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Item Constant Crisis: Deconstructing the Civil Wars in Norway, ca. 1180–1220Orning, Hans Jacob (Cornell University Press, 2025-04-05)Constant Crisis focuses on the culmination of struggles in the medieval Norwegian kingdom to examine whether these conflicts underscored a breakdown of society and polity or whether they created an equilibrium among factions that in fact "served to contain violence." Applying the term "constant crisis" for its deliberate "dissonance," Hans Jacob Orning observes that two properties were manifest in Norwegian political and social structures of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: a systemic balance achieved in an environment of "endemic power struggles," and a normalization of these conflicts that made it "possible to maneuver and make plans and strategies." The kings' sagas Sverris saga and Böglunga sögur are virtually indispensable sources of information on this period of Norwegian history, and Orning relies extensively on them, as well as on other medieval sources, to depict this era and its protagonists, including the major rival armed groups (the Birchlegs and the Croziers); and among kings, bishops, and earls, the person of King Sverre himself.Item Bad Lieutenants: The Khmer Rouge, United Front, and Class Struggle, 1970–1997Mertha, Andrew (Cornell University Press, 2025-04-05)Bad Lieutenants is a riveting account of how the Khmer Rouge remained a force to be reckoned with even after the fall of Democratic Kampuchea—and of the men behind the movement's strange durability. In 1979, the Vietnamese army seized Phnom Penh, toppling Pol Pot's notoriously brutal regime. Yet the Khmer Rouge did not disintegrate. Instead, the movement continued to rule over swathes of Cambodia for almost another two decades even as it failed to become a legitimate governing organization. Andrew Mertha argues that the Khmer Rouge's successes and failures were both driven by a refusal to dilute its revolutionary vision. Rather than take the moderate tack required for viable governance, it pivoted between only two political strategies: united front and class struggle. Through the stories of three key leaders—Ieng Sary, Son Sen, and Ta Mok—Mertha tracks the movement's shifting from one strategy to the other until its dissolution in the 1990s. Vividly written and deeply researched, Bad Lieutenants reveals the powerful grip political ideology can have over the survival of insurgent movements.Item Borders in Red: Managing Diversity in the Early Soviet UnionRindlisbacher, Stephan (Cornell University Press, 2025-03-15)Borders in Red shows how Lenin and his Bolshevik leadership embraced the nationality question as a way of managing diversity and institutionalized it as a means of governance. Stephan Rindlisbacher uses the making of national borders as a lens through which to examine the Bolsheviks' fundamental shift from proletarian internationalism to ethnonational federalism sui generis. Comparing how party and state managed issues of national diversity in the core regions of Soviet federalism—Ukraine, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia—Rindlisbacher provides insights into their policymaking and into the roots of current territorial conflicts. President Putin has condemned Lenin's nationality policy to be a historical mistake, and with its war against Ukraine, Russia has tried to revise borders that date back to the early days of the Soviet state. However, Borders in Red shows that the Soviet Republics were not arbitrarily divided by leaders like Stalin or Khrushchev. They were the result of long-lasting debates involving politicians, experts, and people from the border regions. The developing Soviet order was a product of trial and error.Item Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern JapanPitt, Jon L. (Cornell University Press, 2025-04-15)Botanical Imagination explores the complicated legacy and enduring lure of plant life in modern Japanese literature and media. Using critical plant studies, Jon L. Pitt examines an unlikely group of writers and filmmakers in modern Japan, finding in their works a desire to "become botanical" in both content and form. For nearly one hundred years, a botanical imagination grew in response to moments of crisis in Japan's modern history. Pitt shows how artists were inspired to seek out botanical knowledge in order to construct new forms of subjectivity and attempt to resist certain forms of state violence. As he follows plants through the tangled histories of imperialism and state control, Pitt also uncovers the ways plants were used in the same violence that drove artists to turn to the botanical as a model of resistance in the first place. Botanical Imagination calls on us to rethink plants as significant but ambivalent actors and to turn to the botanical realm as a site of potentiality.Item Startup Capitalism: New Approaches to Innovation Strategies in East AsiaKlingler-Vidra, Robyn; Pacheco Pardo, Ramon (Cornell University Press, 2025-03-15)In Startup Capitalism, Robyn Klingler-Vidra and Ramon Pacheco Pardo explore the place of startups in contemporary East Asian economies. The last few decades have seen East Asian governments provide increasing support for startups—new, high-growth, technologically oriented firms. Yet, as the authors observe, such initiatives do not necessarily benefit the growth of startups as challengers to large, established firms. Rather, they often enable startups to function as boosters for the competitiveness of these firms. Startups, in short, are both disruptors to and resources for big businesses. Klingler-Vidra and Pacheco Pardo demonstrate this dual role by examining the evolution of startup-centric policies in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. They show that in the region, what they call startup capitalism—an economic and political system in which startups contribute to employment, innovation, and growth—can take multiple forms. Rich with empirical detail, Startup Capitalism