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New Caribbean Thought
The dawn of the twenty-first century is an opportune time for the people of the Caribbean to take stock of the entire experience of the past forty years since the ending of direct colonialism. The authors believe it is now time to chart our future by carefully learning the lessons of the recent past. This interdisciplinary collection is the first to cross traditionally restrictive disciplinary barriers to address the tough questions that face the Caribbean today. What went wrong with the nationalist project? What, if any, are the realistic options for a more prosperous Caribbean? What are to be the roles of race, gender and class in a more global, less national world? Meeks and Lindahl include thought-provoking articles from twenty-one respected thinkers in diverse fields of study. The groundbreaking articles include critiques of existing bodies of thought, reformulations of general theoretical approaches, policy-oriented alternatives for future development, and more. This book is a must for statesmen, academics and students of political theory, social theory, Caribbean studies, comparative gender studies, post-colonial studies, Marxism and Caribbean history and anyone interested
The Political Economy of Transition in Eurasia
The Political Economy of Transition in Eurasia looks at the progress in democratization and economic liberalization of the 27 post- communist countries of Eurasia with some guarded optimism. Belarus, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are clearly unabashed authoritarian regimes with only sporadic ventures toward political accountability and very limited effort to liberalize economically. Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia have made more substantial moves, particularly on the economic side, but the regimes seem to be undergoing political retrenchment. Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and the three Baltic States clearly have competitive democracies with effective political institutions and processes and functioning market economies. However, as some of the contributors suggest, some very serious challenges and unmet expectations remain. It is clear that the "dual transition" of democratization and economic liberalization has been a challenge for all the regimes that have seriously attempted it.
Demeaned But Empowered
Gray's central thesis asserts that the Jamaican state is a form of predatory state that incorporates contradictory social forces into an arrangement that is hierarchical, often brutal and ultimately debilitating to democracy. He introduces a series of constructs to support this argument, but the more interesting and novel theses are to be found in his vivid description of the social forces that resist the predatory state and how they have carved out a modicum of autonomy based on what he describes as an elaborate value system of badness/honour.
Democracy and Development
This book is a thorough investigation into the requisites of democracy. Based on data from all 132 sovereign states of the Third World, it first establishes a scale to measure the level of democracy existing in these countries. The author discusses various interpretations of the meaning of political democracy, and emerges with a specification of its essential principles which includes such elements as the holding of elections to central decision-making organs, and the maintenance of certain fundamental political liberties. Theories concerning the requisites of democratic government are then examined in order to explain the manifest differences in the level of democracy among the states of the Third World. The author employs statistical techniques including regression analysis to test theories related to socio-economic conditions, demographic and cultural factors, and institutional arrangements. This book thus provides a uniquely wide-ranging examination both of the elements which constitute democracy, and of the factors which explain its varying prevalence.
Making Russia and Turkey Great Again?
This study analyzes theoretically and empirically the background of the rise to power of Vladimir Putin in Russia and Recip Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. It situates this analysis in the contexts of the historical assessment of the fragility of liberal democracy and the persistence and growth of authoritarianism, populism, and dictatorship in many parts of the world. The authors argue that the question whether Putin and Erdogan can make Russia and Turkey great again is hard to confirm; personal ambition for power and wealth is certainly key to an understanding of both rulers. They each squandered opportunities to build from free and fair democratic electoral legitimacy and economic progress. The...
The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society
Adam Smith is popularly regarded as the ideological forefather of laissez-faire capitalism, while Rousseau is seen as the passionate advocate of the life of virtue in small, harmonious communities and as a sharp critic of the ills of commercial society. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries about commercial society that Rousseau did and was strongly influenced by his critique. In this first book-length comparative study of these leading eighteenth-century thinkers, Dennis Rasmussen highlights Smith’s sympathy with Rousseau’s concerns and analyzes in depth the ways in which Smith crafted his arguments to defend commercial society against these charges. These arguments, Rasmussen emphasizes, were pragmatic in nature, not ideological: it was Smith’s view that, all things considered, commercial society offered more benefits than the alternatives. Just because of this pragmatic orientation, Smith’s approach can be useful to us in assessing the pros and cons of commercial society today and thus contributes to a debate that is too much dominated by both dogmatic critics and doctrinaire champions of our modern commercial society.
Caribbean Integration Law
Two key regional organisations in the Caribbean, the Caribbean Community and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, had their roles fundamentally expanded in 2001 by treaties that developed a single market and a regional court. This book sets out the new roles of these organisations and their impact on regional integration in the Caribbean.
Downtown Ladies
The Caribbean “market woman” is ingrained in the popular imagination as the archetype of black womanhood in countries throughout the region. Challenging this stereotype and other outdated images of black women, Downtown Ladies offers a more complex picture by documenting the history of independent international traders—known as informal commercial importers, or ICIs—who travel abroad to import and export a vast array of consumer goods sold in the public markets of Kingston, Jamaica. Both by-products of and participants in globalization, ICIs operate on multiple levels and, since their emergence in the 1970s, have made significant contributions to the regional, national, and global ec...
Blackness Visible
Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience. Ralph Ellison's metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptual "whiteness" has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities. Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing race's centrality to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination. European expansionism in its various forms, Mills contends, generates a social ontology of race that warrants philosophical attention. Through expropriation, settlement, slavery, and colon...
