Title: Between memory and desire: the Middle East in a troubled age
Author: Humphreys, R. Stephen
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Politics | Islam | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Middle Easterners today are caught between memories of the past and frustrated hopes for the future. They struggle to find solutions to crises of economic stagnation, political gridlock, and cultural identity. In recent decades Islam has become central to this struggle, and almost every issue involves fierce, sometimes violent debates over the role of religion in public life. R. Stephen Humphreys's new book presents a much-needed and thoughtful analysis of Islam's place in today's Middle East. In clear, accessible language, he integrates the medieval and modern history of the region to show how the sacred and secular are tightly interwoven in its political and intellectual life. Humphreys discusses the conflicts over power and resources that engage Middle Eastern politicians and looks at the major ideologies that have shaped these conflicts. He focuses on the impact of Islam on public life and examines Muslim ways of thinking about the "secular" versus the "religious." What values does Islam put into play? What challenges does it pose to "ordinary" politics? What resources does it bring to the struggle for social justice? Humphreys recognizes the Western tendency to dismiss Middle Eastern politics as an incoherent tale of violence and fanaticism, and his book is especially valuable for its analysis of the deeper issues behind the headlines. These issues include the region's apparent inability to evolve democratic institutions, conflicts rooted in the peace settlements after World War I, and the unresolved debates over which cultural and moral values should drive Middle Eastern policy. Between Memory and Desire reminds us that Middle Easterners remember the past in specific ways: the shame of the colonial era; the disappointments since independence; and the glory of the Middle Ages, when Muslim achievements were respected throughout the world. Even if these memories are only partially true, in defining the past, they also define what the future ought to be.   [brief]
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Title: Hooliganism: crime, culture, and power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 
Author: Neuberger, Joan
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Criminology
Publisher's Description: n this pioneering analysis of diffuse underclass anger that simmers in many societies, Joan Neuberger takes us to the streets of St. Petersburg in 1900-1914 to show us how the phenomenon labeled hooliganism came to symbolize all that was wrong with the modern city: increasing hostility between class . . . [more]
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Title: Women in the Chinese enlightenment: oral and textual histories
Author: Wang, Zheng
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | China | Women's Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Centering on five life stories by Chinese women activists born just after the turn of this century, this first history of Chinese May Fourth feminism disrupts the Chinese Communist Party's master narrative of Chinese women's liberation, reconfigures the history of the Chinese Enlightenment from a gender perspective, and addresses the question of how feminism engendered social change cross-culturally.In this multilayered book, the first-person narratives are complemented by a history of the discursive process and the author's sophisticated intertextual readings. Together, the parts form a fascinating historical portrait of how educated Chinese men and women actively deployed and appropriated ideologies from the West in their pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation. As Wang demonstrates, feminism was embraced by men as instrumental to China's modernity and by women as pointing to a new way of life.   [brief]
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Title: The invention and decline of Israeliness: state, society, and the military
Author: Kimmerling, Baruch
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Politics | Jewish Studies | Sociology | Judaism
Publisher's Description: This thought-provoking book, the first of its kind in the English language, reexamines the fifty-year-old nation of Israel in terms of its origins as a haven for a persecuted people and its evolution into a multi- cultural society. Arguing that the mono-cultural regime built during the 1950s is over, Baruch Kimmerling suggests that the Israeli state has divided into seven major cultures. These seven groups, he contends, have been challenging one other for control over resource distribution and the identity of the polity. Kimmerling, one of the most prominent social scientists and political analysts of Israel today, relies on a large body of sociological work on the state, civil society, and ethnicity to present an overview of the construction and deconstruction of the secular-Zionist national identity. He shows how Israeliness is becoming a prefix for other identities as well as a legal and political concept of citizen rights granted by the state, though not necessarily equally to different segments of society.   [brief]
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Title: Holland under Habsburg rule, 1506-1566: the formation of a body politic 
Author: Tracy, James D
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Politics | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Under what conditions were limited forms of self-government possible in medieval and early modern Europe? While many historians have sought an answer by focusing on the development of parliamentary institutions in emerging national monarchies, or investigating the wider autonomy enjoyed by various city-states within their own borders, James Tracy looks instead at an intermediate level of political organization, the self-governing province. Readers of medieval and early modern European history will learn here how the province of Holland, during the reigns of Charles V and Philip II (1506-1566), effectively underwent an apprenticeship in self-government.   [brief]
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Title: The deficit and the public interest: the search for responsible budgeting in the 1980s 
