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As China has transformed itself from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, economists have tried to understand and interpret the success of Chinese reform. As the Chinese economist Yingyi Qian explains, there are two schools of thought on Chinese reform: the “School of Universal Principles,” which ascribes China’s successful reform to the workings of the free market, and the “School of Chinese Characteristics,” which holds that China’s reform is successful precisely because it did not follow the economics of the market but instead relied on the government. In this book, Qian offers a third perspective, taking certain elements from each school of thought but emphasizing not why reform worked but how it did. Economics is a science, but economic reform is applied science and engineering. To a practitioner, it is more useful to find a feasible reform path than the theoretically best way. The key to understanding how reform has worked in China, Qian argues, is to consider the way reform designs respond to initial historical conditions and contemporary constraints. Qian examines the role of “transitional institutions”—not “best practice institutions” but “incentive-compatible institutions”—in Chinese reform; the dual-track approach to market liberalization; the ownership of firms, viewed both theoretically and empirically; government decentralization, offering and testing hypotheses about its link to local economic development; and the specific historical conditions of China’s regional-based central planning.

The Art of Command provides biographical and topical portraits of exceptional leaders from all four branches of the United States armed forces. Laver and Matthews have identified eleven core characteristics of effective leadership, such as vision, charisma, determination, and integrity, and apply them to significant figures in American military history. In doing so, they argue that leadership is a learned and practiced skill, developed through conscious effort and mentoring by superiors. Tracing the careers, traits, and behaviors of eleven legendary leaders, including Ulysses Grant, George Marshall, Henry Arnold, and David Shoup, each chapter provides detailed critical analysis of a leader's personal development and leadership style. This historically grounded exploration delivers an insightful examination of various military command styles that transcend time, place, rank, and branch of service.

While toppling decades-old authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen took only months, rebuilding these states will likely take years. This book argues that to transition to sustainable peace and stability, these societies must engage in an inclusive national reconciliation process. Based on over 200 interviews with key figures in Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen, this book identifies the greatest drivers of the polarization afflicting each country and the specific national reconciliation processes that can best address them. Dr. Sharqieh finds that an effective national reconciliation process must include a national dialogue, a truth seeking effort, the reparation of victims’ past injuries, dealing with the former regime, and institutional reform. Each subject country has taken different approaches thus far. Tunisia held a homegrown national dialogue driven mainly by civil society organizations and Yemen completed a ten-month, UN-assisted conference, but Libya has been unable to begin a national dialogue thus far. Party politics and limited resources have influenced the other reconciliation processes. While Libya opted to purge all those who served in Muammar Qaddafi’s regime, Yemen chose to grant President Saleh immunity from prosecution in return for his abdication. Tunisia, meanwhile, has adopted a transitional justice law that mandates the investigation and prosecution of the state’s past crimes. These processes, especially if supported by key agents of reconciliation including women, civil society, and tribes, can combine to create the momentum needed to bridge divides and help Arab Spring societies move toward peace, stability, and development.

This book offers a new and critical perspective on the global reconciliation technology by highlighting its contingent and highly political character as an authoritative practice of post-conflict peacebuilding. After retracing the emergence of the reconciliation discourse from South Africa to the global level, the book demonstrates how implementing reconciliation in post-conflict societies is a highly political practice which entails potentially undesirable consequences for the post-conflict societies to which it is deployed. Inquiring into the example of Sierra Leone, the book shows how the reconciliation discourse brings about the marginalization and neutralization of political claims and identities of local populations by producing these societies as being composed of the ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ of past human rights violations which are first and foremost in need of reconciliation and healing.

This book grapples with fundamental questions regarding what type of revolution took place in South Africa over a more than 50 year long struggle. Each chapter grapples with the questions related to the idea that the revolution in South Africa was a substantive revolution, because of its insistence on the establishment of a democratic and constitutional state that recognized the thoroughgoing wrongs of the colonial and apartheid past.

Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru studies how literature, drama, film, and the visual arts contest the dominant narrative of national peace and reconciliation, as constructed by Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Established in 2001, the Commission aimed to ‘investigate and make public the truth’ of the country’s twenty-year civil war, drawing upon homologous predecessors that provided a highly scripted model of truth-gathering and national healing. In this model, a predetermined collective mourning, catharsis, and reconciliation would move the nation forward in a consensually-determined fashion. Andean Truths shows that the Peruvian case proves internationally-endorsed models insufficient for arriving at the ‘truth’ of a national trauma that primarily affected disenfranchised ethnic groups, namely, the Andean Quechua speaking populations that accounted for the overwhelming majority of victims of the violence. Even as scholars recognize the importance of bringing multiple voices to the table in discussing post-Shining Path Peru, the question remains of what a more Andean-oriented transitional justice process might entail. Drawing on theories of decoloniality, intercultural communication and epistemological diversity (following scholars such as Enrique Dussel, Aníbal Quijano and Boaventura de Sousa Santos), this book analyzes cultural products, from the theater of Yuyachkani to the narrative of Oscar Colchado Lucio, the art of Edilberto Jiménez, and other popular artistic responses, that highlight Andean understandings of the conflict and its aftermath. These cultural products challenge dominant understandings of the conflict and question Peru’s ability to overcome its collective trauma without seriously reconsidering prevailing cultural paradigms.

