"The Art of Coercion"

New from Cornell University Press: The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma by Reid B. C. Pauly.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Art of Coercion presents a fresh explanation for the success―and failure―of coercive demands in international politics.

Strong states are surprisingly bad at coercion. History shows they prevail only a third of the time. Reid B. C. Pauly argues that coercion often fails because targets fear punishment even if they comply. In this "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, targets have little reason to obey.

Pauly illustrates this logic in nuclear counterproliferation efforts with South Africa, Iraq, Libya, and Iran. He shows that coercers face an "assurance dilemma": When threats are more credible, assurances not to punish are less so. But without credible assurances, targets may defy threats, bracing for seemingly inevitable punishment. For coercion to work, as such, coercers must not only make targets believe that they will be punished if they do not comply, but also that they will not be if they do.

Packed with insights for any foreign policy challenge involving coercive strategies, The Art of Coercion crucially corrects assumptions that tougher threats alone achieve results.

Visit Reid B. C. Pauly's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Politics of Failed Policies"

New from Oxford University Press: The Politics of Failed Policies by Sarah James.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Politics of Failed Policies examines the darker side of state autonomy and policy experimentation in our federal system: policy failure. While advances in statistics and computing promised the ability to evaluate the outcomes of state policies more precisely and accurately, the path from information to responsive policy remains far from guaranteed, especially given our highly polarized political climate. Most of the existing scholarship focuses on individual characteristics that affect public officials' likelihood of internalizing new information and refining their policy preferences. In stark contrast, author Sarah Jamestakes a historical institutionalist approach and shows that the design, resources, and processes of state-level research institutions can systematically influence when evidence can overcome confirmation bias and partisan preferences among elected state officials evaluating a policy. This work contributes a more precise definition of a state's capacity for research that better explains political responses to policy failure. The detailed case studies support a theory of policy feedback in which policy and institutional landscape can empower diffusely organized and disadvantaged policy opponents to overcome the power of the traditional winners in the American political economy.

The Politics of Failed Policies takes seriously that policy research and learning are not isolated from the caprices of party politics, and yet I show that state politics and policymaking are not irrevocably beholden to the whims of partisan bickering. While ideological battles, pressure from well-resourced interest groups, and, yes, even elections, remain formidable forces in American politics, strategically designed state policies and institutions can lay a foundation for building a coalition to respond to actual policy outcomes. Choices about policy and institutional design have long-term effects on when, how, and why public officials feel pressured to acknowledge and respond to policy failure.

Visit Sarah James's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unlawful Advances"

New from Princeton University Press: Unlawful Advances: How Feminists Transformed Title IX by Celene Reynolds.

About the book, from the publisher:

The remarkable story of the women who defined sexual harassment as unlawful sex discrimination under Title IX

When the US Congress enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, no one expected it to become a prominent tool for confronting sexual harassment in schools. Title IX is the civil rights law that prohibits education programs from discriminating “on the basis of sex.” At the time, however, the term “sexual harassment” was not yet in use; this kind of misconduct was simply accepted as part of life for girls and women at schools and universities. In Unlawful Advances, Celene Reynolds shows how the women claiming protection under Title IX made sexual harassment into a form of sex discrimination barred by the law. Working together, feminist students and lawyers fundamentally changed the right to equal opportunity in education and schools’ obligations to ensure it.

Drawing on meticulously documented case studies, Reynolds explains how Title IX was applied to sexual harassment, linking the actions of feminists at Cornell, Yale, and Berkeley. Through analyses of key lawsuits and an original dataset of federal Title IX complaints, she traces the evolution of sexual harassment policy in education—from the early applications at elite universities to the growing sexual harassment bureaucracies on campuses today—and how the work of these feminists has forever shaped the law, university governance, and gender relations on campus. Reynolds argues that our political and interpretive struggle over this application of Title IX is far from finished. Her account illuminates this ongoing effort, as well as the more general process by which citizens can transform not only the laws that govern us, but also the very meaning of equality under American law.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Colonization of Names"

New from Columbia University Press: The Colonization of Names: Symbolic Violence and France’s Occupation of Algeria by Benjamin Brower.

About the book, from the publisher:

French colonization dismantled Algerian names. Under the occupation that began in 1830, not only were Algerian towns and streets renamed in honor of French figures, but personal names were forced to follow French conventions and norms. Colonial authorities simplified and transformed Algerian names to suit their administrative and legal purposes, crudely transcribing and transliterating Arabic and Berber. They imposed a two-part name and surname model that stripped away the extended family ties and social context inherent to precolonial naming practices.

