Showing papers on "Modernization theory published in 2013"

Trade Unions in Western Europe: Hard Times, Hard Choices

Abstract: Book synopsis: Trade unions in most of Europe are on the defensive: in recent decades they have lost membership, sometimes drastically; their collective bargaining power has declined, as has their influence on government; and in many countries, their public respect is much diminished. This book explores the challenges facing trade unions and their responses in ten west European countries: Britain, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Italy. Based on a substantial number of interviews with key union representatives and academic experts in each country, together with the collection of a large amount of union documentation and background material, the book gives an account of how trade unionism has evolved in each country, the main recent challenges that unions have faced, and their responses. The book engages with the debates of the past two decades on union modernization and revitalization, and more generally with theories of institutional change and the literature on varieties of capitalism. Some observers ask whether unions remain relevant socio-economic actors, but challenging times can stimulate new thinking, and hence provide new opportunities. This book aims to show why trade unions are (still) important subjects for scientific analysis: first, as a means of collective 'voice' allowing employees to challenge management control and bringing a measure of balance to the employment relationship; second, as a form of 'countervailing power' to the socio-economic dominance of capital; and third, their potential as a 'sword of justice' to defend the weak, vulnerable and disadvantaged, express a set of values in opposition to the dominant political economy, and offer aspirations for a different—and better—form of society.

Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract: "Returns" explores homecomings--the ways people recover and renew their roots. Engaging with indigenous histories of survival and transformation, James Clifford opens fundamental questions about where we are going, separately and together, in a globalizing, but not homogenizing, world.It was once widely assumed that native, or tribal, societies were destined to disappear. Sooner or later, irresistible economic and political forces would complete the work of destruction set in motion by culture contact and colonialism. But many aboriginal groups persist, a reality that complicates familiar narratives of modernization and progress. History, Clifford invites us to observe, is a multidirectional process, and the word "indigenous," long associated with primitivism and localism, is taking on new, unexpected meanings.In these probing and evocative essays, native people in California, Alaska, and Oceania are understood to be participants in a still-unfolding process of transformation. This involves ambivalent struggle, acting within and against dominant forms of cultural identity and economic power. Returns to ancestral land, performances of heritage, and maintenance of diasporic ties are strategies for moving forward, ways to articulate what can paradoxically be called "traditional futures." With inventiveness and pragmatism, often against the odds, indigenous people today are forging original pathways in a tangled, open-ended modernity. The third in a series that includes "The Predicament of Culture "(1988) and "Routes" (1997), this volume continues Clifford's signature exploration of late-twentieth-century intercultural representations, travels, and now returns.

Circuits of Knowledge and Techniques: The Transnational Flow of Planning Ideas and Practices

Abstract: This article considers the conceptual and methodological tools which may help to focus the critical analysis of transnational flows of planning ideas and practices in the present period. The discussion starts from the rejection of the 'modernization myth' with its linear concept of a single development trajectory and reviews the philosophical background to the array of alternative conceptions which have displaced it. It then examines three, often overlapping, fields of intellectual development which offer promising concepts for exploring contemporary transnational flows of planning ideas and practices: actor-network theory (especially with respect to the way ideas and technologies get to 'travel' and get 'translated'), institutionalist versions of policy 'discourse analysis' (discourse structuration and institutionalization, in particular), and discussions about circuits of knowledge and hegemonic projects in the globalization and international development literatures. Drawing on these, I suggest that critical analysis of such flows should give special attention to the 'origin stories' of such ideas, their 'travelling histories' and the 'translation experiences' through which exogenous planning ideas and practices become 'localized'. I conclude by commenting on what may be distinctive about transnational flows in the present period, why undertaking critical analysis of such flows is valuable, and key methodological attitudes to keep in mind in conducting such analyses.

BEANS BEFORE THE LAW: Knowledge Practices, Responsibility, and the Paraguayan Soy Boom

Abstract: This article provides an ethnographic response to the statement that soy kills (“la soja mata”), a refrain often repeated by campesino activists living on the edge of Paraguay's rapidly expanding soybean frontier. In the context of Paraguay's modernization projects since the 1960s, statements like these were easily disqualified as irrational or nonmodern. In the process, the political importance and analytic potential of the beans were dismissed, and so, too, were the lives and analyses of rural activists. And yet the activists with whom I worked managed, over the course of five years of court battles, to bring killer beans before the courts and to have them recognized as a force in Paraguayan politics. In so doing, they also opened up an analytic position for ethnography, allied with Isabelle Stengers's cosmopolitics, which emerges from a situation of mutually enacting responses, rather than as a mediator of relationships between beings included or excluded from the political territory by the criteria of modernity. [legal activism, response, responsibility, knowledge practices, modernity, human–plant relations, frontiers, agrarian transitions, rural politics]