Author: White, Joseph 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Economics and Business | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Political time is counted, not in years, but in issues - the depression defined the political era of the 1930s just as the cold war did the 1950s and civil rights the 1960s. Today the federal budget looms as the dominant issue by which all others are considered and has become a concern which catalyzes debate again and again in our nation's capital. In this definitive new work, Joseph White and Aaron Wildavsky describe and analyze the struggles over taxing and spending from Carter's last year through the Reagan administration.The battle of the budget is largely about how we define the role of the government and its relationship to the people. It is a story of congressional horsetrading, partisan posturing, and technical tricks that affect billions of dollars. It is also a story of politicians operating within constraints set by both public opinion and political interpretation of economic reality. Though budgeting has always been important, its impact on the national agenda has grown dramatically in the last decades.Based on extensive interviews with participants and thorough use of documentary sources, this book both explains how budgeting works so the reader can see what is at stake in seemingly arcane disputes and locates budgeting within larger ideological trends in American society. It also explains the relationship of the budget to media, party and policy activists and explores the ways in which the deficit represents a crisis of self-confidence in the ability of our institutions, preeminently Congress and the presidency. Along the way, it provides a uniquely comprehensive account of the entire budget problem, exploring Gramm-Rudman, tax reform, and the continuing stalemate around this issue. The Deficit and the Public Interest offers a wide-ranging "solution" to the deficit that encompasses several ideas: the authors demonstrate that institutions have performed better than their members and critics believe, and they contend that extreme solutions would likely be much worse than the original problems. Further, they redefine the problem as one of reducing interest costs so the deficit becomes manageable, and they proffer political advice on how to make this approach politically acceptable, both at home and abroad.This meticulously researched work provides an invaluable journey through the last decade of American politics. In its theoretical depth and incisive new approach to policymaking, The Deficit and the Public Interest lends a fundamentally new understanding of the place of the federal government in American society.   [brief]
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Title: To the Right: the transformation of American conservatism 
Author: Himmelstein, Jerome L
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Sociology | Politics | Public Policy | American Studies
Publisher's Description: In this timely book, Jerome Himmelstein offers a new interpretation of the growth of conservatism in American politics. Tracing the New Right of the 1970s and 1980s back to the Old Right of the 1950s, Himmelstein provides an interpretive map of the political landscape over the past decades, showing . . . [more]
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Title: Civic innovation in America: community empowerment, public policy, and the movement for civic renewal
Author: Sirianni, Carmen
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Print Media | Environmental Studies | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: In this book, two leading experts on community action provide the first scholarly examination of the civic renewal movement that has emerged in the United States in recent decades. Sirianni Friedland examine civic innovation since the 1960s as social learning in four arenas (community organizing/development, civic environmentalism, community health, and public journalism), and they link local efforts to broader networks and to the development of "public policy for democracy." They also explore the emergence of a movement for civic renewal that builds upon the civic movements in these four arenas. In contrast to some recent studies that stress broad indicators of civic decline, this study analyzes innovation as a long process of social learning within specific institutional and policy domains with complex challenges and cross-currents. It draws upon analytical frameworks of social capital, policy learning, organizational learning, regulatory culture, democratic theory, and social movement theory. The study is based upon interviews with more than 400 innovative practitioners, as well as extensive field observation, case study, action research, and historical analysis.   [brief]
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Title: The dynamics of the breakthrough in Eastern Europe: the Polish experience 
Author: Staniszkis, Jadwiga
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Politics | European History | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Understanding the dramatic political, social, and economic changes that have taken place in Poland in the mid-1980s is one key to predicting the future of the communist bloc. Jadwiga Staniszkis, an influential, internationally known expert on contemporary trends in Eastern Europe, provides an insider's analysis that deserves the attention of all scholars interested in the region.Staniszkis presents the breakthrough of 1989 as a consequence not only of systemic contradictions within socialism but also of a series of chance events. These events include unique historical circumstances such as the emergence of the "globalist" faction in Mosow, with its new, world-system perception of crisis, and the discovery of the round-table technique as a productive ritual of communication, imitated all over Eastern Europe. After describing the development, collapse, and reorganization of a "new center" in Poland in 1989-1990, she discusses the first attempt at privatizing the economy. Her analysis of the dilemmas accompanying breakthrough and transition is an invaluable guide to the challenges that face both capitalism and democracy in Eastern Europe.   [brief]
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Title: China's new voices: popular music, ethnicity, gender, and politics, 1978-1997
