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.

 Exit and Voice: the Paradox of Cross-Border Politics in Mexico

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Duquette-Rury, Lauren. 2019. Exit and Voice: the Paradox of Cross-Border Politics in Mexico. University of California Press.

 Available through UC Press and Amazon.

 Exit and Voice Sometimes leaving home allows you to make an impact on it—but at what cost? Exit and Voice is a compelling account of how Mexican migrants with strong ties to their home communities impact the economic and political welfare of the communities they have left behind. In many decentralized democracies like Mexico, migrants have willingly stepped in to supply public goods when local or state government lack the resources or political will to improve the town. Though migrants’ cross-border investments often improve citizens’ access to essential public goods and create a more responsive local government, their work allows them to unintentionally exert political engagement and power, undermining the influence of those still living in their hometowns. In looking at the paradox of migrants who have left their home to make an impact on it, Exit and Voice sheds light on how migrant transnational engagement refashions the meaning of community, democratic governance, and practices of citizenship in the era of globalization.

The Politics of Empowerment: Disability Rights and the Cycle of American Policy Reform

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Pettinicchio, David. 2019. The Politics of Empowerment: Disability Rights and the Cycle of American Policy Reform. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press

Politics of Empowerment

Politics of Empowerment

Despite the progress of decades-old disability rights policy, including the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act, threats continue to undermine the wellbeing of this population. The U.S. is, thus, a policy innovator and laggard in this regard. In Politics of Empowerment, David Pettinicchio offers a historically grounded analysis of the singular case of U.S. disability policy, countering long-held views of progress that privilege public demand as its primary driver. By the 1970s, a group of legislators and bureaucrats came to act as “political entrepreneurs.” Motivated by personal and professional commitments, they were seen as experts leading a movement within the government. But as they increasingly faced obstacles to their legislative intentions, nascent disability advocacy and protest groups took the cause to the American people forming the basis of the contemporary disability rights movement. Drawing on extensive archival material, Pettinicchio redefines the relationship between grassroots advocacy and institutional politics, revealing a cycle of progress and backlash embedded in the American political system.

Dehumanization and the Normalization of Violence: It’s Not What You Think

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Luft, Aliza. 2019. “Dehumanization and the Normalization of Violence: It’s Not What You Think.” Items: Insights from the Social Sciences blog.

 Aliza Luft tackles a question essential for social science and for human rights work—how, and how much, does dehumanizing propaganda spread by planners of genocide affect the “foot soldiers” of mass killings? Drawing on her own research on Rwanda as well as the Holocaust and other cases, Luft argues that the effects of pronouncements that describe potential victims as nonhuman or animals needs to be considered alongside other potential factors that motivate ordinary people to kill, and that the impact of such language is rarely straightforward. Luft concludes that “dehumanizing discourse can pave the way for violence to occur, but violence does not require it.”

The 3×1 Program for migrants and vigilante groups in contemporary Mexico

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Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz & Lauren Duquette-Rury. 2019. “The 3×1 Program for migrants and vigilante groups in contemporary Mexico.”Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2019.1623345

What explains the emergence of armed vigilante groups in Mexico over the past decade? This article links the recent emergence of armed vigilante organisations to United States-Mexico migration. Drawing on an original dataset collected from 2352 Mexican municipalities between 2002 and 2013, we find that a given community’s participation in programmes through which migrant organisations called hometown associations (HTAs) produce public goods in collaboration with sending state authorities is associated with a higher probability of observing an armed vigilante group. More specifically, armed vigilante groups are more likely to operate in those municipalities where HTAs repeatedly participate in the formal co-provision of public goods with government authorities. Contrary to our theoretical expectations, we also find that the presence of vigilante groups does not appear to be driven by HTA’s desire to protect their collective investments. We are not more likely to observe vigilante groups in those communities in which HTAs invest the most money. We argue that the positive relationship between frequent HTA participation in programmes where government authorities and migrants co-produce public goods obtains because the processes that this collaboration entails enable community members to act collectively to provide self-help forms of security and justice for their communities.