Heritage as Improvement Cultural Display and Contested Governance in Rural China

Abstract: This article explores the display of cultural heritage as a contested project of governance and social ordering in rural China. It argues that heritage preservation and display are viewed by many Chinese scholars, officials, and villagers themselves as powerful tools of modernization and development; that cultural display implies a project of “improvement” and of building “quality” among the “backward” rural population; and that this view of heritage preservation emerges amid a complex and often contradictory mixture of global perspectives on heritage preservation, state traditions of cultural regulation, and local yearnings for modernity and improved standards of living. The article proposes an interpretation of heritage as an ongoing project of improvement, generating its own unforeseen political dynamics as it churns along. In short, cultural heritage display is treated here as a field of government and social regulation.

The Peasant in Postsocialist China: History, Politics, and Capitalism

Abstract: Introduction: peasants, history, and politics 1. The peasantry and social stagnation: the roots of the reform-era liberal narrative 2. From peasant to citizen: liberal narratives on peasant dependency 3. Capitalism and the peasant: new left narratives 4. 'Deconstructing modernization': Wen Tiejun and 'Sannong wenti' 5. Into the soil: ethnographies of social disintegration 6. New rural reconstruction and the attempt to organize the peasantry Conclusion Glossary Bibliography Index.

Understanding revolution in the middle east: the central role of the middle class

Abstract: The paper presents the outlines of a coherent, structural, long term account of the socio-economic and political evolution of the Arab republics that can explain both the persistence of autocracy until 2011, and the its eventual collapse, in a way that is empirically verifiable. I argue that the changing interests of the middle class would have to be a central aspect of a coherent story, on accounts of both distributional and modernization considerations, and that the ongoing transformation can be best understood in terms of their defection from the autocratic order to a new democratic order, which is still in formation. I then review what the evidence says in two central parts of the emerging narrative, for the case of Egypt: first, by looking directly at changes in opinion and asking whether these are consistent with the predictions of the theory. And second, by examining the corporate sector before and during the uprisings of 2011 in order to understand better the performance of “crony capitalism”, and...

Urban Schools and English Language Education in Late Modern China: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography

Abstract: Shortlisted for the 2014 BAAL Book Prize This book explores the meaning of modernization in contemporary Chinese education. It examines the implications of the implementation of reforms in English language education for experimental-urban schools in the People’s Republic of China. Perez-Milans sheds light on how national, linguistic, and cultural ideologies linked to modernization are being institutionally (re)produced, legitimated, and inter-personally negotiated through everyday practice in the current context of Chinese educational reforms. He places special emphasis on those reforms regarding English language education, with respect to the economic processes of globalization that are shaping (and being shaped by) the contemporary Chinese nation-state. In particular, the book analyzes the processes of institutional categorization of the "good experimental school", the "good student", and the "appropriate knowledge" that emerge from the daily discursive organization of those schools, with special attention to the related contradictions, uncertainties and dilemmas. Thus, it provides an account of the on-going cultural processes of change faced by contemporary Chinese educational institutions under conditions of late modernity. Winner of The University of Hong Kong's Faculty Early Career Research Output Award for outstanding book publication, by the Faculty of Education

The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present

Abstract: Michael E. Latham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), ix+246 pp I thoroughly recommend this book. It is an insightful account into modernisation theory and its importance in US foreign po...

A culturalist critique of ‘online community’ in new media studies:

Abstract: This essay provides an overview of the theoretical perspectives and trends in the study of online community. It traces the genealogy of the community concept, addressing the conflicting views of community as a morally valued way of life and as a complex of social relationships in Western sociology. The essay also critiques the network approach to online community for its inadequate conceptualization of culture, which provides a particular tradition of meanings for social action. Lastly, under the rubrics of development and modernization, the paper contrasts the conception of online community as social network with what has been observed about the social and political lifeworlds of East Asian societies.

