This book explores the history of the Dominican Republic as it evolved from the first European colony in the Americas into a modern nation under the rule of Rafael Trujillo. It investigates the social foundations of Trujillo’s exceptionally enduring and brutal dictatorship (1930-1961) and, more broadly, the way power is sustained in such non-democratic regimes. The author reveals how the seemingly unilateral imposition of power by Trujillo in fact depended on the regime’s mediation of profound social and economic transformations, especially through agrarian policies that assisted the nation’s large independent peasantry. By promoting an alternative modernity that sustained peasants’ free access to land during a period of economic growth, the regime secured peasant support as well as backing from certain elite sectors. This book thus elucidates for the first time the hidden foundations of the Trujillo regime.

India is heralded as the world's largest democracy. Yet, there is now growing alarm about its democratic health. To Kill a Democracy gets to the heart of the matter. Combining poignant life stories with sharp scholarly insight, it rejects the belief that India was once a beacon of democracy but is now being ruined by the destructive forces of Modi-style populism. The book details the much deeper historical roots of the present-day assaults on civil liberties and democratic institutions. Democracy, the authors also argue, is much more than elections and the separation of powers. It is a whole way of life lived in dignity, and that is why they pay special attention to the decaying social foundations of Indian democracy. In compelling fashion, the book describes daily struggles for survival and explains how lived social injustices and unfreedoms rob Indian elections of their meaning, while at the same time feeding the decadence and iron-fisted rule of its governing institutions. Much more than a book about India, To Kill A Democracy argues that what is happening in the country is globally important, and not just because every third person living in a democracy is an Indian. It shows that when democracies rack and ruin their social foundations, they don't just kill off the spirit and substance of democracy. They lay the foundations for despotism.

How does history end? -- The Red Queen -- Will to power -- Economics outside the corridor -- Allegory of good government -- The European scissors -- Mandate of Heaven -- Broken Red Queen -- Devil in the details -- What's the matter with Ferguson? -- The paper leviathan -- Wahhab's children -- Red Queen out of control -- Into the corridor -- Living with the leviathan.

Heathen Earth: Trumpism and Political Ecology looks beyond the rising fortunes of authoritarian nationalism in a fossil-fueled late capitalist world to encounter its conditions. Trumpism represents an alternative to the forces undermining the very cosmology of the modern West from two opposing directions. The global economy, pinnacle of modernization, has brought along a dark side of massive inequality, corrupt institutions, colonial violence, and environmental destruction, while global warming, nadir of modernity, threatens to undo the foundations of all states and all markets. To the vertigo of placelessness symptomatic of globalization is added the ecological vertigo of landlessness. With reality slowly fragmenting, it is only too obvious in this light that Trumpism and other nationalist movements would attract massive hordes of supporters. Promising to expel foreigners and to restore unity and equality by taking power back from the global elites, while utterly denying the climate science that calls ordinary means of subsistence and consumption radically into question, Trumpism can be seen as an antidote to the toxic combination of global markets and global warming. The irony, of course, is that Trumpism only responds to these dangers by doubling down on the reckless expansionist logic that gave rise to them in the first place. This book, composed entirely between November 8, 2016 and January 20, 2017, examines Trumpism according to its regime of political representation (despotism), its political ontology (nativism), and its political ecology (geocide), while laying the groundwork for an alternative politics and a resistant, responsive ecology of the incompossible.