"The Politics of Exile"

New from Routledge: The Politics of Exile by Elizabeth Dauphinee.

About the book, from the publisher:

Written in both autoethnographical and narrative form, The Politics of Exile offers unique insight into the complex encounter of researcher with research subject in the context of the Bosnian War and its aftermath. Exploring themes of personal and civilizational guilt, of displaced and fractured identity, of secrets and subterfuge, of love and alienation, of moral choice and the impossibility of ethics, this work challenges us to recognise pure narrative as an accepted form of writing in international relations.

The author brings theory to life and gives corporeal reality to a wide range of concepts in international relations, including an exploration of the ways in which young academics are initiated into a culture where the volume of research production is more valuable than its content, and where success is marked not by intellectual innovation, but by conformity to theoretical expectations in research and teaching.

This engaging work will be essential reading for all students and scholars of international relations and global politics.

"Power to the Poor"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960-1974 by Gordon K. Mantler.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Poor People's Campaign of 1968 has long been overshadowed by the assassination of its architect, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the political turmoil of that year. In a major reinterpretation of civil rights and Chicano movement history, Gordon K. Mantler demonstrates how King's unfinished crusade became the era's most high-profile attempt at multiracial collaboration and sheds light on the interdependent relationship between racial identity and political coalition among African Americans and Mexican Americans. Mantler argues that while the fight against poverty held great potential for black-brown cooperation, such efforts also exposed the complex dynamics between the nation's two largest minority groups.

Drawing on oral histories, archives, periodicals, and FBI surveillance files, Mantler paints a rich portrait of the campaign and the larger antipoverty work from which it emerged, including the labor activism of Cesar Chavez, opposition of Black and Chicano Power to state violence in Chicago and Denver, and advocacy for Mexican American land-grant rights in New Mexico. Ultimately, Mantler challenges readers to rethink the multiracial history of the long civil rights movement and the difficulty of sustaining political coalitions.

Visit Gordon K. Mantler's website.

"Free Trade and Sailors' Rights in the War of 1812"

New from Cambridge University Press: Free Trade and Sailors' Rights in the War of 1812 by Paul A. Gilje.

About the book, from the publisher:

On July 2, 1812, Captain David Porter raised a banner on the USS Essex proclaiming "A free trade and sailors rights," thus creating a political slogan that explained the War of 1812. Free trade demanded the protection of American commerce, while sailors' rights insisted that the British end the impressment of seamen from American ships. Repeated for decades in Congress and in taverns, the slogan reminds us today that our second war with Great Britain was not a mistake. It was a contest for the ideals of the American Revolution bringing together both the high culture of the Enlightenment to establish a new political economy and the low culture of the common folk to assert the equality of humankind. Understanding the War of 1812 and the motto that came to explain it – free trade and sailors' rights – allows us to better comprehend the origins of the American nation.

Read an excerpt from Free Trade and Sailors' Rights in the War of 1812.

"Cauldron of Resistance"

New from Cornell University Press: Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam by Jessica M. Chapman.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem organized an election to depose chief-of-state Bao Dai, after which he proclaimed himself the first president of the newly created Republic of Vietnam. The United States sanctioned the results of this election, which was widely condemned as fraudulent, and provided substantial economic aid and advice to the RVN. Because of this, Diem is often viewed as a mere puppet of the United States, in service of its Cold War geopolitical strategy. That narrative, Jessica M. Chapman contends in Cauldron of Resistance, grossly oversimplifies the complexity of South Vietnam's domestic politics and, indeed, Diem’s own political savvy.

Based on extensive work in Vietnamese, French, and American archives, Chapman offers a detailed account of three crucial years, 1953–1956, during which a new Vietnamese political order was established in the south. It is, in large part, a history of Diem’s political ascent as he managed to subdue the former Emperor Bao Dai, the armed Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religious organizations, and the Binh Xuyen crime organization. It is also an unparalleled account of these same outcast political powers, forces that would reemerge as destabilizing political and military actors in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Chapman shows Diem to be an engaged leader whose personalist ideology influenced his vision for the new South Vietnamese state, but also shaped the policies that would spell his demise. Washington’s support for Diem because of his staunch anticommunism encouraged him to employ oppressive measures to suppress dissent, thereby contributing to the alienation of his constituency, and helped inspire the organized opposition to his government that would emerge by the late 1950s and eventually lead to the Vietnam War.

"A History of Prejudice"

New from Cambridge University Press: A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States by Gyanendra Pandey.

About the book, from the publisher:

This is a book about prejudice and democracy, and the prejudice of democracy. In comparing the historical struggles of two geographically disparate populations – Indian Dalits (once known as Untouchables) and African Americans – Gyanendra Pandey, the leading subaltern historian, examines the multiple dimensions of prejudice in two of the world's leading democracies. The juxtaposition of two very different locations and histories and, within each of these, of varying public and private narratives of struggle, allows for an uncommon analysis of the limits of citizenship in modern societies and states. Pandey, with his characteristic delicacy, probes the histories of his protagonists to uncover a shadowy world where intolerance and discrimination are part of both public and private lives. This unusual and sobering book is revelatory in its exploration of the contradictory history of promise and denial that is common to the official narratives of nations such as India and the United States and the ideologies of many opposition movements.