This groundbreaking history of personal names in nineteenth-century Algeria sheds new light on the symbolic violence of renaming and the relationship between language and colonialism. Benjamin Claude Brower traces the changes Algerians’ personal names suffered during the colonial era and the consequences for individuals and society. France’s imposition of new names, he argues, destabilized Algerians’ sense of self and place in the community, distorted local identities, and compromised institutions such as the family. Drawing on previously unstudied records, Brower examines different northwestern African naming traditions and how colonialism changed them. With the aid of literary and critical theory, he develops new insights into the name and its relationship to power and subjectivity. A rigorous theoretical and historical account of symbolic violence, The Colonization of Names unveils many unseen forms of harm under colonial rule.

--Marshal Zeringue

"How Time Passes"

New from Oxford University Press: How Time Passes by Thomas Sattig.

About the book, from the publisher:

Time organizes things in a dynamic fashion, whereas space organizes things in a static fashion-so things in time undergo passage, whereas things in space do not. What makes the temporal organization of things dynamic? What is the nature of the passage of time? Traditional discussions of passage have taken one of two perspectives. Some philosophers start with passage as a phenomenon that occurs in the physical world. They ask what constitutes this objective phenomenon. Theirs is a project in metaphysics and the foundations of physics. Others begin with passage as a phenomenon that is given in our experiences of the world. They ask what constitutes this subjective phenomenon. Theirs is a project in philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

In How Time Passes, Thomas Sattig gives both perspectives on passage equal weight. The first part of the book concerns the existence and nature of physical passage. The second part is concerned with the existence and nature of experiential passage. In both parts, the standard kind of explanation of passage is juxtaposed with a new kind of explanation. On the tripartite approach, which has dominated classical and contemporary philosophy of time, the denizens of time undergo passage, in virtue of changing with respect to what is past, what is present, and what is future. On the geometrical approach, the denizens of time undergo passage, in virtue of being temporally organized in a manner that does not involve the holding of any geometrical relations between them.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Legal Plunder"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Legal Plunder: The Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice by Joshua Page and Joe Soss.

About the book, from the publisher:

A searing, historically rich account of how US policing and punishment have been retrofitted over the last four decades to extract public and private revenues from America’s poorest and most vulnerable communities.

Alongside the rise of mass incarceration, a second profound and equally disturbing development has transpired. Since the 1980s, US policing and punishment have been remade into tools for stripping resources from the nation’s most oppressed communities and turning them into public and private revenues. Legal Plunder analyzes this development’s origins, operations, consequences, and the political struggles that it has created.

Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence, including original ethnographic research, Joshua Page and Joe Soss examine the predatory dimensions of criminal legal governance to show how practices that criminalize, police, and punish have been retrofitted to siphon resources from subordinated groups, subsidize governments, and generate corporate profits. As tax burdens have declined for the affluent, this financial extraction—now a core function of the country’s sprawling criminal legal apparatus—further compounds race, class, and gender inequalities and injustices. Legal Plunder shows that we can no longer afford to overlook legal plunder or the efforts to dismantle it.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Canal Dreamers"

Coming soon from the University of North Carolina Press: Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions by Jessica M. Lepler.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the 1820s, there was a little-known quest to unite the world by building a waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. As Spanish American nations declared independence and new canals intensified US expansion and British industrialization, many imagined the construction of an interoceanic canal as predestined. With dreams substituting for data, an international cast of politicians, lawyers, philosophers, and capitalists sent competing agents on a race to transform Lake Nicaragua, the San Juan River, and the terra incognita of Central American forests into the world’s first global waterway.

Jessica M. Lepler tells the captivating story of this global journey in Canal Dreamers. Although the idea of literally changing the world by connecting the oceans proved too revolutionary for the Age of Revolution, the quest itself changed history. Canal dreams prompted political transformations, financial crisis, recognition of new countries, concern about climate change, and more. Full of adventure, corruption, far-reaching consequences, and present-day parallels, Lepler’s absorbing narrative cuts through two centuries, revealing that dreams do not need to come true to make history.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Refusing Sustainability"

New from Stanford University Press: Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe by Elana Resnick.

