Open Access Books - Social Sciences and Humanities - 2016 and earlier
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PublicationGoverning Failure: Provisional Expertise and the Transformation of Global Development Finance( 2014)Traces an important shift in international development policy as global institutions have become preoccupied with policy failure
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PublicationThe Peacebuilding Puzzle: Political Order in Post-Conflict States( 2016)This book explains why international post-conflict interventions have fallen short of the weighty aspirations they embody. It reframes the peacebuilding puzzle by presenting a new theory of how domestic elites construct political order during and after peacebuilding interventions. A comparative analysis of the UN's transformative peacebuilding attempts in Cambodia, East Timor, and Afghanistan shows that while international peacebuilders want to build effective and legitimate government, domestic elites essentially do not. As is the case in much of the developing world, post-conflict elites use strategies to prioritize their own political survival and power that result in a neopatrimonial political order that better delivers on their goals. Peacebuilding interventions thus generate a set of unintended yet predictable effects. In all three cases, the UN's efforts at peacebuilding through elite settlement followed by a process of simultaneous statebuilding and democratization were co-opted by a small subset of domestic power-holders who successfully closed down the political space and stunted state capacity. To be sure, each of these countries is better off than before the peace operations. Yet the goals of intervention have not truly been met. Instead, there are striking similarities in the patterns of neopatrimonial order that emerge in the aftermath of intervention. This book makes the case that the peacebuilding approach is, at least in part, itself responsible for the eventually disappointing governance outcomes that emerge in post-conflict countries
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PublicationPrint, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s: The Laurel of Liberty( 2016)Jon Mee explores the popular democratic movement that emerged in the London of the 1790s in response to the French Revolution. Central to the movement's achievement was the creation of an idea of 'the people' brought into being through print and publicity. Radical clubs rose and fell in the face of the hostile attentions of government. They were sustained by a faith in the press as a form of 'print magic, ' but confidence in the liberating potential of the printing press was interwoven with hard-headed deliberations over how best to animate and represent the people. Ideas of disinterested rational debate were thrown into the mix with coruscating satire, rousing songs, and republican toasts. Print personality became a vital interface between readers and print exploited by the cast of radicals returned to history in vivid detail by Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism
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PublicationLiterary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture: 1740–1790( 2016)Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture, 1740-1790 offers the first study of manuscript-producing coteries as an integral element of eighteenth-century Britain's literary culture. As a corrective to literary histories assuming that the dominance of print meant the demise of a vital scribal culture, the book profiles four interrelated and influential coteries, focusing on each group's deployment of traditional scribal practices, on key individuals who served as bridges between networks, and on the aesthetic and cultural work performed by the group. Literary Coteries also explores points of intersection between coteries and the print trade, whether in the form of individuals who straddled the two cultures; publishing events in which the two media regimes collaborated or came into conflict; literary conventions adapted from manuscript practice to serve the ends of print; or simply poetry hand-copied from magazines. Together, these instances demonstrate how scribal modes shaped modern literary produc
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PublicationThe Myth of Piers Plowman: Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive( 2014)Addressing the history of the production and reception of the great medieval poem, Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner reveals the many ways in which scholars, editors and critics over the centuries created their own speculative narratives about the poem, which gradually came to be regarded as factually true. Warner begins by considering the possibility that Langland wrote a romance about a werewolf and bear-suited lovers, and he goes on to explore the methods of the poem's localization, and medieval readers' particular interest in its Latinity. Warner shows that the 'Protestant Piers' was a reaction against the poem's oral mode of transmission, reveals the extensive eighteenth-century textual scholarship on the poem by figures including the maligned Chaucer editor John Urry, and contextualizes its first modernization by a literary forger inspired by the 1790s Shakespeare controversies. This lively account of Piers Plowman challenges the way the poem has traditionally been read and understood