In Inglorious, Illegal
Bastards , Aaron Herald Skabelund examines
how the Self-Defense Force (SDF)-the post-World War II Japanese
military-and specifically the Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF),
...struggled for legitimacy in a society at best indifferent to them
and often hostile to their very existence.
From the early iterations of the GSDF as the Police Reserve
Force and the National Safety Force, through its establishment as
the largest and most visible branch of the armed forces, the GSDF
deployed an array of public outreach and public service
initiatives, including off-base and on-base events, civil
engineering projects, and natural disaster relief operations.
Internally, the GSDF focused on indoctrination of its personnel to
fashion a reconfigured patriotism and esprit de corps. These
efforts to gain legitimacy achieved some success and influenced the
public over time, but they did not just change society. They also
transformed the force itself, as it assumed new priorities and
traditions and contributed to the making of a Cold War defense
identity, which came to be shared by wider society in Japan. As
Inglorious, Illegal Bastards demonstrates, this identity
endures today, several decades after the end of the Cold War.
In this account of an unusual episode in the Cold War, Audrey Kurth Cronin examines the negotiations over Austria and the Soviet Union's sudden and surprising decision to withdraw its troops and ...accept the country as a neutral Western state, after having rejected any settlement for eight years.
When the interstate highway program connected America's cities, it also divided them, cutting through and destroying countless communities. Affluent and predominantly white residents fought back in a ...much heralded "freeway revolt," saving such historic neighborhoods as Greenwich Village and New Orleans's French Quarter. This book tells of theotherrevolt, a movement of creative opposition, commemoration, and preservation staged on behalf of the mostly minority urban neighborhoods that lacked the political and economic power to resist the onslaught of highway construction.
Within the context of the larger historical forces of the 1960s and 1970s, Eric Avila maps the creative strategies devised by urban communities to document and protest the damage that highways wrought. The works of Chicanas and other women of color-from the commemorative poetry of Patricia Preciado Martin and Lorna Dee Cervantes to the fiction of Helena Maria Viramontes to the underpass murals of Judy Baca-expose highway construction as not only a racist but also a sexist enterprise. In colorful paintings, East Los Angeles artists such as David Botello, Carlos Almaraz, and Frank Romero satirize, criticize, and aestheticize the structure of the freeway. Local artists paint murals on the concrete piers of a highway interchange in San Diego's Chicano Park. The Rondo Days Festival in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Black Archives, History, and Research Foundation in the Overtown neighborhood of Miami preserve and celebrate the memories of historic African American communities lost to the freeway.
Bringing such efforts to the fore in the story of the freeway revolt,The Folklore of the Freewaymoves beyond a simplistic narrative of victimization. Losers, perhaps, in their fight against the freeway, the diverse communities at the center of the book nonetheless generate powerful cultural forces that shape our understanding of the urban landscape and influence the shifting priorities of contemporary urban policy.
The United States holds the dubious distinction of having the most unequal income distribution of any advanced industrialized nation. While other developed countries face similar challenges from ...globalization and technological change, none rivals America’s singularly poor record for equitably distributing the benefits and burdens of recent economic shifts. In Categorically Unequal, Douglas Massey weaves together history, political economy, and even neuropsychology to provide a comprehensive explanation of how America’s culture and political system perpetuates inequalities between different segments of the population. Categorically Unequal is striking both for its theoretical originality and for the breadth of topics it covers. Massey argues that social inequalities arise from the universal human tendency to place others into social categories. In America, ethnic minorities, women, and the poor have consistently been the targets of stereotyping, and as a result, they have been exploited and discriminated against throughout the nation’s history. African-Americans continue to face discrimination in markets for jobs, housing, and credit. Meanwhile, the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border has discouraged Mexican migrants from leaving the United States, creating a pool of exploitable workers who lack the legal rights of citizens. Massey also shows that women’s advances in the labor market have been concentrated among the affluent and well-educated, while low-skilled female workers have been relegated to occupations that offer few chances for earnings mobility. At the same time, as the wages of low-income men have fallen, more working-class women are remaining unmarried and raising children on their own. Even as minorities and women continue to face these obstacles, the progressive legacy of the New Deal has come under frontal assault. The government has passed anti-union legislation, made taxes more regressive, allowed the real value of the federal minimum wage to decline, and drastically cut social welfare spending. As a result, the income gap between the richest and poorest has dramatically widened since 1980. Massey attributes these anti-poor policies in part to the increasing segregation of neighborhoods by income, which has insulated the affluent from the social consequences of poverty, and to the disenfranchisement of the poor, as the population of immigrants, prisoners, and ex-felons swells. America’s unrivaled disparities are not simply the inevitable result of globalization and technological change. As Massey shows, privileged groups have systematically exploited and excluded many of their fellow Americans. By delving into the root causes of inequality in America, Categorically Unequal provides a compelling argument for the creation of a more equitable society.
