Search

It has been more than five decades since Ted Robert Gurr asked the question, "Why Men Rebel" (1970), in the most popular scholarly work of political rebellion and protest. The subsequent research often focused on grievances as the main motivation behind collective mobilization (Collier and Hoeffler 1998; Fearon and Laitin 2003). Yet the questions of how and why grievances lead to group mobilization and violent or nonviolent conflict onset still attract much scholarly attention. Not all groups with grievances engage in violent and/or nonviolent mobilization. Some do. This is the puzzle Manuel Vogt addresses in this theoretically novel and empirically rich book. He focuses on the type of state birth, i.e. colonial settler or decolonized states, as the backbone of several causal paths from grievances to ethnic conflict onset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why African Americans do not rebel? Why is there no armed insurrection of African Americans across the USA, especially in cities and states where they make up almost half of the population? In many parts of the world, ethnic, racial, and religious groups that are much smaller in size, much less disadvantaged socioeconomically and politically, and with relatively fewer historical grievances than African Americans, launched armed insurrections that lasted for decades. The quiescence of African Americans is a momentous puzzle if one subscribes to grievance-based theories of violent ethnic insurgencies (e.g., Gurr 1970). There are more than 40 million African Americans in the USA, which makes them a more populous ethnic group or a potential nation than any Eastern European nation in the European Union. Yet, approximately 40 million African Americans, despite their high level of collective consciousness and multifaceted grievances, did not produce as much armed insurgency as less than three million Basques in Spain have, to expand a comparison Manuel Vogt (4) briefly alludes to. What accounts for this dramatic difference? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book offers a detailed historical account of the political transformations of monarchic empires throughout the 1,780-1830 revolutionary cycle and beyond, and carries out an in-depth case analysis of French, British, Spanish and American constitutional changes regarding citizenship and rights. In the interregnum between regimes understood as monarchic empires becoming fully-fledged nation-states, European and American constitutions deployed an incredible range of constitutional mechanisms to divide their apparently universal legislative frameworks (dual constitutions or I specialités i ). In this dualism, Fradera finds what he calls "imperial nations" and "imperial constitutions", that is, liberal nations in both hemispheres championing free and equal citizens, at least on paper; these did not last long. [Extracted from the article]

The author first read "History of the Ojibway People," as research for a paper he was writing on Ojibway people for a college senior-level indigenous anthropology course. As the author is part Anishinabe, Ojibway, he felt it was important to have a firmly rounded grasp of the history of his people. What initially attracted him to the book was the author, William W. Warren, who was the son of an Ojibway mother and a white father. Warren was a true bi-culturalist, having a firm grasp of his traditional Ojibway society and knowing how to translate his understanding of his people in a format that non-aboriginal people could understand.