Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2020 -

Han (Univ. of Hong Kong) has given readers a timely, up-to-date study of state-building in the China-Myanmar-Thailand borderland zone. His two primary goals are to illustrate how nation- and state-building are iterative processes that occur across national boundaries, and to use this borderland zone as a case study of these processes. This text is especially interesting as the author provides a new understanding of this complex borderland in the modern era, a process that illustrates how deeply intertwined China is with its neighbors Myanmar and Thailand. Han's approach is a welcome shift from the traditional area studies method of treating each country separately, facilitated further by his distinction of state- and nation-building as different but interrelated processes most affected by cross-border dynamics, what Han calls the "neighborhood effect" (p. 9). Specialists will appreciate the author's use of sources in multiple languages, while general readers will welcome how this highly accessible account makes sense of a complex geographic, political, and ethnic context. Readers not familiar with this terrain should first consult James Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed (CH, Jul'10, 47-6429).Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

Mares (Yale) and Young (Univ. of California, Davis) use both ethnographic and survey evidence to analyze everyday politics in poor rural regions of Hungary and Romania. Local politicians use their discretion in allocating state resources to buy votes; they also exploit political differences within the community by applying welfare programs in a coercive manner, thus attracting support from the working poor. This signaling blurs the distinction between clientilistic and programmatic appeals. Threats seem to be more effective than gifts, and employers or moneylenders are often used as intermediaries. Such tactics are used by parties on both the Right and the Left. A flawed electoral system combines with such factors as corruption and poverty to lead to widespread disillusionment with the efficacy of democracy. Exemplary in its use of both qualitative and quantitative methods, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of electoral politics around the world.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Berman (Barnard College) reviews the travails of democracy from 1789 onward to demonstrate that repeated backsliding has both delayed its success and made it uneven. Berman implicitly refutes recent democracy mavens who have seen democracy falling easily into place after tyranny. Arranging the book mostly by country--England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and East Central Europe--the author shows that democratic growth, intermittent and difficult, faced massive resistance at every turn. Unfair taxation, government debt, and war helped overthrow old regimes. Conservative forces, historically led by landed gentry, demanded strong-man rule to end chaos that followed overthrow. The Europe-wide upheavals of 1848 were crushed everywhere. Fragmented societies worked against democracy. Papering over the splits may have lead to fascism, which possibly began with France's Georges Boulanger in 1889. Boulanger reaped mass discontent by mixing religion, anti-corruption, nationalism, pseudo-socialism, and populism, which still draw discontented groups. State building, nation building, and democracy building require sequencing over time; attempting them simultaneously guarantees breakdown. Berman argues that from its first emergence, democracy may take one or two centuries to reach stability. Berman scarcely mentions Trump, but her lessons are clear enough. She gives preference to recent works in her end notes. Berman's book provides an essential grounding for those studying comparative politics.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This excellent book makes an important contribution to the literature on South Asian security, addressing the neglected issue of state-nonstate alliances in civil wars. Biberman (Skidmore College) investigates why states would outsource violence to deal with domestic insurgencies at the risk of losing legitimacy through four comparative case studies. She analyzes Pakistan's counterinsurgency campaign in East Pakistan/Bangladesh (1971), India's counterinsurgency in Kashmir (1988-2003), Pakistan's alliance with nonstate actors to combat a tribal "awakening" in the northwest (2002-14), and India's alliance with nonstate actors to deal with a tribal "awakening" in Chhattisgarh (2004-15). She validates her model with additional case studies of Turkey's counterinsurgency against Kurdish rebels (1984-99) and Russia's two counterinsurgency campaigns in Chechnya (1994-96 and 1999-2009). Using extended archival research and over 200 interviews, Biberman explains these decisions to arm citizens against insurgents using a "new balance-of-interests theory" that draws on structural and neoclassical realism. Debunking the idea that democracies do not outsource violence, the author condemns this practice for violating international humanitarian law and concludes that instead of using proxies, India and Pakistan must address the social, economic, and political conditions underlying domestic unrest. This is a useful addition to the literature on civil wars and the conflict over Kashmir.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This clear, thoughtful, and persuasive case study helps explain why anti-immigration forces have successfully helped restrict social welfare for immigrants in some wealthy nations. Political scientist Koning (Univ. of Guelph) carefully examines the policies used to choke off social provision for immigrants and the differences in national welfare states, analyzing the experiences of Sweden, Canada, and the Netherlands in responding to emerging political demands for immigrant exclusion. As he finds, economic problems are not driving these restrictions. Instead, the willingness of mainstream political parties to accept or reject these demands is producing restrictive policies, as happened in the Netherlands. There, mainstream political parties have responded to pressures from emerging anti-immigrant parties by absorbing and implementing parts of the immigrant exclusion agenda. In contrast, Canadian mainstream parties have marginalized such impulses to single out immigrants because of Canada's very strong national identity as an immigrant nation. Instead of excluding immigrants, Sweden has embraced them and extended to them the benefits of social welfare (at least for now). This excellent study includes a very valuable bibliography and is recommended for scholars and students seeking to understand anti-immigration success and comparative political parties.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

