Late 2019 Publications from NSSR Faculty
Faculty across all departments at The New School for Social Research published exciting new research this year. Their work takes many forms, most often articles in popular and peer-reviewed journals as well as books. Below, Research Matters highlights three books by NSSR professors published in late 2019. Be sure to check out a full list of books from the past decade on our Social Research Bookshelf!
MARK W. FRAZIER
The Power of Place: Contentious Politics in Twentieth-Century Shanghai and Bombay
While many scholars of China treat it as sui generis, Mark W. Frazier, Professor of Politics, does not. He is among a small but expanding group of China scholars who are study China by way of comparison with other countries. In The Power of Place: Contentious Politics in Twentieth-Century Shanghai and Bombay (Cambridge), Frazier does this through a paired comparison of the politics, history, and urban planning of two cities in China and India with the deepest engagements with global capitalism.
In bringing together the three fields, Frazier attempts to answer a bigger question: How do changes in the urban political geographies of cities over the long term influence conceptions of rights to the city and patterns of popular protest?
“I’ve always been interested in the ways in which we understand the historical context of politics, and I’ve always done work in cities,” says Frazier. “This is my first work in which I really turned to urban studies and doing work on cities as opposed to in cities.” In researching the book, he immersed himself in the foundational literature of urban studies and planning, and drew on a variety of sources: primary sources related to popular protests, archive materials from municipal agencies, and observations of neighborhood activities with NGOs. He also drew upon numerous contacts from conferences and talks hosted by the India China Institute, where he is now Co-Director and Starr Foundation Professor.
Why Shanghai and Mumbai? The two port cities “were basically shaped by British colonial capitalism as it existed in the nineteenth century,” he says. They share other characteristics as well: both evolved as cities with globally prominent textile industries, and were “at the forefront of revolutionary movements that sought to replace colonial governance and capitalism with a vision of socialist modernity in which urban inequities would be a thing of the past.”
In The Power of Place, Frazier focuses on urban politics and protests that rocked Shanghai and Mumbai over the 20th century. He notes a number of convergences in popular movements over time: anti-imperialist, nationalist sentiment in 1919; dissatisfaction with broken promises of socialist modernization in 1966; and resistance to development by housing dispossession and deindustrialization in the late 1990s. Throughout the book’s seven chapters, he explains these parallels by looking at larger transnational currents and changes in each city’s political economy over those periods.
Today, residents of both cities continue to raise questions surrounding citizenship and urban governance despite their differences in democratic and authoritarian political institutions. Fortunately, The Power of Place can help readers better understand the roots of these current debates.
MARK SETTERFIELD
Heterodox Macroeconomics: Models of Demand, Distribution and Growth
More than a decade has passed since the 2008 Financial Crisis and the start of the Great Recession. As academics, journalists, and other thinkers continue to dissect what went wrong, many heterodox economists believe they may have an idea or two about it, and what others may have missed.
In their new book, Heterodox Macroeconomics: Models of Demand, Distribution, and Growth (Elgar), Mark Setterfield, Professor of Economics, and co-author Robert A. Blecker write:
“…Mainstream macroeconomics lacks (and continues to display little interest in developing) a theory of capitalism as a stratified and contested terrain that is vulnerable to periodic crises.”
Heterodox Macroeconomics doesn’t propose to change mainstream economics, but rather to offer a comprehensive look at heterodox growth theories, especially ones in the classical-Marxian and post-Keynesian traditions. Its three sections detail growth and distribution models, models of distributional conflict and cyclical dynamics, and Kaldorian approaches to export-led growth and the balance-of-payments constraint.
Economists from all schools of thought will find this foundational heterodox text useful, especially the many mainstream economists and policymakers who, Setterfield notes, are finally beginning to pay attention to long-held heterodox ideas. Graduate students and advanced undergraduate students, and the faculty who teach them, will find the text particularly helpful.
“I actually don’t like to teach from textbooks, but here I am producing a textbook!” says Setterfield. “In many ways, this is a compendium of everything [Blecker and I] have been teaching for years. We do try to go over all of the ideas from a first principles position, not assuming a lot of familiarity with concepts.”
In fact, in the book’s introduction, Setterfield and Blecker specifically thank the thousands of students they’ve taught over the past several decades, including NSSR alumni Daniele Tavani and Ramaa Vasudevan, both now faculty at Colorado State University, as well as the many other colleagues who’ve helped them refine their ideas. “The good and the bad thing about heterodox economics is that the community is relatively small. So, the bad thing is there aren’t many of you and there aren’t many resources to do a lot of work. The good thing is you get to know each other pretty quickly!” says Setterfield.
Going back to the basics has been a new sort of collaborative writing process for the co-authors. “This was just one gigantic process of taking something for granted, getting into writing it down, and thinking, ‘Hm, really? I hadn’t thought about it!’” remembers Setterfield. The process mirrors what he often tells New School students when they remark that they’ve read a text before: “Oh, I’ve been reading this for 25 years and I’m still seeing things!’” Heterodox Macroeconomics will hopefully help readers at all levels have similar aha moments.
ALEX ALEINIKOFF
The Arc of Protection: Reforming the International Refugee Regime
Writing a book can be a messy process. In 2018, Alex Aleinikoff, University Professor and head of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, decided to make part of that process public.
He and co-author Leah Zamore published an early draft of their new book, The Arc of Protection: Reforming the International Refugee Regime, on Public Seminar, a digital intellectual commons supported by The New School. With an introduction both their work and the current state of refugee affairs, they shared each chapter and invited feedback from readers on their work.
A lot changed between that draft and the book itself, published in 2019. Aleinikoff and Zamore realized their ideal audience included policymakers and refugee advocates as well as academics, so they worked with Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, to make the text more concise and accessible. They also sharpened their arguments with feedback from Public Seminar readers.
Aleinikoff and Zamore’s arguments remained the same, however: The international refugee regime — the titular arc of protection, designed in the wake of World War II — is fundamentally broken. More than 70 million people are currently displaced by conflict and violence. Routinely denied rights guaranteed to them by international law, they have few prospects for rebuilding their lives, contributing to host communities, or returning to their former homes.
A former dean at Georgetown University Law Center, Aleinikoff shifted to full-time policymaking in 2010 as the United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). He held that position for five years, during which time he worked with Zamore, then a Yale Law School student. That academic and professional experience helped inform their perspective and recommendations in The Arc of Protection. “As a legal academic, I previously focused much more on asylum proceedings in the U.S. I ran an asylum clinic, wrote a few journal articles that raised issues useful for adjudicators in the U.S.,” he says. “[At UNHCR], I became much more focused on where the real problems of the refugee system is, which is not movement of asylum seekers to developed states. It’s rather the fact that the vast majority of refugees are unable to move from the initial country they fled to. They’re not able to go home, they’re not able to resettle, and they’re not fully integrated into the communities in those hosting states. It’s that stuckness — what we call the second exile — that’s the essential problem.”
Refugee rights and refugee agency can help change the current situation, and Aleinikoff and Zamore offer strategies for change at the level of structures and institutions. They argue for the creation of a new structure that would incorporate all global actors, from states to the World Bank, that would be able to make decisions and act in ways that the UNHCR can’t. They also advocate for a move away from formal resettlement programs and toward refugees’ right of mobility on the regional level. Ordinary people can get involved as well, helping to elevate refugee voices, especially in amplifying the messages of refugee-led advocacy groups.
Those looking to learn more about U.S. refugee and asylum policy can listen to Aleinikoff’s Tempest Tossed podcast, which recently featured David Miliband, President of the International Rescue Committee, and which will cover Trump’s immigration policies in the lead-up to the 2020 election.