This book investigates a phenomenon in world politics that is largely overlooked by scholars, namely entities lacking international recognition of their status as independent states. It includes case studies on the Eurasian Quartet, Kosovo, Somaliland, Palestine, Northern Cyprus, Western Sahara and Taiwan.

The 2011 secession of South Sudan spurred hopes for a more just, democratic Sudan, but was followed by new wars and growing unrest. This book examines how the Islamist project has shaped these developments in Sudan, with a particular focus on how divisive policies have driven regional violence as well as the fight against continued marginalization.

Originally published in 2000, The Right to Vote was widely hailed as a magisterial account of the evolution of suffrage from the American Revolution to the end of the twentieth century. In this revised and updated edition, Keyssar carries the story forward, from the disputed presidential contest of 2000 through the 2008 campaign and the election of Barack Obama. The Right to Vote is a sweeping reinterpretation of American political history as well as a meditation on the meaning of democracy in contemporary American life.

Contested States examines how hegemony is created and facilitated through law as well as how people use legal arenas to resist oppression. The essays, written by anthropologists and historians, offer rich historical and ethnographic detail as they engage these themes in such contexts as: colonial and post-colonial courts in Kenya, India, Uganda and the Caribbean; bureaucracies in Tonga and Turkey; and judicial processes in the historical and contemporary United States. Contested States contributes to the new focus on power and social process in legal studies and argues that while states encode and enforce law, a crucial part of the power of law is its very contestability. The book demonstrates that theoretical insights learned in legal arenas can deepen one's overall understanding of sociocultural order and the processes of historical and legal change.

Del Sarto argues that internal disputes over national identity limit the ability of states to participate in regional forums. This is a close look at problems faced in negotiating the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) as a regional security project, with particular attention to case studies of Israel, Egypt and Morocco.

Despite the severity of the global economic crisis and the widespread aversion towards austerity policies, neoliberalism remains the dominant mode of economic governance in the world. What makes neoliberalism such a resilient mode of economic and political governance? How does neoliberalism effectively reproduce itself in the face of popular opposition? States of Discipline offers an answer to these questions by highlighting the ways in which today’s neoliberalism reinforces and relies upon coercive practices that marginalize, discipline and control social groups. Such practices range from the development of market-oriented policies through legal and administrative reforms at the local and national-level, to the coercive apparatuses of the state that repress the social forces that oppose various aspects of neoliberalization. The book argues that these practices are built on the pre-existing infrastructure of neoliberal governance, which strive towards limiting the spaces of popular resistance through a set of administrative, legal and coercive mechanisms. Exploring a range of case studies from across the world, the book uses ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ as a conceptual prism to shed light on the institutionalization and employment of state practices that invalidate public input and silence popular resistance.

State sovereignty is an inherently social construct. The modern state system is not based on some timeless principle of sovereignty, but on the production of a normative conception that links authority, territory, population, and recognition in a unique way, and in a particular place (the state). The unique contribution of this book is to describe and illustrate the practices that have produced various sovereign ideals and resistances to them. The contributors analyze how the components of state sovereignty are socially constructed and combined in specific historical contexts.