Khosla (Ashoka Univ., India) has produced an excellent and superbly argued study of the "world's longest constitution." A revision of the author's Harvard dissertation, this postcolonial and nationalist tract analyzes the basis of British constitutional ideas and how the Indian constitution broke from underlying imperialist assumptions. The study argues for Indian agency. The key factor was the transformation of the vote, which went from being based on property and education to one of universal suffrage. Particularly impressive is Khosla's discussion of the world views of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and B. R. Ambedkar, the writer of the constitution, who was born into a community treated as untouchable. In large measure, the constitution was a self-conscious repudiation of communal representation and the two-nation theory. Gandhi and Nehru could not accept Jinnah's demand for representation on the basis of religious identity. Gandhi could not accept Ambedkar's need for caste representation. Separate electorates led to separatism; India would be based on Nehru's universalist and Gandhi's idealistic principles. History has proved Jinnah right and Ambedkar correct. The constitution, pace postmodernists, has never created people who were their own agents creating their own political identity.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

As the momentum behind Latin America's left recedes, this important, cohesive, timely volume, edited by Ellner, a well-known scholar of Latin America, takes stock of the successes and failures of the Pink Tide. Separate chapters consider "radical" Pink Tide governments (Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador), "pragmatic" Pink Tide governments (the Workers' Party in Brazil, the Frente Amplio in Uruguay, and "Kirchnerism" in Argentina), and the left in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Mexico. One of the volume's core arguments is that aspirations for structural transformation were severely constrained by the hegemony of global capitalism as Pink Tide governments largely maintained "extractivist" economic models based on commodity exports. However, despite these constraints, these governments sought to reduce social and economic injustice and succeeded, according to the authors. Contributing scholars hail from diverse countries, providing a wealth of valuable information for each case study. They effectively engage with questions regarding the implications of global capitalism's hegemony for the political economy of Latin America, though this reviewer would have liked them to wrestle more vigorously with questions drawn from the dictum "absolute power corrupts absolutely."Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals.

