New Publications - Global and Transnational Sociology

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Encountering US Empire in Socialist Venezuela: The Legacy of Race, Neo-Colonialism, and Democracy Promotion

by Timothy Gill, University of Pittsburgh Press (2022)

Since the end of World War II, the United States has come to dominate the world economically and politically, leading many to describe the United States as an empire. Scholars have analyzed how the US government has worked through international financial institutions, its Central Intelligence Agency, and outright warfare to achieve its will. In this book, Timothy M. Gill spotlights how the US government also worked through democracy promotion to undermine governments abroad, including in Venezuela. President Hugo Chávez, who ruled from 1999 until his death in 2013, was among the democratically elected Latin American state leaders who embraced socialism and challenged the idea of US global power. Gill shows how US government agencies funded and trained opposition parties and activists, and how such intervention often was justified in neocolonial and racist terms. Through analysis of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, embassy cables, and interviews with US government and Venezuelan nonprofit members, Gill details such operations and the imperial thinking behind them.

The Gender Order of Neoliberalism

by Smitha Radhakrishnan and Cinzia D. Solari, Polity Press (2023)

What do mompreneurs, angry working-class men, and migrant domestic workers all have in common? They are all gendered subjects responding to the economic, political, and cultural realities of neoliberalism’s global gender order.

In this ambitious book, Radhakrishnan and Solari map the varied gendered pathways of a global hegemonic regime. Focusing on the US, the former Soviet Union, and South and Southeast Asia, they argue that the interconnected histories of imperialism, socialism, and postcolonialism have converged in a new way since the fall of the Soviet Union, transforming the post-war international order that preceded it. Today, the ideal of the empowered woman – a striving, entrepreneurial subject who overcomes adversity and has many “choices” – symbolizes modernity for diverse countries competing for status in the global hierarchy. This ideal bridges the painful gap between aspiration and lived reality, but also spurs widespread discontent.

The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil

by Katherine Jensen, Chicago University Press (2023)

Brazil has been widely lauded as the best place in the world for refugees. Yet its celebrated policies veil how racism shapes the everyday politics of asylum. The Color of Asylum follows asylum seekers as they navigate the refugee regime—from how they arrive in Brazil, through the steps of applying for asylum and seeking assistance, to their lives after refugee status. It shows how bureaucratic practices produce racialized hierarchies, as the state variably incorporates refugees into the racial political order. In the process, refugees learn what it means to be black—or not—in Brazil. With its rare ethnographic access inside the state, The Color of Asylum garners new insights into bureaucracies and state racial projects, the dynamism of racial states, immigration governance, and the limits of refugee status.

The Migration- Development Regime: How Class Shapes Indian Emigration

by Rina Agarwala, Oxford University Press (2022)

The Migration-Development Regime: How Class Shapes Indian Emigration, is a sweeping history of how India has used its poor and elite emigrants to further Indian development and how Indian emigrants have reacted, resisted, and re- shaped India’s development in response. How can states and migrants themselves explain the causes and effects of global migration? The Migration-Development Regime introduces a novel analytical framework to help answer this question in India, the world’s largest emigrant exporter and the world’s largest remittance-receiving country. Drawing on an archival analysis of Indian government documents, an original data base of Indian migrants’ transnational organizations, and over 200 interviews with poor and elite Indian emigrants, recruiters, and government officials, this book exposes the vital role the Indian state (from the colonial era to the present day) has long played in forging and legitimizing class inequalities within India through the management of international emigration. It also exposes how poor and elite emigrants have differentially resisted and re-shaped state emigration practices over time. By taking a long and class-based view, this book recasts contemporary migration not simply as a problematic function of neoliberalism or as a development panacea for sending countries, but as a dynamic historical process that sending states and migrants have long used to shape local development. In doing so, it re-defines the primary problems of global migration, exposes the material and ideological impact that migration has on sending state development, and isolates what is truly novel about contemporary migration.