The tragedy of responsibility in high Asia: modernizing traditional pastoral practices and preserving modernist worldviews

Abstract: The nomadism/pastoralism debate has always been closely connected to discourses about modernization theories whenever development issues were at stake. While the mainstream debates have changed since stage models apparently became outdated, it is surprising that the Chinese development model seems to adhere to classical modernization theory. Consequently, it appears worthwhile to consider present challenges in the pastoral sector first from the Chinese perspective and, second, in comparison with the situation in neighbouring countries. The discussion reveals that the Chinese model is quite different from neighbouring countries' practices and is embedded in an authoritarian approach that suggests similarities with the implementation of a development model during the collectivization phases in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, when Stalinist- and Mao Zedong-inspired models were implemented under autonomy and sedentarization regimes. Nevertheless, the present context is quite different because ecological degradation of pastures and the non-existent closure of the development gap between affluent urbanites and remote farmers and pastoralists have been addressed by implementing the present resettlement programmes. In China's pastoralism regions, the tragedy of responsibility is related to top-down approaches without adequate participation of stakeholders. In neighbouring countries, pastoralists tend to complain about negligence by state authorities, nonbinding regulations and arbitrariness by powerful actors. Countries such as India and Pakistan are still reworking their colonial legacies and trying to adapt pasture legislation to the demands of rangeland management and nature protection.

The Greek crisis and European modernity

Abstract: 1. Introduction: Is Greece a Modern European Country? Anna Triandafyllidou, Ruby Gropas and Hara Kouki 2. International Bubbles, Currency Union and National Failures: The Case of Greece and the Euro Loukas Tsoukalis 3. We Are All Greeks Now! The Crisis in Greece in its European and Global Context Yanis Varoufakis 4. On the Jacobin Dimension of Greek Constitutional Tradition Ioannis A. Tassopoulos 5. 'Memoranda': Greek Exceptionalism or the Mirror of Europe's Future? George Katrougalos 6. Religion in Contemporary Greece - a Modern Experience? Thalia Dragonas 7. The Orthodox Church in Greece Today Stavros Zoumboulakis 8. The Crisis and the Welfare State in Greece: A Complex Relationship Manos Matsaganis 9. Is the Crisis a Watershed Moment for the Greek Welfare State? The Chances for Modernization Amidst an Ambivalent EU Record on 'Social Europe' Maria Petmesidou 10. Postscript: Cultural Dualism Revisited Nikiforos Diamandouros

Beyond the formal economy: evaluating the level of employment in informal sector enterprises in global perspective

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to evaluate the varying level of employment in informal sector enterprises across the globe and to undertake an exploratory analysis of the wider economic and social conditions associated with greater levels of informalization. Examining International Labor Organization surveys conducted in 43 countries, the finding is that the main job of just under one in three (31.5 percent) non-agricultural workers is in an informal sector enterprise. Conducting an exploratory analysis of the correlation between countries with higher levels of employment in informal sector enterprises and economic under-development ('modernization' thesis), higher taxes, corruption and state interference ('neo-liberal' thesis) and inadequate state intervention to protect workers from poverty ('structuralist' thesis), the finding is that there is a need to synthesize various tenets from all three perspectives. The outcome is a tentative call for a 'neo-modernization' perspective, which posits that higher levels of employment in informal sector enterprises are associated with economic under-development, public sector corruption and inadequate state intervention to protect workers from poverty.

Civil Society in Turkey

Abstract: This chapter provides a contextual background on the development of civil society in Turkey, and in so doing acts as a hinge between the theoretical and policy debates of the previous chapters and the empirical discussion of the subsequent chapters. It endeavours to highlight the relevance of historical context in explaining how certain idiosyncrasies regarding the development of civil society have arisen in Turkey. In particular, the chapter explores the historical bifurcation of civil society into ‘official’ (secular, nationalist voices) and ‘informal’ (non-secular, minority voices) sectors, and its consequences on the development of civil society in Turkey. Although somewhat crude as a distinction, this division remains a useful heuristic device to describe the outcomes of the radical modernization and Westernization processes instigated in the early years of the Turkish republic. The last three decades have seen tremendous growth in the size and role of civil society in Turkey, as well as in the variety of organizational forms. Yet the attitudes underlying the earlier bifurcation still resonate in present-day relationships within civil society, particularly within the critical debates on issues such as the role of religion in Turkish politics and society.

