Böcker utgivna av Cornell University Press

Why would countries without nuclear weapons even think about fighting nuclear-armed opponents? A simple answer is that no one believes nuclear weapons will be used. But that answer fails to consider why nonnuclear state leaders would believe that in the first place. In this superb unpacking of the dynamics of conflict under conditions of...

Around the world, border walls and nationalisms are on the rise as people express the desire to "take back" sovereignty. The contributors to this collection use ethnographic research in disputed and exceptional places to study sovereignty claims from the ground up. While it might immediately seem that citizens desire a stronger state, the cases of compromised, contested, or failed sovereignty in this volume point instead to political imaginations beyond the state form. Examples from Spain to Afghanistan and from Western Sahara to Taiwan show how calls to take back control or to bring back order are best understood as longings for sovereign agency. By paying close ethnographic attention to these desires and their consequences, The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty offers a new way to understand why these yearnings have such profound political resonance in a globally interconnected world. Contributors: Panos Achniotis, Jens Bartelson, Joyce Dalsheim, Dace Dzenovska, Sara L. Friedman, Azra Hromadži¿, Louisa Lombard, Alice Wilson, and Torunn Wimpelmann.

Do business schools actually make good on their promises of "innovative," "outside-the-box" thinking to train business leaders who will put society ahead of money-making? Do they help society by making better business leaders? No, they don't, Steven Conn asserts, and what's more they never have. In throwing down a gauntlet on the business of...

In Thomas Mann's War, Tobias Boes traces how the acclaimed and bestselling author became one of America's most prominent anti-fascists and the spokesperson for a German cultural ideal that Nazism had perverted.Thomas Mann, winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in literature and author of such world-renowned novels as Buddenbrooks and The Magic...

Trans Historical explores the plurality of gender experiences that flourished before the modern era, from Late Antiquity to the eighteenth century, across a broad geographic range, from Spain to Poland and Byzantium to Boston. Refuting arguments that transgender people, experiences, and identities were non-existent or even impossible prior to the twentieth century, this volume focuses on archives¿literary texts, trial transcripts, documents, and artifacts¿that denaturalize gender as a category. The volume historicizes the many different social lives of sexual differentiation, exploring what gender might have been before modern medicine, the anatomical sciences, and the sedimentation of gender difference into its putatively binary form.The volume's multidisciplinary group of contributors consider how individuals, communities, and states understood and enacted gender as a social experience distinct from the assignment of sex at birth. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, Trans Historical also offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal. Contributors: Abdulhamit Arvas, University of Pennsylvania; Roland Betancourt, University of California, Irvine; M. W. Bychowski, Case Western Reserve University; Emma Campbell, Warwick University; Igor H. de Souza, Yale University; Leah DeVun, Rutgers University; Micah James Goodrich, University of Connecticut; Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University; Anna K¿osowska; Greta LaFleur; Scott Larson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University; Robert Mills, University College London; Masha Raskolnikov; Zrinka Stahuljak, UCLA.

"The book is an excellent addition to the scholarly literature on subnational movements, both past and present, offering a range of insights to policymakers across the globe."-Ayesha Jalal, author of The Struggle for Pakistan "With judicious use of empirical evidence and rich case studies, Ahsan I. Butt makes a compelling case that states'...

Land Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs.This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land's fictional powers and global visions of landed property's imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development. Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, exposing its simultaneously contingent and collective nature. The essays advance understanding of the politics of land while also contributing to current debates on the intersections of local and global, urban and rural, and general and particular.Contributors Erik Harms, Michael Watts, Sai Balakrishnan, Brett Christophers, David Ferring, Sarah Knuth, Meghan Morris, Benjamin Teresa, Mi Shih, Michael Levien, Michael L. Dwyer, Heather Whiteside

