"Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy"

New from Oxford University Press: Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy: Freedom to Choose from Those Worth Choosing by John J. Park.

About the book, from the publisher:

The alarming and recent rise of populist leaders in democracies over the past twenty years―seen in countries such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, and the United States―has been accompanied by substantial increases in political corruption. A central question in political philosophy concerns the most morally legitimate form of government. The prevailing view in Western philosophy identifies democracy as that system. Yet a more legitimate model for Western societies emerges when the issue is examined through the lens of East Asian philosophy.

In this book, John J. Park introduces a Confucian-inspired hybrid system for the legislative branch, which fuses meritocracy with democracy. It's called prometheocracy, which is based on Prometheus, the mythological figure who gave fire and knowledge to the people. In this model, all legislators remain democratically elected through one person, one vote, but candidates must first meet specific merit-based requirements―such as passing a criminal background check, demonstrating relevant professional experience, and holding certain educational qualifications. Just as professions like medicine, law, engineering, and academia require specialized credentials, Park posits that the most consequential public offices should demand clear standards of competence. Drawing on philosophical reasoning and empirical research in the social sciences, Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy challenges the dominant democratic paradigm in the West and argues that prometheocracy possesses greater moral legitimacy.

Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy demonstrates that this system holds advantages over other major alternatives, including existing Confucian hybrid proposals and epistocracy. While many philosophers who support Confucian hybrid systems restrict their applicability to select Asian contexts, this work develops a model grounded explicitly in Western values and designed for Western societies. This contribution marks a significant development in comparative philosophy, presenting the book as a bridge between contemporary Confucian political theory and Western political thought.

Ultimately, Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy argues that prometheocracy is the most morally legitimate form of legislative governance for the West.

Visit John J. Park's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Divine Season"

New from Princeton University Press: A Divine Season: Christian Nationalist Activism in Zambia by Naomi Haynes.

About the book, from the publisher:

How Zambian Pentecostal activists worked to transform their country into a self-styled “Christian nation”

In 2015, Zambia began an ambitious program to “actualize” the country’s constitutional declaration that it was a “Christian nation.” For Pentecostal Christian nationalist activists, this was a “divine season,” an opportunity to change their country by submitting it to God’s control. In this book, Naomi Haynes examines these efforts at national transformation, offering a careful ethnographic exploration of Christian nationalist theology, ritual, and policy initiatives. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, Haynes describes how activists promoted Zambia’s Christian identity, whether by writing books and newspaper articles, posting on social media, building new monuments, praying for the nation, or lobbying for constitutional changes.

By tracing Zambian Christian nationalism’s internal contradictions and tensions, Haynes charts its ultimate failure, which she ascribes in part to institutional opposition from the civil service and Catholic and mainline Protestant denominations. She also points to what she terms its fatal theological flaw, going beyond the usual secular analysis in anthropology to engage with theological critiques of Christian nationalism. The example of Zambia offers the most fully realized expression of Christian nationalism outside the West, demonstrating what this movement can look like when given free political rein. With this book, Haynes provides an instructive account of an increasingly influential global movement.

The Page 99 Test: Moving by the Spirit.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Pericles"

New from Reaktion Books: Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric by Paul Cartledge.

About the book, from the publisher:

A nuanced portrait of ancient Athens’s boldest statesman and his enduring cultural legacy.

Pericles, the Athenian statesman, was a towering figure of his era, renowned for promoting Athenian democracy, shaping the Athenian Empire, and championing the arts, notably through the Parthenon’s creation. Born to aristocracy, he was a fervent democrat, a masterful demagogue in the ancient sense, and an eccentric in his personal life. Paul Cartledge explores Pericles’ life, examines Athenian history, and provides an insightful account of Pericles’ political career, his role in Athens’s building program, his intellectual connections, and his love life. Cartledge further considers Pericles’ reputation in the theater and how he has been represented over the centuries from antiquity to the present day. This book is a nuanced, illuminating, and lively portrayal of a remarkable politician.

Paul Cartledge is the A. G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge, and Emeritus A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, University of Cambridge. His many books include Democracy: A Life and Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Growth Machines"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Growth Machines: On the Hollow Joys of Consumption in the Desert of Economic Life by Mark Joseph Stelzner.

