Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

It is widely believed that current disparities in economic, political, and social outcomes reflect distinct institutions. Institutions are invoked to explain why some countries are rich and others poor, some democratic and others dictatorial. But arguments of this sort gloss over the question of what institutions are, how they come about, and why they persist. They also fail to explain why institutions are influenced by the past, why it is that they can sometimes change, why they differ so much from society to society, and why it is hard to study them empirically and devise a policy aimed at altering them. This 2006 book seeks to overcome these problems, which have exercised economists, sociologists, political scientists, and a host of other researchers who use the social sciences to study history, law, and business administration. It presents a multi-disciplinary perspective to study endogenous institutions and their dynamics.

/pdf/institutions-and-the-path-to-the-modern-economy-4dlla029fs.pdf

Institutions and the path to the modern economy

Introduction Part I. Theory of Collective Action: 1. The construction of collective action 2. Conflict and change 3. Action and meaning 4. The process of collective identity Part II. Contemporary Collective Action: 5. conflicts of culture 6. Invention of the present 7. The time of difference 8. Roots for today and for tomorrow 9. A search for ethics 10. Information, power, domination Part III. The Field of Collective Action: 11. A society without a centre 12. The political system 13. The state and the distribution of social resources 14. Modernization, crisis, and conflict: the case of Italy Part IV. Acting Collectively: 15. Mobilization and political participation 16. The organization of movements 17. Leadership in social movements 18. Collective action and discourse 19. Forms of action 20. Research on collective action.

Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age@@@The Playing Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society

WOMEN Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, by Saba Mahmood Princeton, NJ and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2004 xvi + 199 pages Gloss, to p 203 Refs to p 223 Index to p 233 $55 cloth; $1795 paper This book explores "the conceptual challenges that women's involvement in the Islamist movement poses to feminist theory in particular and to secular-liberal thought in general through an ethnographic account of the urban women's mosque movement that is part of the Islamic Revival in Cairo, Egypt" (p 2) However, Saba Mahmood promises more than an ethnography based on two years of fieldwork (1995-1997) She embarks on an intellectual journey of selfreflection in which she has come "to believe that a certain amount of self-scrutiny and skepticism is essential regarding the certainty of my own political commitments, when trying to understand the lives of others who do not necessarily share these commitments" (p xi) By refusing to take her own political stance as the necessary lens through which the analysis proceeds, the author opens up the possibility that "my analysis may come to complicate the vision of human flourishing that I hold most dear and which has provided the bedrock of my personal existence" (p xii) It is necessary, the author cautions as she embarks upon her inquiry, not to assume that the political position we uphold will necessarily be vindicated or provide the ground for our theoretical analysis As readers, we are invited to join her in "parochializing our assumptions, about the constitutive relationship between action and embodiment, resistance and agency, self and authority - that inform most feminist judgments from across a broad range of the political spectrum about non-liberal movements such as the women's mosque movement" (p 38) It is within that spirit that I have critiqued this book The five chapters are a running argument with and against key analytic concepts in liberal thought as these concepts have come to inform various strands of feminist theory through which non-liberal movements, such as the women's mosque movement, are analyzed Through each chapter Mahmood makes her ethnographic talk back to the normative liberal assumptions about human nature against which such a movement is held accountable "The Subject of Freedom" illustrates the different ways in which the activism of the mosque movement challenges the liberal conception of politics Mahmood analyzes the conception of self, moral agency, and politics that undergird the practices of this non-liberal movement in order to come to an understanding of the historical projects that animate it The pious subjects of the mosque movement occupy an uncomfortable place in feminist scholarship because they pursue practices and ideals embedded in a tradition that has historically accorded women a subordinate status "Topography of the Piety Movement" provides a brief sketch of the historical development against which the contemporary mosque movement has emerged and critically engages with themes within scholarship of Islamic modernism regarding such movements We sense the broad-based character of the women's mosque movement through the author's description and analysis of three of six mosques where she concentrated her fieldwork Despite the differences among the mosque groups - ranging from the poorest to the upper-middle income neighborhoods of Cairo - they all shared a concern for the increased secularization of Egyptian society and illustrate the increasing respect accorded to the da 'iya preacher/religious teacher (who undertakes da'waliterally call, summons or appeal that in the 20th century came to be associated with proselytization activity) "Women and the Da'wa" (pp 64-72) is particularly insightful, as the author juxtaposes the emergence of secular liberalism with the da'wa movement and concludes that "the modernist project of the regulation of religious sensibilities, undertaken by a range of postcolonial states (and not simply Muslim states), has elicited in its wake a variety of resistances, responses and challenges …

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

The causal logic behind many arguments in historical institutionalism emphasizes the enduring impact of choices made during critical junctures in history. These choices close off alternative options and lead to the establishment of institutions that generate self-reinforcing path-dependent processes. Despite the theoretical and practical importance of critical junctures, however, analyses of path dependence often devote little attention to them. The article reconstructs the concept of critical junctures, delimits its range of application, and provides methodological guidance for its use in historical institutional analyses. Contingency is the key characteristic of critical junctures, and counterfactual reasoning and narrative methods are necessary to analyze contingent factors and their impact. Finally, the authors address specific issues relevant to both cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons of critical junctures.

