"Violence in Proportion"

New from Oxford University Press: Violence in Proportion by Patrick Tomlin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Almost everyone agrees that violence can sometimes be justified, but if it is to be justified it must be proportionate. Whether we are discussing war, self-defence, punishment, human rights law, protest, or free speech, most philosophers agree that inflicted harms or incursions into our most basic rights must be proportionate.

Violence in Proportion closely examines this widely held proportionality principle, focusing on situations in which inflicted harm prevents harm to others. It finds that lurking beneath our surface agreement that violence must be proportionate, there are many philosophically knotty problems that we must address. The book uncovers, explores, and offers solutions to these problems. This is the first philosophical monograph dedicated to the study of this important concept.

The book begins by mapping different species of proportionality, and the limits of their application. Focusing on a specific type of proportionality that Tomlin calls preventive limiting proportionality, Violence in Proportion goes on to explore puzzles concerning counterfactual baselines, proportionality under uncertainty, whether and when to continue a disproportionate course of conduct, the relationship between the proportionality of acts and courses of conduct, and aggregation.

The book seeks to do three things: uncover and explain the philosophical puzzles that a commitment to a proportionality limit on violence and harm gives rise to; map out various positions that we may take in response to these puzzles; and to argue for certain responses, and in so doing build a novel account of proportionality. Along the way, Tomlin shows us how complex this seemingly simple idea is.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Against Innocence"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World by Miriam Ticktin.

About the book, from the publisher:

A provocative critique of how the concept of innocence functions in contemporary politics and society.

In this timely and bold book, Miriam Ticktin explores how a concept that consistently appears as a moral good actually ends up creating harm for so many. Claims to innocence protect migrant children, but often at the expense of their parents; claims to the innocence of the fetus work to punish women. Ticktin shows how innocence structures political relationships, focusing on individual victims and saviors, while foreclosing forms of collective responsibility. Ultimately, she wants to understand how the discourse around innocence functions, what gives it such power, and why we are so compelled by it, while showing that alternative political forms already exist. She examines this process across various domains, from migration, science, and environmentalism to racial and reproductive justice.

Throughout the book, Ticktin shows how the concept of innocence intimately shapes why, how, and for whom we should care and whose lives matter—and how this can have devastating consequences when only an exceptional few can qualify as innocent. A politics grounded on innocence justifies a world built on inequality, designating most people—especially the racialized poor—as unworthy, undeserving, and less than human. As an alternative, she explores the aesthetics and politics of “commoning”—a collective regime of living that refuses a liberal politics of individual identity and victimhood.

--Marshal Zeringue

"When Rebels Win"

New from Cornell University Press: When Rebels Win: Ideology, Statebuilding, and Power After Civil Wars by Kai M. Thaler.

About the book, from the publisher:

In When Rebels Win, Kai M. Thaler explores why victorious rebel groups govern in strikingly different ways.

Many assume civil wars destroy state capacity. In the Democratic Republic of Congo and Libya, for instance, victorious rebels perpetuated state weaknesses. Yet elsewhere, like in China and Rwanda, they built strong, capable states.

Kai M. Thaler argues that, to explain post-victory governance, we must look at rebel group ideologies: the ideas and goals around which a group is formed. Where a group's ideology falls along two key dimensions―programmatic versus opportunistic, inclusive versus exclusive―influences how it governs. Programmatic-inclusive groups seek to reach across territory and work with populations to implement goals, building the state to try to transform society. Opportunistic-exclusive groups, by contrast, prioritize personalized power and private wealth, neglecting statebuilding.

With rich evidence from Africa, Latin America, and Asia, When Rebels Win rethinks accounts of rebel behavior and post-war governance emphasizing factors such as resource availability or international intervention. Wartime rebel ideology, Thaler demonstrates, is not just "cheap talk"―and civil war can, counterintuitively, lead to stronger states.

Visit Kai M. Thaler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Worldly Afterlives"

New from Princeton University Press: Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire by Julia Stephens.

About the book, from the publisher:

The hidden histories of empire, told through the haunted afterlives of colonial migrations

Indian migrants provided the labor that enabled the British Empire to gain control over a quarter of the world’s population and territory. In the mid-1800s, the British government began building an elaborate bureaucracy to govern its mobile subjects, issuing photo IDs, lists of kin, and wills. It amassed records of workers’ belongings such as handwritten IOUs, crumpled newspaper clippings, and copper bangles. Worldly Afterlives uses this trove of artifacts to recover the stories of the hidden subjects of empire.

