Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2017 -

This is an insightful and timely book written by a leading scholar on central-local politics in China. China is a vast and diverse country in terms of territory and population, and has a long imperial history, making its central-local relations a perennial issue of vital importance. Despite decentralizing trends in the post-Mao era, the party state insists on a highly centralized unitary system rather than opting for a more decentralized federal structure that might make the country easier to govern. Drawing on rich primary sources collected over decades, this book provides a compelling explanation to this puzzle by arguing that Chinese leaders' obsession with, and practice of, central control are rooted in China's long history of local governance despite its variations and adaptations over time. One factor that probably deserves more discussion is the ideational role of rising nationalism--which is mostly sponsored by the state but also widely accepted within the society--in partially countering centrifugal tendencies in the contemporary setting. Overall, this comprehensive and definitive book on China's central-local relations is a must-read for scholars interested in related issues.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals.

A marvelously intelligent read by an articulate student of comparative politics, Despot's Accomplice, by Brian Klass, a fellow in comparative politics at the London School of Economics, posits a thesis that demands consideration and serves as a sounding board for examination and discussion, to wit: liberal democracies in the West and particularly in the US foreign policy arsenal parlay short-term gains for the sake of national strategic or economic interests against the long-term benefits of promoting liberal democracy. In a conspicuously well-researched and documented exposition augmented by a host of interviews, the author reviews the quality of governance in many states that have had gratuitous support from the West while simultaneously exposing themselves as authoritarian or worse, despotic regimes abusing human rights at will. A real contribution is the exposure of states that may appear or present themselves as a democracy but whose domestic political practices bely the label. This is a book that shouts out for inclusion on comparative politics reading lists and political science collections for all concerned about the current state of democracy.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals.

Roessler's superb analysis of civil wars and coups stresses "meso-level" connections between regimes and society. He starts with the "anarchic conditions that arose with the dissolution of colonialism in Africa." Ethnic Politics and State Power in Africa includes detailed case studies of the two Darfur uprisings in Sudan and the continent's "Great War" in the Congo. Quests for political power played out along ethnic lines. To build peace in such Hobbesian situations, sharing power with rivals was essential. However, sharing opened the door to rivals' seizing control. Civil war, he argues, resulted from strategic choices made by rulers, backed by their co-ethnics, to coup-proof their regimes. Rulers can be caught in traps that risk civil wars or coups. However, should the capital city be threatened and the rival be strong, power sharing can result. Roessler buttresses this fascinating conclusion with statistically tested data from the Ethnic Power Relations data set. His research is exceptionally thorough: 18 months' fieldwork in Darfur; scores of footnotes per chapter; wide-ranging references. Even better, Roessler's theory can be utilized by scholars analyzing threats to political regimes in multiethnic societies outside Africa. Ethnic Politics and State Power in Africa ranks as one of the best recent publications.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Ang (Michigan) borrows from complexity studies to present an important theory that the "coevolution" of market and state lifted China out of poverty. Long debated has been which came first: economic growth or good governance. Ang finds instead that state and market must interact and adapt to each other. Weak institutions initially permit the emergence of markets, which in turn stimulate stronger institutions, which then preserve markets. Too many bureaucrats too early choke off growth. The author starts with China in 1978, when Deng encouraged markets at the local level, an effort characterized by "directed improvisation" and mutual feedback between institutions and markets. Bureaucrats were rewarded for economic growth in their counties and provinces not based on one single model. As markets grew, they needed more state supervision through incremental reforms to establish fair rules. In studying several towns and counties and interviewing more than 400 participants, Ang found that this process was not always successful--a messy and uneven zigzag. Case studies from late medieval Europe, the antebellum US, and Nigeria's Nollywood confirm the coevolution pattern. Ang worries that Xi's crackdown on corruption will stifle innovation. Essential for graduate development studies and practitioners.Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students through professionals.

Inside the Muslim Brotherhood is a rich study of this socioreligious, economic, and political movement, which endured decades of ups and down and remains an influential and resilient player in Egypt and the Middle East. Through a detailed analysis of internal documents, deep knowledge of its history, and interviews with Brotherhood's members, `Anani (Doha Institute, Qatar) presents readers with a unique study that captures internal structure and ideology informed by organizational theory, social movement theory, psychology, and sociology of Islam. Readers learn about the Brotherhood's origins, growth, and expansion into one of the most influential Islamic movements of our time. The founder Hassan al-Banna's vision still remains vital to the Brotherhood through careful multistage recruitment strategy, socialization, and mobilization channels. Figures and tables provide powerful visual description of the Brotherhood. Al-Banna's framework of Islamic identity, the Jama'a paradigm that shows how aims translate into objectives and mission to be carried out by the brotherhood, and strategies of individual's provide important background to understanding the internal struggles and successes of this movement under turbulent politics. This is a must-read for understanding Islamist politics of our time.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