/pdf/the-study-of-critical-junctures-theory-narrative-and-qt3ouv9nvn.pdf

The Study of Critical Junctures: Theory, Narrative, and Counterfactuals in Historical Institutionalism

Preface 1. Introduction: integrating the study of order, conflict, and violence Stathis N. Kalyvas, Ian Shapiro and Tarek Masoud Part I. Creating, Maintaining, and Restoring Order: 2. Probing the sources of political order Robert H. Bates 3. Attaining social order in Iraq Michael Hechter and Nika Kabiri 4. Factors impeding the effectiveness of partition in South Asia and the Palestine mandate Lucy Chester 5. The social order of violence in Chicago and Stockholm neighborhoods: a comparative inquiry Robert J. Sampson and Per-Olof H. Wikstroem 6. Traditions of justice in war: the modern debate in historical perspective Karma Nabulsi 7. Problems and prospects for democratic settlements: South Africa as a model for the Middle East and Northern Ireland? Courtney Jung, Ellen Lust-Okar and Ian Shapiro Part II. Challenging, Transforming, and Destroying Order: 8. Civil wars and guerilla warfare in the contemporary world: toward a joint theory of motivations and opportunities Carles Boix 9. Clausewitz vindicated? Economics and politics in the Colombian war Francisco Gutierrez Sanin 10. Articulating the geo-cultural logic of nationalist insurgency Lars-Erik Cederman 11. Which group identities lead to most violence? Evidence from India Steven I. Wilkinson 12. Order in disorder: a micro-comparative study of genocidal dynamics in Rwanda Scott Straus 13. Sexual violence during war: toward an understanding of variation Elisabeth Jean Wood 14. 'Military necessity' and the laws of war in imperial Germany Isabel V. Hull 15. Preconditions of international normative change: implications for order and violence Jack L. Snyder and Leslie Vinjamuri 16. Promises and pitfalls of an emerging research program: the microdynamics of civil war Stathis N. Kalyvas.

Order, conflict, and violence

Introduction: The Third Arab Spring 1. Theorizing the Arab Spring 2. Lineages of Repression 3. Breakdowns and Crackdowns 5. Why Breakdowns Did Not Always Produce Transitions 6. Limits and Legacies of the Arab Spring

The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform

Introduction: problems and methods in the study of politics Ian Shapiro, Rogers Smith and Tarek Masoud Part I. Description, Explanation and Agency: 2. Problems, methods and theories in the study of politics, or: what's wrong with political science and what to do about it Ian Shapiro 3. Of problems and methods: identities, interests, and the tasks of political science in the 21st century Rogers M. Smith 4. Political science as a vocation Anne Norton 5. The politics of policy science Frances Fox Piven 6. The study of black politics and the practice of black politics: their historical relation and evolution Adolph Reed 7. External and internal explanation John Ferejohn Part II. Redeeming Rational Choice Theory?: 8. Lies, damned lies and rational choice analyses Gary W. Cox 9. On problems and methods Alan Ryan 10. An analytic narrative approach to puzzles and problems Margaret Levi 11. The methodical study of politics Bruce Bueno de Mesquita Part III. Possibilities for Pluralism and Convergence: 12. The illusion of learning from observational research Alan S. Gerber, Donald P. Green and Edward H. Kaplan 13. Concepts and commitments in the study of democracy Lisa Wedeen 14. Problems chasing methods or methods chasing problems, research communities, constrained pluralism, and the role of eclecticism Rudra Sil 15. Method, problem, faith William E. Connolly 16. Provisionalism in the study of politics Elisabeth Ellis 17. What have we learned? Robert Dahl, Truman Bewley, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and John Mearsheimer.

Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics

Introduction: Islam's steady march 1. Explaining Islamist dominion Part I. Elections under Authoritarianism: 2. Clientelism and class: the tragedy of leftist opposition in Mubarak's Egypt 3. The Islamic machine? 4. Winning in the 'well-run casino' Part II. After the 'Arab Spring': 5. God, mammon, and transition 6. Islam's organizational advantage? 7. Conclusion Epilogue: requiescat in pace?

Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt

It is easy now to see why Egypt's revolution had to happen, and why President Hosni Mubarak's thirty-year reign had to end in the spectacular manner in which it did. Given a combustible mix of a failing regime, an aging leader, and a people increasingly willing to confront both, one might conclude that the revolution was not only inevitable, but overdetermined. Yet those of us who study the region not only failed to predict the regime's collapse, we actually saw it as an exemplar of something we called "durable authoritarianism"—a new breed of modern dictatorship that had figured out how to tame the political, economic, and social forces that routinely did in autocracy's lesser variants. The institutional underpinnings of durable authoritarianism, however, were far flimsier than previously thought.

Tarek Masoud

Papers

Order, conflict, and violence

The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform

Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics

Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt

The Road to (and from) Liberation Square