Author: Baranovitch, Nimrod 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Music | China | Popular Music | Ethnomusicology | Politics | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This is the most comprehensive study to date of the rich popular music scene in contemporary China. Focusing on the city of Beijing and drawing upon extensive fieldwork, China's New Voices shows that during the 1980s and 1990s, rock and pop music, combined with new technologies and the new market economy, have enabled marginalized groups to achieve a new public voice that is often independent of the state. Nimrod Baranovitch analyzes this phenomenon by focusing on three important contexts: ethnicity, gender, and state politics. His study is a fascinating look at the relationship between popular music in China and broad cultural, social, and political changes that are taking place there. Baranovitch's sources include formal interviews and conversations conducted with some of China's most prominent rock and pop musicians and music critics, with ordinary people who provide lay perspectives on popular music culture, and with others involved in the music industry and in academia. Baranovitch also observed recording sessions, concerts, and dance parties, and draws upon TV broadcasts and many publications in Chinese about popular music. keywords: Ethnicity   [brief]
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Title: The military and the state in Latin America 
Author: Rouquié, Alain
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Politics
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Title: When capitalists collide: business conflict and the end of empire in Egypt 
Author: Vitalis, Robert 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Politics | Ancient History | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Robert Vitalis's empirically rich study challenges the left-nationalist paradigm through which twentieth-century Egyptian history and politics has generally been interpreted. He argues with those who explain Egyptian economic development primarily in terms of class and of power struggles between British and Egyptian entrepreneurs and politicians.Vitalis offers a rare, detailed view of the objectives and political strategies of both international firms and Egypt's own big business rivals. He highlights the career of Muhammad Ahmad 'Abbud, modern Egypt's most successful businessman. Vitalis's argument can be effectively applied to many other Third World countries and his book makes a major contribution to ongoing debates regarding class, underdevelopment, and nationalism.   [brief]
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Title: Discrepant dislocations: feminism, theory, and postcolonial histories 
Author: John, Mary E 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Gender Studies | Anthropology | Postcolonial Studies | South Asia | Politics
Publisher's Description: Mary E. John investigates the metaphor of dislocation within and across two specific "locations" - the United States and India - in this epistemological inquiry into the production of theory in general and the grounds of feminist ethnography in particular. She probes a set of distinct but related themes: the lines of tension marking U.S. feminism, especially as foregrounded by women of color; the inescapable complexities of feminist theory and practice in India; and the traffic - in theory, feminists, and women - between the two contexts. Emphasizing the discrepancies in the dislocations articulated by feminists unequally affected by the West and its power, John explores issues of displacement and otherness in contemporary culture. She also raises compelling questions of how location impacts and is impacted by theory.As an Indian scholar schooled in the United States, John works as an "anthropologist in reverse," a "participant-observer" in the world of North American feminist theory. Her argument ranges widely, encompassing profound readings of theorists from Freud to Gayatri Spivak, Hortense Spillers to Aida Hurtado, as well as feminist theorists in India. By focusing on concepts of displacement, travel, and reterritorialization and by reaffirming a politics of location, John visualizes an alternate internationalism in our rapidly globalizing world.   [brief]
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Title: Regulatory encounters: multinational corporations and American adversarial legalism 
Author: Axelrad, Lee 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Law
Publisher's Description: Regulatory Encounters reports on a path-breaking study of how government regulation of business in the United States differs in practice from regulation in other economically advanced democracies. In each of ten in-depth case studies, the contributors to this volume compare a particular multinational corporation's experience with parallel regulatory regimes in the United States and in Japan, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, The Netherlands, and the European Union, noting precisely which regulatory precautions were actually implemented in each country. The regulatory systems analyzed include aspects of environmental protection, product safety, debt collection, employees' rights, and patent protection. The studies in Regulatory Encounters indicate that the adversarial and legalistic character of American regulation imposes higher costs and delays on economic activity than comparable regulatory regimes in other economically advanced democracies, and often does not generate higher levels of protection for the public.   [brief]
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Title: Healing the masses: Cuban health politics at home and abroad
Author: Feinsilver, Julie Margot
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Politics | Medicine | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: How has Cuba, a small, developing country, achieved its stunning medical breakthroughs? Hampered by scarce resources and a long-standing U.S. embargo, Cuba nevertheless has managed to provide universal access to health care, comprehensive health education, and advanced technology, even amid desperate economic conditions. Moreover, Cuba has sent disaster relief, donations of medical supplies and technology, and cadres of volunteer doctors throughout the world, emerging, in Castro's phrase, as a "world medical power."In her significant and timely study, Julie Feinsilver explores the Cuban medical phenomenon, examining how a governmental obsession with health has reaped medical and political benefits at home and abroad. As a result of Cuba's forward strides in health care, infant mortality rates are low even by First World standards. Cuba has successfully dealt with the AIDS epidemic in a manner that has aroused controversy and that some claim has infringed on individual liberties - issues that Feinsilver succinctly evaluates.Feinsilver's research and travel in Cuba over many years give her a unique perspective on the challenges Cuba faces in this time of unprecedented economic and political uncertainty. Her book is a must-read for everyone concerned with health policy, international relations, and Third World societies.   [brief]
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Title: Vietnam 1945: the quest for power
Author: Marr, David G
