Vietnam's Lost Revolution employs newly-released archival material from Vietnam to examine the rise and fall of the Special Commissariat for Civic Action in the First Republic of Vietnam, and in so doing reassesses the origins of the Vietnam War. A cornerstone of Ngô Đình Diệm's presidency, Civic Action was intended to transform Vietnam into a thriving, modern, independent, noncommunist Southeast Asian nation. Geoffrey Stewart juxtaposes Diem's revolutionary plan with the conflicting and competing visions of Vietnam's postcolonial future held by other indigenous groups. He shows how the government failed to gain legitimacy within the peasantry, ceding the advantage to the communist-led opposition and paving the way for the American military intervention in the mid-1960s. This book provides a richer and more nuanced analysis of the origins of the Vietnam War in which internal struggles over national identity, self-determination, and even modernity itself are central.

Building on Schmitz's earlier work, Thank God They're On Our Side, this is an examination of American policy toward right-wing dictatorships from the 1960s to the end of the Cold War. During the 1920s American leaders developed a policy of supporting authoritarian regimes because they were seen as stable, anti-communist, and capitalist. After 1965, however, American support for these regimes became a contested issue. The Vietnam War served to undercut the logic and rationale of supporting right-wing dictators. By systematically examining U.S. support for right-wing dictatorships in Africa, Latin America, Europe, and Asia, and bringing together these disparate episodes, this book examines the persistence of older attitudes, the new debates brought about by the Vietnam War, and the efforts to bring about changes and an end to automatic U.S. support for authoritarian regimes.

This book considers the Vietnam war in light of U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam, concluding that the war was a direct result of failed state-building efforts. This U.S. nation building project began in the mid-1950s with the ambitious goal of creating a new independent, democratic, modern state below the 17th parallel. No one involved imagined this effort would lead to a major and devastating war in less than a decade. Carter analyzes how the United States ended up fighting a large-scale war that wrecked the countryside, generated a flood of refugees, and brought about catastrophic economic distortions, results which actually further undermined the larger U.S. goal of building a viable state. Carter argues that, well before the Tet Offensive shocked the viewing public in late January, 1968, the campaign in southern Vietnam had completely failed and furthermore, the program contained the seeds of its own failure from the outset.

This book investigates the new representation unfolding in Chinese local congresses. Drawing qualitative fieldwork and data analysis from original surveys of 5,130 township, county, and municipal congressmen and women and constituents, Melanie Manion shows the priorities and problems of ordinary Chinese significantly influence both who gets elected to local congresses and what the congresses do once elected. Candidates nominated by ordinary voters are 'good types', with qualities that signal they will reliably represent the community. By contrast, candidates nominated by the communist party are 'governing types', with qualities that reflect officially valued competence and loyalty. However, congressmen and women of both types now largely reject the Maoist-era role of state agent. Instead, they view themselves as 'delegates', responsible for advocating with local government to supply local public goods. Manion argues that representation in Chinese local congresses taps local knowledge for local governance, thereby bolstering the rule of autocrats in Beijing.

Land reforms have been critical to the development of Chinese capitalism over the last several decades, yet land in China remains publicly owned. This book explores the political logic of reforms to land ownership and control, accounting for how land development and real estate have become synonymous with economic growth and prosperity in China. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, the book tracks land reforms and urban development at the national level and in three cities in a single Chinese region. The study reveals that the initial liberalization of land was reversed after China's first contemporary real estate bubble in the early 1990s and that property rights arrangements at the local level varied widely according to different local strategies for economic prosperity and political stability. In particular, the author links fiscal relations and economic bases to property rights regimes, finding that more "open" cities are subject to greater state control over land.

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Why do some countries emerge from civil war more democratic than when they entered into it, while others remain staunchly autocratic? Observers widely depict internal conflict as a pathway to autocracy or state failure, but in fact there is variation in post-civil war regimes. Conventional accounts focus on war outcomes and international peacebuilding, but Huang suggests that postwar regimes have wartime origins, notably in how rebel groups interact with ordinary people as part of war-making. War can have mobilizing effects when rebels engage extensively with civilian populations, catalyzing a bottom-up force for change toward greater political rights. Politics after civil war does not emerge from a blank slate, but reflects the war's institutional and social legacies. The Wartime Origins of Democratization explores these ideas through an original dataset of rebel governance and rigorous comparative case analysis. The findings have far-reaching implications for understanding wartime political orders, statebuilding, and international peacebuilding.
Offers an original explanation of why some civil wars lead to democratization rather than authoritarianism
Uses social dynamics during war itself to explain popular demand for democracy
Provides theoretical and empirical insights on peacebuilding, statebuilding, and foreign intervention

This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars working on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to examine in depth three waves of democratic change that took place in eleven different former Communist nations. Its essays draw important conclusions about the rise, development, and breakdown of both democracy and dictatorship in each country and together provide a rich comparative perspective on the post-Communist world. The first democratic wave to sweep this region encompasses the rapid rise of democratic regimes from 1989 to 1992 from the ashes of Communism and Communist states. The second wave arose with accession to the European Union (from 2004 to 2007) and the third, with the electoral defeat of dictators (1996 to 2005) in Croatia, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. Although these three waves took place in different countries and involved different strategies, they nonetheless shared several overarching commonalities. International factors played a role in all three waves, as did citizens demanding political change. Further, each wave revealed not just victorious democrats but also highly resourceful authoritarians. The authors of each chapter in this volume examine both internal and external dimensions of both democratic success and failure.
1 Contains a unique group of country cases, with each chapter presenting new empirical data and analysis
2 Tightly organized around the causes of transitional successes and failures
3 Both North American and in-country experts are included in the distinguished list of authors

