By Lara Deeb
Lara Deeb's An Enchanted Modern concerns the many ways religious piety has been reborn and reshaped in the Shi'i neighborhood of Al-Dahiyya in Beirut. She presents an engrossing anthropological account of a community fashioning a creative and rich religious modernity. Deeb encounters a vibrant, redirected, Islamic life, reshaped by the politics of the recent past, creatively re-imagined and lived in the present, with no sign of losing its centrality to individuals, communities and states in the future. Most notably, it is an Islamic life that is expressed in especially creative ways in the public and private lives of women. The modern pious includes women involved, educated, outspoken and part of a community, at odds at points with Western notions of modernity, and equally powerful and attractive.
(Princeton University Press, 2006)
Lara Deeb is assistant professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She was a Harvard Academy Scholar in 2003–04 and 2006–07.
by Devra C. Moehler
The late twentieth century's wave of democratization has offered a laboratory to understand better the dynamics of democracy. In Distrusting Democrats Harvard Academy Scholar Devra C. Moehler addresses the question: does participation in democratic politics—in this case Uganda's constitution-making from 1988–1995—strengthen democracy? Distrusting Democrats is based on a survey of 820 Ugandan citizens, all of voting age as constitution writing, discussion and voting took place. Her analysis nuances traditional expectations that participation alone is conducive to democratic attitudes. Moehler's study shows that involvement in fledgling democratic politics stimulates participation, but may also produce what she terms “distrusting democrats”—informed, experienced, yet disappointed citizens whose political involvement raised expectations that were not met. Distrusting Democrats explores this phenomenon, and suggests how democratic participation may ultimately be made more widely supportive of democratic government.
(The University of Michigan Press, 2008)
Devra C. Moehler is assistant professor of Government at Cornell University. She was a Harvard Academy Scholar from 2005–2007.
by Melani Claire Cammett
The adjustments to a global economy have produced varied industry/ state relations throughout the world, but perhaps nowhere as crucially as in the developing industrial countries. Melani Cammett's Globalization and Business Politics finds that these forms of cooperation rely on past relations of the state and industry. Her subtle comparative analysis of the textile and clothing industries in Morocco and Tunisia encompasses the social, political, economic, and historical forces that shaped—and continue to shape—these contrasting examples. Success in this new environment depends crucially, Globalization and Business Politics suggests, on new and productive ways that state, society, and industries can develop means of persistent, ongoing, and adaptive mutual support.
(Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Melani Claire Cammett is the Kutayba Alghanim Assistant Professor of Political Science, Brown University. She was a Harvard Academy Scholar in 2005–2006 and 2007–2008.
by Mary Alice Haddad
Mary Alice Haddad's book is a comparative examination of the sometimes crucial phenomenon in democratic societies: volunteering. Yet patterns of volunteering vary across cultures. These differences are measured in this important study as a combination of citizen's attitudes toward their government, their own society's patterns of expectations and practices, and the sense of responsible individualism found in each society. Politics and Volunteering in Japan develops a predictive model for understanding volunteering across cultures from a comparison of three Japanese cites, and tests it against patterns of volunteering in Finland, Japan, Turkey and the United States.
(Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Mary Alice Haddad is assistant professor of government and East Asian studies, Wesleyan University. She was a Harvard Academy Scholar in 2003–2004 and 2006–2007.
by Lily L. Tsai
Observers of modern China have noted the stark differences in the kinds of public expenditure undertaken by villages in rural China, villages often located right next to each other. The differences in social services and public amenities between villages in rural China cannot be accounted for by just the exercise of democratic activity, nor by direction from the central government. Instead, these differences are produced by the informal means of exercising accountability and control over officials by village and temple organizations, and family lineages. Lily Tsai's book is an exploration of the unseen mechanisms of public life in rural China—a study of how governance in rural China at the local level cannot be understood through democratic institutional forms alone.
Accountability Without Democracy has been selected as the winner of the 2007/2008 Dogan Award from the Society for Comparative Research.
(Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Lily L. Tsai is an assistant professor of political science, MIT. She was a Harvard Academcy Scholar in 2005–2006 and 2007–2008.
by Catherine Boone
Political Topographies shows that central rulers' powers, ambitions, and strategies of control vary across subregions of the national space, even in countries reputed to be highly centralized. Boone argues that this unevenness reflects a state-building logic that is shaped by differences in the political economy of regions—that is, by relations of property, production, and authority that determine the political clout and economic needs of regional-level elites. Center-provincial bargaining, rather than the unilateral choices of the center, is what drives the politics of national integration and determines how institutions distribute power. Boone's innovative analysis speaks to scholars and policy makers who want to understand geographic unevenness in the centralization and decentralization of power, in the nature of citizenship and representation, and in patterns of core-periphery integration and breakdown in many of the world's multiethnic or regionally divided states.
Catherine Boone (Academy Scholar, 1990-92) is associate professor of political science at the University of Texas at Austin.
by Timothy Snyder
Moving from the sixteenth century to the present, and using a wide array of multi-lingual sources, The Reconstruction of Nations shows how multiple versions of national identity evolved and competed with each other in what are now Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Snyder contends that the triumph of modern ethnic nationalism in this part of Eastern Europe is very recent. Federalism and communal toleration were considered viable national ideas from the 16th through 20th centuries—only the atrocities of the Second World War buried such traditional alternatives. Snyder's original explanations for these atrocities include the first scholarly account of the Ukrainian-Polish ethnic cleansings of the 1940s. Snyder concludes with an analysis of the peaceful resolution of national tensions in the region since 1989. Winner of the American Historical Association's George Louis Beer Prize for the best publication in European international history since 1895.
Tim Snyder (Academy Scholar 1998-2000) is assistant professor of history at Yale University.
by Richard Turits
This book explores the history of the Dominican Republic as it evolved from the first European colony in the Americas into a modern nation under the rule of Rafael Trujillo. Turits reveals how the seemingly unilateral imposition of power by Trujillo in fact depended on the regime's mediation of profound social and economic transformations, especially through agrarian policies that assisted the nation's large independent peasantry. Most of the existing literature casts the Trujillo dictatorship as the paradigm of despotic rule through coercion and terror alone. This book elucidates instead the hidden foundations of the regime, portraying everyday life and economy in the Dominican countryside and the exchanges between state and society under Trujillo. Winner of the American Historical Association's John Edwin Fagg Prize for the best publication in Latin American history.
Richard Turits, (Academy Scholar 1996-1997 and 1999-2000) is associate professor of history, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.