The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society

by Bin Xu, Polity (2022)

Against the bleak backdrop of pressing issues in today’s world, civil societies remain vibrant, animated by people’s belief that they should and can solve such issues and build a better society. Their imagination of a good society, their understanding of their engagement, and the ways they choose to act constitute the cultural aspect of civil society. Central to this cultural aspect of civil society is the “culture of democracy,” including normative values, individual interpretations, and interaction norms pertaining to features of a democratic society, such as civility, independence, and solidarity. The culture of democracy varies in different contexts and faces challenges, but it shapes civic actions, alters political and social processes, and thus is the soul of modern civil societies. The Culture of Democracy provides the first systematic survey of the cultural sociology of civil society and offers a committed global perspective. It shows that, as everyone is eager to have their voice heard, cultural sociology can serve as an “art of listening,” a thoroughly empirical approach that takes ideas, meanings, and opinions seriously, for people to contemplate significant theoretical and public issues.

Fractured Militancy: Precarious Resistance in South Africa after Racial Inclusion

by Marcel Paret, Cornell University Press (2022)

What are the legacies and ongoing realities of racial capitalism in the post-civil rights, post-apartheid era? What are the causes and consequences of Black protest, after formal racial inclusion, and how do precarious layers of the working-class forge resistance? Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with activists, Fractured Militancy tells the story of post- apartheid South Africa from the perspective of four low-income Black neighborhoods in and around Johannesburg – along the way, offering parallels and contrasts to the United States. It will be of interest to scholars and students of race, immigration, social movements, and the political dimensions of capitalism. Marcel Paret traces rising protests back to the process of democratization and racial inclusion, which took the form of an elite- driven “passive revolution” from above. This process dangled the possibility of change but preserved racial inequality and economic insecurity, prompting residents to use militant protests to express their deep sense of betrayal and to demand recognition and community development. Underscoring remarkable parallels to Black Lives Matter in the United States, this account attests to an ongoing struggle for Black liberation in the wake of formal racial inclusion. Rather than unified resistance, however, class struggles within the process of racial inclusion produced a fractured militancy. Revealing the complicated truth behind the celebrated “success” of South African democratization, Paret uncovers a society divided by wealth, urban geography, nationality, employment, and political views. Fractured Militancy warns of the threat that capitalism and elite class struggles present to social movements and racial justice everywhere.

Authoritarianism and Civil Society in Asia

edited by Anthony Spires and Akhiro Ogawa, Routledge (2022)

Sociology in Ecuador

by Philipp Altmann, Palgrave Macmillan (2022)

This Palgrave Pivot presents a concise yet comprehensive history of sociology in Ecuador. The case of Ecuador is especially interesting, as Ecuadorian sociology oscillated between theoretical debates—some of them out of time —and a constant search for ways of applying them to the local reality. In the decades after its formal creation in 1915, early academic sociology in Ecuador worked creatively with already outdated theories around positivism and organicism to understand the indigenous population’s position, the regional fragmentation, and the formation of a coherent nation-state in Ecuador. After a short attempt of installing a more technical sociology in the 1960s, those topics were taken up and re-read by Marxist-inspired critical sociology after the 1970s, leading to the nation-wide institutionalization of one particular tradition that could connect to continental debates. This book engages with several relevant debates in social sciences and humanities, particularly by adding to the thriving research on social sciences and the role of the university and higher education in Latin America. Furthermore, it touches some recently influential topics in sociology: Ecuadorian sociology can be read as Southern Theory or engaged with from a postcolonial or decolonial perspective; the research on how ideas travel, are diffused or localized is vital for understanding sociology in Ecuador; the relation between academia and politics; and more.

Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China’s Global Rise

by Monica Liu, Stanford University Press (2022)

Commercial dating agencies that facilitate marriages across national borders comprise a $2.5 billion global industry. Ideas about the industry are rife with stereotypes—younger, more physically attractive brides from non-Western countries being paired with older Western men. These ideas are more myth than fact, Monica Liu finds in Seeking Western Men. Her study of China’s email- order bride industry offers stories of Chinese women who are primarily middle-aged, divorced, and proactively seeking spouses to fulfill their material and sexual needs. What they seek in their Western partners is tied to what they believe they’ve lost in the shifting global economy around them. Ranging from multimillionaire entrepreneurs or ex-wives and mistresses of wealthy Chinese businessmen, to contingent sector workers and struggling single mothers, these women, along with their translators and potential husbands from the US, Canada, and Australia, make up the actors in this multifaceted story. Set against the backdrop of China’s global economic ascendance and a relative decline of the West, this book asks: How does this reshape Chinese women’s perception of Western masculinity? Through the unique window of global internet dating, this book reveals the shifting relationships of race, class, gender, sex, and intimacy across borders.

