​This edited book investigates how life is affected by the increasingly authoritarian regime in Bangladesh.Earlier a flawed but real electoral democracy, over the last several years Bangladesh has been characterised as a ‘hybrid regime’ in The Economist’s Democracy Index. Today it is a country in which law still rules and leaders are still chosen – but only on paper. The uniqueness of this book is not in defining regime type or investigating trajectories. It is in its efforts to study how these changes affect everyday life. All chapters are based on intimate knowledge of a field, on first-hand experience, and on interviews and ethnography. This book will interest political scientists and scholars of Bangladesh, the Islamic world and beyond, with findings of broad relevance to hybrid regimes.

One of “the most comprehensive, erudite, and timely” explorations of power dynamics and authoritarianism in religions, institutions, relationships and even personal struggles (San Francisco Chronicle Book Review) Authoritarian control, which once held societies together, is now at the core of personal, social, and planetary problems, and thus a key factor in social disintegration. Authoritarianism is embedded in the way people think—hiding in culture, values, daily life, and in the very morality people try to live by. In The Guru Papers, authors Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad unmask authoritarianism in areas such as relationships, cults, 12-step groups, religion, and contemporary morality. Chapters on addiction and love show the insidious nature of authoritarian values and ideologies in the most intimate corners of life, offering new frameworks for understanding why people get addicted and why intimacy is laden with conflict. By exposing the inner authoritarian that people use to control themselves and others, the authors show why people give up their power, and how others get and maintain it.

During the 1990s, international democracy promotion efforts led to the establishment of numerous regimes that cannot be easily classified as either authoritarian or democratic. They display characteristics of each, in short they are semi-authoritarian regimes. These regimes pose a considerable challenge to U.S. policymakers because the superficial stability of many semi-authoritarian regimes usually masks severe problems that need to be solved lest they lead to a future crisis. Additionally, these regimes call into question some of the ideas about democratic transitions that underpin the democracy promotion strategies of the United States and other Western countries. Despite their growing importance, semi-authoritarian regimes have not received systematic attention. Marina Ottaway examines five countries (Egypt, Azerbaijan, Venezuela, Croatia, and Senegal) which highlight the distinctive features of semi-authoritarianism and the special challenge each poses to policymakers. She explains why the dominant approach to democracy promotion isn't effective in these countries and concludes by suggesting alternative policies. Marina Ottaway is senior associate and codirector of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment.

Hackers as vital disruptors, inspiring a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens take back democracy. Hackers have a bad reputation, as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of infrastructure. In Coding Democracy, Maureen Webb offers another view. Hackers, she argues, can be vital disruptors. Hacking is becoming a practice, an ethos, and a metaphor for a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens are inventing new forms of distributed, decentralized democracy for a digital era. Confronted with concentrations of power, mass surveillance, and authoritarianism enabled by new technology, the hacking movement is trying to "build out" democracy into cyberspace.

"The entire town is disguised," declared a French tourist of eighteenth-century Venice. And, indeed, maskers of all ranks—nobles, clergy, imposters, seducers, con men—could be found mixing at every level of Venetian society. Even a pious nun donned a mask and male attire for her liaison with the libertine Casanova. In Venice Incognito, James H. Johnson offers a spirited analysis of masking in this carnival-loving city. He draws on a wealth of material to explore the world view of maskers, both during and outside of carnival, and reconstructs their logic: covering the face in public was a uniquely Venetian response to one of the most rigid class hierarchies in European history. This vivid account goes beyond common views that masking was about forgetting the past and minding the muse of pleasure to offer fresh insight into the historical construction of identity.

This book argues that - in terms of institutional design, the allocation of power and privilege, and the lived experiences of citizens - democracy often does not restart the political game after displacing authoritarianism. Democratic institutions are frequently designed by the outgoing authoritarian regime to shield incumbent elites from the rule of law and give them an unfair advantage over politics and the economy after democratization. Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy systematically documents and analyzes the constitutional tools that outgoing authoritarian elites use to accomplish these ends, such as electoral system design, legislative appointments, federalism, legal immunities, constitutional tribunal design, and supermajority thresholds for change. The study provides wide-ranging evidence for these claims using data that spans the globe and dates from 1800 to the present. Albertus and Menaldo also conduct detailed case studies of Chile and Sweden. In doing so, they explain why some democracies successfully overhaul their elite-biased constitutions for more egalitarian social contracts.

The populist turn to street protest and the reasons behind its global resurgence are the twin themes of this timely analysis

This book analyses the influence of religion on political parties and party politics in contemporary democracies. To do so, it compares five cases of democracies belonging to different geographic-cultural areas, and marked by different religious majorities: India, Israel, Italy, Turkey, and the US. The time span of the analysis is the period between 1980 (year which can be conventionally regarded as a turning point for the return of religion in the public and the political spheres at the global level), and the present day. Unlike most works on religion and parties, this book does not simply take into account officially "religious" parties, but all "religiously oriented parties" (with an influence of religion on party manifestos, constituencies and/or factions) even if they are officially secular. The theoretical framework is provided by the "cleavages theory", which considers some relevant traumatic social events as the origin of specific kinds (or families) of political parties; and by a typology of religiously oriented parties dividing them into five categories: conservative, fundamentalist, progressive, nationalist, and camp party.

"... A historical ethnography of the socialist period in Guinea"--Page 5.

Masks have been a ubiquitous and oft-politicized aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic. Years of painstakingly organized pre-pandemic planning documents led public health experts to initially discourage the use of masks, or even insinuate that they could lead to increased rates of spread. Yet seemingly in a matter of days in spring 2020, leading infectious disease scientists and organizations reversed their previous positions and recommended masking as the key tool to slow the spread of COVID and dramatically reduce infections. Unmasked tells the story of how effective or ineffective masks and mask mandate policies were in impacting the trajectory of the pandemic throughout the world. Author Ian Miller covers the earliest days of the pandemic, from experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci contradicting their previous statements and recommending masks as the most important policy intervention against the spread of COVID, to the months afterward as many locations around the globe mandated masks in nearly all public settings. With easy-to-understand charts and visual aids, along with detailed, clear explanations of the dramatic shift in policy and expectations, Unmasked makes the data-driven case that masks might not have achieved the goals that Fauci and other public health experts created.