About the book, from the publisher:

A provocative look at America’s compulsion to consume and our obsession’s surprising—and strange—origins.

In a capitalist society, people sell their labor to purchase staples like food, shelter, and anxiety medication. That’s the equation of everyday economic life that we’ve always been told is true. Except, is it really that simple anymore? No matter how unmaterialistic you may think you are, odds are that deep within is a drive to consume because it feels good: books you won’t read, clothes you won’t like and might wear even less, a replacement phone whose novelty runs out as quickly as its upgrade hits the market. But what drives this impulse?

In Growth Machines, Mark Joseph Stelzner shows how today’s consumers are now programmed by a US economy intent on infinite growth to work for goods they’ve been convinced they need and conditioned to want. Stelzner establishes the gaps between economic thinking and economic reality, arguing that consumption is no longer just a reflection of needs, but rather, it reflects a need for transaction—in many cases, a treat we seek out because it feels good. We work not only to be able to consume the essentials for living, but also to consume for consumption's sake. Yet such consumption doesn’t make us happier. Stelzner traces this strange nature of consumption to an environmental source: an economy that demands growth. To keep its economy pumping, the US must keep Americans consuming. This makes Stelzner’s book an uncomfortable reflection on how we internalize our economy. To be an American is to consume; to consume is what makes America.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Refugees Together and Citizens Apart"

New from Oxford University Press: Refugees Together and Citizens Apart: Control, Emotions, and Politics at the Palestinian Margins by Silvia Pasquetti.

About the book, from the publisher:

Grounded in long-term ethnography, Refugees Together and Citizens Apart examines how dispossessed Palestinians experience and seek to resist Israeli coercive differentiation through the study of two areas with intertwined histories of forced displacement: the segregated Palestinian districts of Lyd (renamed Lod), and the Jalazone refugee camp in the West Bank. This book brings together the securitized policing that Palestinians experience today in Lyd and the layers of militarism, humanitarianism, and Palestinian Authority rule that Palestinians are forced to negotiate in Jalazone. Melding Palestine Studies and Bourdieusian sociology of settler colonialism, the book connects coercive control, collective emotions, and political life, and argues that how coercive control is exercised, by whom, and against whom matters for how dispossessed Palestinians strive to (re)build affective and political worlds locally and globally.

Refugees Together and Citizens Apart compares the emotional climate of fear, distrust, stigma, and frustration at communal frailty in Lyd's segregated Palestinian districts with the defiant defensive togetherness in Jalazone, examining how these two emotional climates are conducive to different forms of political life. The book supplements the comparative lens with a cross-border perspective attentive not only to the historical but also familial and social ties between the two localities. Crossing Israeli borders of coercive control, this book highlights the role of legal status, place, and class in structures, experiences, and refusals of coercive differentiation. Along the way, it illuminates how the violent dismemberment of the Palestinian body politic is reproduced and the collective struggle for liberation articulated at the Palestinian margins.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Language of Terrorists"

New from Columbia University Press: The Language of Terrorists: Distinguishing Trolls from Violent Extremists by Julia Ebner.

About the book, from the publisher:

If someone posts a death threat or a violent manifesto online, will they cross over from words to deeds? Explicit threats, intimidation campaigns, and incitements to violence are no rarity among white nationalists, incels, and other racist and misogynist extremists. Yet it is often difficult to determine whether they pose genuine risks, since the boundaries between trolling and true violent intent can be blurry. How can we tell the difference between online bluster and terrorist threats?

Julia Ebner―an internationally acclaimed expert on online radicalization―offers a fresh approach, showing how language patterns reveal the potential for political violence. She investigates the psychological underpinnings of texts by terrorists such as Anders Breivik, Dylann Roof, Elliot Rodger, and Brenton Tarrant, offering statistical and qualitative contrasts with nonviolent political writing. Ebner finds striking similarities among their manifestos, including the fusion of personal identity with the group, visceral othering of outgroups, narratives of existential conflict, and the glorification of violence. Following these trails, she demonstrates that perpetrators of extremist violence inadvertently give away their intentions in what they say. Featuring vivid writing and actionable conclusions, The Language of Terrorists presents a new model of violent threat detection that can address pressing challenges faced by the international security and intelligence communities.

