bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Conclusion
Authors: Avila Maria
Published: September 2023

This chapter emphasizes how being aware of stories and sharing them with others is one way to awaken to the richness of traditions and teachings about struggles, victories, and possibilities for a better world. It confirms whether building collective leadership in projects was successful and whether these projects create culture change in and outside academia. It also reviews the creation of a collaborative space for thinking, learning, co-creating, and sharing stories that would eventually lead to enhancing the leadership skills of participants in each project, transforming their individual civic agency into collective civic agency. The chapter points out how participants of the projects were not fully aware of the organizing purpose and methodology for creating a space where they could grow as leaders. It highlights the use of community-organizing practices to create culture change in higher education and the surrounding communities.
Slum
Authors: Ranganathan Malini , Pike David L. , Doshi Sapana
Published: September 2023

This chapter starts with corruption plots in the space of the slum, describing corruption talk swirling around slum evictions and resettlement that turns fundamentally on a charged critique of structural inequality. It talks about how hypocrisies abound in the cleansing of the urban poor from the city that typically entails “whitening” the real estate illegalities and excesses of the wealthy and “blackening” or criminalization of the poor. It also argues that corruption emplotted in the slum calls forth spectral publics that serve as the moral conscience of the city. The chapter examines the creation of a spectacle out of allegations of corruption and the re-narration of corruption against the transgressions of the elite. It provides textured accounts of the ethics at play in antipoor blackening/whitening gaze from novels and films, including ethnographic observations of slum-related corruption stories.
Swampland
Authors: Ranganathan Malini , Pike David L. , Doshi Sapana
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the ecological publics conjured by insinuations of corruption in, and of, the urban ecological commons. It uses the term “swampland” both literally, to refer to urban wetlands, and as a heuristic to delineate the sinister affect associated with this materiality. It also looks at corruption plots in the swampland that invoke a long history of colonial property-making, land reclamation, and disease eradication projects steeped in racism, classism, and casteism. The chapter cites examples of urban flooding in the context of climate-change-induced weather events that contemporary activists have descended on wetlands as spaces that need saving from ecologically devastating and corrupt urban development. It discusses ecological publics that are often antipoor in their anger at corruption, narrating slums located on or near wetlands as illegal, polluting, and risky.
World-Class City
Authors: Ranganathan Malini , Pike David L. , Doshi Sapana
Published: September 2023

This chapter is dedicated to the contested democratic publics brought to the fore by ethically questionable world-class city-making. It talks about the world-class development of high-rise towers, high-end shops, and high-class restaurants that signal arrival on the world stage across the mega-cities of the global. It also explores how corruption plots restore ethically inflected local meanings to nowhere places of world-class zones and call forth counterpublics that had been absented when such spaces were emptied for development. The chapter includes corruption stories that raise the question of who constitutes the demos of a particular public. It argues that at stake in corruption emplotted through the world-class city is how and by whom meaning and lived experience are reinvested into nowhere spaces ostensibly emptied of both.
CONCLUSION
Authors: Ranganathan Malini , Pike David L. , Doshi Sapana
Published: September 2023

This chapter draws out present-day consequences of the core argument that corruption plots from the global South are an essential heuristic for understanding processes undergirding increasing inequality. It highlights the wealth-amassing practices of the elite everywhere and how elites control the discourse on corruption. It also reviews topoi with an eye explicitly toward the work theory from the south when faced with corruption plots emerging from the home base in the United States. The chapter suggests that the specific forms and idioms of corruption can be effectively recognized and countered only by situating corruption talk in lived and imagined spaces. It considers corruption as an ethical discourse wielded by different groups, in different places, and across uneven arrangements of power and privilege.
Prologue
Authors: Coutin Susan Bibler , Yngvesson Barbara
Published: September 2023

This introductory chapter discusses vignettes which bring together research on unauthorized movement and transnational adoption. The first vignette considers the case study of “Carlos,” who is both unauthorized and a member of society. The second focuses on birth mother and child Maria and Clara, who are kin yet unrelated. Juxtaposing the work in this fashion shows the fields in which ethnographers are immersed as unfixed, constituted in relationships with interlocutors, and moving with ethnographers through their fieldnotes and memories, rather than simply being there to be inhabited. Immersion within such unfixed fields produces fieldsight, a kind of binocular vision made possible by being entangled in two realities that are incompatible but that also must be true.
Fieldsight
Authors: Coutin Susan Bibler , Yngvesson Barbara
Published: September 2023