Exploring the Myth of Mixed Marriages in India: Evidence from a Nation-wide Survey

Abstract: INTRODUCTIONInter-marriages have attracted considerable research attention all over the world since the beginning of the twentieth century. Social scientists have shown keen interest in the study of different forms of inter-marriages. From time immemorial, men and women of different nationalities, race and religion inter-married and lived together (Burma, 1963; Aldridge, 1973; Becker, 1973; Institute for Palestine Studies, 1972). Love marriage couples have historically come to inhabit a social space of powerful moral ambivalence (Mody, 2002). Mixed marriages, which are more frequent these days, are often being considered as one of the most conclusive and objective indicators of degree of assimilation in a multi-racial and a multi-religious society (Coleman, 1994).The marriage system in India is based primarily on the social system and stratification (Sastri, 1918; Rao, 1982; Saroja, 1999; Netting, 2010; Desai and Andrist, 2011). For hundreds of years, the Indian society has been stratified mainly on the basis of caste. The lower castes are not only socially deprived but also economically discriminated. Efforts by various social reformers and organizations to free India from the clutches of the caste system, untouchability and racial discrimination have had limited impact. When we discuss Indian marriages with a shade of inter-caste union, it sounds like a taboo to the majority evento this day (Corwin, 1977; Malhotra and Tri vedi, 1977; Saroja, 1999).Similarly, marriage across the religious and economic groups is not a common custom in India. Another important practice of Hindus is endogamous marriage among blood relatives. However, this varies widely for North and South Indian states. In North India, marriage among close blood relatives is virtually prohibited. In contrast, marriage among the blood relatives is a common practice in South India. The attributes of marriage such as Tcin marriage', Village endogamy' and the difference in the age of spouses, continue to be influenced by region and gender systems' (Jejeebhoy and Halli, 2006; Sekher, 2012).Despite the enormous significance of this nineteenth-century debate, India fostered the importance of civil marriage legislation in a country with contradictory and conflicting 'personal laws' (Mody, 2002). Though India has legalised inter-caste mariages for more than fifty years, new intermarried are still threatened with violence, often by their own families and villagejeaders. During the past few years, more than 1000 Honor Killings2 were reported from various states, in which young men and women, who got married against the wishes of their families, became victims (Joanne, 2008). The recent rise in such violence supports the perspective that the younger generation (especially females) are slowly gaining individual freedom in marriage. However, the older generation still insist on the old ways where marriage is a status symbol and not a bond of emotional love (Uberoi, 2006; Chowdhry, 2007). As a part of an encouraging incentive for inter-caste marriage promotion, the government recently began offering $1,000 (that is equivalant to a year's salary for a vast majority of Indians) to inter-caste couple. Starting from 2006, smaller cash payments were initiated after the Supreme Court gave a ruling in which the judges termed the high-profile honor killings as acts of "barbarism" and labeled caste system as a curse on the nation (Joanne, 2008). In 2010, the Supreme Court of India also asked the central and state governments to take more preventive measures against honour killings (Helfer, 2011).With the increasing urbanization, education and employment of women in modern occupations and the emerging middle class have had a strong influence in paving the way for more inter-caste marriages. With the increasing influence of modernization and western education in India there has been a visible change in the traditional marriage practices. Socio-economic development and globalisation of the Indian economy has also contributed to the changing trends in the marriage patterns. …

The Stage of Adolescence: Anticolonial Time, Youth Insurgency, and the Marriage Crisis in Hashimite Iraq

Abstract: Modern understandings of childhood and adolescence, as a number of scholars have shown, are intertwined with histories of European colonialism. There has been less focus on how these categories shaped and were shaped by global processes of decolonization. This article contributes to such an inquiry, by exploring how adolescence was mobilized in Iraq from its 1921 foundation under British Mandate rule to the 1958 anticolonial revolution that toppled the British-backed Hashimite monarchy. The historically peculiar mandate system of semicolonial rule established by the League of Nations after World War I was itself based on certain parallels between adolescence as a stage of psychological and national life posited by European and American social scientists at the turn of the century. Both colonial and anticolonial discourses on adolescence in Hashimite Iraq were thus inevitably riven with the tensions, homologies, and incommensurabilities of this temporal-spatial category, which was simultaneously normalizing and constitutively conflictual. Leyla Neyzi writes of nationalist discourses in republican Turkey: “The notion that educated youth would take the lead in the construction of modern nation-states emerged out of Enlightenment ideas about progress.” I do not contest this assertion as such, and will make a similar point below in the context of Hashimite Iraq. Yet one risk of this kind of analysis is its potential for constructing “youth” as a homogeneous attribute of the “modern,” emerging in eighteenth-century Europe before making its plodding, predictable way across time and space until it finally conquers the globe in more or less the same shape it was in when it departed Europe a century or two previously. In failing to break with the spatialization of time on which Westernization/ modernization paradigms are based, this narrative would ignore the eventfulness of lived global time, starting with the eighteenth-century colonial relations through which Enlightenment ideas about progress emerged. In the twentieth century, changing conceptions of childhood, adolescence, and youth were not repetitions of the Enlightenment; they were effects first of local and global struggles over colonialism and decolonization and then of the dawning of the Cold War “age of development” after 1945. I am not arguing

Lonely Ideas: Can Russia Compete?