The Global Rules of Art. The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy

by Larissa Buchholz, Princeton University Press (2022)

Based on sources that span more than a hundred years and countries as well as fieldwork on four continents, The Global Rules of Art. The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy examines the multifaceted historical developments that affected the emergence of a global field in the visual arts. It moreover illuminates how creative producers from formerly colonized or “peripheral” places can reach worldwide visibility and recognition, shedding light on conditions that enable globalizing cultural spaces to become more diverse. Blending comprehensive historical analysis with detailed case studies, theoretically the book contributes to the advancement of multi-scalar global fields analysis as a relatively new paradigm in global and transnational sociology.

A People’s Guide to New York City

by Carolina Bank Muñoz, Penny Lewis and Emily Tumpson Molina, University of California Press (2022)

This alternative guidebook for one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations explores all five boroughs to reveal a people’s New York City. The sites and stories of A People’s Guide to New York City shift our perception of what defines New York, placing the passion, determination, defeats, and victories of its people at the core. Delving into the histories of New York’s five boroughs, you will encounter enslaved Africans in revolt, women marching for equality, workers on strike, musicians and performers claiming streets for their art, and neighbors organizing against landfills and industrial toxins and in support of affordable housing and public schools. The streetscapes that emerge from these groups’ struggles bear the traces, and this book shows you where to look to find them.
New York City is a preeminent global city, serving as the headquarters for hundreds of multinational firms and a world-renowned cultural hub for fashion, art, and music. It is among the most multicultural cities in the world and also one of the most segregated cities in the United States. The people that make this global city function—immigrants, people of color, and the working classes—reside largely in the so-called outer boroughs, outside the corporations, neon, and skyscrapers of Manhattan. A People’s Guide to New York City expands the scope and scale of traditional guidebooks, providing an equitable exploration of the diverse communities throughout the city. Through the stories of over 150 sites across the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island as well as thematic tours and contemporary and archival photographs, a people’s New York emerges, one in which collective struggles for justice and freedom have shaped the very landscape of the city.

Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India

by Smitha Radhakrishnan, Duke University Press (2022)

In the past two decades, India’s commercial microfinance industry has come to saturate the everyday lives of women in the name of state-led efforts to promote financial inclusion and women’s empowerment. Despite this favorable language, however, Making Women Pay show that although microfinance in India may appear to help women borrowers, the industry instead extracts the maximum value from its customers through exploitative relationships that benefit especially class-privileged men. Through ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis, Radhakrishnan demonstrates how the unpaid and underpaid labor of marginalized women borrowers ensures both profitability and symbolic legitimacy for microfinance institutions, their employees, and their leaders. In doing so, she centralizes gender in the study of microfinance, reveals why most microfinance programs target women, and explores the exploitative implications of this targeting.

AT RISK: INDIAN SEXUAL POLITICS AND THE GLOBAL AIDS CRISIS

by Gowri Vijaykumar, Stanford University Press (2021)

In the mid-1990s, experts predicted that India would face the world’s biggest AIDS epidemic by 2000. Though a crisis at this scale never fully materialized, global public health institutions, donors, and the Indian state initiated a massive effort to prevent it. HIV prevention programs channeled billions of dollars toward those groups designated as at-risk—sex workers and men who have sex with men. At Risk captures this unique moment in which these criminalized and marginalized groups reinvented their “at-risk” categorization and became central players in the crisis response. The AIDS crisis created a contradictory, conditional, and temporary opening for sex-worker and LGBTIQ activists to renegotiate citizenship and to make demands on the state. Working across India and Kenya, Gowri Vijayakumar provides a fine-grained account of the political struggles at the heart of the Indian AIDS response. These range from everyday articulations of sexual identity in activist organizations in Bangalore to new approaches to HIV prevention in Nairobi, where prevention strategies first introduced in India are adapted and circulate, as in the global AIDS field more broadly. Vijayakumar illuminates how the politics of gender, sexuality, and nationalism shape global crisis response. In so doing, she considers the precarious potential for social change in and after a crisis.

Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA

by Nadia Y. Kim, Stanford University Press (2021)

The industrial-port belt of Los Angeles is home to eleven of the top twenty oil refineries in California, the largest ports in the country, and those “racist monuments” we call freeways. In this uncelebrated corner of “La La Land” through which most of America’s goods transit, pollution is literally killing the residents. In response, a grassroots movement for environmental justice has grown, predominated by Asian and undocumented Latin@ immigrant women who are transforming our political landscape—yet we know very little about these change makers. In Refusing Death, Nadia Y. Kim tells their stories, finding that the women are influential because of their ability to remap politics, community, and citizenship in the face of the country’s nativist racism and system of class injustice, defined not just by disproportionate environmental pollution but also by neglected schools, surveillance and deportation, and political marginalization. The women are highly conscious of how these harms are an assault on their bodies and emotions, and of their resulting reliance on a state they prefer to avoid and ignore. In spite of such challenges and contradictions, however, they have developed creative, unconventional, and loving ways to support and protect one another. They challenge the state’s betrayal, demand respect, and, ultimately, refuse death.

Dying to Count: Post-Abortion Care and Global Reproductive Health Politics in Senegal.

by Siri Suh, Rutgers University Press (2021)

During the early 1990s, global health experts developed a new model of emergency obstetric care: post-abortion care or PAC. In developing countries with restrictive abortion laws and where NGOs relied on US family planning aid, PAC offered an apolitical approach to addressing the consequences of unsafe abortion. In Dying to Count, Siri Suh traces how national and global population politics collide in Senegal as health workers, health officials, and NGO workers strive to demonstrate PAC’s effectiveness in the absence of rigorous statistical evidence that the intervention reduces maternal mortality. Suh argues that pragmatically assembled PAC data convey commitments to maternal mortality reduction goals while obscuring the frequency of unsafe abortion and the inadequate care women with complications are likely to receive if they manage to reach a hospital. At a moment when African women face the highest risk worldwide of death from complications related to pregnancy, birth, or abortion, Suh’s ethnography of PAC in Senegal makes a critical contribution to studies of global health, population and development, African studies, and reproductive justice.

Abortion and Democracy: Contentious Body Politics in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay

by Barbara Sutton and Nayla Luz Vacarezza, Routledge (2021)

Abortion and Democracy offers critical analyses of abortion politics in Latin America’s Southern Cone, with lessons and insights of wider significance. Drawing on the region’s recent history of military dictatorship and democratic transition, this edited volume explores how abortion rights demands fit with current democratic agendas. With a focus on Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, the book’s contributors delve into the complex reality of abortion through the examination of the discourses, strategies, successes, and challenges of abortion rights movements. Assembling a multiplicity of voices and experiences, the contributions illuminate key dimensions of abortion rights struggles: health aspects, litigation efforts, legislative debates, party politics, digital strategies, grassroots mobilization, coalition-building, affective and artistic components, and movement-countermovement dynamics. The book takes an approach that is sensitive to social inequalities and to the transnational aspects of abortion rights struggles in each country. It bridges different scales of analysis, from abortion experiences at the micro level of the clinic or the home to the macro sociopolitical and cultural forces that shape individual lives. This is an important intervention suitable for students and scholars of abortion politics, democracy in Latin America, gender and sexuality, and women’s rights.

Chairman Mao’s Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China

by Bin Xu, Cambridge University Press (2021)

In the 1960s and 1970s, around 17 million Chinese youths were mobilized or forced by the state to migrate to rural villages and China’s frontiers. Bin Xu tells the story of how this ‘sent-down’ generation have come to terms with their difficult past. Exploring representations of memory including personal life stories, literature, museum exhibits, and acts of commemoration, he argues that these representations are defined by a struggle to reconcile worthiness with the political upheavals of the Mao years. These memories, however, are used by the state to construct an official narrative that weaves this generation’s experiences into an upbeat story of the ‘China dream’. This marginalizes those still suffering and obscures voices of self-reflection on their moral-political responsibility for their actions. Xu provides careful analysis of this generation of ‘Chairman Mao’s children’, caught between the political and the personal, past and present, nostalgia and regret, and pride and trauma.