This chapter theorizes how ethnographic fields of vision are created and disrupted, drawing on examples of fieldwork in both film and ethnography. It argues that fields are not simply geographical locations to which ethnographers travel in space and time, but also as-if phenomena or transitional objects in that they are both internal to and external from ethnographers. These phenomena or objects are constantly in the process of fabrication and revision as the impressions and understandings of ethnographers are transformed through multiple experiences in both the field and the academy, exchanges over time with interlocutors, engagement with other scholarly work, and conversations or collaborations with colleagues. Further, the juxtapositions, displacements, and movements that create fields locate filmmakers, ethnographers, and others on the threshold between worlds, at least temporarily. The chapter refers to the mode of perception enabled by such positioning as fieldsight.
The Search for a “Back”
Authors: Coutin Susan Bibler , Yngvesson Barbara
Published: September 2023

This chapter considers the estado de búsqueda (“state of searching,” “quest”) that materializes within several sorts of returns: roots trips that adoptees take to the places where they were born; searches that relatives of the disappeared conduct for their loved ones; exiles' quest to understand the past, even as it erupts in the present; and ethnographers' returns (via fieldnotes) to their field sites. In each of these cases, there is a powerful pull to a “back,” which may be intensified by the tension between the longing for a time and space before the present, and the impossibility of fully reaching such a point. When the pull is to a position that was legally recorded or erased, returns may be focused on a search for papers. The necessity yet impossibility of return gives rise to a paradox: access to an evidentiary record—to the time and space before death, deportation, adoption, or departure—holds out the promise of wholeness but also the risk of annihilation as the world that one imagined or experienced is undone. The chapter emphasizes that paper and other evidentiary trails do not merely document prior moments and movements, but also have the potential to redefine persons, compel movement, alter moments, and make ties ambiguous.
Beyond “Spooky Action at a Distance”
Authors: Coutin Susan Bibler , Yngvesson Barbara
Published: September 2023

This chapter ponders the ways that “spooky” quantum physics coexists with the more commonsense understandings of time, space, movement, and location. These are part of classical physics which in some ways parallels the impossible realities that have been explored in previous chapters. Classical physics presumes that objects exist in particular locations, that time is linear, that space can be mapped, that theory corresponds to the physical world, and that scientific observations exist outside the phenomena they measure. At extremes of scale, however, such as the microscale and situations with extreme mass concentrations, classical theory breaks down. Likewise, it is possible to act as if the world works according to legal conventions: that people belong to the society where they are born, that biological relationships are the basis for kinship, that there are orderly ways to cross national borders, that people do not simply disappear, and that it is impossible to be alive and dead at the same time. Yet in the nowhere occupied by those who are in an estado de búsqueda, these conventions break down.
The Need for Cognitive Closure and Partisan Group-Centrism
Authors: Luttig Matthew D.
Published: September 2023

This chapter provides an empirical assessment examining the relationship between the need for cognitive closure and outcomes among both Republicans and Democrats. It talks about group-centric partisanship, which expresses the outcomes of partisan strength, intensity of partisan social identity, difference in feelings about the two parties, and attitudes toward interparty marriage. It also emphasizes the relevance of the concept of affective polarization in the causes of affective polarization in US society. The chapter highlights the nationally representative 2008 survey collected through GfK networks, the representative survey from 2014 collected through YouGov, and a 2018 SSI study containing unique indicators of group-centric partisanship and were administered in an environment of high political polarization or party entitativity. It explores the interaction of the need for cognitive closure (NFCC) and political attention, which are positively associated with various indicators of group-centric partisanship.
Lydia Chukovskaia’s Sofia Petrovna and Going Under
Authors: Klots Yasha
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses the journey of Lydia Chukovskaia's manuscript abroad, its first publication and reception in tamizdat, and the political and aesthetic reasons for its rejection in gosizdat vis-à-vis its reception abroad. Situating Sofia Petrovna in the context of Chukovskaia's later novella, Going Under, the chapter addresses those aspects of both works that go beyond the author's incontestable historical accomplishment—daring “'to name the torture chamber' in its presence.” Because of the immediate proximity of Chukovskaia's fiction to the historical events described, Sofia Petrovna was read primarily “as history rather than fiction,” while Going Under was often read as an autobiography, rather than a creative amplification of the earlier work. The chapter argues, however, that the two works, set and written ten years apart, are “indexical” to each other. They may be read as a cycle or diptych without being reduced to the respective historical contexts that inform their subject matter: the Great Terror of the 1930s and Stalin's persecution of the Soviet intelligentsia and Jewry in the late 1940s.
Who Agrees and Who Disagrees
Authors: Kostovicova Denisa
Published: September 2023

