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Humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) present themselves as servants of the most longstanding and universal human values. And yet, the idea that NGOs like Médecins sans Frontières, International Rescue Committee, or Oxfam should provide humanitarian relief is relatively new and—when proposed in the mid-nineteenth century—was surprisingly controversial. Above the Fray examines the origins of the political and organizational culture that provides humanitarian NGOs today with extraordinary influence in international politics. Drawing on archival research, the book traces its origins to a mid-nineteenth-century Geneva-based orthodox Calvinist movement. The book shows that the founding members of the Red Cross—essential figures for the emergence of the humanitarian sector—were convinced by their Calvinist faith that the only way relief could come to the victims of armed conflict was through an international volunteer program that would be free of state interests. These early activists were the first to advocate the establishment of volunteer relief societies in all state capitals, and they were the ones to propose the 1864 Geneva Convention, which has become the ethical standards for humane conduct on the battlefield. The analysis follows the remarkable international spread of humanitarian ideas over the second half of the nineteenth century, and shows how the Red Cross project struck a chord in numerous quarters for different reasons—national, professional, religious, and others—and popularized the notion of organized humanitarian volunteer societies. The book highlights the imprint of mid-nineteenth-century Calvinism that contemporary humanitarian relief organizations and policies continue to bear.

Civic Gifts traces how practices of reciprocity and organized mass benevolence—that is, philanthropy—have contributed to the development of novel forms of national solidarity and impressive governing capacities in the United States, contributing even to a famously anti-statist political culture. Sociologist Elisabeth Clemens paints a picture of the US, whether as nation or as state, as a puzzle. How, she asks, did a sense of shared nationhood develop despite the linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences among the settlers? How did a global power emerge from an often anti-statist political culture? How did some version of this collective identity come to be articulated with organized governance? With Civic Gifts, Clemens reveals that an important piece of the answer to these questions can be found in the unexpected political uses of philanthropy and the power of gifts to mobilize communities and to create solidarity among strangers.

Traditionally, social scientists have assumed that past imperialism hinders the future development prospects of colonized nations. Challenging this widespread belief, this book argues that countries once under direct British imperial control have developed more successfully than those that were ruled indirectly. Combining statistical analysis with in-depth case studies of former British colonies, it argues that direct rule promoted cogent and coherent states with high levels of bureaucratization and inclusiveness, which contributed to implementing development policy during late colonialism and independence. On the other hand, the author finds that indirect British rule created patrimonial, weak states that preyed on their own populations. The book is firmly grounded in the tradition of comparative-historical analysis while offering insight into the colonial roots of uneven development.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent social thinkers in France, Germany, and the United States sought to understand the modern world taking shape around them. Although they worked in different national traditions, emphasized different features of modern society, and disagreed about whether Jews were synonymous with or antithetical to those features, they repeatedly invoked the Jews as a touchstone for defining modernity and national identity. In France, Émile Durkheim challenged antisemitic depictions of Jews as agents of revolutionary subversion or counterrevolutionary reaction. In Germany, Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber debated the relationship of the Jews to modern industrial capitalism, reproducing in secularized form cultural assumptions derived from Christian theology. In the United States, William Thomas, Robert Park, and their students conceived the modern city in part by reference to the Jewish immigrants concentrating there. In all three countries, real or purported differences between Jews and gentiles were invoked to elucidate key dualisms of modern social thought. The Jews thus became an intermediary through which social thinkers discerned in a roundabout fashion the nature, problems, and trajectory of the wider society. The book proposes a novel explanation for why Jews became a pivotal cultural reference point yet signified such varied and inconsistent meanings; it rethinks previous scholarship on Orientalism, Occidentalism, and European perceptions of America; and it shows that history extends into the present with the Jews—and now the Jewish state—continuing to serve as an intermediary for self-reflection in the twenty-first century.