August 19, 2020

Coming of Age in Iran: Poverty and the Struggle for Dignity

by Manata Hashemi. NYU Press (2020)

Crippling sanctions, inflation, and unemployment have increasingly burdened young people in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Coming of Age in Iran, Manata Hashemi takes us inside the lives of poor Iranian youth, showing how these young men and women face their future prospects. Drawing on first-hand accounts, Hashemi follows their stories, one by one, as they struggle to climb up the proverbial ladder of success. Based on years of ethnographic research among these youth in their homes, workspaces, and places of leisure, Hashemi shows how public judgments can give rise to meaningful changes for some while making it harder for others to escape poverty. Ultimately, Hashemi sheds light on the pressures these young men and women face, showing how many choose to comply with—rather than resist—social norms in their pursuit of status and belonging. Coming of Age in Iran tells the unprecedented story of how Iran’s young and struggling attempt to extend dignity and alleviate misery, illuminating the promises—and limits—of finding one’s place during a time of profound uncertainty.

Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions: Prospects for a Critical Sociology

by Tamás Demeter. Leiden-Boston: Brill (2019)

This volume is devoted to the central themes in Iván Szelényi’s sociological oeuvre comprising of empirical explorations and their theoretical refinement in the last 50 years. The contributors have been asked to take interpretive and critical stances on his work, and to clarify the relevance of his insights. Iván Szelényi has been asked to write a concluding chapter, and respond to the present reflections on his work. The ensuing volume discusses Szelényi’s captivating scholarship as being grounded in a complex program for the political economy of socialisms and post-socialist capitalisms, and introduces him as a neoclassical sociologist whose research projects continue to investigate inequalities created by the interaction of markets and redistributive structures in various societies. Contributors include: Dorothee Bohle, Tamás Demeter, Gil Eyal, Béla Greskovits, Michael D. Kennedy, Tamás Kolosi, Karmo Kroos, Victor Nee, David Ost, Iván Szelényi, Bruce Western.

Exit and Voice: The Paradox of Cross-Border Politics in Mexico

by Tamás Demeter. Leiden-Boston: Brill (2019)

Gringolandia: Lifestyle Migration under Late Capitalism

by Matthew Hayes. University of Minnesota Press (2018).

Even as the “migration crisis” from the Global South to the Global North rages on, another, lower-key and yet important migration has been gathering pace in recent years—that of mostly white, middle-class people moving in the opposite direction. Gringolandia is that rare book to consider this phenomenon in all its complexity.

Matthew Hayes focuses on North Americans relocating to Cuenca, Ecuador, the country’s third-largest city and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Many began relocating there after the 2008 economic crisis. Most are self-professed “economic refugees” who sought offshore retirement, affordable medical care, and/or a lower–cost location. Others, however, sought adventure marked by relocation to an unfamiliar cultural environment and to experience personal growth through travel, illustrative of contemporary cultures of aging. These life projects are often motivated by a desire to escape economic and political conditions in North America.

Regardless of their individual motivations, Hayes argues, such North–South migrants remain embedded in unequal and unfair global social relations. He explores the repercussions on the host country—from rising prices for land and rent to the reproduction of colonial patterns of domination and subordination. In Ecuador, heritage preservation and tourism development reflect the interests and culture of European-descendant landowning elites, who have most to benefit from the new North–South migration. In the process, they participate in transnational gentrification that marginalizes popular traditions and nonwhite mestizo and indigenous informal workers. The contrast between the migration experiences of North Americans in Ecuador and those of Ecuadorians or others from such regions of the Global South in North America and Europe demonstrates that, in fact, what we face is not so much a global “migration crisis” but a crisis of global social justice.

Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines

by Victoria Reyes. Stanford University Press (2019).

