Joshua Fogel offers an incisive historical look at Sino-Japanese relations from three different perspectives. Introducing the concept of “Sinosphere” to capture the nature of Sino-foreign relations both spatially and temporally, Fogel presents an original and thought-provoking study on the long, complex relationship between China and Japan.

Traditionally, the concept of quality of life has been viewed through objective indicators of living conditions, basic needs, or capabilities. In Beyond Facts, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) looks at quality of life through the perceptions of millions of Latin Americans. Using an enhanced version of the recently created Gallup World Poll that incorporates Latin America–specific questions, the IDB surveyed people from throughout the region and found that reality and perceptions of quality of life are often very different. Beyond Facts attempts to explain these differences and consider their implications for both politics and policy.

In The Cultural Logic of Computation, David Golumbia, who worked as a software designer for more than ten years, argues that computers are cultural “all the way down”—that there is no part of the apparent technological transformation that is not shaped by historical and cultural processes, or that escapes existing cultural politics. The Cultural Logic of Computation provides a needed corrective to the uncritical enthusiasm for computers common today in many parts of our culture.

In The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen, Stephen K. White contends that Western democracies face novel challenges demanding our reexamination of the role of citizens. White argues that the intense focus in the past three decades on finding general principles of justice for diversity-rich societies needs to be complemented by an exploration of what sort of ethos would be needed to adequately sustain any such principles. Accessible, pithy, and erudite, The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen will appeal to a wide audience.

A new Germany has come of age, as democratic, sophisticated, affluent, and modern as any other western nation. This remarkable transition in little more than a generation is the central theme of Germany Transformed. Here all the old stereotypes and conclusions are challenged and new research is marshalled to provide a model for an advanced democratic republic.

In Hope and Despair, Gerald Grant compares two cities—his hometown of Syracuse, New York, and Raleigh, North Carolina—in order to examine the consequences of the nation’s ongoing educational inequities. The result is an ambitious portrait—sometimes disturbing, often inspiring—of two cities that exemplify our nation’s greatest educational challenges, as well as a passionate exploration of the potential for school reform that exists for our urban schools today.

The involvement of health professionals in human rights and humanitarian law violations has again become a live issue as a consequence of the U.S. prosecution of conflicts with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Iraq. In this volume, a wide range of prominent practitioners and scholars explore these issues. Their insights provide significant potential for reforming institutions to assist health professionals maintain their legal and ethical obligations in times of national crisis.

The concept of generation as a historical category has never been used more effectively than in Lost Comrades. Lost Comrades follows the Front Generationsocialists from their questioning of Marxistorthodoxies in the 1920s into their confrontationswith the twin challenges of fascism and worlddepression in the early 1930s.

As Hegel famously noted, referring to the Roman goddess Minerva, her owl brought back wisdom only at dusk, when it was too late to shine light on actual politics. Jeffrey Abramson provides a lively and accessible guide for readers discovering the tradition of political thought that dates back to Socrates and Plato, with contemporary examples that illustrate the enduring nature of political dilemmas.

Pulitzer Prize–winner Steven Hahn’s provocative new book challenges deep-rooted views in the writing of American and African-American history. Moving from slave emancipations of the eighteenth century through slave activity during the Civil War and on to the black power movements of the twentieth century, he asks us to rethink African-American history and politics in bolder, more dynamic terms. Throughout, Hahn presents African Americans as central actors in the arenas of American politics, while emphasizing traditions of self-determination, self-governance, and self-defense.

This book presents a diverse collection of perspectives on prosecutions in South Africa, including a foreword by playwright and actor John Kani. Throughout, it highlights the important themes related to any post-conflict prosecution scheme including rule-of-law concerns, questions of evenhandedness and moral relativism, competing priorities and resource allocation, the limits of a court-centered approach to justice, and the potential transformative power of prosecutions.

Authors Moorsteen and Abramowitz propose a plan of action for improving U.S.–China relations that should stimulate the American public as well as Washington decisionmakers. Dealing effectively with China requires both a long–term perspective and an approach that faces up to fundamental issues, going beyond “atmospherics” and gestures. 

A Socratic dialogue set in the court of King Mattias Corvinus of Hungary (ca. 1490), Aurelio Lippo Brandolini’s Republics and Kingdoms Compared depicts a debate between the king himself and a Florentine merchant at his court on the relative merits of republics and kingdoms. This is the first critical edition and the first translation into any language.

What exactly is neoliberalism, and where did it come from? This volume attempts to answer these questions by exploring neoliberalism’s origins and growth as a political and economic movement. The Road from Mont Pèlerin presents the key debates and conflicts that occurred among neoliberal scholars and their political and corporate allies regarding trade unions, development economics, antitrust policies, and the influence of philanthropy. 

In this compelling study, Baker recreates the public worlds of eight groups on the periphery of Egyptian politics. They range in their political stances from Communists to the Muslim Brothers and include shifting clusters of critical intellectuals who gather around influential journals or in research centers, as well as the quiescent aestheticists of the Wissa Wassef community. Taken together, the experiences of Egyptians in alternative groups reveal that Egyptians are more than the objects of diverse external pressures and more than the sufferers from multiple internal problems. They are also creative political actors who have stories to tell about the human potential to struggle for humane values and goals in the modern world.

A series of closely interrelated essays on game theory, this book deals with an area in which progress has been least satisfactory--the situations where there is a common interest as well as conflict between adversaries: negotiations, war and threats of war, criminal deterrence, extortion, tacit bargaining. It proposes enlightening similarities between, for instance, maneuvering in limited war and in a traffic jam; deterring the Russians and one's own children; the modern strategy of terror and the ancient institution of hostages.

On the eve of World War I, Russia, not known as a nation of joiners, had thousands of voluntary associations. Joseph Bradley examines the crucial role of voluntary associations in the development of civil society in Russia from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century.