reveals how and why startups can end up working with—or even for—large firms to drive a country's technological capabilities.Item Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern EuropeMidura, Rachel (Cornell University Press, 2025-03-15)Postal Intelligence connects and situates histories of the post and government intelligence alongside print technology and state power in the wider context of the early modern communications revolution. In the sixteenth century, postal services became central to domestic governance and foreign policy enterprises, extended government reach and surveillance, and offered new control over the public sphere. Rachel Midura focuses on the Tassis family, members of which served as official postmasters to the dukes of Milan, the pope, Spanish kings, and Holy Roman emperors. Using administrative records and family correspondence, she follows the Tassis family, their agents, and their rivals as their influence expanded from northern Italy across Europe. Postal Intelligence shows how postmasters and postmistresses were key players in early modern diplomacy, commerce, and journalism, whose ultimate success depended on both administrative ingenuity and strategic ambiguity.Item Invisible University for Ukraine: Essays on Democracy at War(Cornell University Press, 2024-11-15)Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU) is an initiative of Central European University that began in Spring 2022, only months after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since that time, nearly 1,000 Ukrainian students have taken online and on-site courses taught by hundreds of faculty from across Europe and beyond. The program's objective is to help sustain intellectual growth in the midst of incredible hardships, with coursework designed to mitigate the effects of the war on students' academic development and provide a framework to push back against autocracy. This volume recognizes the initiative of IUFU's organizers and its students, describes their work to sustain democracy, and outlines their innovative educational model developed in the face of ongoing war. For this important work, they are the recipients of the 2024 Brown Democracy Medal from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy.Item Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe(Cornell University Press, 2025-02-15)Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe maps the generation and growth of novel forms of belonging in the years after World War II, crisscrossing the continent from Madrid to Warsaw and from Athens to London. Even as Europe struggled to rebuild, new forms of identity, statehood, and citizenship were beginning to take shape. Rachel Chin and Samuel Clowes Huneke bring together a diverse group of scholars to illustrate how citizenship was reimagined in the postwar decades in unusual settings and unexpected ways, while highlighting how ordinary citizens, living in democratic and authoritarian regimes alike, struggled to forge new kinds of belonging through which to assert their human rights and dignity. Ultimately, Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe contends that if we are to grapple with fraying citizenship in the twenty-first century, we must first look to when, how, and why citizenship originated in the calamitous years after World War II.Item Russia, Disinformation, and the Liberal Order: RT as Populist PariahHutchings, Stephen; Tolz, Vera; Chatterje-Doody, Precious; Crilley, Rhys; Gillespie, Marie (Cornell University Press, 2024-09-15)Through the prism of the first comprehensive account of RT, the Kremlin's primary tool of foreign propaganda, Russia, Disinformation and the Liberal Order sheds new light on the provenance and nature of disinformation's threat to democracy. Interrogating the communications strategies pursued by authoritarian states and grassroots populist movements, the book reveals the interlinked nature of today's global media-politics pathologies. Stephen Hutchings, Vera Tolz, Precious Chatterje-Doody, Rhys Crilley, and Marie Gillespie provide a systematic investigation into RT's history, institutional culture, and journalistic ethos; its activities across multiple languages and media platforms; its audience-targeting strategies and audiences' engagements with it; and its response to the war in Ukraine and associated bans on the network. The authors' analysis challenges commonplace notions of disinformation as something that Russia brings to the West, where passive publics are duped by the Kremlin's communications machine, and reveals the reciprocal processes through which Russia and disinformation infiltrate and challenge the liberal order. Russia, Disinformation and the Liberal Order provides provocative insights into the nature and extent of the challenge that Russia's propaganda operation poses to the West. The authors contend that the challenge will be met only if liberals reflect on liberalism's own internal tensions and blind spots and defend the values of open-minded impartiality.Item Thinking Otherwise: How Walter LaFeber Explained the History of US Foreign Relations(Cornell University Press, 2024-09-15)Thinking Otherwise addresses the question of what makes a great historian by exploring the teaching and scholarship of Walter LaFeber, widely acclaimed as the most distinguished historian of US foreign relations. This volume of essays, edited by Susan A. Brewer, Richard H. Immerman, and Douglas Little, is a testament to a scholar who published more than a dozen books during his time at Cornell University, where he delivered legendary lectures for half a century. The chapters trace LaFeber's journey as a scholar and demonstrate his enduring influence on the history of US foreign relations by linking six of his monographs to his abiding concern about the fate of the American experiment from the 18th century to the present. Thinking Otherwise explains and assesses the scholarship of a historian whose work became canonical in his lifetime and continues to resonate throughout public policy debates.