The U.S. military continues to be an overt presence in the Philippines, and a reminder of the country’s colonial past. Using Subic Bay (a former U.S. military base, now a Freeport Zone) as a case study, Victoria Reyes argues that its defining feature is its ability to elicit multiple meanings. For some, it is a symbol of imperialism and inequality, while for others, it projects utopian visions of wealth and status. Drawing on archival and ethnographic data, Reyes describes the everyday experiences of people living and working in Subic Bay, and makes a case for critically examining similar spaces across the world. These foreign-controlled, semi-autonomous zones of international exchange are what she calls global borderlands. While they can take many forms, ranging from overseas military bases to tourist resorts, they all have key features in common. This new unit of globalization provides a window into broader economic and political relations, the consequences of legal ambiguity, and the continuously reimagined identities of the people living there. Rejecting colonialism as merely a historical backdrop, Reyes demonstrates how it is omnipresent in our modern world.

Gift Exchange: The Transnational History of a Political Idea

by Grégoire Mallard. Cambridge Uni Press (2019).

Since Marcel Mauss published his foundational essay The Gift in 1925, many anthropologists and specialists of international relations have seen in the exchange of gifts, debts, loans, concessions or reparations the sources of international solidarity and international law. Still, Mauss’s reflections were deeply tied to the context of interwar Europe and the French colonial expansion. Their normative dimension has been profoundly questioned after the age of decolonization. A century after Mauss, we may ask: what is the relevance of his ideas on gift exchanges and international solidarity? By tracing how Mauss’s theoretical and normative ideas inspired prominent thinkers and government officials in France and Algeria, from Pierre Bourdieu to Mohammed Bedjaoui, Grégoire Mallard adds a building block to our comprehension of the role that anthropology, international law, and economics have played in shaping international economic governance from the age of European colonization to the latest European debt crisis. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Gringolandia: Lifestyle Migration under Late Capitalism

by Matthew Hayes. University of Minnesota Press (2018).

Trade Battles: Activism and the Politicization of International Trade Policy

by Tamara Kay & R. L. Evans. Oxford Uni Press (2018).

Trade was once an esoteric economic issue with little domestic policy resonance. Activists did not prioritize it, and grassroots political mobilization seemed unlikely to free trade advocates. The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s was therefore expected to be a fait accompli. Yet, as Trade Battles shows, activists pushed back: they increased the public consciousness on trade, mobilized new constituencies against it, and demanded that the rules of the global economy protect the collective rights and common good of citizens. Activists also forged a sustained challenge to U.S. trade policies after NAFTA, setting the stage for future trade battles. Using data from extensive archival materials and over 215 interviews with Mexican, Canadian, and U.S. trade negotiators; labor and environmental activists; and government officials, Tamara Kay and R.L. Evans assess how activists politicized trade policy by leveraging broad divisions across state and non-state arenas. Further, they demonstrate how activists were not only able to politicize trade policy, but also to pressure negotiators to include labor and environmental protections in NAFTA’s side agreements. A timely contribution, Trade Battles seeks to understand the role of civil society in shaping state policy.

Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers.

by David S. FitzGerald. Oxford Uni Press (2019).

In Refuge beyond Reach, David Scott FitzGerald traces how rich democracies have deliberately and systematically shut down most legal paths to safety. Drawing on official government documents, information obtained via WikiLeaks, and interviews with asylum seekers, he finds that for ninety-nine percent of refugees, the only way to find safety in one of the prosperous democracies of the Global North is to reach its territory and then ask for asylum. FitzGerald shows how the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia comply with the letter of the law while violating the spirit of those laws through a range of deterrence methods – first designed to keep out Jews fleeing the Nazis – that have now evolved into a pervasive global system of “remote control.” While some of the most draconian remote control practices continue in secret, FitzGerald identifies some pressure points and finds that a diffuse humanitarian obligation to help those in need is more difficult for governments to evade than the law alone.

In summary, this book:

Explores why 99% of refugees can only find safety in the prosperous democracies of the Global North by asking for asylum after they arrive.
Describes how governments have developed increasingly elaborate techniques of remote control to keep asylum seekers away from spaces where they can ask for sanctuary.
Uses American diplomatic cables from the 2000s released by WikiLeaks and declassified CIA documents from the 1960s through early 1980s to provide an unprecedented window into policymaking behind the scenes.

America, As Seen on TV: How Television Shapes Immigrant Expectations around the Globe

by Clara E. Rodriguez. NYU Press (2018).