Visit Julia Ebner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fakers"

New from Oxford University Press: Fakers: A Top-Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Front Line by Rory Cormac.

About the book, from the publisher:

Intrigue, espionage, and deception. The truth behind 8,000 once top-secret files, so explosive their authors never dreamed they would be released.

Fakers reveals the rise and fall of the mavericks running Britain's Cold War forgery empire. Their secret mission was audacious: to disrupt and discredit adversaries across the world using phantom groups, fake sources, and counterfeit documents.

The leader was a remarkable character, wrestling with personal and professional dilemmas: Hans Welser. An Austrian refugee and one-time MI5 suspect interned behind barbed wire, Welser was a great survivor who rose to become special operations adviser to the Foreign Office, working hand in glove with MI6. His second in command was an eccentric, hard drinking, and high-flying journalist-turned-propagandist called John Rayner. Brought out of semi-retirement, for one final posting. Their team of bowler-hatted refugees, voluble ex-journalists, trailblazing women, and licentious literary sorts navigated loyalty and betrayal — both professionally and romantically — from the diplomats' attic, in the most sensitive part of the Foreign Office's secret propaganda department.

The newly declassified files expose an array of plots, some comically absurd and others dangerously controversial. The forgery empire impersonated everything from hippies and ghosts to Islamists and ballet composers in their campaign to smear hostile politicians, stir tensions among adversaries, and even stymie the career of a contentious British historian. All took place against a high stakes backdrop — both overseas as states competed beneath the looming threat of nuclear war and in the corridors of power at home where grey-suited bureaucrats circled, keen to shut down the team for good.

With timely insight into how propaganda works and how to respond to disinformation, Fakers is a thrilling journey into a secret world where nothing was as it seemed.

The Page 99 Test: Disrupt and Deny.

--Marshal Zeringue

"In a Land of Strangers"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: In a Land of Strangers: Northern Teachers in the Slave South by Michael T. Bernath.

About the book, from the publisher:

What makes the American South distinctive? Is it the location, the culture, the mindset—or a story Americans learned to tell about themselves? In a Land of Strangers contends that the idea of a “distinctive” South did not crystallize out of the Civil War or politics alone; instead, it took shape decades earlier through the everyday observations of thousands of Northern teachers who lived and worked there from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War. Young, white, educated, and marked as outsiders, these men and women occupied an unusual position of trust within Southern households, classrooms, and plantations, granting them rare, intimate access to the inner workings of slaveholding society.

Michael T. Bernath offers the first full-length study of this vast group of teachers—the most sustained point of contact between North and South in the antebellum era. Bewildered, curious, and constantly translating the South for themselves and audiences back home, these educators described a strange and profoundly different place in their diaries and letters. Collectively, they fixed a shared image of the South in the national imagination. In this book, Bernath reshapes our understanding of sectional identity, American culture, and why the idea of a distinctive South endures.

The Page 99 Test: Confederate Minds.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Joy to the World"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Joy to the World: The Performance of Collective Pleasure by Gary Alan Fine.

About the book, from the publisher:

A celebration and exploration of the idea of pleasure and the unique role it serves in bringing individuals and communities together.

There are innumerable ways to take pleasure in life: a bite of cake in the late afternoon, a walk in the warm springtime air after a long winter, a listen to the opening chords of your favorite song. But each of these pleasures is transformed by the presence of others. In Joy to the World, sociologist Gary Alan Fine takes up one of the major themes of his lifetime of work: pleasure. Fine gives us the conceptual basis for a sociology of pleasure: a joyous view of the world that, at times, inspires us, through expectations of interaction, shared cultures, and routine practices that make life worth living in community.

Fine focuses on the impact of group relations as the platform for satisfaction, emphasizing the power of communities of practice. While pleasures may be enjoyed alone, the pleasure that occurs in social spaces performs a unique function in our personal and social lives; they help us understand ourselves as individuals who are part of a group. What is pleasurably transgressive in one context might seem inappropriate, cruel, or just plain nonsensical in another, and these shades of difference serve to solidify the bonds of the group.