This chapter analyzes interactivity in discussions about war crimes in order to understand the patterns of agreement and disagreement across ethnic lines. It first defines the concept of interactivity. As the chapter notes, certain tendencies can distort interethnic discourse and undermine the benefits of good-quality deliberation. The findings show, however, that there is no discursive ethnic enclavization, as greater interactivity exists across ethnic lines than between speakers belonging to the same ethnic group. The chapter then proceeds by reviewing the study of interactivity in scholarship on deliberation in divided societies. Based on this, it argues that we need to go beyond a narrow operationalization of interactivity and consider the nature of responses (agreement and disagreement) alongside the tally of counts of interethnic responses. The chapter also argues that we need to understand whether deliberators are respectful when engaging individuals and groups across ethnic lines.
Discursive Solidarity against Identity Politics
Authors: Kostovicova Denisa
Published: September 2023

This chapter investigates how people's enactment of their ethnic identities meets ethical goals of deliberation in order to reveal how people orient themselves discursively toward each other in public communication. It builds on the argument that to be reconciliatory, good-quality deliberation needs to be accompanied by recognition of the ethnic Other and their suffering. The chapter first shows how identity politics bears on deliberation in civil society, which is why we need an ethical perspective to evaluate the enactment of ethnic identities during deliberation. It then introduces the data and the qualitative method—the other strand alongside the quantitative analysis in this book's mixed-method research design. The chapter demonstrates how discursive identity practices counter divisive effects of identity politics premised on the denigration of the ethnic Other during deliberation and lead to reconciliation.
Prologue
Authors: Minty Christopher F.
Published: September 2023

This prologue provides an overview of the political mobilizations in the decade or so before 1776, presenting a background of loyalism and the American Revolution in New York City. Colonists' respective journeys to the American Revolution, wherever they were, were influenced by a variety of factors—social, political, economic, historical, and cultural. Their choices, political or otherwise, affected not only whom they spent their time with but also how they were perceived by others. The prologue explains that the book shows how people who became loyalists contributed to the origins of American political practice. They pushed to involve more people in the political process, used innovative and engaging methods to mobilize people, and created institutions that are still in existence today. On various occasions, it was people who became loyalists who laid the groundwork for the establishment of an expansive and more inclusive political republic in the 1780s and beyond. At the center of their associationism was a firm interpretation of what Manhattan's political economy should be and how New York should fit into the British Empire.
Too Much Power over Our Common People
Authors: Minty Christopher F.
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines how the DeLanceys legislated when they were in power, showing how they implemented their political beliefs and followed through on much of what they campaigned on. The DeLanceys had expanded the ways in which non-elites could take part in their city's political culture, inundating public spaces with eighteenth-century conceptions of manliness and civic virtue to create an informal civic-minded political association with broad-based support. They also rearticulated their commitment to be the people's representatives within the assembly. They increased their future loyalist votes in 1769 by 44 percent, while the Livingstons' future loyalist votes fell by 29 percent. The DeLanceys' rhetoric about securing economic independence spoke to the interests that mattered to these men. Indeed, many future loyalists associated with the DeLanceys, and through their association, they cultivated a group consciousness that encouraged partisanship within New York.
All the Sons of Liberty
Authors: Minty Christopher F.
Published: September 2023

This chapter assesses how Alexander McDougall, a Scottish immigrant, mobilized support in opposition to the DeLanceys and successfully created a political association that offered an alternative vision for Manhattan's future. McDougall was committed to securing and advancing New Yorkers' constitutional rights. His arrest, as well as the events that followed, mobilized people who were against the DeLanceys, or apathetic toward them. However, McDougall's supporters recognized the effectiveness of the DeLanceyite methods of political mobilization, and they adopted similar approaches to mobilize support. With McDougall in jail at the New Gaol, Isaac Sears and John Lamb had moved quickly to mobilize support for their new associate. To counter the actions of the DeLanceys, the three men decided on a scheme that emphasized the Britishness of colonial New York's political culture, using recent, relevant political characters and events to advance their cause.
The Din of War
Authors: Minty Christopher F.
Published: September 2023

This chapter describes how political and wartime circumstances affected colonists' behavior during the American Revolutionary War. It examines how revolutionaries like Alexander McDougall dictated how New Yorkers behaved and were able to push some of their opponents out of the political sphere—and sometimes out of the city. From April 1775 through the spring of 1777, New Yorkers were often forced to determine who or what best represented their interests, if at all, whether it was McDougall, the DeLanceys, the Livingstons, or the assembly, Parliament, the provincial convention, the Second Continental Congress, or the church. The chapter then looks at the battles of Lexington and Concord. It shows how the British military influenced events, prompting a large-scale outburst of loyalism in Manhattan and beyond.
Epilogue
Authors: Minty Christopher F.
Published: September 2023

