Beginning in the early 1970s, a large number of countries initiated transitions from forms of authoritarian rule to democracy.The research for this essay was made possible by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship as well as support from the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Institute for Turkish Studies, and Princeton University's Center for International Studies and Council on Regional Studies. The author wishes to thank John Waterbury, Atul Kohli, Jeffrey Herbst, Anna Seleny, and two anonymous reviewers for reading and commenting thoughtfully on earlier versions of this essay. This democratizing trend, dubbed “The Third Wave,” began in Southern Europe and continued in Latin America, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe.Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Similar transitions were also begun in parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The Middle East, by contrast, has remained untouched. Some instances of political liberalization (i.e., enlargement of the freedoms of speech and movement, and the freedom from arbitrary state action) have taken place in the region. But no country held democratic elections that contained the possibility of real change in the locus of political power.

The information society, late capitalism, and globalization raise serious questions about many tidy categories through which the world has conventionally been understood. Resistance, the subject of this essay, is one of these categories. The proliferation of globalizing means of communications such as the satellite dish and the internet has added new dimensions to our world. One is the collapse of premodern conceptions of space and time. Our phenomenological world is one that compresses time and in turn annihilates space, as Harvey suggests,David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989). or delineates space and time and liberates them from their local markers, asGiddens argues.Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 21. As space shrinks phenomenologically, people in different places experience the same events at the same time.The globalized world and modernity and their impact on our understanding of the social phenomenon are not tied to the works of Harvey and Giddens alone. Other theorists such as Roland Peterson, Ulrich Beck, and Scott Lash are central to the globalization debate. For a good summary of the Globalization debate, see Malcolm Walters, Globalization (New York: Routledge, 1995). In light of the confusion stemming from the increase in global political, economic, and social activities, the world seems beset by the paradox of homogenizing and fragmenting impulses. Complicating this picture even further is our increasing dependence on the mediaFor a debate on the media, information society, and globalization, see Karamjit S. Gill, ed., Information Society: New Media, Ethics and Postmodernism (London: Springer-Verlag London Limited, 1996); Lance Starte, Ronald Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson, Communication and Cyberspace (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 1996); Sandra Braman and Annabelle Mohammadi, Globalization, Communication, and Transnational Civil Society (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 1996); and Andrew King (ed.) Postmodern Political Communication: The Fringe Challenges the Center (Westport, CT: Braeger, 1992). to bring world events to our homes, giving us the illusion that we were taken there to witness these events. In this heavily mediated world, the “signs for the real,”This is Baudrillard's argument. For more, see Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Mark Poster, ed., Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166–84. text and image alike, seem more real than the real itself. Nowhere has the impact of globalization been felt more intensely than in the Middle East. Data from the Gulf states in particular raise new questions about our understanding of resistance, national boundaries, and territoriality as well as other social science concepts such as sovereignty, the nation state, and citizenship.

Workers have figured prominently in a series of political confrontations that have changed the face of modern China. From the May Fourth Movement of 1919 to the June Fourth Massacre of 1989, working-class participation has proven critical. Although these famous milestones in Chinese history are, for good reason, usually regarded as student—rather than labor—protests, the involvement of members of the working class was far from incidental. The spectacle of workers marching outside their factory gates to engage in protest not simply as laborers, but also as citizens, has been a notable feature of Chinese contentious politics at critical junctures throughout the twentieth century. This phenomenon, moreover, carries implications that extend beyond the borders of China itself. Worker participation in the watersheds of Chinese political history turn out to hold international ramifications as well.

Accounts of late-twentieth-century capitalist restructuring have emphasized the decline of “permanent” work contracts and the growth of more “flexible” ways of employing labor. Most of these accounts have argued that, under conditions of global competition, firms seek to reduce the cost of wages and benefits by hiring more temporary workers. Such accounts assume permanent labor contracts to be a norm that is violated only when economic systems come under pressure. This essay adopts a different perspective, suggesting that, in fact, permanent labor contracts have been normative only in certain historical situations (such as the twentieth century United States). In a global and trans-historical context, these contracts have been introduced under specific conditions to solve particular kinds of problems. Thus, this study attempts to shift the question from “why is permanent work declining?” to “where and why do permanent work contracts emerge?”

