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Shifting States draws on a rich history of anthropological theorising on all kinds of states – from the pre- to the post- industrial – and explores topics as diverse as bureaucracy, infrastructure, surveillance, securitization, and public health. As we enter the third decade of the twentieth century, there is a growing sense that ‘the state’ is in crisis everywhere. Although the nature of this perceived crisis varies from place to place, everywhere it is seen to have been caused by some combination of the inter-related forces of ‘globalisation’, of successive economic shocks, and of the rise of social media-fuelled populist movements. Yet, conversely, there is also a creeping perception that state power is becoming more pervasive in its reach, and in its effects, in ways which make it ever more imminent to the material worlds in which we live, more fundamental to the ways in which we conceive of the future, and more foundational to our very sense of self. How might we try to make sense of, and to mediate, these apparently contradictory impressions? Based on ethnographic case studies from all over the world, this timely volume forges new ways of thinking about how state power manifests, and is imagined, and about the effects it has on ordinary people’s lives. In so doing, the volume provides tools not only for understanding states’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also for judging what effects these responses are likely to have.
Shifting States in Global Markets contributes to the debates over the political economy of globalization by focusing attention on the increasingly important role of subnational governments in implementing economic policies. Challenging the view that the effects of decentralization are positive or negative uniformly and can be explained by reference to the influence of national political institutions, Alfred Montero uses his comparisons of industrial policy in Brazil and Spain, and between different regions in these countries, to argue that we need to pay attention to political conditions at the subnational level to account for the variation in economic success between regions. Two crucial conditions are emphasized in Montero's analysis: how much competition there is among political elites within any region, and how much competition there is between regions for scarce fiscal resources. Lower competition among elites leads to subnational governments delegating more autonomy to public agencies to develop ties with private businesses favoring allocative efficiency and innovation; higher competition between regions provides incentives for political leaders to support involvement in economic development efforts by a greater variety of public agencies, whose cooperation and mutual trust over time create the conditions for long-term success in these efforts. This analysis gives us a much more nuanced understanding of how countries are experiencing the challenges of globalization today.
Joel S. Migdal revisits the approach U.S. officials have adopted toward the Middle East since World War II, which paid scant attention to tectonic shifts in the region. After the war, the United States did not restrict its strategic model to the Middle East. Beginning with Harry S. Truman, American presidents applied a uniform strategy rooted in the country's Cold War experience in Europe to regions across the globe, designed to project America into nearly every corner of the world while limiting costs and overreach. The approach was simple: find a local power that could play Great Britain's role in Europe after the war, sharing the burden of exercising power, and establish a security alliance along the lines of NATO. Yet regional changes following the creation of Israel, the Free Officers Coup in Egypt, the rise of Arab nationalism from 1948 to 1952, and, later, the Iranian Revolution and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty in 1979 complicated this project. Migdal shows how insufficient attention to these key transformations led to a series of missteps and misconceptions in the twentieth century. With the Arab uprisings of 2009 through 2011 prompting another major shift, Migdal sees an opportunity for the United States to deploy a new, more workable strategy, and he concludes with a plan for gaining a stable foothold in the region.
Shifting the Color Line explores the historical and political roots of racial conflict in American welfare policy, beginning with the New Deal. Robert Lieberman demonstrates how racial distinctions were built into the very structure of the American welfare state.
As politicians debate how to address the estimated eleven million unauthorized immigrants residing in the United States, undocumented youth anxiously await the next policy shift that will determine their futures. From one day to the next, their dreams are as likely to crumble around them as to come within reach. In Shifting Boundaries, Alexis M. Silver sheds light on the currents of exclusion and incorporation that characterize their lives. Silver examines the experiences of immigrant youth growing up in a small town in North Carolina—a state that experienced unprecedented growth in its Latino population in the 1990s and 2000s, and where aggressive anti-immigration policies have been enforced. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interview data, she finds that contradictory policies at the national, state, and local levels interact to create a complex environment through which the youth must navigate. From heritage-based school programs to state-wide bans on attending community college; from the failure of the DREAM Act to the rescinding of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA); each layer represents profound implications for undocumented Latino youth. Silver exposes the constantly changing pathways that shape their journeys into early adulthood—and the profound resilience that they develop along the way.
Bringing together for the first time distinguished Gulf experts to analyse the renewed geo-economic prominence of the Gulf states, this volume investigates some of the 'new power brokers' in the world economy: the oil-exporting states of the Gulf. The Gulf Cooperation Council's (GCC) members: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, collectively have the largest proven oil reserves in the world and are among the world's largest oil-exporting states. Gulf Arab states are actively pursuing a variety of foreign investment strategies. Some of these investments are being managed by sovereign wealth funds, government investment corporations, and government-controlled companies. This renewed geo-economic status has received a lot of media attention but there has been a dearth of academic study on what this shift in global economic power means for the international economic system. This volume aims to fill this gap with a rigorous scholarly analysis based on primary sources and raw economic data. It brings together the expertise of academics who have devoted their career to careful study of the region and of renowned scholars of international political economy.
Examine the everyday lives of ordinary Americans from the 1940s and 1950s and discover how very different the two decades were. World War II affected Americans and the way they behaved, not only in the 1940s, but also in the years that followed when the depression that preceded the war was replaced with an economic boom. Explore how women's roles and lives changed during these two very distinct decades, how politics and political decisions impacted all walks of life, and what the advent of growing technology, much of it developed during the war, meant to the general population. What was it like to be a woman suddenly earning her own money while men were off fighting? How did children and teenagers contribute to the war effort? How did housing change in postwar America? What pastimes were popular during these two decades and how did they reflect the times? These questions and others are explored in detail, encouraging students, teachers, and interested readers to recognize the tremendous shift in society between the war years and the atomic age that immediately followed. This text presents the 1940s as a time of social problems that existed alongside community commitment to the war, while the 1950s are presented as a time when exciting social change such as the beginning of the civil rights movement and the building of Levittowns occurred. After the war ordinary people began to question long-accepted ideas. The exploration of these everyday details provides a rich look at two very important decades in our country's history.
This book offers a historical analysis of one of the most striking and dramatic transformations to take place in Brazil and the United States during the twentieth century—the redefinition of the concepts of nation and democracy in racial terms. The multilateral political debates that occurred between 1930 and 1945 pushed and pulled both states towards more racially inclusive political ideals and nationalisms. Both countries utilized cultural production to transmit these racial political messages. At times working collaboratively, Brazilian and U.S. officials deployed the concept of “racial democracy” as a national security strategy, one meant to suppress the existential threats perceived to be posed by World War II and by the political agendas of communists, fascists, and blacks. Consequently, official racial democracy was limited in its ability to address racial inequities in the United States and Brazil. Shifting the Meaning of Democracy helps to explain the historical roots of a contemporary phenomenon: the coexistence of widespread antiracist ideals with enduring racial inequality.
Addressing base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) is a key priority of governments. In 2013, OECD and G20 countries, working together on an equal footing, adopted a 15-point Action Plan to address BEPS. This publication is the final report for Action 11.