Based on in-depth interviews with 70 international college students and foreign nationals working or living in the US, America, As Seen on TV explores the global and transnational effects of US TV content on global viewers. Specifically, how does watching “American” TV impact views about race, class, gender, and sexuality? And how do these views match the actual realities migrants experience when they come to the US? Rodriguez finds that that many of the foreign born were surprised to learn that America is racially and economically diverse; and, that it does not reflect the “easy-breezy, happy-endings” culture portrayed in the media they watched before they came. Interestingly, Rodriguez finds that the 171 US millennials she surveyed also share the sense that American TV does not accurately reflect racial/ethnic relations in the US; and that what American TV projects is different from what they have experienced (in this regard) in real life. However, the two groups, i.e., the US millennials and the foreign born, young adults, differ on how much they think US TV has influenced their views in other areas, e.g., in views about sexual behavior, smoking, and drinking. These differences allow us to draw a larger picture of media consumption and its effects both in the US and in other countries. As Carlos E. Cortés, author of The Children Are Watching: How the Media Teach about Diversity, says “This is a landmark study of television’s role in shaping popular views of our nation, particularly its racial, ethnic, class, and gender diversity.” It is particularly timely in today’s political climate, where many have become aware of the role that TV has had in influencing the public’s views on past and future candidates for public office.

Strategic Impasse: Social Origins of Geopolitical Disarray

by Juan E. Corradi. Routledge (2019).

The book seeks to ground geopolitics in social theory and social research, in a language accessible to students and lay readers alike. The first part analyzes the inability of Western powers to enact international initiatives of their choice. What and who prevents them? Europe and the United States seem unable to manage and mitigate unavoidable challenges and to prevent avoidable ones. The book offers some historical and comparative reflections on previous episodes of “losing the center”, as they may apply to the apparent decline of Western hegemony and then moves on to explore (1) the de-coupling of political systems from the concerns of the citizenry, and (2) the polarization within the systems, or the disarray of elites. It offers an explanation for the distraction of leaders from geopolitical challenges in Europe and the US and a parallel development at the level of civil society: a mixture of routine distraction and fitful protests. Ongoing research on the apparent paradox of increased connectivity and collective disengagement from the political process helps us understand a perverse dynamic between publics and elites, with a serious impact on international affairs.

The second part of the book is devoted to alternate views of power and destiny manifest in the growing geopolitical weight of China, and the possible scenarios of collaboration or clash between East and West. A centerpiece of this section of the book is an analysis of the changing nature of armed conflict, not as a topic per se but as a window from which to observe the strategic impasse in which the West finds itself, and to gauge the utility of the concept. The question here is: how can incipient decline be managed and distracting paralysis overcome? A final chapter discloses the observational position –a Latin American perspective—as a source of hypotheses.

Surviving State Terror: Women’s Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina by Barbara Sutton. NYU Press (2018).

Based on oral testimonies of women who survived clandestine detention centers during a period of state terrorism in Argentina (1976–83), this book illuminates the gendered and embodied forms of trauma that women endured as well as their historical and political agency. Through the lens of the body as a transversal theme, the book reveals multiple gendered dimensions of experience during captivity and beyond. While sexual violence as a weapon of state terror is addressed, the book transcends this focus to show more subtle dynamics of gender inscription through torture. Similarly, though the study attends to motherhood ideologies and the egregious treatment of pregnant women in captivity, it also explores women’s experiences beyond maternity. In contrast to much work on human rights violations in Argentina and other parts of Latin America, which focuses on family members of the disappeared, this book brings to the fore the stories of women who themselves were forcibly disappeared but ultimately survived. Surviving State Terror includes accounts of the specific forms of victimization that women experienced, but it also incorporates women’s narratives of solidarity, resistance, and political organizing. Attending to women’s perspectives on social change, human rights, and democracy, the book highlights the importance of their testimonies beyond experiences of captivity. Through these poignant stories, the book connects past, present, and future: it draws on the urgent lessons that women survivors offer to a world that continues to grapple with atrocity and underscores the vital role of collective organizing as a means of social transformation.