Navigating the remains of imperial bureaucracy—in archives scattered across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas—Julia Stephens follows migrant families as they traverse the Indian Ocean and the British Empire. She draws on in-depth interviews to show how the histories of empire reverberate in the present through the memories and experiences of their descendants, who collected their own remnants of empire in albums and curio cabinets. We encounter women, subaltern migrants, and people of mixed heritage whose family stories upend ethnonationalist and patriarchal approaches to studying Asian diasporas. What emerges is a social history of Indian migration and a political history of British imperial governance, one that offers a new methodological approach to the historian’s craft.

Spanning archives, family collections, cemeteries, online ancestry records, and social media, Worldly Afterlives breaks down boundaries that separate academic, amateur, and public history to open new conversations about the ongoing legacies of empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Fires of Moloch"

New from Oxford University Press: The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One by Timothy Larsen.

About the book, from the publisher:

The First World War is the bloodiest war in British history. As casualties mounted during one of its great, seemingly futile battles, the Passchendaele offensive of 1917, seventeen Anglican priests serving as temporary military chaplains wrote chapters for the book, The Church in the Furnace. In it, they urged the Church of England to make fundamental changes in the light of the war. They were impatient and hard-hitting. They gained a reputation as radicals.

The Furnace seventeen experienced more than enough of the war. Some were wounded, others gassed. One of them was recognized as a war hero but suffered from shell shock for the rest of his life. Some won the Military Cross, the Distinguished Service Order, or other honours. One of them was the most famous padre of them all, the war poet G. A. Studdert Kennedy, who was widely known by his nickname, Woodbine Willie. The others included the Irish novelist, James O. Hannay (who wrote under the penname, George A. Birmingham), the Oxford theologian, Kenneth E. Kirk, and Eric Milner-White, whose response to the war included creating the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols for Christmas Eve, King's College, Cambridge. Though they had been scathing about the Church hierarchy during the war, most of them lived to be consecrated a bishop. They strove to make sense of the turbulent events through which they lived, a span of years that included two world wars. Some of their brothers died in the First World War, and some of their sons in the Second World War. They spoke out on issues such as birth control, the League of Nations, Prayer Book revision, church reunion, and pacifism. They sought to do something with their lives after the war that would make retrospectively meaningful all the meaningless losses that had occurred during the war.

The Fires of Moloch is a group biography of a generation which went through the fire--a generation which went from the Victorian age to the atomic age, but which was forever haunted by the trenches and battlefields of France and Flanders, 1914-18.

The Page 99 Test: John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Demolishing Detroit"

New from Stanford University Press: Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures by Nicholas L. Caverly.

About the book, from the publisher:

Innovative field work reveals how infrastructural systems―buildings, laws, algorithms, excavators, regulations, toxins―maintain white supremacy within the urban landscape

For decades, Detroit residents, politicians, planners, and advocacy organizations have campaigned for the elimination of empty buildings from city neighborhoods. Leveling these structures, many argue, is essential to making space for Detroit's majority-Black populace to flourish in the wake of white flight and deindustrialization. In 2013, the city set out to demolish more than twenty thousand empty buildings by the end of the decade, with administrators suggesting it would offer an innovative model for what other American cities could do to combat the effects of racist disinvestment. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with city residents, demolition workers, and public officials, as well as analyses of administrative archives, Demolishing Detroit examines the causes, procedures, and consequences of empty-building demolitions in Detroit. Contrary to stated goals of equity, the book reveals how racism and intersecting inequities endured despite efforts to level them.

As calls to dismantle racist systems have become increasingly urgent, this book provides cautionary tales of urban transformations meant to combat white supremacy that ultimately reinforced inequality. Bridging political analyses of racial capitalism, infrastructures, and environments in cities, Nick Caverly grapples with the reality that tearing down unjust policies, ideologies, and landscapes is not enough to end racist disparities in opportunities and life chances. Doing so demands rebuilding systems in the service of reparative futures.

Visit Nicholas L. Caverly's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Work of Disaster"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line by Aidan Seale-Feldman.

About the book, from the publisher:

A compelling portrait of post-disaster imaginaries of repair in Nepal.

