Books published by Stanford University Press

The book explains why some Third World states have centralized, conventional military forces while others rely on militias, paramilitaries, and other non-state actors using detailed case studies of Indonesia, Iraq, and Iran and offers policy recommendations for dealing with weak states based on this analysis.

Chronicling the rise of the Iraqi public sphere from 1921 to 1958, The Other Iraq reveals Iraqi intellectuals' democratic and pluralistic ideals, deconstructing the notion that Iraq has always been a totalitarian, artificial state, torn by sectarian violence.

Rethinking Japanese Public Opinion and Security argues that Japanese public opinion matters and has acted to prevent overseas military deployments involving combat while increasingly supportive of a more normal military establishment capable of autonomously defending Japanese territory.

This student-friendly text details the fascinating history of how Asia has evolved from being little more than a geographic expression to becoming a vibrant, assertive region with an increasing impact on global political, economic, and security affairs.

Passage to Manhood is a groundbreaking and beautifully written ethnography that addresses the intersection of modernity, heroin use, and AIDS as they intersect in a new "rite-of-passage" among young ethnic-minority males in contemporary China.

This book studies the impact of cultural factors on the course of military innovations.

This book integrates the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant-particularly the concepts of autonomy, dignity, and character-into economic theory, enriching models of individual choice and policymaking, while contributing to our understanding of how the economic individual fits into society.

Fiction Agonistes defends literature as a space where we experience the difference between living and imagining, life and life-like, reality and invention.

Using newly collected data from American and Korean newspapers, this book examines relations between the United States and South Korea from 1992 to 2003, a particularly contentious period in the history of the two allies.

The book provides a clear assessment of the New Labour governments in Britain, when Tony Blair then Gordon Brown were Prime Ministers between 1997 and 2009. This assessment is based upon a review of implemented public policies and their outcomes instead of programmes or discourses.

Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time to put forward a new theory of cultural memory and uncover an unacknowledged tradition of exchange between the legacies of genocide and colonialism.

A broad and ambitious reexamination of anthropology's potential and obligation to transform human rights theory and practice.

Through a wide-ranging discussion, that extends from Ovid and Leonardo da Vinci to Gerhard Richter, and from philosophy and literature to time-based art, Kaja Silverman shows that the master myth of Western subjectivity is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, not that of Oedipus, and this Janus-faced myth has the capacity both to destroy and to save us.

Shows how senses of gender shape and get shaped by sign systems that prove arbitrary, fluid, and susceptible of lively transformation.

Considers the legal, moral and pragmatic issues at stake when international standards of human rights are trumped by culture and politics, and proposes new approaches to fill the gaps in current human rights theories and practice, namely relational sovereignty, reciprocal adjudication, and regional human rights courts.

Arguing that Western power is both "government" and "glory," this book reveals the "theological-economic" paradigm at the origin of several of the most important components of modern politics and illuminates the function of consent and the media in today's democracies.

Refugees, Women, and Weapons examines the role of domestic advocates, state identity and domestic norms in Japan's counterintuitive adoption of and compliance with three treaties-related to women's rights, refugee protection, and land mines-whose international normative framework conflict with Japan's domestic norms.

Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and the Ridiculous Jew: A Study in the Exploitation and Transformation of the Jewish Stereotype is a study devoted to exploring the dynamic use of a Russian version of the Jewish stereotype (the ridiculous Jew) in the works of three of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century.

A new generation of China scholars offers a fresh look at the unusual cross-cultural territory constituted by China's missionary-established Christian colleges before 1950 in this fascinating work.

This book is a collection of essays about the invention-and disappearance-of the 'Semites' and the lingering effects, both institutional and theologico-political, of this invention.

This book studies how our personal memory is transformed as a result of technological and cultural transformations: digital photo cameras, camcorders, and multimedia computers inevitably change the way we remember and affect conventional forms of recollection.

This book examines the universal preschool movement-its growth, its proponents and opponents, and how preschools have become a popular element of school reform.

The book traces current Indian activism in Bolivia, arguing that a new social formation is emerging to challenge racism and the harsh effects of the dominant neoliberal economic model.

The book provides a lucid and systematic theory of the work of literature and its major aspects.

Talks about jurisprudence - or legal philosophy. This book attempts not only a jurisprudential reading of popular culture, but a popular rereading of jurisprudence, removing it from the legal experts in order to restore it to the public at large: a lex populi by and for the people.

Stuart Kirsch is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He has consulted widely on environmental issues and land rights in the Pacific, and was actively involved in the political campaign and legal case against the environmental impact of the Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea.

A Poverty of Rights examines the history of poor people's citizenship in Rio from the 1920s through the 1960s, the 20th-century period that most critically shaped urban development, social inequality, and the meaning of law and rights in modern Brazil.

This book is a study of everyday life in rural north China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century told through the story of one man's life.

In the 1950s Sinhalese linguistic nationalism precipitated a situation in which the movement to replace English as the main language and replace with it with Sihala and Tamil was abandoned and Sinhala alone became the official language. This work looks at the subsequent outcome this had.

These hard-to-find writings afford an inside look at the emergence of Girard's scapegoat theory from his pioneering analysis of rivalry and desire. Girard unbinds the Oedipal triangle from its Freudian moorings, replacing desire for the mother with desire for anyone-or anything-a rival desires.