Abdo Baaklini, Guilain Denoeux, and Robert Springborg

The vitality and significance of parliaments in the Arab world is one of the essential—but overlooked—stories of political life in the 1990s. Baaklini, Denoeux, and Springborg present the first comprehensive, comparative analysis of modern Arab legislatures. Drawing on their extensive experience as both scholars and project consultants, the authors Yemen). Their work is of critical  More >

Misty L. Bastian and Jane L. Parpart, editors

Choice Outstanding Academic Book! This award-winning book presents a wealth of ideas for teaching African studies in a variety of disciplines. The authors present a wide range of approaches: from preparing African cuisines as a way to understand people-environment relations, to using the Internet to develop a virtual art history exhibit; from viewing an African film or assigning a novel to  More >

Ofra Bengio and Gabriel Ben-Dor, editors

Questions of identity and ethnicity have always been part of the intricate web of politics in the Arab World, but the recent expansion of political participation has made these issues more political, more visible, and more acute. This book offers a comprehensive discussion of minorities and ethnic politics in eight Arab countries. Focusing on the strategic political choices made by minorities,  More >

Andreas Schedler, Larry Diamond, and Marc F. Plattner, editors

New democracies all over the world are finding themselves haunted by the old demons of clientelism, corruption, arbitrariness, and the abuse of power—leading to a growing awareness that, in addition to elections, democracy requires checks and balances. Democratic governments must be accountable to the electorate; but they must also be subject to restraint and oversight by other public  More >

Mavis Hiltunen Biesanz, Richard Biesanz, and Karen Zubris Biesanz

This unparalleled social and cultural history traces the development of Costa Rica's culture and institutions. With the perspective of more than half a century of first-hand observation, the Biesanzes describe how Costa Rica's economy, government, educational and health-care systems, family structures, religion, and other institutions have evolved, and how this evolution has  More >

David Sciulli

This original book looks methodically at corporate law, corporate governance, and judicial practice from the perspective of social theory. Sciulli explores whether there are identifiable limits—legal or normative—to corporate power in any democratic society; when the corporate judiciary in the U.S. maintains those limits, despite the pressures of intensifying global economic  More >

Rebecca Pierce Bomann

The Pentecostal Poor offers a rich and powerful perspective on evangelicalism in the barrios of Latin America, exploring conversion and subsequent commitments to faith in an unstable environment of poverty and violence. Bomann’s study, based on extensive fieldwork, is unique in that it reveals the evangelical Protestant movement through the eyes of the believers themselves, as well as from  More >

Shalendra D. Sharma

This broad, historically grounded study examines the relationship between democratic governance and economic development in postindependence India (1947-1998). Sharma addresses the fundamental paradox of India’s political economy: why have five decades of democratically guided strategies failed to reconcile economic growth with redistribution or to mitigate the condition of extreme poverty  More >

Philip Oxhorn and Pamela K. Starr, editors

The result of an ongoing collaborative effort, this book analyzes the constraints faced by Latin American countries as they seek both to consolidate fragile democratic regimes and to restore economic dynamism in the context of a new, outward-oriented development model. The authors focus on the relationship between the two goals, highlighting the interplay of societal and state-level actors and  More >

Denis J. Sullivan and Sana Abed-Kotob

This unusually accessible book provides a comprehensive picture of Islam in contemporary Egyptian politics and society, emphasizing its diversity and heterogeneity. Tracing the development of Islam as a social, political, and economic force in Egypt, Sullivan and Abed-Kotob analyze the role it plays in governance and opposition to political authority, in social relations, and in the often-ignored  More >