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Violence and Politics
Violence and Politics points out a paradox of contemporary political violence: it appears to be growing in scope and complexity even in this era of unprecedented democratic and economic growth. These essays cover a number of timely issues including pro-life terrorism, hate crimes, Islam's connection (or stereotyped connection) to violence, rape as a war crime, ethnic conflicts, and violence against those protesting for civil rights for women, gays and lesbians and blacks. Contributors cross disciplines and subdisciplines to examine the counter-intuitive persistence of violence in advanced democracies and in steadily improving developing countries.
Policing Democracy
2011 Winner of the Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize of the International Political Science Association Latin America’s crime rates are astonishing by any standard—the region’s homicide rate is the world’s highest. This crisis continually traps governments between the need for comprehensive reform and the public demand for immediate action, usually meaning iron-fisted police tactics harking back to the repressive pre-1980s dictatorships. In Policing Democracy, Mark Ungar situates Latin America at a crossroads between its longstanding form of reactive policing and a problem-oriented approach based on prevention and citizen participation. Drawing on extensive case studies from Argentina, Bolivia, and Honduras, he reviews the full spectrum of areas needing reform: criminal law, policing, investigation, trial practices, and incarceration. Finally, Policing Democracy probes democratic politics, power relations, and regional disparities of security and reform to establish a framework for understanding the crisis and moving beyond it.
Elusive Reform
Democracy cannot exist, proclaims Ungar (political science, City U. of New York-Brooklyn College) without the rule of law, which he defines as comprising an independent effective judiciary, state accountability to the law, and citizen accessibility to conflict-resolution mechanisms. He looks to Latin American countries to illustrate how stable democracies are undermined by executive power and judicial disarray that prevent the rule of law from taking hold. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
Politics In The Andes
The Andean region is perhaps the most violent and politically unstable in the Western Hemisphere. Politics in the Andes is the first comprehensive volume to assess the persistent political challenges facing Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela.Arguing that Andean states and societies have been shaped by common historical forces, the contributors' comparative approach reveals how different countries have responded variously to the challenges and opportunities presented by those forces. Individual chapters are structured around themes of ethnic, regional, and gender diversity; violence and drug trafficking; and political change and democracy.Politics in the Andes offers a contemporary view of a region in crisis, providing the necessary context to link the often sensational news from the area to broader historical, political, economic, and social trends.
The Dubious Link
This text examines the dark side of civil society - the cases in which the participation of average citizens leads to undemocratic results. It looks at associational life in pre-Nazi Germany, anti-desegregation movements in the United States and organizations for rights in democratic Argentina.
State Building in Putin’s Russia
This book argues that Putin's strategy for rebuilding the state was fundamentally flawed. Taylor demonstrates that a disregard for the way state officials behave toward citizens - state quality - had a negative impact on what the state could do - state capacity. Focusing on those organizations that control state coercion, what Russians call the 'power ministries', Taylor shows that many of the weaknesses of the Russian state that existed under Boris Yeltsin persisted under Putin. Drawing on extensive field research and interviews, as well as a wide range of comparative data, the book reveals the practices and norms that guide the behavior of Russian power ministry officials (the so-called siloviki), especially law enforcement personnel. By examining siloviki behavior from the Kremlin down to the street level, State Building in Putin's Russia uncovers the who, where and how of Russian state building after communism.
Democratic Brazil Revisited
Brazil presents a compelling example of twenty-first century democracy in action. In this sequel to their landmark study Democratic Brazil, editors Peter Kingstone and Timothy J. Power have assembled a distinguished group of U.S.- and Brazilian-based scholars to assess the impact of competitive politics on Brazilian government, institutions, economics, and society. The 2002 election of Lula da Silva and his Worker's Party promised a radical shift toward progressive reform, transparency, and accountability, opposing the earlier centrist and market-oriented policies of the Cardoso government. But despite the popular support reflected in his 2006 reelection, many observers claim that Lula and h...
Borrowing Constitutional Designs
After the collapse of communism, some thirty countries scrambled to craft democratic constitutions. Surprisingly, the constitutional model they most often chose was neither the pure parliamentary model found in most of Western Europe at the time, nor the presidential model of the Americas. Rather, it was semi-presidentialism--a rare model known more generally as the "French type." This constitutional model melded elements of pure presidentialism with those of pure parliamentarism. Specifically, semi-presidentialism combined a popularly elected head of state with a head of government responsible to a legislature. Borrowing Constitutional Designs questions the hasty adoption of semi-presidenti...
A More Beautiful and Terrible History
Praised by The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Bitch Magazine; Slate; Publishers Weekly; and more, this is “a bracing corrective to a national mythology” (New York Times) around the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. And it is used perniciously in our own times to chastise present-day movements and obscure contemporary injustice. In A More Beautiful and Terrible Histo...
Corruption, Institutions, and Fragile States
This book examines the relationship between state fragility and corruption. It analyzes a variety of regions throughout the world, including Latin America, Central Asia and the Middle East, Africa, Central America and Mexico, South America, and Russia. States that are plagued by high levels of state fragility and corruption facilitate illicit activities and other criminal enterprises.