Rules Without Rights: Land, Labor, and Private Authority in the Global Economy by Tim Bartley.

Oxford University Press (2018).

Activists have exposed startling forms of labor exploitation and environmental degradation in global industries, leading many large retailers and brands to adopt standards for fairness and sustainability. This book is about the idea that transnational corporations can push these standards through their global supply chains, and in effect, pull factories, forests, and farms out of their local contexts and up to global best practices. For many scholars and practitioners, this kind of private regulation and global standard-setting can provide an alternative to regulation by territorially-bound, gridlocked, or incapacitated nation states, potentially improving environments and working conditions around the world and protecting the rights of exploited workers, impoverished farmers, and marginalized communities. But can private, voluntary standards actually create meaningful forms of regulation? Are forests and factories around the world actually being made into sustainable ecosystems and decent workplaces? Can global norms remake local orders?

This book provides striking new answers by comparing the private regulation of land and labor in democratic and authoritarian settings. Case studies of sustainable forestry and fair labour standards in Indonesia and China show not only how transnational standards are implemented ‘on the ground’ but also how they are constrained and reconfigured by domestic governance. Combining rich multi-method analyses, a powerful comparative approach, and a new theory of private regulation, Rules without Rights reveals the contours and contradictions of transnational governance.

Cambridge University Press Contentious Politics Series (2018). ‘Political Translation.

How Social Movement Democracies Survive’ by Nicole Doerr

Can democracy work in multiethnic, multilingual social movements?

The arrival of millions of refugees in Europe has made many people interested in the challenges that linguistic and cultural misunderstandings may pose to democracy and civic participation. How can people work together across differences in increasingly multilingual, globalized social movements and in local communities and international organizations engaged in solidarity with immigrants, disadvantaged groups, and refugees? Over a decade, scholars of globalization/transnational social movements race/ethnicity, gender/intersectionality, and immigration/political participation have debated this issue. In Political Translation, Nicole Doerr presents the collective practices of political translation, which helped multilingual and culturally diverse social movements and intersectional coalitions work together more democratically. The book’s counterintuitive finding is that because both multilingual and highly diverse deliberative group settings drew explicit attention to cultural differences between participants, these settings also inspired political translation, the collective practice of openly challenging and tackling positional misunderstandings regarding race, gender, class and language differences or other cultural differences. These misunderstandings remain unseen within models of neutral facilitation and, in turn, impede democratic dialogue and deliberation. The book’s analysis reviews a wide range of political deliberations covering high-stakes, fundamental issues, such as inequality in the context of European integration; and immigration, race, gender, and housing politics in the United States.

Reviews

‘For decades, those of us intensely interested in the inequalities that typically arise in social movements despaired of finding ways to counter those inequalities – of class, gender, race, and language. Now, in a breakthrough analysis, Nicole Doerr shows how the techniques of political translation can right many of the inegalitarian wrongs that typically flow from an open participatory setting. In a series of closely observed and well-analyzed cases, Doerr shows how social movement activists evolved these techniques and used them effectively. A must-read for anyone interested in social movements or (an unusual juxtaposition) deliberative democratic theory.’

-Jane Mansbridge – Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, Harvard University

‘Political Translation is one of those rare gems that offers a fresh perspective – dare I say, a new language – for understanding recurrent themes in the study and practice of participatory democracy: power, inequality, inclusion/exclusion, and bridging cultural-political differences. This path-breaking analysis highlights translation as a critical practice and metaphor with the potential to transform our understanding of social movements.’

Jeffrey S. Juris – Northeastern University, Massachusetts

‘At last – an innovative, specific way to make public deliberation inclusive, democratic, and effective. Nicole Doerr’s groundbreaking study of decision-making forums on two continents is a must-read for anyone interested in moving beyond the tensions and misunderstandings of modern politics.’

-Kathleen Blee – Senior Associate Dean, Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh

‘Rich in empirical evidence and original in its theoretical approach, this book discusses challenges and opportunities for the discursive quality of democracy in culturally diverse forums. Different from neutral facilitators, political translators have the potential to address positional misunderstanding emerging from inequalities and power. An essential read for those who are interested in deliberative democracy in social movements and beyond.’

-Donatella della Porta – Dean of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence