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The government of Yemen, unified since 1990, remains largely incapable of controlling violence or providing goods and services to its population, but the regime continues to endure despite its fragility and peripheral location in the global political and economic order. Revealing what holds Yemen together in such tenuous circumstances, Peripheral Visions shows how citizens form national attachments even in the absence of strong state institutions. Lisa Wedeen, who spent a year and a half in Yemen observing and interviewing its residents, argues that national solidarity in such weak states tends to arise not from attachments to institutions but through both extraordinary events and the ordinary activities of everyday life. Yemenis, for example, regularly gather to chew qat, a leafy drug similar to caffeine, as they engage in wide-ranging and sometimes influential public discussions of even the most divisive political and social issues. These lively debates exemplify Wedeen’s contention that democratic, national, and pious solidarities work as ongoing, performative practices that enact and reproduce a citizenry’s shared points of reference. Ultimately, her skillful evocations of such practices shift attention away from a narrow focus on government institutions and electoral competition and toward the substantive experience of participatory politics.
“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University
The modern state is hugely important in our everyday lives. It takes nearly half our income in taxes. It registers our births, marriages and deaths. It educates our children and pays our pensions. It has a unique power to compel, in some cases exercising the ultimate sanction of preserving life or ordering death. Yet most of us would struggle to say exactly what the state is. The Modern State offers a clear, comprehensive and provoking introduction to one of the most important phenomena of contemporary life. Topics covered include: * the nation state and its historical context * state and economy * state and societies * state and citizens * international relations * the future of the state
This edited volume investigates young people within their social contexts. The focus is on engaging young people as they transition from youth into young adulthood. Key advantages of this book are its embodiment of interdisciplinarity in gathering research across a range of diverse methods, theories, settings, and countries. The volume begins with reviews of key theories and methods in understanding young people within their social networked contexts of generosity, networks, identity, and ethnic heritage. The second section includes chapters attending to education and work as contexts for transitions to adulthood, counseling, meaning, and aesthetics from high school to college and into workplaces. The third section includes chapters studying community engagement and the well-being of young people, including social support, meaning in life, religiosity, spirituality, stress coping, yoga, and sports. The diverse topics addressed in this edited volume are generosity, philanthropy, voluntary action, social networks, social identity, personhood, ethnic heritage, post-colonialism, intersectionality, personality, lived experiences, informal economy, sustainability, pandemic, family support, educational counselors, motivation, ?Not in Education, Employment, or Training? (NEET), everyday aesthetics, built environment, generativity, community, adult allies, youth engagement, life satisfaction, spiritual identity, religious affiliation, stress, practicing yoga, sexual violence, athletes, sports climate, pressures to perform, resilience, and neurodiversity. Disciplines span economics, business, education, sociology, psychology, medical science, geography, journalism, architecture, engineering, science and technology, and applied sciences. Methods include quantitative surveys, qualitative in-depth interviews, life course biographies, ethnographic case studies, bibliometric analysis, and integrative reviews. Young people are investigated across thirteen countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Yemen, Ghana, Bahrain, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Canada, Romania, and the Netherlands.
This study examines the nature of changes to Yemen's power structures, political dynamics and institutions since the intention to democratize was announced in 1990 paying particular attention to the role of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Since 2011, civil wars and state failure have wracked the Arab world, underlying the misalignment between national identity and political borders. In Break all the Borders, Ariel I. Ahram examines the separatist movements that aimed to remake those borders and create new independent states. With detailed studies of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the federalists in eastern Libya, the southern resistance in Yemen, and Kurdish nationalist parties, Ahram explains how separatists captured territory and handled the tasks of rebel governance, including managing oil exports, electricity grids, and irrigation networks. Ahram emphasizes that the separatism arose not just as an opportunistic response to state collapse. Rather, separatists drew inspiration from the legacy of Woodrow Wilson and ideal of self-determination. They sought to reinstate political autonomy that had been lost during the early and mid-twentieth century. Speaking to the international community, separatist promised a more just and stable world order. In Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Libya, they served as key allies against radical Islamic groups. Yet their hopes for international recognition have gone unfulfilled. Separatism is symptomatic of the contradictions in sovereignty and statehood in the Arab world. Finding ways to integrate, instead of eliminate, separatist movements may be critical for rebuilding regional order.