This book provides a wide-ranging survey of Egyptian political history under military domination since the 1952 Revolution. Abul-Magd (Oberlin) presents the political history of military control in Egypt throughout the regimes of the Free Officers and their successors. She traces the military's role in the Egyptian economy from socialist state intervention under Nasser, through neoliberal reform beginning with Sadat, to the contemporary setting of military hegemony over the Egyptian economy. The book is dense with detail and relies on in-depth analysis of each time period under study. Its assessment of the military's role in Egyptian politics is timely and significant. Abul-Magd's argument situates the Sisi regime as the culmination of decades of military, political, and economic policies that underpin authoritarian dominance and the inefficiency of the Egyptian economy. Essential reading for anyone interested in the contemporary Egyptian military state.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This is an exceptionally well-crafted and objective history of Tunisia's principal Islamist movement and party, Ennahda, headed by Rachid Ghannouchi. It is based on over 400 interviews conducted over a four-year period of field work in Tunisia, together with relevant documents including WikiLeaks reports from the US embassy in Tunis. It is very reader-friendly, starting with concise political biographies of 23 leading personalities in the movement, many of whom are unknown to the public. It places the movement in the context of Tunisia's traditions of reform and modernization, cultivated in the nineteenth century, and makes stimulating comparisons between Ghannouchi and Habib Bourguiba, who had condemned him to death. The book also places Ennahda in the context of competing Islamist tendencies and highlights its failure to tame Salafists by co-opting them or by supporting moderate Salafist parties. Ghannouchi has converted the movement into a political party that downplays identity politics but risks defections of activists to more extreme movements. This study, so well grounded in recent history, is essential reading for anyone interested in political Islam or the evolution of regimes in the Middle East and North Africa.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This first-rate work by Meital (Ben-Gurion Univ. of the Negev, Israel) focuses on the use of special courts during the two-and-a-half-year period following the 1952 Egyptian military coup. (A final chapter serves as an incisive postscript on subsequent decades.) Meital uses Arabic-language materials extensively, notably the published trial transcripts he fortuitously stumbled on. He shows how "judges acting as historians," with compliant mass media amplifying the proceedings for the public, not only tried individuals but also created a hegemonic narrative demonizing the former monarchical regime and some of the junta's original allies, particularly the Muslim Brothers. One sees that even in such unfair trials, some of the defendants' testimony included in the published proceedings undermines the regime's narrative, e.g., its depiction of the Muslim Brothers as a conspiratorial, hierarchical organization relying on terrorism to produce chaos. This is essential reading for students of modern Egypt and will prove valuable to historians and social scientists with broad, comparative concerns that include (inter alia) revolution, politicized judiciaries, and ways regimes and nationalist movements develop narratives to legitimize themselves and delegitimize others.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Cook (UC Berkeley) presents a deep and scholarly exploration of the 1980 trial of the "Gang of Four" (actually, 10) "counterrevolutionaries," who attempted to seize power during the Cultural Revolution. He sees the media spectacle as an attempt at "transitional justice" but, because it focused on "containing" and directing mass discontent, it failed to modernize China's legal system. The 1976 arrest of the "monsters" one month after Mao's death was more a purge or coup. Cook uses public court documents (many are still secret) but interweaves much literature, some of which rediscovered Marx's early humanism. The Chinese Communist Party, trying to save itself and rehabilitate Mao Zedong's thought, limited this. Ultimately, Cook argues, the show trial left hollow the establishment of either "rational socialist legality" or "socialist humanity" of "positive values that people could believe in." Despite remarkable economic growth, China still uses "law as a weapon" (as in Xi Jinping's anticorruption trials), a lingering systemic weakness and invitation to future instability. Cook finds that ideology, minimized by most current analysts, is still important, especially within upper CCP ranks. A heavy, pessimistic read but essential for scholars of Chinese law.Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students and faculty.

This is the best one volume interpretive history of the historical, intellectual, philosophical, and political origins of the ideal of republicanism in the late Ottoman Empire and in the Turkish Republic after its creation in 1923. It is a remarkable, erudite interpretation that contests previous interpretations by many foremost European, American, and Turkish scholars of Turkey. The author possesses the language skills--Turkish, Ottoman, French, German, and Arabic--necessary for the task, no small feat in itself. She displays full knowledge of the ideas of republicanism and its origins in late 19th-century France and Germany and its influence on Ottoman and Turkish intellectuals. She argues that the idea of republicanism helped shape the thought of Tanzimat reformers (1839-78),young Ottomans, Young Turks, and the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (1889-1918), as well as the new Turkish Republic under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1923-38). She argues that the idea of republicanism was diminished and became authoritarian after the assumption to power of the Young Turks in 1914, World War I, the demise of the Ottoman Empire, and the rise to power of Ataturk. This, in turn, has contributed to the current consolidation of authoritarianism under current strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This is a marvelous book.Summing Up: Essential.Graduate students through professionals.

Plaut, a former BBC Africa correspondent, has published an outstanding insider's analysis of the continent's most noteworthy example of political repression. He traces practically all Eritrea's ills to the suspicious, secretive nature of its president, Isaias Afwerki. Trained in China and focused on tight Leninist control, Isaias has brooked no opposition since Eritrea became independent in 1993. His suspicious nature and lack of diplomatic finesse means the country stands isolated. As a former US Ambassador wrote, Isaias "is an austere and narcissistic dictator whose political ballast derives from Maoist ideology fine-tuned during Eritrea's 30-year war for independence." His suspicious, secretive nature isolates the country. Eritrea has cool or hostile relations with all its neighbors, including at least three rounds of fighting with its much larger neighbor Ethiopia. More than one million citizens have fled. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry documented crimes against humanity committed by the regime. Those drafted into the military serve indefinite terms, with a pittance for salaries and danger of physical abuse. Although opposition groups exist, infiltration by the government or infighting minimizes their effectiveness. Understanding Eritrea is a sobering, incisive analysis, replete with detail not readily available elsewhere.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.