About the book, from the publisher:

Sustainability has become a touchstone for development worldwide, promising an antidote to environmental degradation and capitalism's excess: waste. Refusing Sustainability presents a fundamentally different account of sustainability and waste itself by uncovering the intersections of international environmental reforms and racialized labor. In Bulgaria, Roma comprise the bulk of the country's waste workers, while anti-Roma racism casts them as socially disposable. Without their labor, however, the country cannot meet the sustainability targets required by the European Union. Drawing on fieldwork that spans twenty years, including eleven months working alongside Romani women street sweepers, and years embedded in waste organizations, political campaigns, Roma NGOs, and activist groups, Elana Resnick examines the power hierarchies that shape both waste management and European geopolitics.

Instead of focusing on only environmental harms or toxic distributions, Refusing Sustainability approaches Romani life-worlds as spaces of creative production, and also tells several larger stories: of postsocialist racial capitalism, environmental progressivism, democratic failures, mutual aid, and the power of women's friendships. Through these stories, Resnick illuminates how ordinary people, racialized as discardable, resist systems that simultaneously rely on and exclude them.

Visit Elana Resnick's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Spanish Atlantic World, 1492–1825"

New from Oxford University Press: The Spanish Atlantic World, 1492–1825: From Kingdoms to Colonies to Independence by Kenneth J. Andrien.

About the book, from the publisher:

The overseas enterprises of Spain expanded dramatically following the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. The Spanish had already conquered the Canary Islands, which served as a base for the later conquest of lands in the Americas (known as the Indies) that served as the foundation of the Spanish Atlantic world. After 1492 Spanish colonists fanned out from a few Caribbean outposts to Mexico, as armies overthrew the Aztec Empire and annexed the Maya domains in southern Mexico and Central America. In just over a decade the Spaniards brought down the Inca Empire, giving the Castilians control over the vast human and mineral resources in South America. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Castilian invaders, followed by crown bureaucrats and Catholic clergymen, consolidated control over the central regions of Mexico and Peru. Spain eventually claimed control over the vast region from the current southwest of the United States to the southern tip of South America, creating a massive domain that brought unimaginable wealth to the Kingdoms of Spain.

This wide-ranging study examines the evolution of the Spanish Atlantic World from its inception with the voyages of Christopher Columbus through the period of conquest and expansion in the sixteenth century, the era of consolidation in the seventeenth century, to the reform and renovation of the eighteenth century, culminating in its slow-motion collapse by 1825. Drawing on traditions from the long Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims, the first conquistadors and settlers attempted to establish a stratified patriarchal society, based on Roman Catholic values and firmly tied to metropolitan Spain and the wider Atlantic world. As Spain became mired in a series of disastrous wars with European rivals and the colonial economy expanded, diversified, and became more self-sufficient in the seventeenth century, colonial elites gained greater political and social power. Under the new French Bourbon dynasty after 1700, crown ministers framed Enlightenment-inspired policies to reform the Spanish Atlantic world, creating a more centralized state apparatus with the ability to raise taxes, curtail contraband commerce, and establish a military capable of defending the interests of the crown against its European foes. These Bourbon Reforms enjoyed successes, despite provoking opposition among conservative groups in Spain and unrest and revolts in the Indies. Finally, Spain became embroiled in the wars of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, which led a French invasion of Iberia, political tumult in Spain and the Indies, and the collapse of the Spanish Atlantic World and independence for the Americas.

Drawing on his extensive research and the most recent literature, eminent historian Kenneth J. Andrien lucidly narrates the three hundred years during which the Spanish Indies evolved from kingdoms of the crown to dependent colonies to independent nations, leading to the fracturing of the Spanish Atlantic world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Resilience beyond Rebellion"

New from Cornell University Press: Resilience beyond Rebellion: How Today's Rebels Become Tomorrow's Parties by Sherry Zaks.

About the book, from the publisher:

Resilience beyond Rebellion addresses a critical question in insurgency studies: Why some rebel groups successfully become political parties, while others die trying.

Only half of rebel groups with political aspirations manage to reinvent themselves as lasting political parties. Sherry Zaks argues that the key to successful rebel-to-party transformations lies in the organizational structures and institutions that rebels build during wartime. These proto-party structures, which involve governance, political messaging, social outreach, and other noncombat tasks, equip rebel groups with the personnel, skills, and routines needed to succeed in the electoral arena.

Zaks draws on insights from organizational sociology to reconceptualize how rebel groups operate. Through examining the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador and other cases, they demonstrate that rebel groups with established proto-party structures often form the core of post-conflict parties and attract more votes. Innovative in approach and rich in evidence, Resilience beyond Rebellion advances our understanding of rebel group dynamics both during and after conflict by showing that party-building begins not with the last bullet fired but with the very first.

Visit Sherry Zaks's website.

--Marshal Zeringue