In this bold new perspective on the United States-China power transition, Paul K. MacDonald and Joseph M. Parent examine all great power transitions since 1870. They find that declining and rising powers have strong incentives to moderate their behavior at moments when the hierarchy of great powers is shifting. How do great powers respond to decline? they ask. What options do great powers have to slow or reverse their descent?In Twilight of the Titans, MacDonald and Parent challenge claims that policymakers for great powers, unwilling to manage decline through moderation, will be pushed to extreme measures. Tough talk, intimidation, provocation, and preventive war, they write, are not the only alternatives to defeat. Surprisingly, retrenchment tends not to make declining states tempting prey for other states nor does it promote domestic dysfunction. What retrenchment does encourage is resurrection. Only states that retrench have recovered their former position.MacDonald and Parent show how declining states tend to behave, what policy options they have to choose from, how rising states respond to decline, and what conditions reward which strategies. Using case studies that include Great Britain in 1872 and 1908, Russia in 1888 and 1903, and France in 1893 and 1924, Twilight of the Titans offers clear evidence that declining powers have a wide array of options at their disposal and offers guidance on how to use the right tools at the right time. The result is a comprehensive rethinking of power transition and hegemonic war theories and a different approach to the policy problems that declining states face. What matters most, the authors write, is the strategic choices made by the great powers.

In the first and only examination of how the British Empire and Commonwealth sustained its soldiers before, during, and after both world wars, a cast of leading military historians explores how the empire mobilized manpower to recruit workers, care for veterans, and transform factory workers and farmers into riflemen. Raising armies is more than counting people, putting them in uniform, and assigning them to formations. It demands efficient measures for recruitment, registration, and assignment. It requires processes for transforming common people into soldiers and then producing officers, staffs, and commanders to lead them. It necessitates balancing the needs of the armed services with industry and agriculture. And, often overlooked but illuminated incisively here, raising armies relies on medical services for mending wounded soldiers and programs and pensions to look after them when demobilized. Manpower and the Armies of the British Empire in the Two World Wars is a transnational look at how the empire did not always get these things right. But through trial, error, analysis, and introspection, it levied the large armies needed to prosecute both wars. Contributors Paul R. Bartrop, Charles Booth, Jean Bou, Daniel Byers, Kent Fedorowich, Jonathan Fennell, Meghan Fitzpatrick, Richard S. Grayson, Ian McGibbon, Jessica Meyer, Emma Newlands, Kaushik Roy, Roger Sarty, Gary Sheffield, Ian van der Waag

Paul Robinson's Russian Conservatism examines the history of Russian conservative thought from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. As he shows, conservatism has made an underappreciated contribution to Russian national identity, to the ideology of Russian statehood, and to Russia's social-economic development. Robinson...

Emphasizing the instability of marriage in premodern Europe, Ferguson argues that same-sex unions should be considered part of the institution's complex and contested history.

Among the largest of all insects, dragonflies and damselflies are conspicuous. Active during the day, often brightly colored, and extremely photogenic¿something about their appearance and dashing flight suggests a primeval world of tree ferns and dinosaurs.The first guide of its kind, this book includes an in-depth introduction with an overview of Costa Rican biodiversity and illustrated morphological terms. The species accounts show males and females of most species, detailed illustrations and close-ups of key distinguishing features, and descriptions of habitat, behavior, and range. Dragonflies and Damselflies of Costa Rica gives readers the information they need to identify nearly every species in the country. Experienced dragonfly fans and new enthusiasts alike will find it an indispensable resource.

The definitive guide to raising bees, now thoroughly revised and updated.

In 1098, three years into the First Crusade and after a brutal eight-month siege, the Franks captured the city of Antioch. Two days later, Muslim forces arrived with a relief army, and the victors became the besieged. Exhausted and ravaged by illness and hunger, the Franks were exhorted by their religious leaders to supplicate God, and for three days they performed a series of liturgical exercises, beseeching God through ritual prayer to forgive their sins and grant them victory. The following day, the Christian army, accompanied by bishops and priests reciting psalms and hymns, marched out of the city to face the Muslim forces and won a resounding and improbable victory.From the very beginning and throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against the Muslim armies. During the Fifth Crusade, Pope Honorius III likened liturgy to "e;invisible weapons."e; This book is about those invisible weapons; about the prayers and liturgical rituals that were part of the battle for the faith. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin tells the story of the greatest collective religious undertaking of the Middle Ages, putting front and center the ways in which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how liturgy was deployed in crusading, and how liturgy absorbed ideals or priorities of crusading. Liturgy helped construct the devotional ideology of the crusading project, endowing war with religious meaning, placing crusading ideals at the heart of Christian identity, and embedding crusading warfare squarely into the eschatological economy. By connecting medieval liturgical books with the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin allows us to understand a crucial facet in the culture of holy war.