Joy to the World urges us to understand what draws us together as well as to appreciate what drives us apart. Our joys, as well as our challenges, help us to be a part of a caring, conscientious, committed community.

The Page 99 Test: Players and Pawns.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The People’s Justice"

New from Princeton University Press: The People’s Justice: Revolutionary Law and the Founding of the French Republic by Carla Hesse.

About the book, from the publisher:

A major new interpretation of the French Revolution that brings to life the criminal tribunals at the heart of the Republic’s political culture

In The People’s Justice, Carla Hesse offers a sweeping reappraisal of political violence in the French Revolution. From Charles Dickens to Hannah Arendt, the Revolution of 1789–1799 in France has been depicted as the bloodiest of the eighteenth-century democratic revolutions. Through extensive new archival research, Hesse shows that, to the contrary, what set the French Revolution apart was neither the scale nor the intensity of its violence but rather the ubiquity of its political tribunals and the use of novel forms of criminal law and procedure as a means of adjudicating political conflict.

More than 5,000 political trials were prosecuted by the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris alone, and, with an acquittal rate of more than 50 percent, these were neither perfunctory nor foregone in their outcomes. They had a repressive function, to be sure, but more importantly, they played a critical role in founding a republic in France and in shaping its social and political norms. Through jury deliberation, public witnessing, and media coverage, these political trials legitimated a republic and the revolutionary struggle that brought it into being. They were animated less by class warfare, factional hatreds, or utopian ideology than by a patriotic, albeit tragic, effort to hold fellow citizens accountable. Over the course of the last two centuries, France, of course, has successfully established itself as a constitutional regime, but this constitutional tradition is still rooted in and haunted by its revolutionary past. Since 1793, the French Republic has, to some extent or another, kept itself alive by keeping itself perpetually on trial.

--Marshal Zeringue

"He Has the People"

New from Oxford University Press: He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860 by Jonathan Earle.

About the book, from the publisher:

A gripping and granular look at how Abraham Lincoln got elected the 16th president of the United States.

James McPherson calls the election of 1860 "undeniably the most important--and pivotal--in all of American history." The nation was not merely divided over the issue of slavery; the opposing camps were at each other's throats. The moment John Brown and his men attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in the fall of 1859 the compromises that had stitched the country together for decades unraveled. The presidential election was therefore about more than who the next president would be. It was about how soon war would follow his inauguration.

Using the writings and story of Murat Halstead, the nation's first campaign journalist, as well as previously unused documents from Lincoln's campaign manager, Jonathan Earle captures the full drama of the 1860 election. He shows how Lincoln, a one-time Congressman from Illinois, and a dark horse against the more established Stephen Douglas, the Democratic frontrunner, and William Henry Seward, the presumptive Republican nominee, got the people and votes he needed to win in a protracted yet furiously disputed election cycle.

Earle focuses on the chaotic campaigns themselves, as political bosses, candidates, and their self-appointed partisans took politicking in directions that at times resembled paramilitary exercises more than campaign events. In the end, Lincoln and his associates ran a brilliant campaign, leveraging Northern anger, growing antislavery sentiment, and divisions within both the Democratic Party and the nation as a whole. His platform was built on his speeches, which projected a vision for how the nation would persevere in the coming crisis. Behind the commanding rhetoric, however, was sophisticated and very modern political machinery. He Has the People provides an engaging historical narrative and a fresh appraisal of the most consequential of all presidential elections.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Land of Happiness"

New from The MIT Press: The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life by Nozomi Naoi.

About the book, from the publisher:

A fascinating look at how Japanese department stores of the twentieth century influenced modern life, identity, and the concept of a dreamworld—and why they continue to loom so large in our imagination.

The Land of Happiness explores the far-reaching influence of the Japanese department store on modern life and our imaginations. In this gorgeously illustrated volume, Nozomi Naoi explains how Japanese department stores modeled “the new modern Japanese life and identity” through print media and design, physical and imagined space, and the new experiences that these spaces offered. The stores created the notion of a modern subject enjoying a “land of happiness”—and this, in turn, shaped the wider sociological context, including emerging roles for women and perceptions of coloniality.

The book focuses on three areas: the mediascape of proliferating department store posters, advertisements, commercial design, promotional magazines, and merchandise; the physical space, such as the Western-style architecture that characterized many of these early department stores, and the imagined “modern space” created within their walls; and, finally, the production of a novel “dreamworld,” which included dining spaces with children’s menus, elevators, escalators, and more.

While the research on department stores and their role in the quotidian experience is vast, there is nothing like this study, which is uniquely grounded in an art historical approach that draws upon the visual media environment of early twentieth-century Japan and its impact on the everyday.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Profiling"

New from Stanford University Press: Profiling: How Predictive Algorithms Shape Identity and the Social Fabric by Philippe Huneman.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this book, philosopher Philippe Huneman aims to offer an unprecedented and systematic understanding of a simultaneously banal and singular phenomenon of modern life: the digital profile. Diving deeply into the algorithms that produce these profiles, Huneman examines the way in which an individual becomes a predictable subject, both as unwilling producer of their digital profile and unwitting subject of digital marketing's attempts to influence beliefs and behaviors.

As the book demonstrates, today's society of profiling has profound implications for our understanding of self and politics. The book unfolds across three sections. In the first, Huneman explains profiles and profiling as they operate today and describes their contemporary pervasiveness, using examples from a variety of fields and considering the wide range of types of data that can be digitalized―be they traces, search histories, metadata or the like. In the second section, on profiles, Huneman reflects on who is the subject of profiling societies and what kind of consequences profiling has on individuals―from behavior to memory. And, finally, entering into metaphysical questioning, the book shines a spotlight on the feedback loop that develops between algorithmic profiling and reality.

Visit Philippe Huneman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World"

New from Columbia University Press: Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World: Natural Capital and Climate Disaster in Belize by Patrick M. Gallagher.

About the book, from the publisher:

Belize is often described as a “pristine” ecotourism destination with a landscape that is “naturally” valuable. Yet for much of the twentieth century, British Honduras―as the country was known under colonial rule―was seen as lacking value, an unprofitable backwater. Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World explores how Belize’s precarious coastal environment has become a site for a new kind of capitalist value production, in which landscapes and ecosystems derive worth from their vulnerability or looming destruction in the era of climate change.

Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research, Patrick M. Gallagher offers a critical account of market-oriented conservation in the Caribbean that ranges across everyday coastal life, emergent ecological science, and climate policy spaces. He shows how the long material and social histories of racialized colonialism shape the making of technocratic tools for valuing nature. Gallagher traces how new forms of capitalist value emerge from the interaction among colonial pasts, contemporary conservation practices, and vivid scenarios of imminent climate change–driven disaster and loss. He also examines how people and policymakers in Belize imagine and create new ways of life in a changing environment. Ethnographically grounded and rich in theoretical insight, this book illuminates how the Anthropocene environment, newly visible and valuable at the moment of its presumed disappearance, came into being in Belize and around the world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Is There Always Value to Adversity?"

New from Oxford University Press: Is There Always Value to Adversity?: Looking Beyond "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger" by Eranda Jayawickreme.

About the book, from the publisher:

Clear and compelling, Is There Always Value to Adversity? presents an interdisciplinary exploration of the age-old idea that adversity can lead to personal growth.

Can adversity have an upside? Is there a purpose to suffering? Can difficult experiences involving trauma and hardship make us stronger? These age-old questions, both intuitively compelling yet scientifically problematic, have fascinated philosophers and researchers for centuries.

In Is There Always Value to Adversity?, Eranda Jayawickreme examines whether post-traumatic growth--the positive changes people report after adversity--reflects real transformation or is simply a coping mechanism. As Jayawickreme explains, the idea that struggle, trauma, and adversity can be a catalyst for positive outcomes has a long intellectual history. He outlines the history of this thinking, tracking its development in different cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions. He then discusses its recent emergence as a popular topic and evaluates the current research, highlighting guidelines for how we should think about this phenomenon.

Throughout the course of the book, Jayawickreme interrogates the quality of the research on post-traumatic growth. In the current age of worries about replication and the credibility revolution in science, can we trust this research at all? Is it possible to do good science on a topic with such intuitive appeal? Ultimately, Jayawickreme asks: is growth through suffering real, or just a comforting story we tell ourselves?

--Marshal Zeringue

"Therapeutic Natures"

New from Cornell University Press: Therapeutic Natures: Environment and Health in the Soviet Sanatorium by Johanna Conterio.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Therapeutic Natures, Johanna Conterio analyzes the development of the institution of the Soviet sanatorium as a project of building socialism, a "Magnitstroi of health." The sanatorium not only served as a curative space in nature to counterbalance the intense and often hazardous environmental conditions of Soviet labor, but also monumentalized the achievements and the anxieties of Soviet socialism.

Conterio reveals how health resort towns, and the individual sanatoria within them, served a central role in a distinct socialist model of public health and welfare that emerged in the late nineteenth century, developed in the Soviet Union in response to domestic, transnational, and international events―the Second International, the October Revolution, Stalinism, World War II, and the Cold War. This model foregrounded the study of climate, geography and landscape in medical research and understandings of the human body as ecologically embedded in the physical environment, producing environmental knowledge that informed medical practice and the design of the built and natural environments of what became therapeutic landscapes. Ultimately, a distinct form of environmental governance developed in Soviet health resorts, linked to the authority of medical officials within the planned economy, and offering historians a counterpart to the model of ecocide. Therapeutic Natures outlines an experimental attempt to create healthy environments for optimal human development, rooted in socialist conceptual approaches to human life in the environment

--Marshal Zeringue

"Captive Consumers"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Captive Consumers: Hunger, Violence, and Inequality in American Prison Food by Chin Jou.

About the book, from the publisher:

Much of what happens inside America’s prisons remains hidden from public view, and the food doled out to incarcerated people is no exception. In Captive Consumers, Chin Jou exposes a system of mistreatment and scandal surrounding prison food: across the country, those behind bars live with chronic hunger, eat foods contrary to their religious beliefs and medical needs, and develop foodborne illnesses at alarming rates. At the same time, corrections systems and prison food services weaponize nutritional claims to protect themselves from charges that the incarcerated are starving.

Using a wealth of sources from untapped historical records to prison newspapers, Jou excavates the voices of the incarcerated and shows that prison food dehumanizes the imprisoned, compounds racial and class inequalities, and induces more violence—ultimately making carceral institutions more dangerous. But this compelling book also illuminates how people behind bars have reasserted their identities, resourcefulness, and humanity through self-prepared food even as prison food services profit from lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts that reward cost-cutting over care. If US corrections systems continue to perpetuate physical and psychological violence through food, Jou argues, Americans will suffer not just wasted tax dollars but the cost of bringing traumatized, ailing, and hungry formerly incarcerated people back into society.

The Page 99 Test: Supersizing Urban America.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Preparing for War"

New from Oxford University Press: Preparing for War: Strategy, Power and Military Change by Olivier Schmitt.

About the book, from the publisher:

The unravelling of the post-Cold War order has intensified geopolitical tensions, driving a global increase in defense spending. Most military organizations are engaged in a process of drastic transformation, trying to scale their activities, learn from contemporary battlefields, and improve readiness. Yet armed forces engaged in such reforms must solve a major dilemma: how to adapt to an uncertain future without losing their current identity, coherence or operational effectiveness.

In this incisive and timely study, Olivier Schmitt explores how modern militaries adapt, or fail to adapt, to evolving threats, technologies and political constraints. Drawing on global case-studies-from the trenches of Ukraine to the halls of the People's Liberation Army leadership-he investigates how social expectations, political constraints and organizational cultures collide in the worldwide quest to reform the military.

Essential reading for defense professionals, policymakers and scholars of international security, Preparing for War equips readers with the tools to grasp not only the "how" but the "why" behind military transformation. In an era of rising defense budgets and shrinking certainties, this book delivers crucial insights into the future of war-and the institutions that must be ready for it.

Visit Olivier Schmitt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Need/Emergency"

New from Stanford University Press: Need/Emergency: Political Theater in Exigent Times by Benjamin Lewis Robinson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Modern politics is preoccupied with states of emergency. Yet emergency politics obscures underlying socioeconomic, infrastructural, and ecological conditions of need. Prompted by Hannah Arendt's claim that theater is "the political art par excellence," Benjamin Lewis Robinson treats this political perplexity as a theatrical problem. In the company of political thinkers including Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School, Rosa Luxemburg and Martin Heidegger, Robinson revisits the entwined histories of politics and theater, analyzing plays that stage the political scene as an always asymmetrical coupling of need and emergency.

In Arendt's view, the defining tendency in modern politics is for need to emerge where it has no right to appear, posing a threat to politics as such. In contrast, the works of theater addressed in Need/Emergency concern moments when, whether it ought to or not, need does appear―demanding justice. Writing in exigent times, Elfriede Jelinek, Heinrich von Kleist, Georg Büchner, Bertolt Brecht, and Friedrich Hölderlin produced formally innovative political theater. Not reducible to the drama of emergency, these plays bring into focus the very need for politics. Moving fluently between theory and theater, Robinson offers a critical study of biopolitics and emergency politics in times of poverty, plague, infrastructural predation, and forced displacement, from the French Revolution to the climate crisis.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Greenlining of Staten Island"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Greenlining of Staten Island: Environmental Preservation and Racial Segregation, 1945–1995 by Patrick D. Nugent.

About the book, from the publisher:

Illuminates how borough residents, urban planners, and politicians used environmental policy to cement a racially restrictive landscape.

Though it was once home to the world’s largest landfill, today Staten Island boasts thousands of acres of parklands, dozens of public-private conservation arrangements, and four ecological zoning districts. In this book, Patrick D. Nugent details the political forces that gave rise to this wealth of greenery in a famously dense city. He demonstrates how postwar economic and political trajectories intersected in the 1960s with the rising consciousness of environmentalism to create a distinctive laboratory in Staten Island, where white communities and politicians heeded the rising call for the preservation of green space―but often as a tool to maintain racial segregation. Ecological zoning, public-private park management, conservation easement, environmental litigation, and other strategies created a lush, discriminatory landscape. Nugent refers to these policies as greenlining.

The Greenlining of Staten Island shows that the political and environmental history of Staten Island is key to understanding how environmentalism has been used to reinforce racial discrimination, not just in New York City, but nationwide. By the mid-1970s, conservationists had embraced urban planning that preserved low-density housing districts and bolstered the sprawling and segregated landscape that took shape in metropolitan America over the coming decades. In exploring the gap between the modern environmental movement’s ambitious goals and its tangible outcomes, Nugent excavates important lessons for contemporary city dwellers debating zoning reform and planning for climate change’s impending effects.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, 1662–1712"

New from Oxford University Press: Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, 1662–1712: Merchants, Consuls, and Cultural Exchange by Nat Cutter.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the mid-seventeenth to early eighteenth century, a wide network of English-speaking men, women, and children took up residence in the Ottoman Maghrebi regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. There they formed expatriate communities, engaged with the societies around them, and undertook their businesses, from trading to captivity redemption to international politics.

Moving beyond official diplomatic records and printed texts, this book delves into thousands of personal letters and financial records, where we find friendship, conflict, adoration, derision, manipulation, and scandal across cultures and countries. In so doing, it offers new ways of thinking about British-Maghrebi relations in a transitional age for global trade and military-naval power, moving beyond plaintive consular complaints, gunboat diplomacy, and brutal captivity to accommodate positive cooperation and mutual benefit.

These expatriates became embedded mediators, hybridised European and Ottoman cultural forms, and experienced distanciation from both homeland and hostland to enjoy and manipulate both. For them, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli were not solely sites for danger or exploitation but, as peace was progressively established with each regency, increasingly places for pragmatic cooperation, personal and professional advancement, commercial success, and enjoyment.

Expansive networks of correspondence and cooperation around the Maghreb, Mediterranean, and Britain embedded the expatriates in a cross-cultural trade in material goods and information and allowed them to manipulate the course of trade and diplomacy between Britain and the Maghreb. The expatriates were less marginal, miserable, and misbehaving Britons and more embedded, canny, Mediterranean actors.

Visit Nat Cutter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue