New Books
The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa
By Malika Zeghal
In The Making of the Modern Muslim State, Malika Zeghal reframes the role of Islam in modern Middle East governance. Challenging other accounts that claim that Middle Eastern states turned secular in modern times, Zeghal shows instead the continuity of the state’s custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion. Drawing on intellectual, political, and economic history, she traces this custodianship from early forms of constitutional governance in the nineteenth century through post–Arab Spring experiments in democracy. Zeghal argues that the intense debates around the implementation and meaning of state support for Islam led to a political cleavage between conservatives and their opponents that long predated the polarization of the twentieth century that accompanied the emergence of mass politics and Islamist movements. (Read more at Princeton University Press)
Faculty Associate Malika Zeghal is the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor in Contemporary Islamic Thought and Life at Harvard University.
To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People
By Noah Feldman
What does it mean to be a Jew? At a time of worldwide crisis, venerable answers to this question have become unsettled. In To Be a Jew Today, the legal scholar and columnist Noah Feldman draws on a lifelong engagement with his religion to offer a wide-ranging interpretation of Judaism in its current varieties. How do Jews today understand their relationship to God, to Israel, and to each other—and live their lives accordingly? (Read more at Macmillan)
Faculty Associate Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
Zionism: An Emotional State
By Derek J. Penslar
Emotion lies at the heart of all national movements, and Zionism is no exception. For those who identify as Zionist, the word connotes liberation and redemption, uniqueness and vulnerability. Yet for many, Zionism is a source of distaste if not disgust, and those who reject it are no less passionate than those who embrace it. The power of such emotions helps explain why a word originally associated with territorial aspiration has survived so many years after the establishment of the Israeli state. (Read more at Rutgers University Press)
Faculty Associate Derek J. Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University.
Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century
By Sugata Bose
The balance of global power changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century, above all with the economic and political rise of Asia. Asia after Europe is a bold new interpretation of the period, focusing on the conflicting and overlapping ways in which Asians have conceived their bonds and their roles in the world. Tracking the circulation of ideas and people across colonial and national borders, Sugata Bose explores developments in Asian thought, art, and politics that defied Euro-American models and defined Asianness as a locus of solidarity for all humanity. (Read more at Harvard University Press)
Faculty Associate Sugata Bose is the Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University.
Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border
By Ieva Jusionyte
American guns have entangled the lives of people on both sides of the US-Mexico border in a vicious circle of violence. After treating wounded migrants and refugees seeking safety in the United States, anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte boldly embarked on a journey in the opposite direction—following the guns from dealers in Arizona and Texas to crime scenes in Mexico. (Read more at University of California Press)
Former Faculty Associate Ieva Jusionyte is the Watson Family University Associate Professor of International Security and Anthropology at Brown University.
Statelet of Survivors: The Making of a Semi-Autonomous Region in Northeast Syria
By Amy Austin Holmes
Syrian Kurds and their Arab and Christian allies have embarked on one of the most radical experiments in self-governance of our time. In defiance of the Assad regime, the Islamic State, and regional autocrats, this unlikely coalition created a statelet to govern their semi-autonomous region. In Statelet of Survivors, Amy Austin Holmes charts the movement from its origins to what it has become today. Drawing from seven years of research trips to northern and eastern Syria, Holmes traces the genealogy of this social experiment to the Republic of Mount Ararat in Turkey, where a self-governing entity was proclaimed in 1927 based on solidarity between Kurds and Armenian genocide survivors. (Read more at Oxford University Press)
Former Visiting Scholar Amy Austin Holmes is a Research Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University.
Unequal Democracies: Public Policy, Responsiveness, and Redistribution in an Era of Rising Economic Inequality
Coedited by Noam Lupu
While economic inequality has risen in every affluent democracy in North America and Western Europe, the last three decades have also been characterized by falling or stagnating levels of state-led economic redistribution. Why have democratically accountable governments not done more to distribute top-income shares to citizens with low and middle incomes? Unequal Democracies offers answers to this question, bringing together contributions that focus on voters and their demands for redistribution with contributions on elites and unequal representation that is biased against less-affluent citizens. While large and growing bodies of research have developed around each of these perspectives, this volume brings them into rare dialogue. The chapters also incorporate analyses that center exclusively on the United States and those that examine a broader set of advanced democracies to explore the uniqueness of the American case and its contribution to comparative perspectives. (Read more at Cambridge University Press)
Former Visiting Scholar Noam Lupu is an associate professor of political science at Vanderbilt University.
A Life in the American Century
By Joseph S. Nye Jr.
For the past eight decades, we have lived in “the American Century”—a period during which the US has enjoyed unrivaled power—be it political, economic or military—on the global stage. Born on the cusp of this new era, Joseph S. Nye Jr. has spent a lifetime illuminating our understanding of the changing contours of America power and world affairs. His many books on the nature of power and political leadership have rightly earned him his reputation as one of the most influential international relations scholars in the world today. (Read more at Wiley)
Former Center Director Joseph Nye is a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus, at Harvard Kennedy School.
A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands
By Sahana Ghosh
A Thousand Tiny Cuts chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in northern Bangladesh and eastern India, Sahana Ghosh shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and management of threat in relation to mobility. Rather than focusing solely on border fences and border crossings, she demonstrates that bordering reorders relations of value. The cost of militarization across this ostensibly "friendly" border is devaluation—of agrarian land and crops, of borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands, of regional infrastructures now disconnected, and of social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance. Through a textured ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility across postcolonial borderlands in South Asia, this ambitious book challenges anthropological understandings of the violence of bordering, migration and citizenship, and transnational inequalities that are based on Euro-American borders and security regimes. (Read more at University of California Press)
Former Academy Scholar Sahana Ghosh is an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at National University of Singapore.
States-in-Waiting: A Counternarrative of Global Decolonization
By Lydia Walker
After the Second World War, national self-determination became a recognized international norm, yet it only extended to former colonies. Groups within postcolonial states that made alternative sovereign claims were disregarded or actively suppressed. Showcasing their contested histories, Lydia Walker offers a powerful counternarrative of global decolonization, highlighting little-known regions, marginalized individuals, and their hidden (or lost) archives. She depicts the personal connections that linked disparate nationalist struggles across the globe through advocacy networks, demonstrating that these advocates had their own agendas and allegiances, which, she argues, could undermine the autonomy of the claimants they supported. By foregrounding particular nationalist movements in South Asia and Southern Africa and their transnational advocacy networks, States-in-Waiting illuminates the un-endings of decolonization—the unfinished and improvised ways that the state-centric international system replaced empire, which left certain claims of sovereignty perpetually awaiting recognition. (Read more at Cambridge University Press)
Former Graduate Student Associate Lydia Walker is the Myers Chair in Global Military History and assistant professor at The Ohio State University.
January 6 and the Politics of History
Edited by Jim Downs
On January 6, 2021, more than two thousand rioters stormed the doors of the US Capitol building in Washington, DC, hoping to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power from former president Donald Trump to his successor, Joseph Biden. The deaths, property damage, and vicious rampage that ensued were witnessed on live television as an unprecedented attack on the democratic process and those who strive to protect it. (Read more at University of Georgia Press)
Former Fellow Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College.
The Good Eater: A Vegan’s Search for the Future of Food
By Nina Guilbeault
For years, there has been no doubt that widespread consumption of meat is both environmentally destructive and morally dubious. A growing chorus of scientists, health experts, and activists champion the benefits of a plant-based diet. Nevertheless, change has been slow to arrive, and the chasm between our appetites and our collective well-being seems impossibly vast. We know we must transition to a more plant-based world. But what would such a world look like, and how do we realistically get there? (Read more at Bloomsbury Publishing)
Former Graduate Student Associate Nina Guilbeault is a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business.
Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria
By Rabiat Akande
Set in Colonial Northern Nigeria, this book confronts a paradox: the state insisted on its separation from religion even as it governed its multireligious population through what remained of the precolonial caliphate. Entangled Domains grapple with this history to offer a provocative account of secularism as a contested yet contingent mode of governing religion and religious difference. Drawing on detailed archival research, Rabiat Akande vividly illustrates constitutional struggles triggered by the colonial state's governance of religion and interrogates the legacy of that governance agenda in the postcolonial state. This book is a novel commentary on the dynamic interplay between law, faith, identity, and power in the context of the modern state's emergence from colonial processes. (Read more at Cambridge University Press)
Former Graduate Student Associate and Academy Scholar Rabiat Akande is an assistant professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University.
Digital Development in East Africa: The Distribution, Diffusion, and Governance of Information Technology
By Warigia M. Bowman
This book uses comparative case study methodology and extensive field work to examine and compare outcomes of four East African nations (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda) that implemented formal Information and Communications Technology policies in the 1990s. Based on extensive fieldwork, the book assesses the emergence of a new policy and technological arena from the turn of the millennium to the present. In addition to tracing the implementation and reception of these policies, Bowman considers to what extent the politics of infrastructure in four connected but distinct African nations have resulted in global participation and equitable distribution and access of infrastructure to all citizens, as well as the impact a recent history of war or peace have on the technological outcomes in these communities. The book provides us with invaluable new data on how policy and politics function in emerging democracies, and illuminates long-overlooked opportunities and conditions necessary for the distribution of new and potentially beneficial technologies in other developing countries. (Read more at Palgrave Macmillan)
Former Graduate Student Associate Warigia M. Bowman is an associate professor of law at the University of Tulsa College of Law.
Hajj across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture after the Mughals, 1739–1857
By Rishad Choudhury
Rishad Choudhury presents a new history of imperial connections across the Indian Ocean from 1739 to 1857, a period that witnessed the decline and collapse of Mughal rule and the consolidation of British colonialism in South Asia. In this highly original and comprehensive study, he reveals how the hajj pilgrimage significantly transformed Muslim political culture and colonial attitudes towards it, creating new ideas of religion and rule. Examining links between the Indian Subcontinent and the Ottoman Middle East through multilingual sources—from first-hand accounts to administrative archives of hajj—Choudhury uncovers a striking array of pilgrims who leveraged their experiences and exchanges abroad to address the decline and decentralization of an Islamic old regime at home. Hajjis crucially mediated the birth of modern Muslim political traditions around South Asia. Hajj across Empires argues they did so by channeling inter-imperial crosscurrents to successive surges of imperial revolution and regional regime change. (Read more at Cambridge University Press)
Former Academy Scholar Rishad Choudhury is an assistant professor of history at Oberlin College.
Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice
By Xenia A. Cherkaev
Gleaning for Communism is a historical ethnography of the property regime upon which Soviet legal scholars legislated a large modern state as a household, with guaranteed rights to a commons of socialist property, rather than private possessions. Starting with former Leningrad workers' everyday stories about smuggling industrial scrap home over factory fences, Xenia Cherkaev traces collectivist ethical logic that was central to this socialist household economy, in theory and practice: from its Stalin-era inception, through Khrushchev's major foregrounding of communist ethics, to Gorbachev's perestroika, which unfurled its grounding tension between the interests of any given collective and of the socialist household economy itself. (Read more at Cornell University Press)
Former Academy Scholar Xenia A. Cherkaev is a center associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and a postdoctoral fellow in social anthropology at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg.