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The Wa of Myanmar and China's Quest for Global Dominance

By Bertil Lintner

The United Wa State Army (UWSA) is a nonstate armed group that administers an autonomous zone in the difficult-to-reach Wa Hills of eastern Myanmar. As China expands its geopolitical interests across Asia through the Belt...

Constructing Revolution

Soviet Propaganda Posters, 1917-1947

By Kristina A. Toland

The eruption of the First World War, the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and the subsequent civil war broke down established political and social structures and brought an end to the Tsarist Empire. Russia...

Protecting Whiteness

Whitelash and the Rejection of Racial Equality

By Cameron D. Lippard, J. Scott Carter, David G. Embrick, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

The standoff at Cliven Bundy’s ranch, the rise of white identity activists on college campuses, and the viral growth of white nationalist videos on YouTube vividly illustrate the resurgence of white supremacy and overt racism...

Korean Skilled Workers

Toward a Labor Aristocracy

By Hyung-A Kim

South Korea’s triumphant development has catapulted the country’s economy to the eleventh largest in the world. Large family-owned conglomerates, or chaebŏls, such as Samsung, Hyundai, and LG, have become globally preeminent manufacturing brands. Yet Korea’s...

A Secular Need

Islamic Law and State Governance in Contemporary India

By Jeffrey A. Redding

Whether from the perspective of Islamic law’s advocates, secularism’s partisans, or communities caught in their crossfire, many people see the relationship between Islamic law and secularism as antagonistic and increasingly discordant. In the United States...

Taiwan in Dynamic Transition

Nation Building and Democratization

By Ryan Dunch, Ashley Esarey, Thomas B. Gold

Following a remarkable transition from authoritarian rule to robust democracy, Taiwan has grown into a prosperous but widely unrecognized nation-state for which no uncontested sovereign space exists. Increasingly vigorous assertions of Taiwanese identity expose the...

Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx

The Fight for a Secular World of Universal and Equal Rights

By Jonathan I. Israel

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small but conspicuous fringe of the Jewish population became the world’s most resolute, intellectually driven, and philosophical revolutionaries, among them the pre-Marxist Karl Marx. Yet the roots...

Top-Down Democracy in South Korea

By Erik Mobrand

While popular movements in South Korea rightly grab the headlines for forcing political change and holding leaders to account, those movements are only part of the story of the construction and practice of democracy. In...

Sensitive Space

Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border

By Jason Cons

Enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border have posed conceptual and pragmatic challenges to both states since Partition in 1947. These pieces of India inside of Bangladesh, and vice versa, are spaces in which national security, belonging,...

Concrete Mama

Prison Profiles from Walla Walla

By Ethan Hoffman, Dan Berger

Journalists John McCoy and Ethan Hoffman spent four months inside the walls of the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla in 1978, just as Washington, once a leader in prison reform, abandoned its focus on...

Making New Nepal

From Student Activism to Mainstream Politics

By Amanda Thérèse Snellinger

One of the most important political transitions to occur in South Asia in recent decades was the ouster of Nepal’s monarchy in 2006 and the institution of a democratic secular republic in 2008. Based on...

Organic Sovereignties

Struggles over Farming in an Age of Free Trade

By Guntra A. Aistara

This first sustained ethnographic study of organic agriculture outside the United States traces its meanings, practices, and politics in two nations typically considered worlds apart: Latvia and Costa Rica. Situated on the frontiers of the...

Stars for Freedom

Hollywood, Black Celebrities, and the Civil Rights Movement

By Emilie Raymond

From Oprah Winfrey to Angelina Jolie, George Clooney to Leonardo DiCaprio, Americans have come to expect that Hollywood celebrities will be outspoken advocates for social and political causes. However, that wasn’t always the case. As...

High

Drugs, Desire, and a Nation of Users

By Ingrid Walker

Whether drinking Red Bull, relieving chronic pain with oxycodone, or experimenting with Ecstasy, Americans participate in a culture of self-medication, using psychoactive substances to enhance or manage our moods. A “drug-free America” seems to be...

The Goldmark Case

An American Libel Trial

By William L. Dwyer

In 1962 John Goldmark, cattle rancher, Harvard Law School graduate, and distinguished three-term state legislator for a lightly populated area in north central Washington, was overwhelmingly defeated in his bid for reelection. He and his...

Radical Theatrics

Put-Ons, Politics, and the Sixties

By Craig J. Peariso

From burning draft cards to staging nude protests, much left-wing political activism in 1960s America was distinguished by deliberate outrageousness. This theatrical activism, aimed at the mass media and practiced by Abbie Hoffman and the...

Disarmament Sketches

Three Decades of Arms Control and International Law

By Thomas Graham, Jr.

Thomas Graham Jr. played a role in the negotiation of every major international arms control and non-proliferation agreement signed by the United States during the past thirty years. As a U.S. government lawyer and diplomat,...

Days of Defeat and Victory

By Yegor Gaidar. Translated by Jane Ann Miller. Foreword by Michael McFaul

Yegor Gaidar, the first post-Soviet prime minister of Russia and one of the principal architects of its historic transformation to a market economy, here presents his lively account of governing in the tumultuous early 1990s....

The Post-Soviet Handbook

A Guide to Grassroots Organizations and Internet Resources

By M. Holt Ruffin

Post-Soviet Handbook: A Guide to Grassroots Organizations and Internet Resources

Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communism

Ton Duc Thang and the Politics of History and Memory

By Christoph Giebel

Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communisim illuminates the real and imagined lives of Ton Duc Thang (1888–1980), a celebrated revolutionary activist and Vietnamese communist icon, but it is much more than a conventional biography. This multifaceted...