Abstract: When have you gone into an electronics store, picked up a desirable gadget, and found that it was labeled "Made in Russia"? Probably never. Russia, despite its epic intellectual achievements in music, literature, art, and pure science, is a negligible presence in world technology. Despite its current leaders' ambitions to create a knowledge economy, Russia is economically dependent on gas and oil. In Lonely Ideas, Loren Graham investigates Russia's long history of technological invention followed by failure to commercialize and implement. For three centuries, Graham shows, Russia has been adept at developing technical ideas but abysmal at benefiting from them. From the seventeenth-century arms industry through twentieth-century Nobel-awarded work in lasers, Russia has failed to sustain its technological inventiveness. Graham identifies a range of conditions that nurture technological innovation: a society that values inventiveness and practicality; an economic system that provides investment opportunities; a legal system that protects intellectual property; a political system that encourages innovation and success. Graham finds Russia lacking on all counts. He explains that Russia's failure to sustain technology, and its recurrent attempts to force modernization, reflect its political and social evolution and even its resistance to democratic principles. But Graham points to new connections between Western companies and Russian researchers, new research institutions, a national focus on nanotechnology, and the establishment of Skolkovo, "a new technology city." Today, he argues, Russia has the best chance in its history to break its pattern of technological failure.

Bear Traps on Russia's Road to Modernization

Abstract: Introduction 1. Historical Prelude 2. Investment and Physical Capital 3. The Economics of Location 4. Market-Impeding Federalism 5. Human Capital 6. Conclusion

The Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the Cold War

Abstract: This article surveys the activities and funding priorities of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) during the first two decades of the Cold War, from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s. Drawing on documents from the RF's own archive as well as Western government repositories, the article focuses on the foundation's support for research in the social sciences and the humanities. The article first gives an overview of RF policies and grants during the early Cold War and then discusses the political dimension of the foundation's philanthropic practices. The main part of the article looks in detail at two specific RF projects in the humanities and social sciences that exemplify the political and intellectual features of the early Cold War. The final section considers the nature of modernity, modernization, and the Cold War.

Agricultural Modernization and Climate Change in Vietnam's Post‐Socialist Transition

Abstract: This article presents a critique of Vietnam's agricultural modernization in the context of its post-socialist transition and the emerging climate crisis. Agricultural modernization has led to impressive rates of wealth creation that have pulled many Vietnamese out of poverty and food insecurity over the past two decades. However, the model's own logic of accumulation has also made the country increasingly reliant on complex processes and has locked in various technological path dependencies. These include energy- and input-intensive production, engineered landscapes, reduced agro-biodiversity, and weakened social networks, knowledge and skills. As a result, Vietnam is becoming more sensitive and less able to adapt to structural shocks, notably that of climate change. Furthermore, and crucially, the post-socialist transition since the launch of Đổi mới (market reform) has given rise to a political economy with dominant interests increasingly vested in the continuity of this modernization model. The article argues that it is this new dynamics of class and state–society relations that now represents the main obstacle to the development of credible solutions to the climate crisis.

Explaining variation in work ethic in Europe: Religious heritage rather than modernisation, the welfare state and communism

Abstract: This paper presents unique descriptive and explanatory analyses of cross-national variation in work ethic in 44 European countries (European Values Study 2008). A strong work ethic is the conviction that people have a moral duty to work. To explain differences in the adherence of the work ethic between countries two alternative theories are tested: modernisation theory and social institutional theory. Modernisation theory hypothesises that richer, more highly educated and urbanised countries have a weaker work ethic. Alternatively, social institutional theory predicts that countries' religious heritage, generosity of the welfare state and political history can explain differences in work ethic between countries. Multilevel regression models on an unprecedented set of 44 countries show that the modernisation hypotheses are supported. With regard to institutions, it is shown that work ethic is stronger in countries with an Islamic and Orthodox heritage as compared to a Protestant and Catholic herit...

