CRWS Books

Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy across the Political Divide

Ruth Braunstein
2017

Ruth Braunstein - Prophets and Patriots takes readers inside two of the most active populist movements of the Obama era and highlights cultural convergences and contradictions at the heart of American political life. In the wake of the Great Recession and amid rising discontent with government responsiveness to ordinary citizens, the book follows participants in two very different groups—a progressive faith-based community organization and a conservative Tea Party group—as they set out to become active and informed citizens, put their faith into action, and hold...

The Master Plan ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory

Brian Fishman
2016

Brian Fishman - Given how quickly its operations have achieved global impact, it may seem that the Islamic State materialized suddenly. In fact, al-Qaeda’s operations chief, Sayf al-Adl, devised a seven-stage plan for jihadis to conquer the world by 2020 that included reestablishing the Caliphate in Syria between 2013 and 2016. Despite a massive schism between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, al-Adl’s plan has proved remarkably prescient. In summer 2014, ISIS declared itself the Caliphate after capturing Mosul, Iraq—part of stage five in al-Adl’s plan. Drawing on...

Strangers in Their Own Land Anger and Mourning on the American Right

Arlie Russell Hochschild
2016

By Arlie Russell Hochschild - When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a bewildered nation turned to Strangers in Their Own Land to understand what Trump voters were thinking when they cast their ballots. Arlie Hochschild, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Tea Party stronghold. As Jedediah Purdy put it in the New Republic, “Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives. . . . [Her] attentive, detailed...

Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism

Lawrence Rosenthal
2020

By Lawrence Rosenthal - Since Trump's victory and the UK's Brexit vote, much of the commentary on the populist epidemic has focused on the emergence of populism. But, Lawrence Rosenthal argues, what is happening globally is not the emergence but the transformation of right-wing populism.

Rosenthal, the founder of UC Berkeley's Center for Right-Wing Studies, suggests right-wing populism is a protean force whose prime mover is the resentment felt toward perceived cultural elites, and whose abiding feature is its ideological flexibility, which now takes the form of...

Neo-nationalism and Universities: Populists, Autocrats, and the Future of Higher Education

John Aubrey Douglass
2021

By John Aubrey Douglass - Universities have long been at the forefront of both national development and global integration. But the political and policy world in which they operate is undergoing a transition, one that is reflective of a significant change in domestic politics and international relations: a populist turn inward among a key group of nation-states often led by demagogues that includes China and Hong Kong, Turkey, Hungary, Russia, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In many parts of the world, the COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for...

Grandmothers on Guard: Gender, Aging, and the Minutemen at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Jennifer L. Johnson
2021

By Jennifer L. Johnson - For about a decade, one of the most influential forces in US anti-immigrant politics was the Minuteman Project. The armed volunteers made headlines patrolling the southern border. What drove their ethno-nationalist politics?

Jennifer L. Johnson spent hundreds of hours observing and interviewing Minutemen, hoping to answer that question. She reached surprising conclusions. While the public face of border politics is hypermasculine—men in uniforms, fatigues, and suits—older women were central to the Minutemen. Women mobilized support and took...

Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable

Eric A. Stanley
2021

By Eric A. Stanley - Advances in LGBTQ rights in the recent past—marriage equality, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the expansion of hate crimes legislation—have been accompanied by a rise in attacks against trans, queer and/or gender-nonconforming people of color. In Atmospheres of Violence, theorist and organizer Eric A. Stanley shows how this seeming contradiction reveals the central role of racialized and gendered violence in the United States. Rather than suggesting that such violence is evidence of individual phobias, Stanley shows how it...

The Tea Party, the government shut down, and Obamacare

Lawrence Rosenthal
2013
Lawrence Rosenthal - Obamacare has been the bête-noire of the Tea Party movement since its founding in February 2009. The current Tea Party tactic — shutting down the federal government unless Obamacare, currently being implemented, is defunded, delayed, or repealed — had its origin in the movement’s disruption of Congressional Town Hall meetings in summer 2009. Beyond its bombastic rhetoric and tactics, the Tea Party’s view of Obamacare is part and parcel of a theory of the US Constitution. This theory emerges from...

Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present

Dylan Riley
2022

Microverses comprises over a hundred short essays inviting us to think about society—and social theory—in new ways. Lockdown created the conditions for what Adorno once termed ‘enforced contemplation’. Dylan Riley responded with the tools of his trade, producing an extraordinary trail of notes exploring how critical sociology can speak to this troubled decade. Microverses analyses the intellectual situation, the political crisis of Trump’s last months in office, and love and illness in a period when both were fraught with the public emergency of the coronavirus.

Riley brings the...

Global Raciality: Empire, PostColoniality, DeColoniality

Paola Bacchetta
Sunaina Maira
Howard Winant
2018

Paola Bacchetta - Global Raciality expands our understanding of race, space, and place by exploring forms of racism and anti-racist resistance worldwide. Contributors address neoliberalism; settler colonialism; race, class, and gender intersectionality; immigrant rights; Islamophobia; and homonationalism; and investigate the dynamic forces propelling anti-racist solidarity and resistance cultures. Midway through the Trump years and with a rise in nativism fervor across the globe, this expanded approach captures the creativity and variety found in the fight against...