Books published by Cornell University Press

Over the years, Edward Fowler, an American academic, became a familiar presence in San'ya, a run-down neighborhood in northeastern Tokyo. The city's largest day-labor market, notorious for its population of casual laborers, drunks, gamblers, and...

Like many others of my generation, I first read Camus in high school. I carried him in my backpack while traveling across Europe, I carried him into (and out of) relationships, and I carried him into (and out of) difficult periods of my life. More...

Juxtaposing and connecting the art of states and the art of art historians with vernacular or popular arts such as reggae and hip-hop, Crispin Sartwell suggests that we need to take much more seriously the aesthetics of political thought and action.

A major contribution to our understanding of contemporary urban warfare, war economies, and the political repercussions of humanitarian action.

Examining how since 1947 a regime of psychological operations and covert action has made the conflation of reality and fiction a central feature of both U.S. foreign policy and American culture.

In the third edition of his classic work, revised extensively and updated to include recent developments on the international scene, Jack Donnelly explains and defends a richly interdisciplinary account of human rights as universal rights. He shows that any conception of human rights-and the idea of human rights itself-is historically specific...

The Castorland Journal is a diary, a travel narrative about early New York, a work of autobiography, and a narrative of a dramatic and complex period in American history. In 1792 Parisian businessmen and speculators established the New York Company...

In Creating Cooperation, Pepper D. Culpepper explains the successes and failures of human capital reforms adopted by the French and German governments in the 1990s. Employers and employees both stand to gain from corporate investment in worker skills...

In 1974 Richard Nixon's defense secretary, James Schlesinger, announced that the United States would change its nuclear targeting policy from "assured destruction" to "limited nuclear options." In this account of the Schlesinger Doctrine based on...

Phan Chau Trinh (1872-1926) was the earliest proponent of democracy and popular rights in Vietnam. Throughout his life, he favored a moderate approach to political change and advised the country's leaders to seek gradual progress for Vietnam within the French colonial system. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not favor anti-French...

A new edition of this classic study of mandala Southeast Asia. The revised book includes a substantial, retrospective postscript examining contemporary scholarship that has contributed to the understanding of Southeast Asian history.

Glenn H. Snyder creates a theory of alliances by deductive reasoning about the international system, by integrating ideas from neorealism, coalition formation, bargaining, and game theory, and by empirical generalization from international history...

The Mute Immortals Speak will be important for students and scholars in the fields of Middle Eastern literatures, Islamic studies, folklore, oral literature...

This sobering book demonstrates how the interplay between conventional military operations and nuclear forces could inadvertently produce pressures for nuclear escalation.

Poor Numbers is the first analysis of the production and use of African economic development statistics.

Jamison addresses the conditions that have limited our understanding of Vedic myth and ritual, such as the profusion and obscurity of the texts and the tendency on the part of scholars to approach mythology and ritual independently.

A nation's grand strategy rarely serves the best interests of all its citizens. Instead, every strategic choice benefits some domestic groups at the expense of others. When groups with different interests separate into opposing coalitions, societal...

In this important historical account of the role that religion played in defining the political life of a modern national society, Paul A. Hanebrink shows how Hungarian nationalists redefined Hungary-a liberal society in the nineteenth century-as a...

After decades of official atheism, a religious renaissance swept through much of the former Soviet Union beginning in the late 1980s. The Calvinist-like austerity and fundamentalist ethos that had evolved among sequestered and frequently persecuted...

Bethel House, located in a small fishing village in northern Japan, was founded in 1984 as an intentional community for people with schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders. Using a unique, community approach to psychosocial recovery, Bethel House focuses as much on social integration as on therapeutic work. As a centerpiece of this...

Through an examination of the structure and practice of Muslim political and legal-religious authority, a rare look at intercommunal life in Iberia during the first three centuries of Islamic rule.

A fascinating account of journalists struggling to maintain their expertise and authority, even as they find their principles and skills profoundly challenged by ever more complex and fast-moving streams of information.

Alex Weisiger tests three explanations for a nation's decision to go to war and continue fighting regardless of the costs. He combines sharp statistical analysis of interstate wars over the past two centuries with nine narrative case studies.

Steven Vanderputten revisits the history of monastic reform to challenge the widely accepted narrative that foregrounds the role of charismatic leaders by examining the evidence from seven monasteries in Flanders.

Perhaps the most complete reconstruction ever written of life in an early modern European city, this book sets a new standard for urban history and for work on the religious and communal life of Eastern Europe.

In this highly original book, Camille Robcis seeks to explain why and how academic discourses on kinship have intersected and overlapped with political debates on the family-and on the nature of French republicanism itself.

This book details the history and, in many cases, the chronic inadequacies in the making of Israeli national security policy, as well as its strengths: rapid and flexible responses, generally pragmatic decision-making, and effective planning.

This book offers a nuanced portrait of homelessness in St. Petersburg. Based on ethnographic work at railway stations, soup kitchens, and other places where the homeless gather, it describes the material and mental world of this marginalized population.

Stephen Knight traces the myth of Merlin from to the early Welsh figure of Myrddin, through centuries of literature and art, and to contemporary examples of literature, film, and television.

From "Mother Earth" to "Mother Nature," women have for centuries been associated with nature. Feminists, troubled by the way in which such representations show women controlled by powerful natural forces and confined to domestic space, have sought to...