Category Archives: Recent Publications

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Twelve Weeks to Change a Life: At-Risk Youth in a Fractured State

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Greenberg, Max A. 2019. Twelve Weeks to Change a Life: At-Risk Youth in a Fractured State. University of California Press.

Twelve Weeks to Change a LifeHailed as a means to transform cultural norms, interpersonal violence prevention programs have reached nearly two-thirds of high school students in the United States today. Twelve Weeks to Change a Life: At Risk Youth in a Fractured State explores the consequences of this slow-rolling policy revolution for the young people marked for intervention. Drawing on over three years of fieldwork in schools across Los Angeles, as well as historical research into shifting approaches to interpersonal violence, Greenberg examines the reorganization of social policy into a system of short-term grants and fleeting programs, which he refers to as the ephemeral state, and the way this system shapes the stories young people tell about themselves and the state. In addition, he show how statistical surveillance enables new ways to think about and act on harm, giving rise to the category of at-risk youth and in turn shaping the identities and relationships of young people and state actors alike.

When Race Race Meets Class: African Americans Coming of Age in a Small City

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Levine, Rhonda F. 2019. When Race Race Meets Class: African Americans Coming of Age in a Small City. Routledge.

When Race Meets ClassA rare, 15-year ethnography, this book follows the lives of individual, low-income African American youth from the beginning of high school into their early adult years. Levine shows how their interaction and experience with multiple institutions (family, school, community) and individuals (parents, friends, teachers, coaches, strangers) shape their hopes, fears, aspirations, and worldviews. The intersectionality of their social identities—how race, class, and gender come together to influence how they come to think about who they are—influences many behaviors that directly contradict their stated aspirations. Affected, too, by limited access to resources, these youths often take a path profoundly different from their stated values and life goals. Levine explores the volatility and constraints underlying their decision-making and behaviors. The book reveals the critical junctures and turning points shaping life trajectories, challenging many long-held assumptions about the persistence of racial inequality by offering new insights on the educational and occupational barriers facing young African Americans.

The Death of Idealism: Development and Anti-Politics in the Peace Corps

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Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth. 2020. The Death of Idealism: Development and Anti-Politics in the Peace Corps. Columbia University Press.

Death of IdealismPeace Corps volunteers seem to exemplify the desire to make the world a better place. Yet despite being one of history’s clearest cases of organized idealism, the Peace Corps has, in practice, ended up cultivating very different outcomes among its volunteers. By the time they return from the Peace Corps, volunteers exhibit surprising shifts in their political and professional consciousness. Rather than developing a systemic perspective on development and poverty, they tend instead to focus on individual behavior; they see professions as the only legitimate source of political and social power. They have lost their idealism, and their convictions and beliefs have been reshaped along the way.

The Death of Idealism uses the case of the Peace Corps to explain why and how participation in a bureaucratic organization changes people’s ideals and politics. Meghan Elizabeth Kallman offers an innovative institutional analysis of the role of idealism in development organizations. She details the combination of social forces and organizational pressures that depoliticizes Peace Corps volunteers, channels their idealism toward professionalization, and leads to cynicism or disengagement. Kallman sheds light on the structural reasons for the persistent failure of development organizations and the consequences for the people involved. Based on interviews with over 140 current and returned Peace Corps volunteers, field observations, and a large-scale survey, this deeply researched, theoretically rigorous book offers a novel perspective on how people lose their idealism, and why that matters.

Public Perception of International Crises: Identity, Ontological Security and Self-Affirmation

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Chernobrov, Dmitry. 2020. Public Perception of International Crises: Identity, Ontological Security and Self-Affirmation . Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Public Perception of Internal CrisesHow do people make sense of distant, but disturbing international events? Why are some representations more appealing than others? What do they mean for the perceiver’s own sense of self? Going beyond conventional analysis of political imagining and perception at the level of accuracy, this book reveals how self-conceptions are unconsciously, but centrally present in judgments and representations of international others.
Combining international relations and psychosocial studies, Dmitry Chernobrov shows how the imagining of international politics is self-affirming and is shaped by the need for positive societal self-concepts. The book captures evidence of self-affirming political imagining in how the general public in the West and Russia understood the Arab Uprisings and makes an argument both about and beyond this particular case. The book will appeal to those interested in perception and political imagining, ontological security, identity and emotion, collective memory, international crises and political psychology.

First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Power

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Lachmann, Richard. 2020. First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Power. Verso Books.

First Class PassengersThe extent and irreversibility of US decline is becoming ever more obvious as America loses war after war and as one industry after another loses its technological edge. Lachmann explains why the United States will not be able to sustain its global dominance. He contrasts America’s relatively brief period of hegemony with the Netherlands’ similarly short primacy and Britain’s far longer era of leadership.

Decline in all those cases was not inevitable and did not respond to global capitalist cycles. Rather, decline is the product of elites’ success in grabbing control of resources and governmental powers. Not only are ordinary people harmed, but also capitalists become increasingly unable to coordinate their interests and adopt policies and make investments necessary to counter economic and geopolitical competitors elsewhere in the world.

Conflicts among elites and challenges by non-elites determine the timing and mold the contours of decline. Lachmann traces the transformation of US politics from an era of elite consensus to present-day paralysis combined with neoliberal plunder, explains the paradox of an American military with an unprecedented technological edge unable to subdue even the weakest enemies, and the consequences of finance’s cannibalization of the US economy.