In the early 1990s, South Africa and Palestine/Israel began negotiations to end colonial rule. The South African state was democratized and Black South Africans gained formal legal equality. Palestinians, on the other hand, won neither freedom nor equality through the Oslo “peace process.” Israel remains a settler colonial state. Despite these differences, the transitions of the last twenty years have produced similar socio-economic changes in Palestine/Israel and South Africa: growing inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing the racialized poor. Neoliberal Apartheid explores this paradox through an analysis of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994. Based on a decade of research in the Johannesburg and Jerusalem regions, Neoliberal Apartheid presents detailed ethnographic studies of the precariousness of the poor in Alexandra township, the dynamics of colonization and enclosure in Bethlehem, the growth of fortress suburbs and private security in Johannesburg, and the regime of security coordination between the Israeli military and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Scholars and activists increasingly look to South Africa to make sense of conditions in Palestine/Israel. While most studies compare South Africa before 1994 and Palestine/Israel after 1994, Neoliberal Apartheid is the first comparative study of social change in both contexts since the 1990s. It addresses the limitations of liberation in South Africa, highlights the impact of neoliberal restructuring in Palestine/Israel, and argues that a new form of neoliberal apartheid defined by marginalization and securitization has emerged in both states.

Exhorting people to volunteer is part of the everyday vocabulary of American politics. Routinely, members of both major parties call for partnerships between government and nonprofit organizations. These entreaties increase dramatically during times of crisis, and the voluntary efforts of ordinary citizens are now seen as a necessary supplement to government intervention. But despite the ubiquity of the idea of volunteerism in public policy debates, analysis of its role in American governance has been fragmented. Bringing together a diverse set of disciplinary approaches, this book is a thorough examination of the place of voluntary associations in political history and an astute investigation into contemporary experiments in reshaping that role. The essays here reveal the key role nonprofits have played in the evolution of both the workplace and welfare, and illuminate the way that government's retreat from welfare has radically altered the relationship between nonprofits and corporations.

The means by which people protest—that is, their repertoires of contention—vary radically from one political regime to the next. Highly capable undemocratic regimes such as China's show no visible signs of popular social movements, yet produce many citizen protests against arbitrary, predatory government. Less-effective and undemocratic governments like the Sudan's, meanwhile, often experience regional insurgencies and even civil wars. This book offers a wide-ranging case-by-case study of various types of government and the equally various styles of protests they foster. Using examples drawn from many areas—G8 summit and anti-globalization protests, Hindu activism in 1980s India, nineteenth-century English Chartists organizing on behalf of workers' rights, the revolutions of 1848, and civil wars in Angola, Chechnya, and Kosovo—the book shows that such episodes of contentious politics unfold like loosely scripted theater. Along the way, it also brings forth powerful tools to sort out the reasons why certain political regimes vary and change, how the people living under them make claims on their government, and what connections can be drawn between regime change and the character of contentious politics.

Politicians and their political parties tend to act in routine ways, rarely deviating from conventional practice in a given time and place. Where, then, do new political practices come from? When new practices are developed, what shapes their characteristics? And what does it take for them to get assimilated into the toolkit of routine go-to options? Drawing on pragmatist theories of social action, this book elaborates a novel theoretical approach to these questions of political innovation. It then applies the approach to explain a critical development in Peruvian political history: the emergence in 1931 of a distinctively Latin American style of populist mobilization. Prior to Peru’s 1931 presidential election, nothing like populist mobilization had been practiced in the country on a national scale to seek elected office; after this moment, the practice was an established option in the Peruvian political repertoire. Ultimately, populist mobilization emerged in Peru in 1931 because newly empowered outsider political actors had the socially and experientially conditioned understanding, vision, and capacities to recognize the limitations of routine political practice and to modify, transpose, invent, and recombine practices in a way that took advantage of new opportunities that were afforded by the social and political situation. This finding offers new insights to historians of Peru, students of historical sociology and contentious politics, and anyone interested in the social and political origins of populism.

Though the word “sociology” was coined in Europe, the field of sociology grew most dramatically in America. Despite that disproportionate influence, American sociology has never been the subject of an extended historical examination. To remedy that situation—and to celebrate the centennial of the American Sociological Association—the author has assembled a team of sociologists to produce this book. Rather than a story of great sociologists or departments, it is a true history of an often-disparate field—and a considered look at the ways sociology developed intellectually and institutionally. The book explores the growth of American sociology as it addressed changes and challenges throughout the twentieth century, covering topics ranging from the discipline's intellectual roots to understandings (and misunderstandings) of race and gender to the impact of the Depression and the 1960s.