Policing is legitimized in different ways in authoritarian and democratic states. In East and Southeast Asia, different regime types to a greater or lesser extent determine the power of the police and their complex relationship with the rule of law. This volume examines the evolution of the police as a key political institution from a historical perspective and offers comparative insights into the potential of democratic policing and conversely the resilience of authoritarian policing in Asia. The case studies focus on eight jurisdictions: Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. The theoretical chapters analyse and explain the links between policing and society, the politics of policing and recent police reforms. This volume fills a gap in the literature by exploring the nature of authoritarian policing and how it has transformed and developed the rule of law throughout East and Southeast Asia.

A recent wave of decentralization in Latin America has increased the prominence of politicians at the subnational level. Politics Beyond the Capital is the first book to place this trend in comparative historical perspective, examining past episodes of decentralization alongside contemporary ones to determine whether consistent causal factors are at play. At the center of the book is the rigorous testing of two key hypotheses that attribute decentralization to liberalizing changes in political regime type and economic development strategy. The book focuses on the four Latin American countries where politicians have most extensively engaged in the redesign of subnational institutions: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. By reframing the "politics of decentralization" as the "politics of designing subnational institutions," the book moves beyond the policy orientation of much of the current literature, and broadens the debate by analyzing not just decentralization but re-centralization as well.

Delving inside the state, Hassan shows how leaders politicize bureaucrats to maintain power, even after the introduction of multi-party elections.

In Activists beyond Borders, Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink examine a type of pressure group that has been largely ignored by political analysts: networks of activists that coalesce and operate across national frontiers. Their targets may be international organizations or the policies of particular states. Historical examples of such transborder alliances include anti-slavery and woman suffrage campaigns. In the past two decades, transnational activism has had a significant impact in human rights, especially in Latin America, and advocacy networks have strongly influenced environmental politics as well. The authors also examine the emergence of an international campaign around violence against women.

In countries around the world, from the United States to the Philippines to Chile, police forces are at the center of social unrest and debates about democracy and rule of law. This book examines the persistence of authoritarian policing in Latin America to explain why police violence and malfeasance remain pervasive decades after democratization. It also examines the conditions under which reform can occur. Drawing on rich comparative analysis and evidence from Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, the book opens up the 'black box' of police bureaucracies to show how police forces exert power and cultivate relationships with politicians, as well as how social inequality impedes change. González shows that authoritarian policing persists not in spite of democracy but in part because of democratic processes and public demand. When societal preferences over the distribution of security and coercion are fragmented along existing social cleavages, politicians possess few incentives to enact reform.

The relationship between development and democratization remains one of the most compelling topics of research in political science, yet many aspects of authoritarian regime behavior remain unexplained. This book explores how different types of governments take action to shape the course of economic development, focusing on agriculture, a sector that is of crucial importance in the developing world. It explains variation in agricultural and food policy across regime type, who the winners and losers of these policies are, and whether they influence the stability of authoritarian governments. The book pushes us to think differently about the process linking economic development to political change, and to consider growth as an inherently politicized process rather than an exogenous driver of moves towards democracy.

Why do some autocratic leaders pursue aggressive or expansionist foreign policies, while others are much more cautious in their use of military force? The first book to focus systematically on the foreign policy of different types of authoritarian regimes, Dictators at War and Peace breaks new ground in our understanding of the international behavior of dictators. Jessica L. P. Weeks explains why certain kinds of regimes are less likely to resort to war than others, why some are more likely to win the wars they start, and why some authoritarian leaders face domestic punishment for foreign policy failures whereas others can weather all but the most serious military defeat. Using novel cross-national data, Weeks looks at various nondemocratic regimes, including those of Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin; the Argentine junta at the time of the Falklands War, the military government in Japan before and during World War II, and the North Vietnamese communist regime. She finds that the differences in the conflict behavior of distinct kinds of autocracies are as great as those between democracies and dictatorships. Indeed, some types of autocracies are no more belligerent or reckless than democracies, casting doubt on the common view that democracies are more selective about war than autocracies.

Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond features a collection of original essays that represent the first extended treatment of political philosopher John Rawls' idea of a property-owning democracy. Offers new and essential insights into Rawls's idea of "property-owning democracy" Addresses the proposed political and economic institutions and policies which Rawls's theory would require Considers radical alternatives to existing forms of capitalism Provides a major contribution to debates among progressive policymakers and activists about the programmatic direction progressive politics should take in the near future

This book develops a new political-institutional explanation of South America's 'two lefts' and the divergent fates of the region's democratic regimes.

5. Actors and contexts