The social and political uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, designated the “Arab Spring” because the most visible ruptures appeared in the spring of 2011, drew global attention not only because they presented broad-based political protest against regimes which were long- entrenched, whether authoritarian or monarchical. They were landmark events because they led to the removal of several heads of state, and prompted discussions of institutional reform. Notably, they also entailed a broad range of human rights claims, both those related to abuses by prior regimes of civil and political rights and bodily integrity, but also of socio-economic rights. In short, they not only put transitional justice on the political agenda in a region of the world where it was seldom discussed (despite limited experiments in Morocco), but also put forward a broader view of transitional justice than that which has traditionally been implemented. However, many of these transitions have since stalled, leaving transitional justice similarly stalled, stunted, or manipulated for political ends. These phenomena are not unique to the MENA region, but rather experiences from elsewhere with limited or frozen transition may be informative to the region. The chapters in this volume, written largely by experts in the region, draw upon pre- and post-Arab Spring use of transitional justice mechanisms in a range of countries, including Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, and Bahrain.

Since 2013, the Middle East has experienced a double trend of chaos and civil war, on the one hand, and the return of authoritarianism, on the other. That convergence has eclipsed the political transitions that occurred in the countries whose regimes were toppled in 2011, as if they were merely footnotes to a narrative that naturally led from an “Arab Spring” to an “Arab Winter”. This volume aims at rehabilitating those transitions, by considering them as expressions of a “revolutionary moment” whose outcome was never pre-determined, but depended on the choices of a large range of actors. It brings together leading scholars of Arab politics to adopt a comparative approach to a few crucial aspects of those transitions: constitutional debates, the question of transitional justice, the evolution of civil-military relations, and the role of specific actors, both domestic and international.

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996-1998) was an unprecedented step in developing an institution of transitional justice that incorporated emotional responses to mass violence within the context of victim testimony. However, it was unable to recognize the significance of anger in a clear way. The obstacles it revealed in its engagement with anger were reminiscent of debates within the history of political thought on the relationship between anger and justice. Two of the most provocative philosophical positions on this question, that of Adam Smith and Hannah Arendt, are assessed in order to understand the fears surrounding the expression of anger in politics and the costs of its exclusion. The book argues that the expression of anger is vital to the success of transitional justice processes because it can reveal the perceptions of the state, including the emerging political order, of those who had previously been excluded and the obstacles to their full participation in the new society. It also reveals the limits of political life altogether. Most importantly, an engagement with anger can contribute to the development of trust among citizens through the practice of mutual risk.

Drawing the Line examines the ways in which cultural, political, and legal lines are imagined, drawn, crossed, erased, and redrawn in post-apartheid South Africa— through literary texts, artworks, and other forms of cultural production. Under the rubric of a philosophy of the limit, and with reference to a range of signifying acts and events, this book asks what it takes to recalibrate a socio-political scene, shifting perceptions of what counts and what matters, of what can be seen and heard, of what can be valued or regarded as meaningful. The book thus argues for an aesthetics of transitional justice and makes an appeal for a post-apartheid aesthetic inquiry, as opposed to simply a political or a legal one. Each chapter brings a South African artwork, text, speech, building, or social encounter into the ambit of topical conversations in critical theory and continental philosophy, asking: What challenge do these South African acts of signification and resignification pose, and what contribution do they make to current literary-philosophical thinking?

This book explores the complex and creative role of emotion in global politics. From casual observers to trained experts, people care about challenges such as terrorism, violent conflict, and humanitarian crises; these are not just technical problems demanding solutions but also matters possessing emotional urgency and appeal. Political problems acquire emotional significance when they involve human suffering, political controversy, and other qualities of pressing moral concern. But, as this book shows, emotional intensity is also shaped by lived experience of events, communicative practices, and social interactions. The book studies emotional dimensions of global politics by investigating they way everyday social interactions intensify, harmonize, and blend the emotional responses of participants. It begins with on-the-ground events such as protests, speeches, and commemoration rituals and then traces the emotions they evoke among co-participants— both elites and ordinary people, near and far. Revisiting well-studied civil conflicts from the 1990s, as well as the War on Terror from the 2000s, the book uncovers emotional effects missed by research trained on identities, institutions, or interests. Drawing widely from current research in neuroscience, microsociology, and cultural theory, the book reconceptualizes the social genesis of emotion and their distinctive impact on global politics.