Ho Chi Minh is one of the towering figures of the twentieth century, considered an icon and father of the nation by many Vietnamese. Pierre Brocheux's biography of Ho Chi Minh is a brilliant feat of historical engineering. In a concise and highly readable account, he negotiates the many twists and turns of Ho Chi Minh's life and his multiple identities, from impoverished beginnings as a communist revolutionary to his founding of the Indochina Communist Party and the League for the Independence of Vietnam and ultimately to his leadership of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and his death in 1969. Biographical events are adroitly placed within the broader historical canvas of colonization, decolonization, communism war, and nation building. Brocheux's vivid and convincing portrait of Ho Chi Minh goes further than any previous biography in explaining both the myth and the man, as well as the times in which he was situated.

Since 1998, which marked the end of the thirty-three-year New Order regime under President Suharto, there has been a dramatic increase in ethnic conflict and violence in Indonesia. In his innovative and persuasive account, Jacques Bertrand argues that conflicts in Maluku, Kalimantan, Aceh, Papua, and East Timur were a result of the New Order's narrow and constraining reinterpretation of Indonesia's 'national model'. The author shows how, at the end of the 1990s, this national model came under intense pressure at the prospect of institutional transformation, a reconfiguration of ethnic relations, and an increase in the role of Islam in Indonesia's political institutions. It was within the context of these challenges, that the very definition of the Indonesian nation and what it meant to be Indonesian came under scrutiny. The book sheds light on the roots of religious and ethnic conflict at a turning point in Indonesia's history.

Under what conditions would authoritarian rulers be interested in the rule of law? What type of rule of law exists in authoritarian regimes? How do authoritarian rulers promote the rule of law without threatening their grip on power? Tying the Autocrat's Hands answers these questions by examining legal reforms in China. Yuhua Wang develops a demand-side theory arguing that authoritarian rulers will respect the rule of law when they need the cooperation of organized interest groups that control valuable and mobile assets but are not politically connected. He also defines the rule of law that exists in authoritarian regimes as a partial form of the rule of law, in which judicial fairness is respected in the commercial realm but not in the political realm. Tying the Autocrat's Hands demonstrates that the rule of law is better enforced in regions with a large number of foreign investors but less so in regions heavily invested in by Chinese investors.

According to republican theory, we are free persons to the extent that we are protected and secured in the same fundamental choices, on the same public basis, as one another. But there is no public protection or security without a coercive state. Does this mean that any freedom we enjoy is a superficial good that presupposes a deeper, political form of subjection? Philip Pettit addresses this crucial question in On the People's Terms. He argues that state coercion will not involve individual subjection or domination insofar as we enjoy an equally shared form of control over those in power. This claim may seem utopian but it is supported by a realistic model of the institutions that might establish such democratic control. Beginning with a fresh articulation of republican ideas, Pettit develops a highly original account of the rationale of democracy, breathing new life into democratic theory.

Is democracy in crisis? The current threats to democracy are not just political: they are deeply embedded in the democracies of today, in current economic, social, and cultural conditions. In Crises of Democracy, Adam Przeworski presents a panorama of the political situation throughout the world of established democracies, places it in the context of past misadventures of democratic regimes, and speculates on the prospects. Our present state of knowledge does not support facile conclusions. 'We should not believe the flood of writings that have all the answers'. Avoiding technical aspects, this book is addressed not only to professional social scientists, but to everyone concerned about the prospects of democracy.

This book addresses the long-standing puzzle of how China's private sector manages to grow without secure property rights, and proposes a new theory of selective property rights to explain this phenomenon. Drawing on rich empirical evidence including in-depth interviews, a unique national survey of private entrepreneurs, two original national audit experiments and secondary sources, Professor Yue Hou shows that private entrepreneurs in China actively seek opportunities within formal institutions to advance their business interests. By securing seats in the local legislatures, entrepreneurs use their political capital to deter local officials from demanding bribes, ad hoc taxes, and other types of informal payments. In doing so they create a system of selective, individualized, and predictable property rights. This system of selective property rights is key to understanding the private sector growth in the absence of the rule of law.

The question of whether democratization is an elite-led process from above or a popular triumph from below continues to be an area of contention among political scientists. Examining the experiences of countries which have provided the main empirical base for recent theorizing, namely, Western Europe and South America in the 19th and early 20th centuries and again in the 1970s and 1980s, this book delineates a more complex and varied set of patterns. The volume explores the politics of democratization through a comparative analysis that examines the role of labor in relation to elite strategies in both contemporary and historical perspectives. In her detailed analysis, Professor Collier also describes multiple patterns within each historical period, challenges conventional understandings of these events, and recaptures a role for unions and labor-based parties in contemporary processes of democratization.

Political parties in the developing world often face serious electoral crises; from one election to the next, parties can be decisively voted out of national office. What happens to a party that experiences this kind of voter rejection? The literature suggests it will disappear, leaving the party system vulnerable to the inexperience of new political actors. The Fates of Political Parties offers a more nuanced perspective: focusing on a number of individual Latin American countries as well as the region as a whole, it identifies considerable variation regarding how parties survive and even revive after an electoral crisis. The book revitalizes the study of parties as complex entities that rely on a potentially diverse set of resources to remain active in politics. It demonstrates that parties can be remarkably enduring institutions; surviving and reviving parties represent instances of institutional stability. Where they endure, those parties can sustain competition and strengthen the democratic regime.