This epilogue explores how New York loyalists built new lives in London, and they continued to socialize with like-minded associates. However, it was near-impossible to replicate the lives they had in Manhattan. Other DeLanceyite loyalists went elsewhere, settling in Canada, Jamaica, the Bahamas, India, Sierra Leone, and beyond. For those who stayed in Britain, their families often remained intertwined with the British Empire. Ultimately, the associationism of the 1760s and 1770s, cultivated and stewarded by the DeLanceys, endured after the American Revolution, despite the loyalist exodus, with many of the same people and families occupying key roles. Much of this was possible because of the broad-based political mobilization of New York City's white male population.
Topographies of Power
Authors: Ong Andrew
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the topographies of power of the Wa Region. While autonomy was partially produced through imaginaries, Wa Region was envisioned differently by its neighbors, each imposing their framings and interests on it. To the Myanmar state, Wa Region was a bastion of insurgent resistance too difficult to presently disarm but needed to be kept in check. The United Wa State Army (UWSA) had to be contained to prevent its form of autonomy from becoming a model for others. The chapter considers autonomy as a social value within Wa highland imaginaries. It mentions that constant construction in Pangkham was an index of capital flows and ruptures behind the scenes in a cash economy with no formal banking system.
Epilogue
Authors: Ong Andrew
Published: September 2023

This concluding chapter explores the implications of Wa Region's political culture to international community representatives. It covers how the autonomy of the Wa polity has been produced relationally across three decades. The static deadlock in political negotiations between the United Wa State Army (UWSA) and the Myanmar government consists of a flurry of maneuvers and counter maneuvers, postures, and intermittent relations. The chapter explains that relational autonomy is an ongoing process through social values enacted through practice and relations. The chapter highlights the significance of UWSA's vision of autonomy as key to understanding how to accommodate the Wa polity in a new Myanmar.
A Lost Peace
Authors: Jackson Galen
Published: September 2023

The author of this book rewrites an important chapter in the history of the middle period of the Cold War, changing how we think about the Arab–Israeli conflict. During the June 1967 Middle East war, Israeli forces seized the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. This conflict was followed, in October 1973, by a joint Egyptian–Syrian attack on Israel, which threatened to drag the United States and the Soviet Union into a confrontation even though the superpowers had seemingly embraced the idea of détente. This conflict contributed significantly to the ensuing deterioration of US–Soviet relations. The standard explanation for why détente failed is that the Soviet Union, driven mainly by its Communist ideology, pursued a highly aggressive foreign policy during the 1970s. In the Middle East specifically, the conventional wisdom is that the Soviets played a destabilizing role by encouraging the Arabs in their conflict with Israel in an effort to undermine the US position in the region for Cold War gain. The book challenges standard accounts of this period, demonstrating that the United States sought to exploit the Soviet Union in the Middle East, despite repeated entreaties from USSR leaders that the superpowers cooperate to reach a comprehensive Arab–Israeli settlement. By leveraging the remarkable evidence now available to scholars, the book reveals that the United States and the Soviet Union may have missed an opportunity for Middle East peace during the 1970s.
Deadlock
Authors: Jackson Galen
Published: September 2023

This chapter looks at how the Arab–Israeli conflict might trigger a great power war. It seeks to answer the questions: What interest did the Soviet Union have in going to war for the sake of its Arab clients, Egypt and Syria? As for the Americans, they had a fundamental interest in Israel's security, but what interest did they have in supporting that country's enlargement beyond the prewar boundaries, when pursuing that sort of policy was bound to poison US relations with the Arab world? The chapter recounts that the United States and the Soviet Union found it hard to work together for Middle East peace in the aftermath of the June 1967 war. It then analyzes why US policymakers think that an Arab–Israeli settlement was strongly in Washington's interest and why the peace terms that the Americans had in mind make cooperation with the Soviets impossible. Even if they wanted a deal, the chapter investigates why Johnson-administration officials believed that the domestic political constraints they faced were such that they would not be able to put real pressure on Israel to accept a reasonable agreement. Ultimately, the chapter asks why USSR policy so disproportionately favor the Arabs that US–Soviet cooperation was simply out of the question.
“Under the Cover of Détente”
Authors: Jackson Galen
Published: September 2023

This chapter highlights that the United States and the Soviet Union had an opportunity to cooperate for Arab–Israeli peace at the start of 1973. It emphasizes that the only party that was content with the status quo was Israel, but the White House was now relatively well positioned to mobilize US influence with that country. The chapter then chronicles why the superpowers were unable to make progress, which led Egypt and Syria to go to war in October. The chapter underlines that the Arab–Israeli conflict had emerged as arguably the principal reason for what had turned out to be a significant deterioration in US–Soviet relations by the time Nixon resigned from office in August 1974. The chapter explores whether Nixon, upon starting his second term, suddenly considered the Arab–Israeli issue less important for the United States. It analyzes whether the Egyptians had abandoned their pursuit of a political solution by 1973. The chapter also questions whether the Soviets, when it came down to it, opposed a Middle East peace agreement. Given the outcome of the October conflict, the chapter ponders whether their unrealistic approach effectively excluded them from the peace negotiations. It then examines whether US domestic politics once again hindered progress.
A Peace Too Far?
Authors: Jackson Galen
Published: September 2023