"The Watchful Clothier"

New from Yale University Press: The Watchful Clothier: The Life of an Eighteenth-Century Protestant Capitalist by Matthew Kadane.

About the book, from the publisher:

A clothier and a deeply religious man, Joseph Ryder faithfully kept a diary from 1733 until his death, two and a half million words later, in 1768. Recently rediscovered and brilliantly interpreted by historian Matthew Kadane, Ryder’s diary provides an illuminating, real-life perspective on the relationship between capitalism and Protestantism at a time when Britain was rapidly changing from a traditional to a modern society. It also provides fascinating insights on the early modern family, the birth of industrialization, the history of Puritanism, the origins of Unitarianism, melancholy, and the making of the British middle class.

"Classified"

New from Cambridge University Press: Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain by Christopher Moran.

About the book, from the publisher:

Classified is a fascinating account of the British state's long obsession with secrecy and the ways it sought to prevent information about its secret activities from entering the public domain. Drawing on recently declassified documents, unpublished correspondence and exclusive interviews with key officials and journalists, Christopher Moran pays particular attention to the ways that the press and memoirs have been managed by politicians and spies. He argues that, by the 1960s, governments had become so concerned with their inability to keep secrets that they increasingly sought to offset damaging leaks with their own micro-managed publications. The book reveals new insights into seminal episodes in British post-war history, including the Suez crisis, the D-Notice Affair and the treachery of the Cambridge spies, identifying a new era of offensive information management, and putting the contemporary battle between secret-keepers, electronic media and digital whistle-blowers into long-term perspective.

Read an excerpt from Classified.

"Changing Norms through Actions"

New from Oxford University Press: Changing Norms through Actions: The Evolution of Sovereignty by Jennifer M. Ramos.

About the book, from the publisher:

How do international norms evolve? In the modern era, the critically important norm of sovereignty has evolved from a norm once considered absolute to one deemed conditional-to the point where states now risk external intervention if they flout other core norms of national conduct. In Changing Norms through Actions, Jennifer Ramos argues that commitment to international norms depends on the result of actions taken on their behalf. Focusing on the norm of sovereignty, she argues that where intervention does occur, the implications for sovereignty depend on the outcome of the military action. Examining several cases of intervention in support of counterterrorism and human rights, Ramos finds that even when a major power acts primarily out of its own self-interest, the action can unintentionally modify the normative environment within which other states act. Even more surprising, Ramos shows that an arduous military involvement actually strengthens an intervener's commitment to the norm of limited and conditional sovereignty that justified the action. Changing Norms through Actions clearly and skillfully examines the profound international implications of our shifting understanding of sovereignty.

"Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev's Soviet Union"

New from Cambridge University Press: Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev's Soviet Union by Robert Hornsby.

About the book, from the publisher:

Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev's Soviet Union explores the nature of political protest in the USSR during the decade following the death of Stalin. Using sources drawn from the archives of the Soviet Procurator's office, the Communist Party, the Komsomol and elsewhere, Hornsby examines the emergence of underground groups, mass riots and public attacks on authority as well as the ways in which the Soviet regime under Khrushchev viewed and responded to these challenges, including deeper KGB penetration of society and the use of labour camps and psychiatric repression. He sheds important new light on the progress and implications of de-Stalinization, the relationship between citizens and authority and the emergence of an increasingly materialistic social order inside the USSR. This is a fascinating study which significantly revises our understanding of the nature of Soviet power following the abandonment of mass terror.

Read an excerpt from Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev's Soviet Union.

"The Terror Courts"

New from Yale University Press: The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay by Jess Bravin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Soon after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the United States captured hundreds of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and around the world. By the following January the first of these prisoners arrived at the U.S. military’s prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were subject to President George W. Bush’s executive order authorizing their trial by military commissions. Jess Bravin, the Wall Street Journal’s Supreme Court correspondent, was there within days of the prison’s opening, and has continued ever since to cover the U.S. effort to create a parallel justice system for enemy aliens. A maze of legal, political, and moral issues has stood in the way of justice—issues often raised by military prosecutors who found themselves torn between duty to the chain of command and their commitment to fundamental American values.

While much has been written about Guantanamo and brutal detention practices following 9/11, Bravin is the first to go inside the Pentagon’s prosecution team to expose the real-world legal consequences of those policies. Bravin describes cases undermined by inadmissible evidence obtained through torture, clashes between military lawyers and administration appointees, and political interference in criminal prosecutions that would be shocking within the traditional civilian and military justice systems. With the Obama administration planning to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators at Guantanamo—and vindicate the legal experiment the Bush administration could barely get off the ground—The Terror Courts could not be more timely.