New Faculty Publications

  Marcha!: 
Latino Chicago and the Immigrant Rights Movement
A New Book Edited by Amalia Pallares
and Nilda Flores-Gonzalez

University of Illinois Press website

The Struggle for Power and Influence in Cities and States
A New Book by Dick Simpson, James Nowlan,
and Betty O'Shaughnessy

The Struggle provides an insider's perspective on how power and influence are obtained and wielded at the local and state levels of government.

By examining the social, economic, political and governmental conditions in communities and states, The Struggle equips students with the understanding they need to make the impact they want.

Peason Education website

Cooperative Pluralism
A New Book by Andrew McFarland

National business and political leaders, President Clinton included, are urging greater consultation among conflicting interest groups and government to come up with cooperative solutions to serious problems of economic development and international-trade competition.

Such negotiations, Andrew McFarland contends, can lead to surprisingly successful results. But, he warns, mediations that exclude government officials responsible for enacting and enforcing public policy will fail.

To illustrate his argument, McFarland investigates the National Coal Policy Project, an endeavor that started in the right direction but ultimately fizzled because the negotiators--business executives and environmentalists--excluded politicians and executive branch officials from the debates.

Following negotiations, the NCPP, financially supported by business, the federal government, and private foundations, produced a report dealing with strip mining and air pollution regulations, the simplification of licensing procedures, and the promulgation of public policies such as the deregulation of transportation. Although it had received some encouragement from the federal government, the NCPP never received official sanction or a promise that any agreements would be enacted into law. As a result, only a small part of NCPP's policy recommendations did become law, while 90 percent were ignored.

Despite its shortcomings, McFarland contends, the NCPP can be viewed as a building block for future negotiations. By learning from its successes and failures, he shows, settlements can be transacted through 'cooperative pluralism," the process of negotiation between the government and two opposing interest groups.

 Kansas University Press website

Beyond Sacred and Secular
A New Book by Sultan Tepe

Beyond Sacred and Secular investigates religious politics and its implications for contemporary democracy through a comparison of political parties in Israel and Turkey. While the politics of Judaism and Islam are typically seen as outgrowths of oppositionally different beliefs, Sultan Tepe's comparative inquiry shows how limiting this understanding of religious politics can be. Her cross-country and cross-religion analysis develops a unique approach to identify religious parties' idiosyncratic and shared characteristics without reducing them to simple categories of religious/secular, Judeo-Christian/Islamic, or democratic/antidemocratic. Tepe shows that religious parties in both Israel and Turkey attract broad coalitions of supporters and skillfully inhabit religious and secular worlds simultaneously. They imbue existing traditional ideas with new political messages, blur conventional political lines and allegiances, offer strategic political choices, and exhibit remarkably similar political views.

Stanford University Press website

The System Made Me Do It:  Corruption In
Post-Communist Societies
A New Book by Rasma Karklins

Mourning and Modernity - New Book By Ike Balbus

In this collection of essays, political theory professor Ike Balbus deepens and extends the feminist neo-Kleinian account of sexual, political, and technological domination he developed in earlier works.  The first half of Mourning and Modernity responds to Marxist, nonpsychoanalytic feminist, and poststructuralist criticisms of that psychoanalytic account.  The second half applies Kleinian theory to a number of salient topics, including: the issue of reparations for slavery and racism, the fantasies of omnipotence fostered by computer-mediated communication, and the way in which deep ecology and 12-step recovery programs contest omnipotence in the realms of production and consumption.

Balbus conceptualizes modernity as a manic cultural defense against mourning the very losses it mandates and as a source of reparative movements of mourning that challenge its contemporary configuration.  This argument allows Balbus to transcend the tired debate between those scholars for whom modernity is an unambiguous emancipation and those for whom modernity is entirely bereft of emancipatory possibilities.

For more information visit the Other Press Website

Choi Co-Authors Foreign Policy Analysis

Addressing decision-making over interstate disputes and the democratic peace thesis, Seung-Whan Choi and Patrick James build an interactive foreign policy decision-making model with a special emphasis on civil-military relations, conscription, diplomatic channels and media openness. Each is significant in explaining decisions over dispute involvement. The temporal scope is broad while the geographic scope is global. The result is sophisticated analysis of the causes of conflict and factors that can ameliorate it, and a generalizable approach to the study of foreign relations. The findings that media openness contributes to peaceful resolution of disputes, that the greater the influence of the military the more likely for there to be interstate disputes, that conscription is likely to have the same effect, and that increases in diplomatic interaction correlate with increased conflict are sure to generate debate.

Read more about this book on the Palgrave-McMillian site.