2013 Faculty Books

• 2013
• 2012
• 2011
• 2010
• 2009
• 2008
• 2007
• 2006

James Foster, Professor of Economics and International Affairs; Director, Institute for International Economic Policy

A Unified Approach to Measuring Poverty and Inequality: Theory and Practice. James Foster, Suman Seth, Michael Lokshin, Zurab Sajaia. World Bank, 2013.

A Unified Approach to Measuring Poverty and Inequality is an introduction to the theory and practice of measuring poverty and inequality, as well as a user's guide for analyzing income or consumption distribution for any standard household dataset using the World Bank's ADePT software. The approach taken here considers income standards as building blocks for basic measurement, then uses them to construct inequality and poverty measures. This unified approach provides advantages in interpreting and contrasting the measures and in understanding the way measures vary over time and space.

Several recent initiatives have lowered the cost of accessing household datasets. The ADePT software enables users to analyze microdata from household surveys and other sources and generate print-ready, standardized tables and charts. It can also be used to simulate the impact of economic shocks, cash transfers and other policy instruments on poverty, and inequality. The software automates analysis, helps minimize human errors, and encourages development of new economic analysis methods. Of interest to teachers and students as well as to policy practitioners, A Unified Approach to Measuring Poverty and Inequality will empower researchers to plumb greater depths in searching for regularity in larger and larger datasets. This book should help to enrich discussion and analysis relating to the World Bank's recent effort toward defining new targets and indicators for promoting work on eradicating poverty and enhancing shared prosperity.

John Harbeson, Professorial Lecturer

Africa in World Politics: Engaging a Changing Global Order, John Harbeson and Donald Rothchild, Eds., Westview Press, 2013.

In this fully revised edition top scholars in African politics address the effects that major currents in Africa and world politics have upon each other and explore the ramifications of this interconnection for contemporary theories of international and comparative politics.

The fifth edition focuses on engaging a changing world order. The nation-state as we know it is a legacy of European rule in Africa, and the primacy of the nation-state remains the bedrock of most contemporary theories of international relations. Yet in the fifth decade of Africa's independence, this colonial inheritance has been challenged as never before by state weakness, internal and inter-state conflict, new gains in economic development, large investments by China and other G-20 countries, and internal and external demands for economic and political reform, with potentially far-reaching implications. Including six new chapters on warfare, bilateral vs. multilateral peacekeeping, Sudan, the Great Lakes Crisis, and China and Africa, this text remains an invaluable resource for students of African and world politics.

Stephen B. Kaplan, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs

Globalization and Austerity Politics in Latin America, Cambridge University Press, 2013.

In an age of financial globalization, are markets and democracy compatible? For developing countries, the dramatic internationalization of financial markets over the last two decades deepens tensions between politics and markets. Notwithstanding the rise of left-leaning governments in regions like Latin America, macroeconomic policies often have a neoliberal appearance. When is austerity imposed externally and when is it a domestic political choice? By combining statistical tests with extensive field research across Latin America, Globalization and Austerity Politics in Latin America examines the effect of financial globalization on economic policymaking. Kaplan argues that a country's structural composition of international borrowing and its individual technocratic understanding of past economic crises combine to produce dramatically different outcomes in national policy choices. Incorporating these factors into an electoral politics framework, the book then challenges the conventional wisdom that political business cycles are prevalent in newly democratizing regions. This book is accessible to a broad audience and scholars with an interest in the political economy of finance, development and democracy, and Latin American politics.

Dane Kennedy, Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs

The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia, Harvard University Press 2013.

For a British Empire that stretched across much of the globe at the start of the nineteenth century, the interiors of Africa and Australia remained intriguing mysteries. The challenge of opening these continents to imperial influence fell to a proto-professional coterie of determined explorers. They sought knowledge, adventure, and fame, but often experienced confusion, fear, and failure. The Last Blank Spaces follows the arc of these explorations, from idea to practice, from intention to outcome, from myth to reality.

Those who conducted the hundreds of expeditions that probed Africa and Australia in the nineteenth century adopted a mode of scientific investigation that had been developed by previous generations of seaborne explorers. They likened the two continents to oceans, empty spaces that could be made truly knowable only by mapping, measuring, observing, and preserving. They found, however, that their survival and success depended less on this system of universal knowledge than it did on the local knowledge possessed by native peoples.

While explorers sought to advance the interests of Britain and its emigrant communities, Dane Kennedy discovers a more complex outcome: expeditions that failed ignominiously, explorers whose loyalties proved ambivalent or divided, and, above all, local states and peoples who diverted expeditions to serve their own purposes. The collisions, and occasional convergences, between British and indigenous values, interests, and modes of knowing the world are brought to the fore in this fresh and engaging study.

Marlene Laruelle, Research Professor of International Affairs

Migration and Social Upheaval as the Face of Globalization in Central Asia, Marlene Laruelle, Ed., Brill Academic Publishing, 2013.

Since the start of the 1990s, Central Asia has been the main purveyor of migrants in the post-Soviet space. These massive migrations due to social upheavals over the last twenty years impact issues of governance; patterns of social adaptation; individual and collective identities; and gender relations in Central Asia. This volume raises the importance of internal migrations, those at a regional, intra-Central Asian, level, labor migrations to Russia, and carries us as far away to the Uzbek migrants based in Istanbul, New York, or Seoul, as well as to the young women of Tashkent who head to Germany or France, and to the Germans, Greeks, and Jews of Central Asia who have returned to their "ethnic homelands".

Harris Mylonas, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs

The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities, Cambridge University Press, 2013.

What drives a state's choice to assimilate, accommodate, or exclude ethnic groups within its territory? In this innovative work on the international politics of nation-building, Harris Mylonas argues that a state's nation-building policies toward non-core groups — any aggregation of individuals perceived as an ethnic group by the ruling elite of a state — are influenced by both its foreign policy goals and its relations with the external patrons of these groups. Through a detailed study of the Balkans, Mylonas shows that how a state treats a non-core group within its own borders is determined largely by whether the state's foreign policy is revisionist or cleaves to the international status quo, and whether it is allied or in rivalry with that group's external patrons. Mylonas injects international politics into the study of nation-building, building a bridge between international relations and the comparative politics of ethnicity and nationalism. This is the first book to explain systematically how the politics of ethnicity in the international arena determine which groups are assimilated, accommodated, or annihilated by their host states.

David Shambaugh, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs; Director, China Policy Program

China Goes Global: The Partial Power, Oxford University Press, 2013.

Most global citizens are well aware of the explosive growth of the Chinese economy. Indeed, China has famously become the "workshop of the world." Yet, while China watchers have shed much light on the country's internal dynamics — China's politics, its vast social changes, and its economic development — few have focused on how this increasingly powerful nation has become more active and assertive throughout the world.

In China Goes Global, David Shambaugh delivers the book many have been waiting for — a sweeping account of China's growing prominence on the international stage. Thirty years ago, China's role in global affairs beyond its immediate East Asian periphery was decidedly minor and it had little geostrategic power. As Shambaugh charts, though, China's expanding economic power has allowed it to extend its reach virtually everywhere — from mineral mines in Africa, to currency markets in the West, to oilfields in the Middle East, to agribusiness in Latin America, to the factories of East Asia. Shambaugh offers an enlightening look into the manifestations of China's global presence: its extensive commercial footprint, its growing military power, its increasing cultural influence or "soft power," its diplomatic activity, and its new prominence in global governance institutions.

Paul D. Williams, Associate Professor of International Affairs; Director, Security Policy Studies Program

Providing Peacekeepers: The Politics, Challenges, and Future of United Nations Peacekeeping Contributions, Alex J. Bellamy and Paul D. Williams, Eds., Oxford University Press, 2013.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the rising demand for peacekeepers saw the United Nations (UN) operate at a historically unprecedented tempo, with increases in the number and size of missions as well as in the scope and complexity of their mandates. The need to deploy over 120,000 UN peacekeepers and the demands placed upon them in the field have threatened to outstrip the willingness and to some extent capacity of the UN's Member States. This situation raised the questions of why states contribute forces to UN missions and, conversely, what factors inhibit them from doing more? Providing Peacekeepers answers these questions.

After summarizing the challenges confronting the UN in its force generation efforts, Providing Peacekeepers develops a new framework for analyzing UN peacekeeping contributions in light of the evidence presented in sixteen case study chapters which examine the experiences of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the People's Republic of China, the Russian Federation, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Ghana, Nepal, Uruguay, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, and Japan. The book concludes by offering recommendations for how the UN might develop new strategies for force generation so as to meet the foreseeable challenges of twenty-first century peacekeeping and improve the quantity and quality of its uniformed peacekeepers.

Nicholas S. Vonortas, Professor of Economics and International Affairs

Handbook on the Theory and Practice of Program Evaluation, Albert N. Link , Nicholas S. Vonortas, Eds., Edward Elgar Publ., 2013.

There has been a dramatic increase in expenditures on public goods over the past thirty years, particularly in the area of research and development. As governments explore the many opportunities for growth in this area, they — and the general public — are becoming increasingly concerned with the transparency, accountability and performance of public programs. This pioneering Handbook offers a collection of critical essays on the theory and practice of program evaluation, written by some of the most well-known experts in the field.

As this volume demonstrates, a wide variety of methodologies exists to evaluate particularly the objectives and outcomes of research and development programs. These include surveys, statistical and econometric estimations, patent analyses, bibliometrics, scientometrics, network analyses, case studies, and historical tracings. Contributors divide these and other methods and applications into four categories — economic, non-economic, hybrid and data-driven — in order to discuss the many factors that affect the utility of each technique and how that impacts the technological, economic and societal forecasts of the programs in question.

Scholars, practitioners and students with an interest in economics and innovation will all find this Handbook an invaluable resource.