Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> World - General

"An excellent contriubtion to the comparative analysis... " Foreign Affairs

"This work is an important study... The individual chapters are based on extensive reearch and field work, often in difficult and dangerous conditions. They provide facts and insights not to be found elsewhere, and the work will long remain an indispensable text." International Journal of African Historical Studies

..". an outstanding study on the major insurgencies that have gripped the belt of Sub-Saharan Africa." Defense Affairs

Insurgencies or guerrilla movements have come to occupy a...

"The volume edited by Mark Tessler addresses a set of critical issues confronting all social scientists whose field of inquiry is extra-American.... Tessler and his contributors succeed admirably in their goal." --American Historical Review

How should scholars construct knowledge about politics, economics, and international relations in major world regions? According to the contributors to this lively volume, the conflicting approaches of regional specialists and discipline-oriented social scientists must be combined to provide a firm foundation for studying the contemporary politics...

Good data, Michael Ward argues, serve to enhance a perception about life as well as to deepen an understanding of reality. This history of the UN's role in fostering international statistics in the postwar period demonstrates how statistics have shaped our understanding of the world. Drawing on well over 40 years of experience working as a statistician and economist in more than two dozen countries around the world, Ward traces the evolution of statistical ideas and how they have responded to the needs of policy while unraveling the question of why certain data were considered important...

"In Looking Forward," Marifeli Perez-Stable and her colleagues imagine Cuba's future after the poof moment Jorge I. Dominguez's vivid phrase when the current regime will no longer exist. Written in an accessible style that will appeal to all interested readers, this volume does not try to predict how and when the Castro regime will end, but instead considers the possible consequences of change. Each chapter prepared by an expert in the field takes up a basic issue: politics, the military, the legal system, civil society, gender, race, economic transition strategies, social policy and...

Until the 1960s, rural laborers and peasants composed the majority of Brazil's population and yet most scholars have downplayed their influence on the country's history. In contrast, The Seed Was Planted argues that rural labor has been fundamental to the making of modern Brazil.

When the Brazilian military took power in 1964, anarchy in the countryside was one of the problems the conspirators used to justify ousting the civilian government. Cliff Welch examines this claim by narrating the history of rising rural worker activism in Sao Paulo, Brazil's most influential...

While there is much literature analyzing the politics of implementing economic reforms, very little has been written on the social and political consequences of such reforms after they have been implemented. The basic premise of this book is that the convergence of many social, economic, and political ills (such as high levels of poverty, income inequality, criminal violence, and the growth of the informal sector) in the context of unprecedented levels of political democratization in Latin America presents a paradox that needs to be explained. What Kind of Democracy? demonstrates...

Military rule in Argentina from 1976 to 1983 was a classic case of bureaucratic authoritarianism. This book now presents for the first time in English a close look at that country's experience, providing new information on legal and institutional aspects of the Argentine regime and the intricate interaction between military rulers and trade unionists, while offering a model for the study of regimes in general.

Integrating insights from a wide range of literature, Gerardo Munck advances a novel conceptual framework for the study of political regimes and regime change. He follows the...

Latin American societies have undergone fundamental changes in the past two decades, moving from capitalist economies with very wide-ranging state intervention to more market-driven systems. After a prolonged period of recession, these changes produced some successes in economic growth in the 1990s, but they also exacerbated many problems, especially poverty and inequality. Models of Capitalism examines why some societies with market economies perform much better than others in combining growth and equity, and what the less successful countries can learn from the more successful...

What affect does Islamic political culture have on democracy and human rights practices? It has been argued that Islam facilitates authoritarianism, contradicts the values of Western societies, and significantly affects important political outcomes in Muslim countries. This view, Price argues, is based primarily on analysis of Islamic political theory and ad-hoc studies of individual countries, which do not consider other factors. Through rigorous evaluation of the relationship between Islam, democracy, and individual rights at the cross-national level, Price suggests that too much...

"Iran and Its Place among Nations" takes a bird's-eye view of where Iran has been in the international community, where it is today, and where it may ideally end up in the future. Is Iran an Eastern country, bound by traditions that hinder economic development? Or does it also have some attributes of Western countries, given its history, geographic location, culture, and politics? Among the key insights in this book is the observation that Iran is a bridge between East and West.

Is Iran a fomenter of Islamic radicalism in the Middle East and beyond, or can it be a promoter of moderation...

Cobley presents five interconnected case studies of previously neglected aspects of recreation and social welfare policy in South Africa. He charts their historical development and poses the critical question: In shaping recreation and social welfare policy, by what rules did the protagonists play?

Drawing on current conceptual debates concerning the roles of ordinary people and the nature of the colonial state, Cobley seeks to develop an understanding of the operation of power relations--the rules of the game--in twentieth-century South Africa.

Some considerations on the current...

Globalization is perhaps the most extensively discussed topic in contemporary academic literature and mass media. Many philanthropic organizations work on a global level and have been participants in the spread of globalization. This book specifically deals with the role of philanthropy in past and present globalizations, and the contributors explore the scope and degree of the relationships between globalization, philanthropy and civil society and demonstrate the relationships empirically and theoretically. Unlike most existing publications on globalization, this volume examines complex...