Reflections on Laïcité & the Public Sphere
Talal Asad

Globalization, Development and Democracy
José Antonio Ocampo

SSRC National Research Commission on Elections and Voting
Jason McNichol

Pendleton Herring, 1903-2004
Fred I. Greenstein & Austin Ranney

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Online

New Staff

Publications

Estudios migratorios latinoamericanos, special issue on “Migration, Borders and Diasporas in the Americas,” 17, 52, 2003.

The Translocal Flows in the Americas (TLFA) Project at the Social Science Research Council has organized a special issue of Estudios migratorios latinoamericanos—a Latin American peer reviewed journal based in Buenos Aires, Argentina that specializes in migration research—featuring seven essays that were presented at its conference on “Migrations, Borders and Diasporas in the Americas,” held in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in June 2003. The issue includes essays by Nicholas De Genova, Kevin A. Yelvington, Sergio Caggiano, Angela C. Stuesse, Patricia Landolt, Elizabeth Oglesby and Daniel Ramirez. Through this publication, which includes an introduction by Alejandro Grimson (IDES/CONICET) and Marcial Godoy-Anativia (SSRC), the SSRC seeks to strengthen and extend the broad dialogue we have established between migration scholars in diverse parts of the Hemisphere, and to disseminate state of the art scholarship in Spanish on questions of migratory flows, borders and diasporas to scholarly communities in Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States.


Islamism and Its Enemies in the Horn of Africa, edited by Alex de Waal. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 269 pp.

This book examines the social and political manifestations of Islamism in northeast Africa, including both the Nile Valley and the Horn. Northeast Africa has been a crucible for political Islam, and the site of one of the fiercest struggles between Islamists and their enemies. Though militant Islamists were a powerful force in the 1990s in places such as Sudan, by 2000, Islamism was in retreat, brought down by its own political and ideological limitations. Nonetheless, events since 2001, and the refraction of the U.S. agenda through local political struggles, have given militant Islamism renewed salience, thus enabling this book to mark an important step toward understanding the complex dynamics that enfold the region. SSRC Program Director Alex de Waal is the book’s editor.


Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, revised edition, by Alex de Waal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 255 pp.

In 2004, Darfur, Sudan was described as the “world’s greatest humanitarian crisis.” Twenty years previously, Darfur was also the site of a disastrous famine. Famine that Kills is a seminal account of that famine, and a social history of the region. In a new preface prepared for this revised edition, SSRC Program Director Alex de Waal analyses the roots of the current conflict in land disputes, social disruption and impoverishment. Despite vast changes in the nature of famines and in the capacity of response, de Waal’s original challenge to humanitarian theory and practice, including a focus on the survival strategies of rural people, has never been more relevant. Documenting the resilience of the people who suffered, de Waal explains why many fewer died than had been predicted by outsiders. The book is also a pathbreaking study of the causes of famine deaths, showing how outbreaks of infectious disease killed more people than starvation. Now a classic in the field, Famine that Kills provides critical background and lessons of past intervention for a region that finds itself in another moment of humanitarian tragedy.


The Maze of Fear: Security and Migration After 9/11, edited by John Tirman. New York: The New Press, 2004. 296 pp.

The most recent volume in the “After 9/11” series jointly published by the SSRC and The New Press has been released. Edited by former GSC Program Director John Tirman, The Maze of Fear: Security and Migration After 9/11 raises vital questions about government policy and the many dimensions of the migration-security link, including discussions of civil liberties, transnational organizations, refugee populations and politically active diasporas. Contributors include Fiona Adamson, Howard Adelman, Imtiaz Ahmed, Thomas Bierstecker (with Peter Romaniuk), Louise Cainkar, Enseng Ho, and others. Other volumes in the series are Understanding September 11 (Calhoun, Price, Timmer, eds.), Critical Views of September 11 (Hershberg, Moore, eds.), and Bombs and Bandwidth (Latham, ed.). The fifth volume scheduled for the series is Lessons of Empire (edited by Calhoun, Moore and SSRC Board member Fred Cooper).


Iglesia, represión y memoria. El caso chileno, by María Angelica Cruz. Madrid: Siglo XXI Editores, 2004. 171 pp.

The Program on Latin America is pleased to announce the eighth volume resulting from the Council’s project on Collective Memory of Repression in the Southern Cone and Peru has been published in Spanish by Siglo XXI Editores. Iglesia, represión y memoria. El caso chileno, by María Angelica Cruz with a prologue by Paul W. Drake, is a study of the role of the Roman Catholic Church in Chile’s evolution from the road toward socialism under Salvador Allende (1970-73), through the dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet (1973-90), to the restored democracy under the Concertacion (1990 to the present). The publication forms part of a multi-volume series consisting of work produced by program fellows and faculty, which has been released simultaneously in Madrid and Buenos Aires and distributed throughout the world. In addition to the eight volumes already published, four additional volumes will be published with Siglo XXI in 2005.


Remapping East Asia: The Construction of a Region, edited by T. J. Pempel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. 305 pp.

This volume is the result of a seminar series organized by the Abe Fellowship Program of the SSRC with funding provided by the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership. The collection is about the people, processes, and institutions behind region-building in East Asia. In it, experts on the area take a broad approach to the dynamics and implications of regionalism. Instead of limiting their focus to security matters, they extend their discussions to topics as diverse as the mercurial nature of Japan’s leadership role in the region, Southeast Asian business networks, the war on terrorism in Asia, and the political economy of environmental regionalism. Throughout, they show how nation-states, corporations, and problem-specific coalitions have furthered regional cohesion not only by establishing formal institutions, but also by operating informally, semiformally, or even secretly.


International Migration Review, special issue on “Conceptual and Methodological Developments in the Study of International Migration,” edited by Alejandro Portes and Josh DeWind, Vol. 38, Fall 2004.

As a follow-up to the field-survey collection of essays in the Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience (Hirschman, Kasinitz, and DeWind, eds., Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), the SSRC International Migration Program organized in collaboration with the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University a conference that examined research related to recent innovations in this field, both in theory and empirical research, across both sides of the Atlantic. Papers presented at the conference appear in this special issue of the International Migration Review and cover research approaches to subject areas such as states and modes of political incorporation, transnational communities and immigrant enterprise, unauthorized immigration and the second generation, and religion and migrant incorporation.


U.S.-South African Research and Training Collaborations, by Beth Elise Whitaker. New York: Social Science Research Council, 2004. 43 pp.

This working paper is the most recent SSRC project related to knowledge production, research networks, and capacity-building in sub-Saharan Africa. The report, conducted and written by Beth Whitaker (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), explores the state of collaboration between U.S. and South African higher education institutions in the post-apartheid era. Political transformations in South Africa catalyzed a flood of student exchange programs, individual research partnerships, and institutional linkages with U.S. universities. In focusing on the broader institutional connections, the study demonstrates some overlaps and some significant gaps, including the paucity of cross-national collaborations on HIV/AIDS and the unevenly distributed participation in these partnerships, with historically disadvantaged universities in both countries having less ability to establish networks internationally for mutual benefit. The study should be an important resource for planning future collaborations and addressing some of the gaps identified in the study.