Human Rights

Beyond State Crisis? Africa and Post-Colonial Eurasia in Comparative Perspective studies sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union, two regions beset by the breakdown of states suffering from extreme official corruption, organized crime extending into warlordism, the disintegration of human services and economic institutions, and the breakdown of state after state. The book examines state breakdown, democratization, economic reform, ethnicity, and the status of women, and it compares the consequences of postcommunism and postcolonialism.

The Islamic revolution of 1979 transformed all areas of Iranian life. For women, the consequences were extensive and profound, as the state set out to reverse legal and social rights women had won and to dictate many aspects of women’s lives, including what they could study and how they must dress and relate to men.

In Race: The History of an Idea in the West, Ivan Hannaford guides readers through a dangerous engagement with an idea that so permeates Western thinking that we expect to find it, active or dormant, as an organizing principle in all societies. But as Hannaford shows, race is not a universal idea--not even in the West. It is an idea with a definite pedigree, and Hannaford traces that confused pedigree from Hesiod to the Holocaust and beyond.