American scholarship after World War I. Combining intellectual history and conceptual analysis, David Baldwin examines power's increased presence in the study of international relations and looks at how the three dominant approaches of realism, neoliberalism, and constructivism treat power.The clarity and precision of thinking about power increased greatly during the last half of the twentieth century, due to efforts by political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, philosophers, mathematicians, and geographers who contributed to social power literature. Baldwin brings the insights of this literature to bear on the three principal theoretical traditions in international relations theory. He discusses controversial issues in power analysis, and shows the relevance of older works frequently underappreciated today.Focusing on the social power perspective in international relations, this book sheds light on how power has been considered during the last half century and how it should be approached in future research.

Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics


Joseph Sassoon - 2016
    How did the leadership in these countries create such enduring systems? What was the economic system that prolonged the regimes' longevity, but simultaneously led to their collapse? Why did these seemingly stable regimes begin to falter? This book seeks to answer these questions by utilizing the Iraqi archives and memoirs of those who were embedded in these republics: political leaders, ministers, generals, security agency chiefs, party members, and business people. Taking a thematic approach, the book begins in 1952 with the Egyptian Revolution and ends with the Arab uprisings of 2011. It seeks to deepen our understanding of the authoritarianism and coercive systems that prevailed in these countries and the difficult process of transition from authoritarianism that began after 2011.

Advanced Introduction to Public Choice


Randall G. Holcombe - 2016
    This Advanced Introduction presents a focused narrative about political decision-making based on the work that has defined public choice as a discipline. Randall G. Holcombe emphasizes the theoretical foundations of Public Choice, examining the way that voter preferences are aggregated through democratic decision-making, the way that political exchange leads to the production of public policy, and the way that the constitutional framework within which political activity takes place is designed. He provides a concise discussion of the main models of Public Choice in an engaging manner, giving readers a foundation for understanding the theoretical and empirical work in the field. Each chapter ends with a Notes section that discusses the research on which the chapter is based, with an emphasis on the pioneering work that has shaped the development of Public Choice.Undergraduate and graduate level students in economics, political science and public administration will find this introduction an essential resource for understanding political decision making. Instructors in those fields will find this book a useful and affordable text and an indispensable resource for teaching Public Choice.

Political Political Theory: Essays on Institutions


Jeremy Waldron - 2016
    Making the case with his trademark forcefulness and intellectual aplomb, Jeremy Waldron argues in favor of reorienting the theory of politics toward the institutions and institutional principles of modern democracy and the mechanisms through which democratic ideals are achieved.Too many political theorists are preoccupied with analyzing the nature and importance of justice, liberty, and equality, at the cost of ignoring the governmental institutions needed to achieve them. By contrast, political scientists have kept institutions in view, but they deploy a meager set of value-conceptions in evaluating them. Reflecting on an array of issues about constitutional structure, Waldron considers the uses and abuses of diverse institutions and traditions, from separation of powers and bicameralism to judicial review of legislation, the principle of loyal opposition, the nature of representation, political accountability, and the rule of law. He refines his well-known argument about the undemocratic character of judicial review, providing a capacious perspective on the proper role of courts in a constitutional democracy, and he offers an illuminating critique of the contrasting political philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin.Even if political theorists remain fixated on expounding the philosophical foundations of democracy, they need to complement their work with a firmer grasp of the structures through which democracy is realized. This is what political political theory means: theory addressing itself to the way political institutions frame political disagreements and orchestrate resolutions to our disputes over social ideals."

Education and Equality


Danielle S. Allen - 2016
    Why it is so hard to think about education and equality in relation to each other? Allen asks. For all of our talk about the two, we don’t actually talk much about how education itself relates to equality, regardless of whether the equality we have in mind is human, political, or social, or connected to economic fairness. The basic problem that motivates these lectures, then, is the following: Allen thinks that education itself—a practice of human development—has important contributions to make to the defense of human equality, the cultivation of political and social equality, and the emergence of fair economic orders. But she thinks we have lost sight of just how education relates to those egalitarian concerns. If we are to do right by the students we purport to educate, in whatever context and at whatever level, we need to recover that vision. Allen’s goal, therefore, is to recover our understanding of just how education and equality are intrinsically connected to each other.

Sue the Messenger


Subir Ghosh - 2016
    Today, attacks on investigative journalism come from all quarters and range from physical assaults to arm-twisting through legal means. In the last few years, there has been a rising trend of coercing journalists into silence through measures that are known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, SLAPPs for short. 'Sue the Messenger' is a collection of stories about stories -- stories that run foul of corporate entities and conglomerates, which result in SLAPPs. By their very nature, SLAPPs are meant to undermine democracy. This is the concern that 'Sue the Messenger' wishes to address.