"The Political Foundations of Judicial Independence in Dictatorship and Democracy"

New from Oxford University Press: The Political Foundations of Judicial Independence in Dictatorship and Democracy by Brad Epperly.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book argues that explaining judicial independence-considered the fundamental question of comparative law and politics-requires a perspective that spans the democracy/autocracy divide. Rather than seeking separate explanations in each regime context, in The Political Foundations of Judicial Independence in Dictatorship and Democracy, Brad Epperly argues that political competition is a salient factor in determining levels of de facto judicial independence across regime type, and in autocracies a factor of far greater import. This is because a full " and then tested globally. Blending formal theory, observational and instrumental variables models, and elite interviews of leading Hungarian legal scholars and judges, Epperly offers a new framework for understanding judicial independence that integrates explanations of both de jure and de facto independence in both democratic and autocratic regimes.

Visit Brad Epperly's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Adventure Capital"

New from the University of California Press: Adventure Capital: Migration and the Making of an African Hub in Paris by Julie Kleinman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Paris’s Gare du Nord is one of the busiest international transit centers in the world. In the past three decades, it has become an important hub for West African migrants—self-fashioned adventurers—navigating life in the city.

In this groundbreaking work, Julie Kleinman chronicles how West Africans use the Gare du Nord to create economic opportunities, confront police harassment, and forge connections to people outside of their communities. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research, including an internship at the French national railway company, Kleinman reveals how racial inequality is ingrained in the order of Parisian public space. She vividly describes the extraordinary ways that African migrants retool French transit infrastructure to build alternative pathways toward social and economic integration where state institutions have failed. In doing so, these adventurers defy boundaries—between migrant and citizen, center and periphery, neighbor and stranger—that have shaped urban planning and immigration policy. Adventure Capital offers a new understanding of contemporary migration and belonging, capturing the central role that West African migrants play in revitalizing French urban life.

--Marshal Zeringue

"To Serve the Enemy"

New from Oxford University Press: To Serve the Enemy: Informers, Collaborators, and the Laws of Armed Conflict by Shane Darcy.

About the book, from the publisher:

A constant yet oftentimes concealed practice in war has been the use of informers and collaborators by parties to an armed conflict. Despite the prevalence of such activity, and the serious and at times fatal consequences that befall those who collaborate with an enemy, international law applicable in times of armed conflict does not squarely address the phenomenon. The recruitment, use and treatment of informers and other collaborators is addressed only partially and at times indirectly by international humanitarian law.

In this book, Shane Darcy examines the development and application of the relevant rules and principles of the laws of armed conflict in relation to collaboration. With a focus on international humanitarian law as may be applicable to various forms of collaboration, the book also offers an assessment of the relevance of international human rights law.

Shane Darcy is a senior lecturer at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, in the National University of Ireland Galway, a globally recognized institution for teaching and research on human rights and humanitarian law.

--Marshal Zeringue

"'Red Tom' Hickey"

New from Texas A&M University Press: "Red Tom" Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism by Peter Buckingham.

About the book, from the publisher:

This is the fascinating biography of a bright young working man, Tom Hickey, who came to the United States from Ireland in 1892, became a machinist, and soon joined the Knights of Labor and the Socialist Labor Party. His party boss recognized the potential in this Irishman and even made him an “enforcer” against those who questioned the boss’s authority. The enforcer, though, eventually found himself forced out and moved west to start a new life. Ultimately, Hickey landed in Texas and saw an opportunity to use syndicalism as an organizing tool to build a state socialist party.

He did just that. Within a few years, Hickey transformed the faction-ridden Socialist Party of America in Texas into a force strong enough to threaten the Republican Party at the ballot box. He gained a large following thanks to a unique mixture of evangelical rhetoric and militant industrial unionism.

As biographer Peter H. Buckingham points out, Hickey failed to deliver his people into the Promised Land. Violence, poll taxes, voter suppression, and other forces made voting for socialist candidates problematic, and the Democratic Party soon co-opted the more appealing elements of socialism into watered-down, reformist planks for the Texan voter. By the time Hickey died of throat cancer in the mid-1920s, his moment had passed.

“Red Tom” Hickey is an important contribution to Texas and American history, capturing a moment in time that Buckingham argues was the second sustained crisis in American history: a democratic society wrestling with the effects of industrial capitalism.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Traveling with Sugar"

New from the University of California Press: Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic by Amy Moran-Thomas.

About the book, from the publisher:

Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a five-hundred-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction “sugar”—or, as some say in Belize, “traveling with sugar.” A decade in the making, this book unfolds as a series of crónicas—a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease. It profiles the careful work of those “still fighting it” as they grapple with unequal material infrastructures and unsettling dilemmas. Facing a new incarnation of blood sugar, these individuals speak back to science and policy misrecognitions that have prematurely cast their lost limbs and deaths as normal. Their families’ arts of maintenance and repair illuminate ongoing struggles to survive and remake larger systems of food, land, technology, and medicine.

Amy Moran-Thomas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Cold War Exiles and the CIA"

New from Oxford University Press: Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia by Benjamin Tromly.