Yemen, tucked into the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, has often escaped regional and international attention. And yet its history illuminates some of the most important issues at play in the modern Middle East: from Cold War rivalries to the growth of Islamic extremism in the 1990s, and from the rise of 'Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula' (AQAP) in the post-9/11 period to Obama-era drone strikes. Uzi Rabi looks at this country and its economic and political history through the prism of state failure. He examines Yemen's trajectory from revolutions and civil war in the 1960s to unification in the 1990s and on to the 2011 uprisings which eventually saw the fall from power of Ali Abdallah Salih in 2012. Covering the twentieth-century history of Yemen from traditional society to a melting-pot of revolutions accompanied by foreign intervention, Uzi Rabi's book offers an analysis of a state that is failing, both in terms of day-to-day functioning, and in terms of offering its citizens a modicum of security. Rabi covers the initial rulers of the country, Imam Yahya and his descendents, who ruled Yemen until 1962. But with the growing influence of Gamal Abd al-Nasser's vision of Arab nationalism, and the defeat the British and their allies in November 1967, the way was paved for the formation of South Yemen: the only declared Marxist regime in the Arab world. Rabi tracks the turbulent political history of the two Yemens, in particular South Yemen, which between 1967 and 1986 saw five presidents come and go, three of whom were ousted by violent means. But with unification came a new set of problems concerning poverty, terrorism and corruption. Rabi's analysis of the political beginnings, rule and eventual downfall of Salih are key to understanding all of these, and how they have contributed to Yemen's current explosive condition. Drawing extensively on Arabic sources, many of which are not available in the English language, Rabi offers important analysis on the volatility of the state in Yemen. Based on freshly examined materials, this book is a vital reference of any examination of the country's twentieth-century history and its impact on the current unstable situation in the wider Middle East.
This book brings ethnographies of everyday power and ritual into dialogue with intellectual studies of theology and political theory. It underscores the importance of academic collaboration between scholars of religion, anthropology, and history in uncovering the structures of thinking and action that make politics work. The volume weaves important discussions around sovereignty in modern South Asian history with debates elsewhere on the world map. South Asia’s colonial history – especially India’s twentieth-century emergence as the world’s largest democracy – has made the subcontinent a critical arena for thinking about how transformations and continuities in conceptions of sovereignty provide a vital frame for tracking shifts in political order. The chapters deal with themes such as sovereignty, kingship, democracy, governance, reason, people, nation, colonialism, rule of law, courts, autonomy, and authority, especially within the context of India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in politics, ideology, religion, sociology, history, and political culture, as well as the informed reader interested in South Asian studies.
The figure of the traitor plays an intriguing role in modern politics. Traitors are a source of transgression from within, creating their own kinds of aversion and suspicion. They destabilize the rigid moral binaries of victim and persecutor, friend and enemy. Recent history is stained by collaborators, informers, traitors, and the bloody purges and other acts of retribution against them. In the emergent nation-state of Bhutan, the specter of the "antinational" traitor helped to transform the traditional view of loyalty based on social relations. In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers' fear of traitors is tangled with the Tamil civilians' fear of being betrayed to the Tigers as traitors. For Palestinians in the West Bank, simply earning a living can mean complicity with people acting in the name of the Israeli state. While most contemporary studies of violence and citizenship focus on the creation of the "other," the cases in Traitors: Suspicion, Intimacy, and the Ethics of State-Building illustrate the equally strong political and social anxieties among those who seem to be most alike. Treason is often treated as a pathological distortion of political life. However, the essays in Traitors propose that treachery is a constant, essential, and normal part of the processes through which social and political order is produced. In the political gray zones between personal and state loyalties, traitors and their prosecutors play roles that make and unmake regimes. In this volume, ten scholars examine political, ethnic, and personal trust and betrayals in modern times from Mozambique to the Taiwan Straits, from the former Eastern Bloc to the West Bank. This fascinating collection studies the tension between close personal relationships, the demands of nation-states, and the moral choices that result when these interests collide. In asking how traitors are defined in the context of local histories, contributors address larger comparative questions about the nature of postcolonial citizenship.