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Southeast Asia | Asian History | Politics
Publisher's Description: 1945: the most significant year in the modern history of Vietnam. One thousand years of dynastic politics and monarchist ideology came to an end. Eight decades of French rule lay shattered. Five years of Japanese military occupation ceased. Allied leaders determined that Chinese troops in the north of Indochina and British troops in the South would receive the Japanese surrender. Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, with himself as president.Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews, and an examination of published memoirs and documents, David G. Marr has written a richly detailed and descriptive analysis of this crucial moment in Vietnamese history. He shows how Vietnam became a vortex of intense international and domestic competition for power, and how actions in Washington and Paris, as well as Saigon, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh's mountain headquarters, interacted and clashed, often with surprising results. Marr's book probes the ways in which war and revolution sustain each other, tracing a process that will interest political scientists and sociologists as well as historians and Southeast Asia specialists.   [brief]
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Title: Choosing justice: an experimental approach to ethical theory 
Author: Frohlich, Norman
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | Economics and Business | Philosophy | Political Theory | Social Theory | Ethics
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Title: Rickshaw Beijing: city people and politics in the 1920s
Author: Strand, David
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | Politics | Asian History | China
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Title: Making sweatshops: the globalization of the U.S. apparel industry
Author: Rosen, Ellen Israel
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American Studies | Sociology | Anthropology | Politics | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: The only comprehensive historical analysis of the globalization of the U.S. apparel industry, this book focuses on the reemergence of sweatshops in the United States and the growth of new ones abroad. Ellen Israel Rosen, who has spent more than a decade investigating the problems of America's domestic apparel workers, now probes the shifts in trade policy and global economics that have spawned momentous changes in the international apparel and textile trade. Making Sweatshops asks whether the process of globalization can be promoted in ways that blend industrialization and economic development in both poor and rich countries with concerns for social and economic justice - especially for the women who toil in the industry's low-wage sites around the world. Rosen looks closely at the role trade policy has played in globalization in this industry. She traces the history of current policies toward the textile and apparel trade to cold war politics and the reconstruction of the Pacific Rim economies after World War II. Her narrative takes us through the rise of protectionism and the subsequent dismantling of trade protection during the Reagan era to the passage of NAFTA and the continued push for trade accords through the WTO. Going beyond purely economic factors, this valuable study elaborates the full historical and political context in which the globalization of textiles and apparel has taken place. Rosen takes a critical look at the promises of prosperity, both in the U.S. and in developing countries, made by advocates for the global expansion of these industries. She offers evidence to suggest that this process may inevitably create new and more extreme forms of poverty.   [brief]
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Title: Rich democracies: political economy, public policy, and performance
Author: Wilensky, Harold L
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Politics | Social Theory | Public Policy | Economics and Business | Sociology
Publisher's Description: In this landmark work, the culmination of 30 years of systematic, comprehensive comparison of 19 rich democracies, Wilensky answers two basic questions: (1) What is distinctly modern about modern societies--in what ways are they becoming alike? (2) How do variations in types of political economy shape system performance? He specifies similarities and differences in the structure and interplay of government, political parties, the mass media, industry, labor, professions, agriculture, churches, and voluntary associations. He then demonstrates how differences in bargaining arrangements among these groups lead to contrasting policy profiles and patterns of taxing and spending, which in turn explain a large number of outcomes: economic performance, political legitimacy, equality, job security, safety and risk, real health, the reduction of poverty and environmental threats, and the effectiveness and fairness of regulatory regimes. Drawing on quantitative data and case studies covering the last 50 years and more than 400 interviews he conducted with top decision-makers and advisors, Wilensky provides a richly detailed account of the common social, economic, and labor problems modern governments confront and their contrasting styles of conflict resolution. The result is new light on the likely paths of development of rich democracies as they become richer. Assessing alternative theories, Wilensky offers a powerful critique of such images of modern society as "post-industrial" or "high-tech," "the information age" or the alleged dominance of "globalization." Because he systematically compares all of the rich democracies with at least three million population, Wilensky can specify what is truly exceptional about the United States, what it shares with Britain and Britain abroad (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and what it shares with all or almost all of the West European democracies, Israel, and Japan. He gives careful attention to which successful social and labor policies are transferable across nations and which are not. Rich Democracies will interest both scholars and practitioners. It combines the perspectives of political economy (the interplay of markets and politics) and political sociology (the social bases of politics). It will be especially useful in courses on comparative political economy, comparative politics, European politics, public policy, political sociology, the welfare state, American government, advanced industrial societies, and industrial relations.   [brief]
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