This chapter looks at how Jimmy Carter's victory in the 1976 presidential election generated new possibilities for the superpowers to work together. It explores how the conditions in the Middle East by 1977 created an opportunity for the Americans and Soviets to cooperate. The chapter then chronicles that the United States and the Soviet Union issued a joint statement calling for the reconvening of the Geneva conference, as well as a set of agreed principles about the substance of a peace agreement. However, the Carter administration abandoned the statement almost immediately after it was issued. As the chapter argues, the Americans would ultimately gear their efforts toward mediating a bilateral Egyptian–Israeli peace agreement—one that did nothing to address the Palestinian question—and once again leave Moscow sitting on the sidelines. The chapter sheds light on the whole question of why the Cold War escalated so significantly as the decade came to an end. It analyzes two main questions: first, why did the negotiations fail and what caused the breakdown? Second, why did the Carter administration not view a comprehensive Arab–Israeli settlement as valuable as previous administrations did? The chapter also explores whether there was a fundamental disagreement between the United States and the Soviet Union regarding the terms of an agreement.
“First Walk”—Rousseau’s Introduction
Authors: Pangle Thomas L.
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the First Walk in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Reveries. It describes a spontaneous outpouring of an anguished self-expression that segues into a stream of sinuous and cascading reasonings that deal with the Solitary Walker's idiosyncratic present, past, and prospected future life. It also presents the autobiographical justification for, and the explanatory introduction to Rousseau's extremely self-centered writing. The chapter talks about the Solitary Walker's condition being far worse than that of lonely isolation, expressing an experience of feeling, as if in a kind of dream, that many years he has been the victim of a cruel and unjust psychological torture carried out daily by a historically unprecedented deliberate cooperation of all other living humans. It shows how Rousseau was convulsed by a frantically paranoid sense of his own victimization, at the hands of a plot participated in by the entire rest of the human species.
“Second Walk”—Nature, Mortality, God
Authors: Pangle Thomas L.
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the Second Walk in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Reveries, which is explicitly linked in sequence to the First Walk by a beginning that is emphatically in the past tense and of a conventional narrative. It mentions the Solitary Walker that conspicuously leaves behind and highlights the First Walk's artfully soliloquized performance that was delivered in the present tense. It also talks about how nature wanted the Solitary Walker to be the completed subject and the exclusive object of his own consciousness, immersed in undirected, self-engrossed, sweet musings. The chapter describes how Rousseau indicated in the Second Walk the heaviness and constitution of developed human self-conscious and the burden of the awareness of one's own mortality. It highlights the Solitary Walker's portrayal of himself as having undergone an extreme version of the experiential path to God that may be traced through the hellish swamp of unjust victimhood.
“Seventh Walk”—Botany as Consuming “Amusement”
Authors: Pangle Thomas L.
Published: September 2023

This chapter highlights the Seventh Walk in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Reveries, which is a diary-like presentation of the Solitary Walker's major solitary, self-centered, and even frivolous activity at present. It continues the silence into which the Solitary Walker has fallen concerning divine judgment with its compensations for virtue and vice, providing only the barest hint of a reference to the afterlife and to the hand behind nature. It also analyzes the conversation that signals the approaching end of Rousseau's writing and the end of reveries altogether. The chapter talks about how the Solitary Walker expresses himself in a way that indicates his expectation of the reader's disappointed and somewhat disapproving surprise at hearing of the end of this collection of long dreams. It describes botanizing and includes observations of amorous shepherds who are seeking garlands for shepherd lasses.
Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China
Authors: Tang Beibei
Published: September 2023

This book examines the key mechanisms operating at the grassroots level in China that contribute to urban development and increased public support for the legitimacy and authority of the Chinese state. The book uncovers new trends and dynamics of urban neighborhood governance since the 2000s to reveal the significant factors that contribute to regime survival. It introduces the concept of hybrid authoritarianism, a governance mechanism an authoritarian state employs to produce governance legitimacy, public support, and regime sustainability. Hybrid authoritarianism is situated in an intermediary governance space between state and society. It accommodates both state and non-state actors, deals with a wide range of governance issues, employs flexible governance strategies, and in this context, ultimately strengthens CCP leadership. The book documents processes of hybrid authoritarianism through a focus on various types of urban neighborhoods, including new urban middle-class neighborhoods, and the increasing urbanization of the countryside. The book provides a conceptual framework that avoids scholarly approaches that tend to reify either one-party autocracy or Western-centric notions of democracy.
Intermediary Governance Space
Authors: Tang Beibei
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the intermediate governance space as the structural context of hybrid authoritarianism. It highlights the complexity of the intermediate governance space with its interactions among diverse governance actors at the neighborhood level. These intermediary actors include social organizations, market-based groups, and resident volunteers. In addition, “grid governance” in middle-class neighborhoods and new governance structures in urbanized neighborhoods have been adopted and various types of neighborhood party-building and mobilization have been consistently carried out, despite the flexible governance arrangements. Ultimately, in the intermediary governance space, there is a mix of bottom-up and top-down governance structures and practices. This space also embraces mixed practices of rural and urban governance, a blend of formal and informal political arrangements, and a combination of features that exist both within and outside the formal political system.
Neighborhood Conflict Resolution
Authors: Tang Beibei
Published: September 2023

This chapter evaluates two distinct features of authoritarian deliberation in Chinese urban neighborhoods. One is that despite the rigid political control of the party, deliberations are associated with a certain level of autonomy, which accommodates multiple (especially non-state) actors and various forms of participation in searching for practical resolutions for neighborhood conflicts. The other feature is that neighborhood deliberation is one component of an overall local governance strategy. More specifically, the chapter examines the role of Residents' Committees as the agent of the state in coordinating neighborhood deliberations. It explores how they are operated mainly by resident representatives and Residents' Committee staff to maximize resident mobilization and coordination between the state and non-state organizations. In addition, the chapter looks at the impact of the leadership of party organizations at the grassroots level on neighborhood deliberation.
Conclusion
Authors: Tang Beibei
Published: September 2023

This concluding chapter summarizes how hybrid authoritarianism shapes regime survival through governance operations and outcomes at the grassroots level. Through the lens of everyday politics of neighborhood governance, the thesis of hybrid authoritarianism explains the complex political mechanisms involved in both strength building and flexible development of the Chinese party-state. On the one side, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) retains its leadership role under marketization and urbanization by strengthening the party's leadership of organizational structures and enhancing its mass mobilization capacity. Yet it does so with some degree of flexibility, working with multiple actors, diverse governance mechanisms, and clearly targeted governance priorities. Together the strength and flexibility produce governance legitimacy and public support for the party-state, minimizing challenges to regime legitimacy during the current substantial social and economic transformations.
The Breaking Point, 1960–1964
Authors: Jagel Matthew
Published: September 2023

This chapter reveals that severe tensions between Cambodia and its Thai and South Vietnamese neighbors lingered. Sõn Ngc Thành was a major factor in these developments. Norodom Sihanouk began to feel boxed in not only by his so-called Free World neighbors but by the United States as well. He in turn shifted toward an accommodating position with China, further exacerbating his tensions with the Americans. While never the central figure in the frayed relationship between Cambodia, its neighbors, and the United States, Thành was nonetheless an essential element in understanding both how Sihanouk positioned himself politically inside Cambodia and portrayed himself to the wider world. As the record shows, as Cambodia moved toward a break with the United States, the mysterious Thành was never far from the minds of Sihanouk or American officials.
Conclusion
Authors: Jagel Matthew
Published: September 2023

This concluding chapter tracks the tumultuous developments in the aftermath of Sõn Ngc Thành's retirement, and reflects on his legacy. After leaving office, Thành returned to Saigon a humbled and sick man. With the war against the insurgent Khmer Rouge continuing to turn sour, Cambodian officials sought a way to end the war in a manner that would allow them to retain power. Thành continued to find multiple opportunities to become politically active in Cambodia once again. However, in reality, he was a spent force. Yet, as the chapter shows, even with his organization crushed, and the two governments he was allied with defeated, the specter of a resurgent Thành remained. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Thành was likely taken prisoner by the victorious communist Vietnamese forces, languishing in prison for the next two years, before passing away in 1977.
The Vortex That Unites Us
Authors: Emery Jacob
Published: September 2023

This book is a study of totality in Russian literature, from the foundation of the modern Russian state to the present day. Considering a diversity of texts that have in common chiefly their prominence in the Russian literary canon, the book examines the persistent ambition in Russian literature to gather the whole world into an artwork. It reveals how the diversity of totalizing figures in the Russian canon—often in alliance with ideologies like the totalitarian state or enlightenment reason—strive for the frontiers of space and time in order to guarantee the coherence of the globe and the continuity of history. The book explores subjects like romantic metaphors of supernatural possession; Tolstoy's conception of art as a vector of emotional contagion; the panoramic ambitions of the avant-garde to grasp the globe in a new poetic medium; efforts of Soviet utopians to harmonize the whole of social life along aesthetic lines; Mandelstam's evocation of writing as a transcendental authority that guarantees a grandiose historical rhythm even when manifested as authoritarian repression; and the mass market of cultural commodities in which the exiled Vladimir Nabokov found success with his novel Lolita. The book reveals a common thread in the disparate works it explores, bringing into a single horizon a variety of typically siloed texts and aesthetic approaches. In all these cases, the medium of totality is the body, inspired by artistic vision and compelled by aesthetic response.
Versions of Possession
Authors: Emery Jacob
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the trope of possession across the whole of modern Russian literature, from the early Romantic poetry of Konstantin Batiushkov to the contemporary fiction of Vladimir Sorokin. It cites Batiushkov's Scandinavian elegies, wherein the ghosts of Viking skalds dictate verses to their supposed successor, a Russian soldier poet who sojourned in Finland as a member of the occupying Russian Army. It also describes the structure of possession in which the wellspring of Russian poetry is located in the Scandinavian past and is superimposed on the structure of empire. The chapter mentions the demonic figures that visit Ivan Karamazov and Nikolai Stavrogin in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels. marking the conflict between the irreconcilable universalizing ideologies of Orthodox mysticism and Enlightenment reason. It highlights the dystopian allegory by the early Soviet writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky that probes the limits of the materialist position.
A Boy’s Dream
Authors: Wilber Tom
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the story of Wendell Keith Ponder's life, obscured by time and discarded by memory. Enlisted in the Army Air Forces—the AAF—at the age of eighteen, Ponder, as with many of his peers, had no spouse or children to preserve and pass on his letters and personal items. Who was he? A search for other clues yields, first and foremost, evidence of an ambition cultivated since childhood that would guide his fate. The chapter highlights that Keith Ponder's wish for an aviator suit serves as an apt starting point to his story. It follows his early life, which can be resurrected more broadly from the Depression-era Mississippi landscape bearing the roots of his pioneering Baptist ancestors and a large extended family—including a great-nephew who bears his name—trying to understand his fate to this day. It would have been whimsical to imagine young Keith, within the life span of one of his hunting dogs, piloting an aircraft longer than the house in which he came of age and incalculably grander than even his boyhood dreams. Yet, in hindsight, it's plain to see how the time and circumstances of his upbringing provided the raw material for his fortune and ultimate misfortune.
Readying for War
Authors: Wilber Tom
Published: September 2023

This chapter chronicles how Keith Ponder and seven other men in shearling aviator suits walked across the tarmac at the Westover Army Air Forces base in Chicopee, Massachusetts, to one of the Curtiss Jenny biplanes. At sixty-seven feet, the B-24 Liberator bomber was the length of a large whale—a comparison made more apt by its tall, blunt nose and broad fluke-like stabilizers. The chapter stresses that it was a “heavy bomber,” the biggest of the planes of its day, weighing thirty-seven thousand pounds, another twenty thousand pounds loaded. The chapter then shifts to discuss the launch of the largest air offensive to date on interior Germany by US Army Air Forces and England's Royal Air Force Bomber Command. Operation Argument—later known simply as Big Week—would target Germany's airplane factories and manufacturing centers. Success counted on AAF reinforcements as quickly as the factories and air bases back home could turn them out. To this end, the frenetic rate of aircraft production in the United States had been outpaced only by recruitment. The chapter argues that the US war effort was nearing its peak when Ponder enlisted a year and some months prior to this day on February 17, 1944. It notes that Ponder and his crew were the merest of specks in the most monumental war mobilization in modern history.
A Few of Fifteen Thousand
Authors: Wilber Tom
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor which triggered the United States' pivotal commitment to the bloodiest war in history. As the chapter highlights, Americans—favoring a policy of neutrality following World War I—had initially stood by as Axis forces invaded Europe and the Pacific. But after their own vulnerability to conquering armies was graphically exhibited at Pearl Harbor, every available mineral, agricultural, technological, and human resource the country could muster was redirected to the war effort. Patriotism ran high, and the chapter then looks at how civilian energy was effectively channeled into any number of paramilitary organizations tasked with protecting the home front, building morale, and supporting military operations. It examines how US government spending grew by a factor of ten during the country's mobilization for World War II, and how all these changes were accompanied by no small degree of social upheaval, including racial turmoil fueled by institutionalized discrimination and social injustice. As dramatic as the changes were to the social and physical American landscape, one of the most noticeable transformations was overhead. On the day the AT-7 disappeared with its crew of four in the Sierra Nevada, the chapter chronicles the plane crashes at military bases in Georgia, Alabama, Texas, Ohio, and California.
Discovery
Authors: Wilber Tom
Published: September 2023

This chapter recounts how trapper Jim Goudie found the dismembered elements of a four-engine bomber that sat wedged at the base of a tree in the foothills of the Mealy Mountains. It describes the broken fuselage, with the rear section lying almost parallel with the starboard wing. Wires and hydraulic lines spilled from the gap, like tendons of a severed limb. Nearby, a man in an aviator suit, engulfed in a nimbus of respiratory vapor, wielded an ax against one of the splintered trees. The chapter reports that the last flight of Liberator 586 had ended at a tree that didn't budge. It notes that the impact came on the starboard wing, causing the plane to pivot with such force that the rear section snapped off after whipping against another tree. The chapter then investigates how the crew dug an encampment in the snow under the starboard wing and lined it with parachutes and sheepskin rugs they had bought as souvenirs in Iceland. It also examines how the crew of Liberator 586 had been stranded in the woods for four days with temperatures at night routinely falling below minus forty. With the news of the crew's survival, the chapter narrates that an American plane aiding in the search happened to fly over the crash site, and a spotter, finally, saw the men's signal fire.
The UAW's Southern Gamble
Authors: Silvia Stephen J.
Published: September 2023

This book is the first in-depth assessment of the United Auto Workers' efforts to organize foreign vehicle plants (Daimler-Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Volkswagen) in the American South since 1989, an era when union membership declined precipitously. The book chronicles transnational union cooperation between the UAW and its counterparts in Brazil, France, Germany, and Japan and documents the development of employer strategies that have proven increasingly effective at thwarting unionization. The book shows that when organizing, unions must now fight on three fronts: at the worksite; in the corporate boardroom; and in the political realm. The book makes clear that the UAW's failed campaigns in the South can teach hard-won lessons about challenging the structural and legal roadblocks to union participation and effectively organizing workers within and beyond the auto industry.
The Will to Predict
Authors: Rindzeviciūte Egle
Published: September 2023

This book demonstrates how the logic of scientific expertise cannot be properly understood without knowing the conceptual and institutional history of scientific prediction. The book notes that predictions of future population, economic growth, environmental change, and scientific and technological innovation have shaped much of twentieth- and twenty-first-century politics and social life, as well as government policies. Today, such predictions are more necessary than ever as the world undergoes dramatic environmental, political, and technological change. But, the book asks, what does it mean to predict scientifically? What are the limits of scientific prediction and what are its effects on governance, institutions, and society? The book takes as its example twentieth-century USSR. By outlining the role of prediction in a range of governmental contexts, from economic and social planning to military strategy, the book shows that the history of scientific prediction is a transnational one, part of the history of modern science and technology as well as governance. Going beyond the Soviet case, it argues that scientific predictions are central for organizing uncertainty through the orchestration of knowledge and action. Bridging the fields of political sociology, organization studies, and history, the book considers what makes knowledge scientific and how such knowledge has impacted late modern governance.
Introduction
Authors: Rindzevičiūtė Eglė
Published: September 2023

This introductory chapter provides an overview of scientific prediction. Deploying scientific predictions in planning for the long term, whether that takes the form of the Soviet Union's infamous five-year plans, capitalist industrial strategies, or global attempts to regulate the climate, is central to the legitimacy and power of government itself. And yet, the power of scientific prediction is not a given, nor is the process of prediction a straightforward case of input translated mechanically into output, prediction feeding into action. Scientific prediction is at once technical, political, social, and institutional. The chapter explains that the book examines the history of scientific prediction as both a concept and a form of practice as it developed in the quintessentially future-oriented country of Soviet Russia. By focusing on scientific prediction, it also develops the research agenda of the emerging scholarship on the Soviet risk society: the history of Soviet policy approaches to anticipation of global risks, disaster governance, and emergency response.
Global Prediction
Authors: Rindzevičiūtė Eglė
Published: September 2023

This chapter assesses whether the cybernetic model of predictive behavior and goal-setting is suitable for addressing large-scale and long-term problems. It examines the intellectual contribution to the debates on scientific prediction made by a prominent Soviet Russian scientist, policy entrepreneur, and public intellectual, Nikita Moiseev. Moiseev's thought forms a particularly important part of the global history of scientific prediction, bridging the histories of cybernetics and systems analysis, on the one side, and the histories of authoritarian, liberal, and infrastructural governance, on the other side. The chapter then details how computer-based policy sciences shaped the epistemological framework of late-Soviet thought on Earth systems governance and the role of predictability. It also discusses the transformation of the notion of governance from purposive control to guidance through milieus. This constituted an important shift to embrace the collective, synchronizing role of scientific prediction as it goes beyond cognitive operation as in logical empiricism and beyond target-seeking processes of adaptation in cybernetic behaviorism.