Not Some British Colony in Africa: The Politics of Decolonization and Modernization in Soviet Central Asia, 1955-1964

Abstract: This article examines the way that de-Stalinization and Soviet engagement in the Third World provided Central Asian elites with an opportunity to redefine the terms of their republics’ cultural and economic participation in the Soviet Union. Drawing on archival materials, memoirs, and interviews, the article traces the careers of a number of key figures and examines their efforts to negotiate cultural and economic modernization by positioning themselves as Khrushchev’s allies in de-Stalinization and the struggle for the Third World. The wave of decolonization occurring beyond the USSR’s borders provided the impetus to complete the "decolonization" of the Central Asian republics within a Soviet framework.

Globalization, National Identity, and Citizenship Education: China’s Search for Modernization and a Modern Chinese Citizenry

Abstract: Since the early 20th century, numerous scholars have proposed theories and models describing, interpreting, and suggesting the development paths countries have taken or should take. None of these, however, can fully explain China’s efforts, mainly through education and citizenship education, to modernize itself and foster a modern citizenry since the late 19th century. This article traces and examines these efforts through a reflective and critical analysis of such public texts as official policy documents, curriculum standards, and related commentaries, and reveals three major findings. First, China’s leaders have advanced different views of and approaches to development and citizenship in response to changing domestic and global contexts. Second, the Chinese state determines China’s development course, defines its national identity and citizenry, and selects its nation-building curricula. Third, the Chinese state’s growing desire for national rejuvenation in an increasingly competitive, globalized world in the 21st century mandates an important education mission that its citizenship education be politically and ideologically open and accommodative, and help students develop global, national and local identities and function as active, responsible citizens of a multileveled, multicultural world. This article furthers academic understanding of how China’s education responds to economic, political, and social demands and shapes students’ multiple identities in a global age.

The urbanization of the countryside: Depoliticization and the production of space in Chiapas

Abstract: The Plan Puebla Panama (PPP) is a development program for the modernization of southern Mexico and Central America through the construction of transnational urban networks. The implementation of th...

A History of Future Cities

Abstract: Every month, five million people move from the past to the future. Pouring into developing-world "instant cities" like Dubai and Shenzhen, these urban newcomers confront a modern world cobbled together from fragments of a West they have never seen. Do these fantastical boomtowns, where blueprints spring to life overnight on virgin land, represent the dawning of a brave new world? Or is their vaunted newness a mirage? In a captivating blend of history and reportage, Daniel Brook travels to a series of major metropolitan hubs that were once themselves instant cities- St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Mumbai-to watch their "dress rehearsals for the twenty-first century." Understanding today's emerging global order, he argues, requires comprehending the West's profound and conflicted influence on developing-world cities over the centuries. In 1703, Tsar Peter the Great personally oversaw the construction of a new Russian capital, a "window on the West" carefully modeled on Amsterdam, that he believed would wrench Russia into the modern world. In the nineteenth century, Shanghai became the fastest-growing city on earth as it mushroomed into an English-speaking, Western-looking metropolis that just happened to be in the Far East. Meanwhile, Bombay, the cosmopolitan hub of the British Raj, morphed into a tropical London at the hands of its pith-helmeted imperialists. Juxtaposing the stories of the architects and authoritarians, the artists and revolutionaries who seized the reins to transform each of these precociously modern places into avatars of the global future, Brook demonstrates that the drive for modernization was initially conflated with wholesale Westernization. He shows, too, the ambiguous legacy of that emulation-the birth (and rebirth) of Chinese capitalism in Shanghai, the origins of Bollywood in Bombay's American-style movie palaces, the combustible mix of revolutionary culture and politics that rocked the Russian capital-and how it may be transcended today. A fascinating, vivid look from the past out toward the horizon, A History of Future Cities is both a crucial reminder of globalization's long march and an inspiring look into the possibilities of our Asian Century.

Revisiting Second Image Reversed: Lessons from Turkey and Thailand

Abstract: This article draws attention to some surprising similarities between the recent political trajectories of Turkey and Thailand in order to argue that international norms strongly shape domestic cleavage formations. The timing and the manner of incorporation of particular states into the international system affects not only their political and economic development, but also the way various domestic groups see their mission, their identity, and their opposition. In both Turkey and Thailand, what development has brought is neither the opposition between traditional status groups and the market generated social forces, nor the tradition/religion-based opposition to modernization and democracy that is typically assumed to mark developing societies. What we find in both cases instead is a modernization-generated statist/bureaucratic social middle class that justifies its skepticism of democratization on the basis of norms upheld by the international society itself.