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Kerry Ryan Chance, Living Politics in South Africa's Urban Shacklands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 224 pp. Much has been written about popular protests, labor struggles, and social movements [...]

THE AVANT-GARDE AND THE POPULAR IN MODERN CHINA: TIAN HAN AND THE INTERSECTION OF PERFORMANCE AND POLITICS. By Liang Luo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. 367 pp. Paperback, [...]

Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora. By SANA AIYAR. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 384 pp. $51.50 (hardcover). Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice [...]

In the last decade, digital media platforms have grown out of their mere communication functions and became inherently political governance systems. They connect politicians, voters, large businesses, and major advertisement companies that commodify user attention. This is already changing the nature of the capital-politics relationship and is likely to significantly alter the nature of resource generation in online and offline political networks. Democracies are particularly vulnerable to the shift in online governance and rent structures due to higher Internet penetration per capita. The current business model of digital engagement, advertising, and political messaging are prophesized to lock all sides into a vicious circle increasingly threatened by more extreme content. Fake news, trolls, bots, and algorithms exploit this rent generation cycle by feeding on measurement metrics of the current rentier economics of digital media platforms. This trend has generated degrees of concern around concepts dubbed as 'networked feudalism,' 'Authoritarianism 2.0 or 3.0,' and 'Cyber-Communism.' This article evaluates the claims of all three main critiques of online political structures from a political engagement and resource generation perspective. The article argues that digital space is still verv much a democratic space, albeit imperfect, that needs to address two fundamental issues: fixing metrics of digital engagement and bringing human biases in algorithms into more expanded public and political debate. Ultimately, 'saving democracy' in digital space largely depends on institutionalizing these two processes by giving users greater sovereignty over their data., Digital interconnectedness was prophesized to usher in greater understanding between people. It was supposed to be good for democracy, political participation, and representation of disenfranchised segments of the population. Digital [...]

The recent wave of rebellions in the Middle East, commonly referred to as the 'Arab Spring,' has stirred up a revival of scholarly interest in the phenomenon of political reform [...]

ABSTRACT. The fear of a cholera outbreak in Philadelphia in 1893 led to intense debate over how to manage the risk of an epidemic. Philadelphians largely agreed that the risk […]

Japan's electoral system, which emphasizes first-past-the-post, single-member district rules, has led the country's party system to become consolidated around the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). [...]

Governing Fables: Learning from Public Sector Narratives By SANDFORD BORINS. Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing, 2011. Pp. xiv, 291, bibliographic references, index. Everyday Life in British Government By R.A.W. [...]

Summary Africa's knowledge, especially as 'authored', 'created' and packaged in African languages, is inspired by daily life experiences. Its expressive modes mirror traditions and innovations of oral expression. On the [...]

Abstract: The authors explain why ethnicity briefly played a role in Russian politics in the early 1990s and then faded away. They reject explanations that focus on demographic, economic, and [...]

Abstract: In the wake of the collapse of communist regimes between 1989 and 1991, political scientists turned their attention to explaining the variation in the development of political parties and [...]

Abstract: Focusing on the battle between democrats and their opponents does not provide a satisfying way to explain the political trajectories of the former Soviet states. A more useful approach [...]

Abstract: For most of the 1990s, many analysts focused their attention on determining the circumstances under which a particular set of economic policies could be implemented in a post-communist state. [...]

Abstract Religion has been used by many scholars as an analytical category and an independent variable to account for the variances in governance and political violence. Very often, religion is [...]

In her paper, 'Undressing Difference: Hijab in the West,' Anita Allen claims that the French ban on wearing the hijab in public schools was a misguided attempt toward religious neutrality. [...]

Abstract This article combines an auto-ethnographic approach with literary criticism and applied anthropology. It is about the lives of two men whose journeys through the major events of the twentieth [...]

The contemporary literature on authoritarian durability focuses more on democratic-looking institutions such as parties, elections and parliaments than the institution in which authoritarian regimes are most importantly embedded: the state [...]

On the heels of democratic uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), recent 'mass incidents' (qunti shijian) in China have spurred renewed debate about the level of social [...]

Introduction In Genesis (6:15), God instructed Noah to build the ark. Jehovah specified these dimensions to Noah: 'The length of the ark shall he three hundred cubits, the breadth of [...]

SNAPSHOTS At Johnny's Cafe on West Main Street in Carrboro, North Carolina, customers savor gourmet coffee with fresh pastries. Known for more than two decades as Johnny's Sporting Goods, the [...]

Abstract Approaches to the Bedouin's importance in the history of the Arab Middle East regularly conflict on whether outside or inside influences are paramount. In particular, have their political structures [...]

Abstract In 1988 the report of the Royal Commission on Social Policy was published. This massive five-book opus included an extremely wide range of issues within its definition of social [...]

Silja Hausermann, The Politics of Welfare State Reform in Continental Europe: Modernization in Hard Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) As European societies grapple with ageing populations, changing labor market [...]

Sarah Elise Wiliarty, The CDU and the Politics of Gender in Germany: Bringing Women to the Party (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Sarah Wiliarty's book The CDU and the Politics [...]

El Pueblo, Dividido: A Review of The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity by Cristina Beltran (Oxford University Press 2010) Cristina Beltran's new book, The Trouble [...]

