Publications

Michael C. Howard and Nong Quoc Binh (Eds.), Cultural Revival and the Peoples of Ta Van Commune, Sa Pa, Northern Vietnam (White Lotus Press, 2013)

This text includes 20 chapters mainly by Vietnamese authors associated with the Vietnamese Ethnic Minorities Arts and Literature Association describing the cultural traditions of the Hmong, Dao, and Giay people of Ta Van Commune, located near the important tourist center of Sa Pa. The chapters also discuss efforts to revive and sustain these traditions. Several of the chapters describe local festivals, musical instruments, and songs as well as the history of tourism in the area and efforts to link cultural revival to economic development through tourism.

Jeffrey T. Checkel, Ed., Transnational Dynamics of Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Civil wars are the dominant form of violence in the contemporary international system, yet they are anything but local affairs. This book explores the border-crossing features of such wars by bringing together insights from international relations theory, sociology, and transnational politics with a rich comparative-quantitative literature. It highlights the causal mechanisms that link the international and transnational to the local, emphasizing the methods required to measure them. Contributors examine specific mechanisms leading to particular outcomes in civil conflicts ranging from Chechnya, to Afghanistan, to Sudan, to Turkey. The volume thus provides a significant contribution to debates motivating the broader move to mechanism-based forms of explanation, and will engage students and researchers of IR, comparative politics, and conflict processes.

Morten Jerven, Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It (Cornell University Press, 2012)

One of the most urgent challenges in African economic development is to devise a strategy for improving statistical capacity. Reliable statistics, including estimates of economic growth rates and per-capita income, are basic to the operation of governments in developing countries and vital to non-governmental organizations and other entities that provide financial aid to them. Rich countries and international financial institutions such as the World Bank allocate their development resources on the basis of such data. The paucity of accurate statistics is not merely a technical problem; it has a massive impact on the welfare of citizens in developing countries. Where do these statistics originate? How accurate are they? Poor Numbers is the first analysis of the production and use of African economic development statistics. Morten Jerven's research shows how the statistical capacities of sub-Saharan African economies have fallen into disarray.

John Harriss and Jeffrey Craig, India Today: Economy, Politics and Society (Polity, 2012)

Twenty years ago India was still generally thought of as an archetypal developing country, home to the largest number of poor people of any country in the world, and beset by problems of low economic growth, casteism and violent religious conflict. Now India is being feted as an economic power-house which might well become the second largest economy in the world before the middle of this century. Its democratic traditions, moreover, remain broadly intact.

Michael C. Howard, Transnationalism in Ancient and Medieval Societies (McFarland, 2012)

While scholars have long documented the migration of people in ancient and medieval times, they have paid less attention to those who traveled across borders with some regularity. This study of early transnational relations explores the routine interaction of people across the boundaries of empires, tribal confederacies, kingdoms, and city-states, paying particular attention to the role of long-distance trade along the Silk Road and maritime trade routes. It examines the obstacles voyagers faced, including limited travel and communication capabilitieis, relatively poor georgraphical knowledge, and the dangers of a fragmented and shifting political landscape, and offers profiles of better-known transnational elites such as the Hellenic scholar Herodotus and the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, as well lesser known servants, merchants, and sailors. By revealing the important political, economic, and cultural role cross-border trade and travel played in ancient society, this work demonstrates that transnationalism is not unique to modern times.

Michael C. Howard (editor), Textile Traditions in Contemporary Southeast Asia (White Lotus, 2012)

This text includes eight chapters that examine different aspects of the cultural role of textiles in Southeast Asia today. The topics include the relationship between textiles and art with case studies of Tai peoples and Indonesia, the revival of natural dyeing among the Palaung of northern Thailand, the influence of Christian missionaries in northern Thailand, the use of woven banners by Buddhists in northern Thailand and Laos, the secularization of lotus stem weaving in Burma, the changing nature of textile production among the Phutai of Laos, and the use of mortuary blankets among the Kalinga of the Philippines. The chapters are accompanied by over 149 color plates.

