Category: New Publications

Ren, X., 2020. Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution. Princeton University Press.

Urbanization is rapidly overtaking China and India, the two most populous countries in the world. One-sixth of humanity now lives in either a Chinese or Indian city. This transformation has unleashed enormous pressures on land use, housing, and the environment. Despite the stakes, the workings of urban governance in China and India remain obscure and poorly understood.

In this book, Xuefei Ren explores how China and India govern their cities and how their different styles of governance produce inequality and exclusion. Drawing upon historical-comparative analyses and extensive fieldwork (in Beijing, Guangzhou, Wukan, Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata), Ren investigates the ways that Chinese and Indian cities manage land acquisition, slum clearance, and air pollution. She discovers that the two countries address these issues through radically different approaches. In China, urban governance centers on territorial institutions, such as hukou and the cadre evaluation system. In India, urban governance centers on associational politics, encompassing contingent alliances formed among state actors, the private sector, and civil society groups. Ren traces the origins of territorial and associational forms of governance to late imperial China and precolonial India. She then shows how these forms have evolved to shape urban growth and residents’ struggles today.

As the number of urban residents in China and India reaches beyond a billion, Governing the Urban in China and India makes clear that the development of cities in these two nations will have profound consequences well beyond their borders.

Mandić, D., 2020. Gangsters and Other Statesmen: Mafias, Separatists, and Torn States in a Globalized World. Princeton University Press.

Separatism has been on the rise across the world since the end of the Cold War, dividing countries through political strife, ethnic conflict, and civil war, and redrawing the political map. Gangsters and Other Statesmen examines the role transnational mafias play in the success and failure of separatist movements, challenging conventional wisdom about the interrelation of organized crime with peacebuilding, nationalism, and state making.

Danilo Mandić conducted fieldwork in the disputed territories of Kosovo and South Ossetia, talking to mobsters, separatists, and policymakers in war zones and along major smuggling routes. In this timely and provocative book, he demonstrates how globalized mafias shape the politics of borders in torn states, shedding critical light on an autonomous nonstate actor that has been largely sidelined by considerations of geopolitics, state-centered agency, and ethnonationalism. Blending extensive archival sleuthing and original ethnographic data with insights from sociology and other disciplines, Mandić argues that organized crime can be a fateful determinant of state capacity, separatist success, and ethnic conflict.

Putting mafias at the center of global processes of separatism and territorial consolidation, Gangsters and Other Statesmen raises vital questions and urges reconsideration of a host of separatist cases in West Africa, the Middle East, and East Europe.

 Almeida, Paul. 2020. Movimientos Sociales: La estructura de la acción colectiva. Buenos Aires: CLACSO.

En las páginas de Movimientos sociales: asoman las formas cotidianas de resistencia, las luchas de los movimientos locales y los grupos de base, las olas de protesta y los movimientos sociales transnacionales.

Paul Almeida retrata el papel de la movilización colectiva como una poderosa herramienta de transformación humana. Quien recorra las páginas de este libro encontrará una hipótesis: las acciones colectivas de ciudadanos y ciudadanas en las más diversas regiones del mundo son cada vez más fundamentales en la desaceleración del calentamiento global, en las luchas contra el racismo y la violencia de género, entre muchas otras formas de explotación de la sociedad y la naturaleza.

Chase-Dunn, Christopher and Paul Almeida. 2020.  Global Struggles and Social Change. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, an international movement to slow the pace of climate change mushroomed across the globe. The self-proclaimed Climate Justice movement urges immediate action to reduce carbon emissions and calls for the adoption of bold new policies to address global warming before irreversible and catastrophic damage threatens the habitability of the planet. On another front, since the 1980s, multiple waves of resistance have occurred around the world against the uneven transition from state-led development to the neoliberal globalization project. Both Climate Justice and Anti-Austerity movements represent the urgency of understanding how global change affects the ability of citizens around the world to mobilize and protect themselves from planetary warming and the loss of social protections granted in earlier eras.

In Global Struggles and Social Change, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Paul Almeida explore how global change stimulates the formation and shape of such movements. Contending that large-scale economic shifts condition the pattern of social movement mobilizations around the world, the authors trace these trends back to premodern societies, revealing how severe disruptions of indigenous communities led to innovative collective actions throughout history. Drawing on historical case studies, world system and protest event analysis, and social networks, they also examine the influence of global change processes on local, national, and transnational social movements and explain how in turn these movements shape institutional shifts.

Touching on hot-button topics, including global warming, immigrant rights protests, the rise of right-wing populism, and the 2008 financial crisis, the book also explores a broad range of premodern social movements from indigenous people in the Americas, Mesopotamia, and China. The authors pay special attention to periods of disruption and external threats, as well as the role of elites, emotions, charisma, and religion or spirituality in shaping protest movements. Providing sweeping coverage, Global Struggles and Social Change is perfect for students and anyone interested in globalization, international and comparative politics, political sociology, and communication studies.

Almeida, Paul and Amalia Pérez Martín. 2020. “Economic Globalization and Social Movements in Latin America.” In Xóchitl Bada and Liliana Rivera, eds., Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Latin America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190926557.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190926557-e-25

Mueller, Jason C., John McCollum, and Steven Schmidt. 2020. “COVID-19, the Vanishing Mediator, and Postcapitalist Possibilities.” Rethinking Marxism, Pandemic and the Crisis of Capitalism: A Rethinking Marxism Dossier, Pp. 181-192.

Schmidt, Steven, and Jason C. Mueller. “The Emergence of Participatory Budgeting in Mexico City.” Pp. 286-298 in The Routledge Handbook of Planning Megacities in the Global South, edited by Deden Rukmana. London: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Planning-Megacities-in-the-Global-South/Rukmana/p/book/9780367223724

Hammer, Ricarda. “Decolonizing the Civil Sphere: The Politics of Difference, Imperial Erasures, and Theorizing from History.” Sociological Theory (2020): 0735275120921215. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0735275120921215

Thomas, Jacob. “From local control to remote control: an excavation of international mobility constraints.” Theory and Society (2020): 1-32. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-020-09397-y

Zhang, Yueran. “Political Competition and Two Modes of Taxing Private Homeownership: A Bourdieusian Analysis of the Contemporary Chinese State.” Theory and Society: 1-39. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11186-020-09395-0

Skarpelis, A. K. M. “Life on file: Archival epistemology and theory.” Qualitative Sociology 43, no. 3 (2020): 385-405. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11133-020-09460-1

Liu, Jiaqi. “Citizenship on the move: the deprivation and restoration of emigrants’ hukou in China.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2020): 1-18. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1788381

Mueller, Jason C. “Political, Economic, and Ideological Warfare in Somalia.” Peace Review 31, no. 3 (2019): 372-380. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10402659.2019.1735174