Is it always true that decentralization reforms put more power in the hands of governors and mayors? In post-developmental Latin America, the surprising answer to this question is no. In fact, a ...variety of outcomes are possible, depending largely on who initiates the reforms, how they are initiated, and in what order they are introduced. Tulia G. Falleti draws on extensive fieldwork, in-depth interviews, archival records, and quantitative data to explain the trajectories of decentralization processes and their markedly different outcomes in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. In her analysis, she develops a sequential theory and method that are successful in explaining this counterintuitive result. Her research contributes to the literature on path dependence and institutional evolution and will be of interest to scholars of decentralization, federalism, subnational politics, intergovernmental relations, and Latin American politics.
In 2002 the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) swept to power in Turkey. Since then it has shied away from a hard-line ideological stance in favour of a more conservative and democratic ...approach. In this book, M. Hakan Yavuz negotiates this ambivalence asking whether it is possible for a political party with a deeply religious ideology to liberalise and entertain democracy or whether, as he contends, radical religious groups moderate their practices and ideologies when forced to negotiate a competitive and rule-based political system. The author explores the thesis through an analysis of the rise and evolution of the AKP and its more recent 2007 election victory. The book, which tackles a number of important issues including political participation, economics and internal security, provides a masterful survey of modern Turkish and Islamic politics, which will be of interest to a broad range of readers from students to professionals and policymakers.
The Mobilization of Political Islam in Turkey explains why political Islam, which has been part of Turkish politics since the 1970s but on the rise only since the 1990s, has now achieved governing ...power. Drawing on social movement theory, the book focuses on the dominant form of Islamist activism in Turkey by analyzing the increasing electoral strength of four successive Islamist political parties: the Welfare Party; its successor, the Virtue Party; and the successors of the Virtue Party: the Felicity Party and the Justice and Development Party. This book, which is based on extensive primary and secondary sources as well as in-depth interviews, provides the most comprehensive analysis currently available of the Islamist political mobilization in Turkey.
Zimbabwe occupies a special place in African politics and international relations, and has been the subject of intense debates over the years. At independence in 1980, the country was better endowed ...than most in Africa, and seemed poised for economic development and political pluralism. The population was relatively well educated, the industrial and agricultural bases were strong, and levels of infrastructure were impressive. However, in less than two decades, Zimbabwe was mired in a deep political and economic crisis. Towards the end of its third decade of independence, the economy had collapsed and the country had been transformed into a repressive state. How can we make sense of this decline? How can we explain the ‘lost decade’ that followed? Can the explanation be reduced to the authoritarian leadership of Robert Mugabe and role of ZANU-PF? Or was something defective about in the institutions through which the state has exercised its authority? Or was it the result of imperialism, the West and sanctions? Zimbabwe’s Lost Decade draws on Lloyd Sachikonye’s analyses of political developments over the past 25 years. It offers a critique of leadership, systems of governance, and economic strategies, and argues for democratic values and practices, and more broad-based participation in the development process.
Based on extensive field research in Turkey, Istanbul, City of the Fearless explores social movements and the broader practices of civil society in Istanbul in the critical years before and after the ...1980 military coup, the defining event in the neoliberal reengineering of the city. Bringing together developments in anthropology, urban studies, cultural geography, and social theory, Christopher Houston offers new insights into the meaning and study of urban violence, military rule, activism and spatial tactics, relations between political factions and ideologies, and political memory and commemoration. This book is both a social history and an anthropological study, investigating how activist practices and the coup not only contributed to the globalization of Istanbul beginning in the 1980s but also exerted their force and influence into the future.
Since its Broadway debut, Hamilton: An American Musical has infused itself into the American experience: who shapes it, who owns it, who can rap it best. Lawyers and legal scholars, recognizing the ...way the musical speaks to some of our most complicated constitutional issues, have embraced Alexander Hamilton as the trendiest historical face in American civics. Hamilton and the Law offers a revealing look into the legal community's response to the musical, which continues to resonate in a country still deeply divided about the reach of the law. A star-powered cast of legal minds—from two former U.S. solicitors general to leading commentators on culture and society—contribute brief and engaging magazine-style articles to this lively book. Intellectual property scholars share their thoughts on Hamilton 's inventive use of other sources, while family law scholars explore domestic violence. Critical race experts consider how Hamilton furthers our understanding of law and race, while authorities on the Second Amendment discuss the language of the Constitution's most contested passage. Legal scholars moonlighting as musicians discuss how the musical lifts history and law out of dusty archives and onto the public stage. This collection of minds, inspired by the phenomenon of the musical and the Constitutional Convention of 1787, urges us to heed Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Founding Fathers and to create something new, daring, and different.
What explains the presence--and the surprising performance--of former authoritarian-regime officials in Latin American presidential elections? To answer that question, Brett J. Kyle examines the ...experiences of twelve countries that transitioned from military to civilian government in the Third Wave of democratization. His persuasive analysis, incorporating case studies of Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, and El Salvador, sheds new light on the consolidation of democracy in Latin America.
The late twentieth century witnessed the birth of an impressive number of new democracies in Latin America. This wave of democratization since 1978 has been by far the broadest and most durable in ...the history of Latin America, but many of the resulting democratic regimes also suffer from profound deficiencies. What caused democratic regimes to emerge and survive? What are their main achievements and shortcomings? This volume offers an ambitious and comprehensive overview of the unprecedented advances as well as the setbacks in the post-1978 wave of democratization. It seeks to explain the sea change from a region dominated by authoritarian regimes to one in which openly authoritarian regimes are the rare exception, and it analyzes why some countries have achieved striking gains in democratization while others have experienced erosions. The book presents general theoretical arguments about what causes and sustains democracy and analyses of nine compelling country cases.
Danish literary histories often depict the 80ies as a period in which questions of corporeality moved to the foreground of the poetics of its poets. Dubbing this move »corporeal modernism« ...(»kropsmodernisme«), scholars have explained this new agenda as an attempt to reclaim stability in late modernity, an era in which all grand narratives have allegedly collapsed, and the world of new media increasingly fragments perceptions of reality. This article argues that such explanations fail to recognize that a significant amount of poetry from the 80ies does not view the body as the subject’s existential and ontological foundation, but perceives it, rather, as a fluctuating materiality that merges the human with a more-than-human world. The article takes Pia Tafdrup’s Intetfang (1982) and Henrik S. Holck’s Vi må være som alt (1978) as symptomatic examples of this trend and characterizes their more-than-human bodies as watery flesh and cosmological skin respectively. Ultimately, the aim of the article is to problematize established constructions of »corporeal modernism« and stake out some of the ways in which the literary history of Danish poetry in the 80ies could be re-written.