In a world marked by escalating disasters, the forms that care takes are increasingly fraught. In this powerful book, anthropologist Aidan Seale-Feldman focuses on Nepal, where in 2015 a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and equally powerful aftershock struck the country’s central region. The disaster claimed more than nine thousand lives and inspired a surge of humanitarian concern for the mental health of Nepali people. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, The Work of Disaster examines the possibilities generated by disaster, as well as the vexed relationship between crisis and care.

Moving between NGO offices, mountain trails, therapeutic interventions, and affected villages, Seale-Feldman tells the story of an emergent “mental health crisis” and the forms of care that followed in the disaster’s wake. She also analyzes the changes emergency services bring about in the places they seek to assist, the challenges of psychiatric support provided by international organizations, and the place of mental health counseling in a modern biopolitical reality. The Work of Disaster reveals the simultaneous violence and gentleness of humanitarian encounters, engaging along the way with broader debates about world making and the ethics of care.

Visit Aidan Seale-Feldman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Digital Initiation Rites"

New from Cornell University Press: Digital Initiation Rites: Joining Anonymous in Britain by Vita Peacock.

About the book, from the publisher:

Digital Initiation Rites is an ethnography of Anonymous in Britain between 2014 and 2017, in the context of government austerity. Drawing on testimonies of dozens of participants, for whom digital technologies enabled and articulated a political transformation from being "asleep" to being "awake," Vita Peacock narrates the process through which these technologies have become implicated in profound subjective changes. The book joins a wider return of the comparative method in anthropology by placing these accounts in direct conversation with studies of traditional initiation rites―ritual sequences of symbolic death and rebirth―that charge the initiand with knowledge about a society to produce a moral responsibility for it. Through this juxtaposition, Peacock conceptualizes the historically novel form of digital initiation rites, in which digital communication and information technologies play a substantive role in these sequences. Digital Initiation Rites presents another angle to contemporary debates around "conspiracy theorizing" and shows how the consumption of digital media connects to the deep history of humankind.

Vita Peacock is Principal Investigator of the ERC project Surveillance and Moral Community: Anthropologies of Monitoring in Germany and Britain, at King's College London. Her research focuses on hierarchy, surveillance, anonymity, and privacy. She is cofounder of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Founding Fanatics"

New from Oxford University Press: Founding Fanatics: Extremism and the Formation of American Democracy by Noah Eber-Schmid.

About the book, from the publisher:

Since the American Revolution, scholars and citizens have often assumed that dispassionate rationality, reciprocity, and nonviolent tolerance are necessary conditions for the sustained development of democracy. Accordingly, they reject oppositional parties that spurn consensus and terms of mutual respect--and often use force to accomplish their political goals--denouncing extremists as irrational and antidemocratic.

Founding Fanatics questions this understanding, examining how moments of tension, violence, and extremism in the United States have sometimes served the pursuit of political equality. Noah Eber-Schmid focuses his analysis on the American Founding era, presenting case studies of the early memorialization of the Boston Massacre, popular debates over Shays' Rebellion, the thought and practices of the Democratic Societies, and the use of the French Revolution in political discourse. From this historical account of popular politics in the Founding era, Eber-Schmid draws new insights for theoretical approaches to contemporary American democracy, challenging assumptions that extremism is always a negative or antidemocratic force. By recognizing the role that democratic extremism has played in the development of American popular democracy, political theorists and citizens will better understand how such movements may contribute to the struggle to deepen and expand political equality and participation that continues today.

Visit Noah Eber-Schmid's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reclaiming Clio"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Reclaiming Clio: Making American Women's History, 1900-2000 by Jennifer Banning Tomás.

About the book, from the publisher:

Women’s history traveled a long and fascinating path before it became a respected and recognized academic field in twentieth-century America. This book explores the field’s development as a multiracial and multigenerational effort, going beyond the careers of individual women historians to focus on how the discipline itself took shape. Focusing on the foundational period between 1900 and 1968, Jennifer Banning Tomás shines a light on the work performed by archivists and professional historians that gave women’s history its own identity and legitimacy.

The women in Reclaiming Clio laid the groundwork for the field’s remarkable expansion during the final wave of twentieth-century feminism after 1970, when a genuine movement for women’s history emerged. Their contributions made the later success of women’s history possible. Tomás reveals the dedication and vision that turned women’s history into the thriving, influential field it is today.

Visit Jennifer Banning Tomás's website.

--Marshal Zeringue