Michael C. Howard, Transnationalism and Society (McFarland, 2011)

In the past, as in the present, transnationalism has played a vital role in the development of wealth, technology and art in all societies touched by cultures other than their own. This timely book provides an introduction to the social and cultural aspects of transnationalism, particularly focusing on the modern world since 1500, with an emphasis on the past 200 years. Topics covered include the role of migration, the development of cities, the effect of transnationalism on marriage and families, the presence of transnational corporations, dress, religion and art. A key text for understanding our increasingly transnational world.

Lenard J. Cohen and John R. Lampe, Embracing Democracy in the Western Balkans (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011)

This text offers a comparative, cross-regional study of the politics and economics of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Albania from 1999 to the present. It was during this period that the first wave of post-communist regime transition ended and the region became more deeply involved in the challenges of democratic consolidation. Lenard J. Cohen and John R. Lampe explore the legacies of communist rule, the impact of incentives and impediments on reform, and the magnetic pull of European Union accession. The authors ask whether the Western Balkans are embracing democracy by creating functional, resilient institutions-governmental, administrative, journalistic, and economic-and fostering popular trust in the legitimacy of those institutions.

Human Security Report Project, Human Security Report 2009/10
(December 2, 2010)

The Human Security Report 2009/2010 analyzes the drivers of war and peace and the causes of the decline in the deadliness of armed conflict over the past six decades. Part I of the new Report examines the forces and political developments that have driven down the number of international conflicts and war deaths since the 1950s, and the number of civil wars since the early 1990s. It argues that the fact that these forces persist, or have strengthened, provides grounds for cautious optimism about the future of global security. Part II examines the paradox of mortality rates that decline during the overwhelming majority of today’s wars, as well as the challenges and controversies involved in measuring indirect war deaths—those caused by war-exacerbated disease and malnutrition. Part III, “Trends in Human Insecurity,” reviews recent trends in conflict numbers and death tolls around the world, and updates the conflict and other trend data in previous HSRP publications.

John Harriss and Paul Bowles (Eds.), Globalization and Labour in China and India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

Globalization has pushed China and India to the centre of the stage but what has been the impact on workers in these countries? This book analyzes this question and demonstrates the complexity of the processes and responses at play. Bringing together expert analyzes of both rural and urban areas, the book highlights the ways in which local and national policies as well as global actors have an impact on labour. There are signs that the state in both countries is shifting its role in a 'counter movement from above' as shown by the National Employment Guarantee Act in India and the Labour Contract Law in China. But will this be enough to quell the social unrest caused by globalization's dislocating and inequalizing effects, especially after the global financial crisis? This book shows how state responses are unlikely to be up to the task and what role labour in other countries could play.

Michael C. Howard, From Dashes to Dragons: The Ikat-Patterned Textiles of Southeast Asia (White Lotus, 2010)

This text provides a comprehensive survey of Southeast Asia’s ikat-patterned textiles. These include some of the most dramatic textiles from the region such as the famous warp ikat patterned textiles of Sumba along with many textiles that are of great importance to the cultural heritage of the region, such as the Tai tubeskirt cloths with weft ikat gray heron motifs and the double ikat cloths from Tenganan, Bali. The book includes a discussion of ikat techniques and the origin and diffusion of ikat in Southeast Asia. This is followed by surveys of the ikat-patterned textiles of peoples speaking Tai, Austronesian, Mon-Khmer, and Tibeto-Burman languages. 296 color photographs accompany the text.

Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein (Eds.), European Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Why are hopes fading for a single European identity? Economic integration has advanced faster and further than predicted, yet the European sense of 'who we are' is fragmenting. Exploiting decades of permissive consensus, Europe's elites designed and completed the single market, the euro, the Schengen passport-free zone, and, most recently, crafted an extraordinarily successful policy of enlargement. At the same time, these attempts to de-politicize politics, to create Europe by stealth, have produced a political backlash. This ambitious survey of identity in Europe captures the experiences of the winners and losers, optimists and pessimists, movers and stayers in a Europe where spatial and cultural borders are becoming ever more permeable. A full understanding of Europe's ambivalence, refracted through its multiple identities, lies at the intersection of competing European political projects and social processes.

Arctic Security in the 21st Century: Conference Report 2008

The Simons Foundation and the School for International Studies hosted a Dialogue Conference on the Problems of Arctic Security in the 21st Century in April 2008.