This article looks at collective decisions over the limits to consumption of a private good that produces a collective bad and studies the way in which these decisions are affected by changes in the distribution of wealth. It shows that a democratic voting program reduces the maximum permissible consumption of the good, whereas a benevolent planner, and a voting program dominated by the rich, will increase this level. It also shows that under all programs production of the bad is driven down by increases in inequality. KEY WORDS: rationing, environmental, problems, collective bads, voting, welfare, Introduction Societies might sometimes choose to manage environmental problems by directly limiting the consumption of private goods that produce collective bads, such as pollution, rather than by restricting consumption through [...]

In 1986, Kenneth Lieberthal observed that the study of China in the United States had had little effect on the evolution of political science. Over twenty years later, its impact [...]

This article examines federal legislation, An Act to Amend the Canada Pension Plan and the Old Age Security Act (Bill C-36), from the vantage point of the contemporary politics of welfare state reform. Government decisions on the Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) and Old Age Security (OAS) made in the 1990s noticeably generated political and administrative feedback to the policy agenda and policy development processes. Bill C-36 was the response by policy-makers to solve these issues and use the occasion to make other changes they had been contemplating. The legislative reforms contained the imposition of specific losses for one group; the introduction of benefits for another group, both geographically diffuse clienteles; and, for all covered by these programs, modest improvements in service provision. Inside the federal public service, officials responsible for the CPP Disability program acted effectively as policy entrepreneurs, making use of a window of opportunity, and the necessity of amending the legislation, prompted by the focusing event of a critical audit report. Le present article passe en revue les lois federales, la Loi modifiant le Regime de pensions du Canada et la Loi sur la securite de la vieillesse (projet de loi C-36), selon la perspective des politiques actuelles sur la reforme de l'Etat providence. Les decisions du gouvernement relatives au Regime de pensions du Canada (RPC) et a la Securite de la vieillesse (SV) prises dans les annees 1990, ont visiblement suscite des reactions politiques et administratives au programme d'action et aux processus d'elaboration de ces politiques. Le projet de loi C-36 a ete pour les decisionnaires la maniere de resoudre ces problemes et de profiter de l'occasion pour apporter d'autres amendements qu'ils avaient envisages. Les reformes legislatives impliquaient despertes particulieres imposees a un groupe, l'introduction d'avantages pour un autre groupe, tous deux representant une clientele diffuse sur le plan geographique, et pour toutes les personnes visees par ces programmes, de modestes ameliorations dans la prestation des services. Au sein de la fonction publique federale, les dirigeants responsables du Programme de prestations d'invalidite du RPC ont en fait agi comme des entrepreneurs politiques, en profitant d'un creneau et de la necessite de modifier les lois, pousses a agir par un rapport de verification critique portant sur la question., The politics of welfare states across industrial nations is said to be largely about imposing losses and pain through programmatic and systemic retrenchment (Hood 2002; Lindblom 2007; Pierson 1994, 1996; [...]

Abstract This essay analyses Andrew Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House' and demonstrates that the poem registers the ways in which spatial politics, and the representation of home, in particular, underpins as [...]

Samuel Kelton Roberts, Jr., Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Pp. 328. Paper $24.95. Cloth $59.95. Samuel K. [...]

Thomas F. Carter. The Quality of Home Runs: The Passion, Politics, and Language of Cuban Baseball. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 239 pp. Cloth, $22.95. When people think of [...]

In a well-known episode from the Faerie Queene (1590), the seer Merlin delivers a political prophecy to Britomart which predicts the ascension of a 'royall virgin' to the throne of [...]

This article illustrates the importance of negativity within the dialectical method, aiming to bring clarity to what has been rendered unnecessarily mystical within recent revisions of dialectics, particular in the [...]

Economic and social outcomes in Pakistan over the last sixty years are a mixture of paradoxes. The economic growth rate has averaged 5 percent annually since 1947--a feat achieved by [...]

Abstract Soon after his coup in October 1999, General Pervez Musharraf reassured the Pakistani people that his was not an obscurantist religious agenda. Instead, he referred to the Ata Turk [...]

Abstract This paper attempts to critically situate the discourse of Islamic feminism and its activist incarnations such as the Malaysian group Sisters in Islam within an analytical framework that seeks [...]

Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England. By MARY E. FISSELL. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. 283. $45.00 (cloth). Professor Fissell's fascinating new book is an [...]

This article uses notes generated by France's surveillance of African and Afro-Caribbean migrants during the interwar years to analyze the use black men made of racial terms such as negre [...]

Since the mid-1990s, Western states and international organizations have been deeply involved in the reconstruction of political and social institutions in postconflict societies. Whether through temporary international administration in Bosnia, [...]

As Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev and President Dwight Eisenhower made efforts to liberalize relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, progressive Californians gestured warmly toward Soviet Deputy Prime [...]

Charles L. Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008. Pp. 360. Cloth $55.00. Paper $24.95. Charles Lumpkins provides an [...]

In Sao Paulo, Brazil, the musical genre of Black gospel reinforces the thematic power of Black voice, while gospel rap does not. In consequence, Black gospel artists embrace diasporic and [...]

Elinor Accampo, Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). In the introduction to her [...]

Pierre Rosanvallon, The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France Since the Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Although French public opinion is strikingly negative towards [...]

This article makes a contribution to hermeneutic explorations in global politics. Taking as its points of departure the growing body of work on film and the turn to aesthetic and [...]

Electioneering for the Japanese Lower House has undergone significant changes in recent years. While voter mobilization strategies still figure prominently in the local-level campaigns of individual candidates, political parties increasingly [...]

Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender KATE DAVIES New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 336 pp. Kate Davies enters into a flourishing [...]