This unusual and important collection of essays by social scientists, attorneys, tribal leaders, and activists reflects on efforts by indigenous peoples in English-settled countries to move from decades of demanding recognition and rights to actual construction of forms of self-governance. The 12 contributors discuss case studies in new forms of indigenous self-governance in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US. An introduction cogently frames the topic--the shift from protest and activism characteristic of the decades starting in 1960 to a phase of "implementation of self-determination," with or without the approval or support of the larger nation--and the states in which indigenous peoples find themselves embedded. In their well-written essays, contributors show that indigenous self-determination is being advanced through myriad experiments with self-governance--experiments that have in common the imperatives of sustained local involvement and adequately designed structures of decision-making and implementation. No one model of indigenous self-government can serve all peoples and all circumstances. As the collection emphasizes, the initiative for choosing and adapting models of governance must rest with indigenous peoples themselves, not with the authorities of the settler states that have ruled indigenous peoples for centuries.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Japan's intelligence failure, detailed in this book, is all the more remarkable given Japan's political, military, social, and economic successes since the country's emergence on the world stage in the mid-19th century. After presenting an analytic schema for identifying the pathologies of the intelligence process, which merits application in other country case studies, Samuels (MIT) charts the development, or perhaps the underdevelopment, of Japan's intelligence apparatus. During the interbella period, the Imperial Army's Second Bureau and the Imperial Navy's Third Bureau failed both to coordinate and to recognize the true global balance of power. As evidence of the latter, the top one-quarter of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy officers sent abroad for education during this period were sent to Germany, France, and the Soviet Union rather than to Britain and the US. Samuels's assessment of the post-Cold War period offers little reassurance that problems identified in the Cold War--bureaucratic sclerosis, uncoordinated collection and analysis, and weak oversight--have been adequately addressed. A thorough, and thoroughly alarming, treatment of the subject matter, this book is a valuable contribution to the study of intelligence.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

This volume is a welcome addition to the literature on comparative constitutionalism, a fairly new branch of legal learning that began to emerge in response to the fall of the wall--that is, in response to the decline of Soviet-style state socialism and attempts to replace it with regimes constructed along the lines of liberal notions of the rule of law. The principal area of contestation between old (socialist) and new (democratic) constitutional regions was East Central Europe, which witnessed intense conflicts over the legitimacy of their post-communist governments. Most Western legal observers, this reviewer included, predicted the triumph of liberal democratic constitutionalism as the core of a new world order. But it looks as though we were wrong, as states around the world are now moving in an illiberal and even anti-constitutional direction. This superb collection of essays by leading (mostly Western) scholars will help readers locate the ways in which constitutionalism has settled out in the early 21st century. The essays are well grounded, nicely written, and fair in their legal-political arguments. Together they constitute a good picture of where the world now stands with respect to constitutionalism.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Part of the "Indiana Series in Middle East Studies," this volume, edited by King (Georgetown Univ.) and Maghraoui (Duke Univ.), brings together various experts to explain the persistence of authoritarianism in the Maghreb region. The book is organized into two parts and consists of 12 chapters. Part 1 clusters "around three broad topics: the normative or ideological foundations of authoritarianism, the social and economic drivers of authoritarianism, and the security justifications for authoritarianism" (p. 6). Part 2 covers case studies of Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, and Algeria (lacking an independent study of Egypt), including a chapter on elections before and after the Arab Spring. As the contributors detail, the lure of authoritarianism, and even centralized autocracy, is strong in both Arab monarchies and republics because of the nuanced intermingling of fear of radical violence, broad popular support for Islam, demographic pressure and slow economic growth, historical and modern experiences with violence and instability, the character of civil society, and changing political dynamics at both the country and regional levels. This is a highly valued contribution to the study of Middle Eastern politics for scholars and students.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Presidential term limits is a central issue worldwide. Should presidents serve only a limited number of terms to ensure rotation and that one strong individual does not threaten a country's democracy? This thorough and informative collection approaches this question from theoretical, historical, and above all empirical perspectives. Baturo and Elgie (both, Dublin City Univ., Ireland) have gathered detailed contextual case studies involving an interesting balance of older democracies (including the US) and recent democracies, and autocracies such as China. Presidents in European parliamentary systems are also analyzed. A central theme is continuismo (generally applied to Latin American countries), i.e., changing the rules to lengthen the permitted time in office of the sitting president. The key finding is that even more than the formal rules what matters is whether politicians accept the informal norms about presidential term limits, because the informal norms lead to compliance with the rules. Likewise, the behavior (corrupt or not) of a president in a limited final term in office reflects the broader political culture of a country. Including comprehensive tables and figures, this volume is required reading for political scientists.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.