About the book, from the publisher:

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the United States government unleashed covert operations intended to weaken the Soviet Union. As part of these efforts, the CIA committed to supporting Russian exiles, populations uprooted either during World War Two or by the Russian Revolution decades before. No one seemed better prepared to fight in the American secret war against communism than the uprooted Russians, whom the CIA directed to carry out propaganda, espionage, and subversion operations from their home base in West Germany. Yet the American engagement of Russian exiles had unpredictable outcomes. Drawing on recently declassified and previously untapped sources, Cold War Exiles and the CIA examines how the CIA's Russian operations became entangled with the internal struggles of Russia abroad and also the espionage wars of the superpowers in divided Germany. What resulted was a transnational political sphere involving different groups of Russian exiles, American and German anti-communists, and spies operating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Inadvertently, CIA's patronage of Russian exiles forged a complex sub-front in the wider Cold War, demonstrating the ways in which the hostilities of the Cold War played out in ancillary conflicts involving proxies and non-state actors.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Life and Science of Harold C. Urey"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Life and Science of Harold C. Urey by Matthew Shindell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Harold C. Urey (1893–1981), whose discoveries lie at the foundation of modern science, was one of the most famous American scientists of the twentieth century. Born in rural Indiana, his evolution from small-town farm boy to scientific celebrity made him a symbol and spokesman for American scientific authority. Because he rose to fame alongside the prestige of American science, the story of his life reflects broader changes in the social and intellectual landscape of twentieth-century America. In this, the first ever biography of the chemist, Matthew Shindell shines new light on Urey’s struggles and achievements in a thoughtful exploration of the science, politics, and society of the Cold War era.

From Urey’s orthodox religious upbringing to his death in 1981, Shindell follows the scientist through nearly a century of American history: his discovery of deuterium and heavy water earned him the Nobel Prize in 1934, his work on the Manhattan Project helped usher in the atomic age, he initiated a generation of American scientists into the world of quantum physics and chemistry, and he took on the origin of the Moon in NASA’s lunar exploration program. Despite his success, however, Urey had difficulty navigating the nuclear age. In later years he lived in the shadow of the bomb he helped create, plagued by the uncertainties unleashed by the rise of American science and unable to reconcile the consequences of scientific progress with the morality of religion.

Tracing Urey’s life through two world wars and the Cold War not only conveys the complex historical relationship between science and religion in the twentieth century, but it also illustrates how these complexities spilled over into the early days of space science. More than a life story, this book immerses readers in the trials and triumphs of an extraordinary man and his extraordinary times.

Visit Matthew Shindell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The People Are King"

New from Oxford University Press: The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics by S. Elizabeth Penry.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the sixteenth century, in what is now modern-day Peru and Bolivia, Andean communities were forcibly removed from their traditional villages by Spanish colonizers and resettled in planned, self-governed towns modeled after those in Spain. But rather than merely conforming to Spanish cultural and political norms, indigenous Andeans adopted and gradually refashioned the religious practices dedicated to Christian saints and political institutions imposed on them, laying claim to their own rights and the sovereignty of the collective. The People Are King shows how common Andean people produced a new kind of civil society over three centuries of colonialism, merging their traditional understanding of collective life with the Spanish notion of the común to demand participatory democracy. S. Elizabeth Penry explores how this hybrid concept of self-rule spurred the indigenous rebellions that erupted across Latin America in the eighteenth century, not only against Spanish rulers, but against native hereditary nobility, for acting against the will of the comuneros.

Through the letters and documents of the Andean people themselves, The People Are King gives voice to a vision of community-based democracy that played a central role in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions and continues to galvanize indigenous movements in Bolivia today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Universal Enemy"

New from Stanford University Press: The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity by Darryl Li.

About the book, from the publisher:

No contemporary figure is more demonized than the Islamist foreign fighter who wages jihad around the world. Spreading violence, disregarding national borders, and rejecting secular norms, so-called jihadists seem opposed to universalism itself. In a radical departure from conventional wisdom on the topic, The Universal Enemy argues that transnational jihadists are engaged in their own form of universalism: these fighters struggle to realize an Islamist vision directed at all of humanity, transcending racial and cultural difference.

Anthropologist and attorney Darryl Li reconceptualizes jihad as armed transnational solidarity under conditions of American empire, revisiting a pivotal moment after the Cold War when ethnic cleansing in the Balkans dominated global headlines. Muslim volunteers came from distant lands to fight in Bosnia-Herzegovina alongside their co-religionists, offering themselves as an alternative to the US-led international community. Li highlights the parallels and overlaps between transnational jihads and other universalisms such as the War on Terror, United Nations peacekeeping, and socialist Non-Alignment. Developed from more than a decade of research with former fighters in a half-dozen countries, The Universal Enemy explores the relationship between jihad and American empire to shed critical light on both.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Israel Has a Jewish Problem"

New from Oxford University Press: Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self-Determination as Self-Elimination by Joyce Dalsheim.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examining the production and assimilation of Jews as "the nation" in the modern state of Israel, this book shows how identity is constrained through myriad struggles over the meanings and practices of being Jewish. Based on years of ethnographic engagement, the book employs Franz Kafka's writing as a theoretical lens in order to frame the seemingly bizarre and self-contradictory processes it describes. While other scholars have explained Jewish identity conflicts in Israel in terms of a dichotomy between the secular and the religious, this book suggests that such an analysis is inadequate. Instead, it traces these struggles to the definition of "religion" itself. It suggests that the problem lies in the way modern identity categories at once disarticulate "religion" from "nation" and at the same time conflate those categories in the figure of the Jew. The struggles over Jewishness that are part of the process of producing the ethnos for the ethno-national state call into question the notion that self-determination in the form of the nation-state is a liberating process. Modern democratic nation-states are meant to liberate citizens because they are understood to be ruled by "the people" and for "the people." But if "the people" exists for the state and its projects, then there is little liberating about the formula of sovereign citizenship. Instead, self-determination becomes a form of self-elimination, narrowing the possible forms of Jewishness. The case of Israel demonstrates that the classic "Jewish Question" in Europe has been transformed but not answered by political sovereignty.

--Marshal Zeringue