Focusing on the major movements and personalities of the time, as well as the lasting influence of the period,Canada's 1960sexamines the legacy of this rebellious decade's impact on contemporary ...notions of Canadian identity.
Over the past 15 years, the project of advanced European integration has followed a complex secular and cosmopolitan agenda. As that agenda has evolved, however, so have various hard-line populist ...movements with goals diametrically opposed to the ideals of a harmonious European Union. Spearheaded by figures such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, the controversial leader of France's National Front party, these radical movements have become increasingly influential and, because of their philosophical affinities with fascism and national socialism--politically worrisome.
InIntegral Europe,anthropologist Douglas Holmes posits that such movements are philosophically rooted in integralism, a sensibility that, in its most benign form, enables people to maintain their ethnic identity and solidarity within the context of an increasingly pluralistic society. Taken to irrational extremes by people like Le Pen, integralism is being used to inflame people's feelings of alienation and powerlessness, the by-products of impersonal, transnational "fast-capitalism." The consequences are an invidious politics of exclusion that spawns cultural nationalism, racism, and social disorder.
The analysis moves from northern Italy to Strasbourg and Brussels, the two venues of the European Parliament, and finally to the East End of London. This multi-sited ethnography provides critical perspective on integralism as a form of intimate cultural practice and a violent idiom of estrangement. It combines a wide-ranging review of modern and historical scholarship with two years of field research that included personal interviews with right-wing activists, among them Le Pen and neo-Nazis in inner London. Fascinating, provocative, and sobering,Integral Europeoffers a rare inside look at one of modern Europe's most unsettling political trends.
The essays in this book trace the development of the author's thinking about international institutions between 1980 and 1988. The introduction, written especially for this volume, summarizes and ...defends the "neoliberal institutionalism" that he advocates as a framework for understanding world politics.
How challenger parties, acting as political entrepreneurs, are changing European democracies Challenger parties are on the rise in Europe, exemplified by the likes of Podemos in Spain, the National ...Rally in France, the Alternative for Germany, or the Brexit Party in Great Britain. Like disruptive entrepreneurs, these parties offer new policies and defy the dominance of established party brands. In the face of these challenges and a more volatile electorate, mainstream parties are losing their grip on power. In this book, Catherine De Vries and Sara Hobolt explore why some challenger parties are so successful and what mainstream parties can do to confront these political entrepreneurs.Drawing analogies with how firms compete, De Vries and Hobolt demonstrate that political change is as much about the ability of challenger parties to innovate as it is about the inability of dominant parties to respond. Challenger parties employ two types of innovation to break established party dominance: they mobilize new issues, such as immigration, the environment, and Euroscepticism, and they employ antiestablishment rhetoric to undermine mainstream party appeal. Unencumbered by government experience, challenger parties adapt more quickly to shifting voter tastes and harness voter disenchantment. Delving into strategies of dominance versus innovation, the authors explain why European party systems have remained stable for decades, but also why they are now increasingly under strain.As challenger parties continue to seek to disrupt the existing order, Political Entrepreneurs shows that their ascendency fundamentally alters government stability and democratic politics.
Postwar Japan Green, Michael J; Cooper, Zack
2017
eBook
Japanese security, economic, institutional, and development policies have undergone a remarkable evolution in the 70 years since the end of World War II. Distinguished Japanese scholars reflect on ...the evolution of these policies and draw lessons for coming decades, spotlighting emerging Japanese thinking on key issues facing the U.S.-Japan alliance.
What matters most to voters when they choose their leaders? This book suggests that performance politics is at the heart of contemporary democracy, with voters forming judgments about how well ...competing parties and leaders perform on important issues. Given the high stakes and uncertainty involved, voters rely heavily on partisan cues and party leader images as guides to electoral choice. However, the authors argue that the issue agenda of British politics has changed markedly in recent years. A cluster of concerns about crime, immigration and terrorism now mix with perennial economic and public service issues. Since voters and parties often share the same positions on these issues, political competition focuses on who can do the best job. This book shows that a model emphasizing flexible partisan attachments, party leader images and judgments of party competence on key issues can explain electoral choice in contemporary Britain.
