The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

The End of History and the Last Man

For both introductory and advanced courses in VLSI design, this authoritative, comprehensive textbook is highly accessible to beginners, yet offers unparalleled breadth and depth for more experienced readers. The Fourth Edition of CMOS VLSI Design: A Circuits and Systems perspective presents broad and in-depth coverage of the entire field of modern CMOS VLSI Design. The authors draw upon extensive industry and classroom experience to introduce todays most advanced and effective chip design practices. They present extensively updated coverage of every key element of VLSI design, and illuminate the latest design challenges with 65 nm process examples. This book contains unsurpassed circuit-level coverage, as well as a rich set of problems and worked examples that provide deep practical insight to readers at all levels.

CMOS VLSI Design : A Circuits and Systems Perspective

Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, by Olivier Roy. New York: Columbia University Press, in association with the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, Paris, 2004. xi + 340 pages. Index to p. 349. $29.50. Olivier Roy devotes much of Globalized Islam to the distinction between what he calls "Islamism" and "neofundamentalism." He argues that Islamist movements tend to seek power in specific countries and have become increasingly nationalistic. Neofundamentalist movements, on the other hand, tend to focus on the Islamic world as a whole and do not concentrate on achieving power. According to Roy, neofundamentalists usually favor da'wa, or preaching, over jihad. "For neofundamentalists the aim of action is salvation, not revolution" (p. 248). Even when neofundamentalists do engage in jihad, they still shun "political action" (p. 250). Yet, Roy's list of "neofundamentalist" movements includes al-Qa'ida as well as the Tablighi Jama'a (p. 234). It is hard to see how anyone could argue that al-Qa'ida is more interested in salvation than revolution or that its acts of violence are not political. Roy is a knowledgeable and insightful scholar, and he makes many important points. He rightly stresses that Islam often serves primarily as a marker of national and/ or ethnic identity rather than as a political program. He rightly criticizes those who think that the behavior of Muslims today can simply be explained by examining verses of the Qur'an. And he correctly emphasizes that al-Qa'ida has an anti-imperialist dimension that should not be ignored (although this is hard to reconcile with his characterization of al-Qa'ida as an apolitical neofundamentalist movement). At the same time, however, Roy makes many sweeping generalizations that are simply inaccurate. He claims that "Bin Laden only paid lip-service to Palestine till the end of 2001" (p. 3). This is a common assertion. It is also an erroneous one. In a 1994 letter to Sheikh 'Abd al-'Aziz bin Baz, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Bin Laden wrote: "The Shar'i obligation regarding Palestine and our Palestinian brothers, [who are] among the helpless oppressed men, women, and children, is jihad in the path of God and inciting the Umma to jihad to liberate all of Palestine and return it to Islamic rule." Much of this letter is devoted to rejecting the very idea of a peace agreement with Israel. (The Arabic text of the letter is available online at http://www.alwahabiya.org/articles/binladen_to_binbaz.htm) Roy asserts that "popular mobilisation in the Middle East centres around nationalism...not around Islam" (p. 51). Similarly, he contends that "Osama Bin Laden did not grasp that the genuine antiAmericanism of the 'average' Arab had never led to a sustainable political mobilisation, and that if such mobilisation ever did happen it would be over Palestine and Iraq that is, over Arab and not Islamic issues" (p. 56). It is true that groups like Hamas and the main movements fighting the American-led occupation of Iraq have a nationalist dimension, and this is an important point. …

Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah

Ross McLeod's review of our book Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Markets appeared in the April 2005 edition of this journal. Overall we think that the review...

Reorganising power in indonesia: the politics of oligarchy in an age of markets.

This article assesses some of the major premises of neo-institutionalist explanations of decentralization policy and practices, but focuses especially on the relationship between decentralization and democracy, in the context of the recent and ongoing Indonesian experience with decentralization. In the last two decades 'decentralization' has become, along with 'civil society', 'social capital' and 'good governance', an integral part of the contemporary neo-institutionalist lexicon, especially that part which is intended to draw greater attention to 'social' development. The concern of this article is to demystify how, as a policy objective, decentralization has come to embody a barely acknowledged political, not just theoretical, agenda. It also suggests alternative ways of understanding why decentralization has often failed to achieve its stated aims in terms of promoting democracy, 'good governance', and the like. What is offered is an understanding of decentralization processes that more fully incorporates the factors of power, struggle and interests, which tend to be overlooked by neo-institutionalist perspectives. The current Indonesian experience clearly illustrates the way in which institutions can be hijacked by a wide range of interests that may sideline those that champion the worldview of 'technocratic rationality'. © Institute of Social Studies 2004.

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Decentralization and Democracy in Indonesia: A Critique of Neo-Institutionalist Perspectives

This book is about how the design of institutional change results in unintended consequences. Many post-authoritarian societies have adopted decentralization-effectively localizing power-as part and parcel of democratization, but also in their efforts to entrench "good governance." Vedi Hadiz shifts the attention to the accompanying tensions and contradictions that define the terms under which the localization of power actually takes place. In the process, he develops a compelling analysis that ties social and institutional change to the outcomes of social conflict in local arenas of power. Using the case of Indonesia, and comparing it with Thailand and the Philippines, Hadiz seeks to understand the seeming puzzle of how local predatory systems of power remain resilient in the face of international and domestic pressures. Forcefully persuasive and characteristically passionate, Hadiz challenges readers while arguing convincingly that local power and politics still matter greatly in our globalized world.

Localising Power in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asia Perspective

New order Indonesia has undergone a process of sustained industrialization. This has led to the emergence of a new urban industrial working class more inclined to organize independently of the state. Workers have been increasingly involved in industrial unrest in the 1990s, despite stringent state controls over labour. This text provides theoretical analysis on the role and prospects of organized labour in late industrializing countries. With the use of comparative models it argues that labour movements face greater obstacles to their effectiveness the later it is that a country undergoes industrialization. The author demonstrates how the strict labour controls in Indonesia are a legacy of the struggles between the army and the Left before the new order, and how a corporatist social and political framework continues to constrain the development of labour movements. This book offers fresh insights on Indonesian politics and the theoretical debates on industrialization in Souteast Asia.

Workers and the State in New Order Indonesia

When three decades of authoritarian rule unravelled in Indonesia following the fall of President Suharto in 1998, it was widely expected that this would also open the doors for a dramatically different sort of politics in which individuals and social organizations could demand accountable governance and rule of law. It was indeed true that the old centralized authoritarian regime gave way to a remarkably open system of electoral democracy and to the devolution of state administrative authority. A vibrant and often chaotic media emerged to debate ideas previously proscribed, and new figures flooded onto the political landscape. And in the volatile period that followed the Asian financial crisis just a few years previously, successive Indonesian governments had been forced to agree to the demands of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and other global organizations for widespread reforms in finance and banking, in public and corporate governance, and in the judiciary, especially in the commercial courts. However, such institutional changes were not reflected in the way social and economic power was concentrated or imposed in Indonesia. Well over a decade after the fall of the Suharto regime, access to and control of public office and state authority continues to be the key determinant of how private wealth and social power is accumulated and distributed. Many of the old faces continue to dominate politics and business, while new ones are drawn into the same predatory practices that had defined politics in Indonesia for decades. Even political parties that presented themselves as

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Vedi R. Hadiz

Papers

Reorganising power in indonesia: the politics of oligarchy in an age of markets.

Decentralization and Democracy in Indonesia: A Critique of Neo-Institutionalist Perspectives

Localising Power in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asia Perspective

Workers and the State in New Order Indonesia

The political economy of oligarchy and the reorganization of power in Indonesia