Looking at any wall map or atlas, we see a world composed of states. The earth's surface is divided into distinct state territories. Each is demarcated by a linear boundary, an edge dividing one sovereignty from the next. The division is accentuated when each territory is blocked out in a separate color from neighboring states, implying that its interior is a homogeneous space, traversed evenly by state sovereignty. Our world is a jigsaw of territorial states, and we take this picture for granted. Thus our historical atlases show medieval Christendom also divided into demarcated and homogeneous territories, though perhaps less neatly (see, for example, McEvedy 1992). Only the configuration is different. Familiar to us, such a depiction would have been utterly unknown to people at the time, who rarely used maps to represent geographical information and did not imagine states (or rather realms) as enclosed spaces. The transformation of their world into ours—the way the state was put on the map—is the subject of this essay.

A significant paradox of the missionary endeavor in many parts of Africa, as elsewhere, is the preponderance of female adherents to Christianity, despite concerted efforts by most mainstream missionary groups to convert men.Theoretical or comparative studies of missionization, conversion, or religious experience and change which have informed this article include Beidelman (1974), Etherington (1977), King (1995), Holden (1983), Bowie (1993), Rafael (1993), Blakeley, Van Beek and Thomson (1994), Swatos (1994), Shaw (1995), Kipp (1995), and Spear and Kimambo (1999). “Again and again in a mission history,” notes Adrian Hastings, “the early significant baptisms were mostly of women” (Hastings 1993:112).In her history of Christianity in Africa, Elizabeth Isichei (1995) corroborates Hastings' findings, as does much of the ethnographic and historical literature on missionization in Africa (e.g. Barrett 1968:148; Landau 1995:197; Hastings 1993:112–114). Although not self-evident, such an outcome is of course more understandable for missionary groups who tried to convert and train African women to be the “good wives and mothers” necessary for the propagation of the Christian family and the “domestic” duties of the Christian home (Gaitskell 1979, Hunt 1990, Labode 1993, Kanogo 1993). Certainly this has been the case among Maasai in Tanzania, even though Catholic missionaries from the Congregation of the Holy Ghost have spent over forty years trying to evangelize Maasai men. In vain they tried to convert men first through schools, then in their homesteads, and finally in individual instruction classes. Maasai women were restricted from attending school, tolerated but not encouraged to attend homestead instruction and services, and dissuaded from holding formal leadership positions in the church. Despite these gender-based evangelization strategies and objectives, however, significantly more Maasai women than men have sought instruction and baptism in the Catholic church. Conversion to Catholicism was never easy for these women, as they had to overcome not only the reluctance of the missionaries but also the objections of their husbands and fathers. Yet they persevered, and now constitute the majority of practicing Catholics. Intent on creating Christian communities premised on male leadership and patriarchal authority, the men of the church have instead facilitated the creation of a “church of women.”

The neoliberal reforms sweeping the globe are generating strikingly analogous transformations in diverse politico-economic and ideological landscapes, especially through the spread of democratic-liberal political regimes and an emphasis on the “virtues of the invisible hand”—rather than the state—in the investment of a huge mass of mobile capital (Fishlow 1990:64; Amin 1995; Gill 1993). We are witnessing an increasingly dominant and profitable global capitalist economy with a “highly coercive capacity to ensnare enormous numbers of peoples within its grasp” (Blim 1992:5; Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994; Sachs 1995; Mittelman 1996; Dirlik 1994; Diskin and Koechlin 1994; Hojman 1994).

In February 1989, General Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay's longtime dictator, was deposed in a coup led by one of his top generals. During the first days after the coup, hundreds of rural Paraguayans swept onto unused lands claimed by the state, the Stroessner family and its cronies, and foreign investors, to set up ramshackle huts and clear plots to grow manioc and corn. They were soon followed by thousands more. By mid-1990, observers and representatives of the occupants estimated that roughly 19,000 families had claimed lands totaling over 360,000 hectares.These figures are derived from information provided by several organizations involved with the occupants and from data collected by the Centro de Documentación y Estudios and published in its monthly Informativo Campesino. For more information, see note 4. Most of the occupations occurred in the eastern and northern border departments, a frontier zone that had been rapidly developed for commercial agriculture during the preceding decades. But small farmers and rural workers throughout the nation mobilized to demand direct participation in their new government, more favorable agricultural policies, and restitution for past abuses. For Paraguay, then a nation of only 4.1 million persons, 2.06 million of them rural, this mobilization represented a considerable proportion of the population. Although land occupations were not new to Paraguay, his wave of rural activism was exceptional. Coinciding with Paraguay's first hesitant steps toward democracy, the occupations expressed the hopes of the rural poor for a more democratic rural society and for their own voice in the new political system.

The colonial legal order was by its very nature a plural legal order. Multiple legal authorities were created out of the imposition of colonial law and the persistence, protection, and invention of indigenous legal practices. Less obvious but critically important, too, was the plural nature of European legal systems themselves—a complexity that carried over into, and was sometimes exacerbated by, conditions of colonial rule. Broadly speaking, we can trace a historical shift over three centuries of European overseas expansion from a relatively fluid legal pluralism in which semi-autonomous legal authorities operated alongside state law, to a hierarchical model of legal pluralism in which state law subsumed in one way or another all jurisdictions, including “traditional” forums given special status by the state.

Stereotypes about gender relations in late Colonial Mexico — whether expressed as academic assumptions or in popular culture — are the targets of Steve J. Stern's important book, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico. Stern unravels these mythologies through a careful analysis of patriarchy, both the patriarchy of daily life and the patriarchal practices of governance. A central plank of the study is to gage the links between them, and Stern probes the interplay between gendered relations in the household and in the broader sweep of colonial power.

On September 14, 1991, when the National Peace Accord was signed in Johannesburg, the cream of South Africa's political elite was there: future President Nelson Mandela, then President F. W. De Klerk, Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, and other luminaries, new and old. But amid the politicians stood a different kind of figure, looking slightly out of place: a chubby, balding, middle-aged businessman named John Hall. Yet to the surprise of no one present, Hall was chosen unanimously to head the National Peace Committee they had just created in a bid to end the political violence blazing across the country. Although this moment was a turning point in South Africa's transition to democracy, it has been almost forgotten. Indeed, despite the acres of print dedicated to democratization in South Africa, commentators have largely ignored a crucial factor in its success: business.

In Rescuing History from the Nation, Prasenjit Duara challenges the repressive power of the nation-state to frame historical narratives in modern China and India. According to Duara, dominant narratives in both countries have been based on a linear, evolutionary, Enlightenment model of history that stresses national progress toward modernity, whether through idealist evolutionism, anti-imperialism, or even Marxism. As a result, he argues, such narratives have excluded other important discourses on political community that rejected the modernist mode of thought. In order to provide a “multiplicity of historical representations of political community,” he examines a series of alternate narratives like federalism, which promoted goals other than the nation-state, or which expressed critiques of modernity through the promotion of “Asian values.” With this, he attempts to “rescue” historical narratives from the dominant, repressive power of the nation-state, by writing “histories that resist being pressed into the service of the national subject in its progress toward modernity.”Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Modern categories of citizenship and discourses of nationalism are inconceivable without the existence of two inventions: the microscope as a laboratory instrument and the statistical concept of normality. The former, first devised by Dutch opticians around 1600, was the sine qua non of the bacteriological revolution spearheaded by Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur beginning in the 1870s.Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), chs. 9, 14. On bacteriology in the United States, see George Rosen, A History of Public Health (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993 [1958]), chs. 7, 8 and John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), ch. 13. The latter had been christened several decades earlier by Adolphe Quetelet when he prestidigated the mean or “average man” by plotting the chest circumferences of over 5,000 Scottish regiment soldiers and calculating basic frequencies. Soon, the idea of normal distribution became a cornerstone of the emergent fields of sociology, anthropology, demography, as well as the insurance industry.The social, philosophical, and mathematical epistemologies which generated the concept of normality have been deftly analyzed by Ian Hacking. See his The Taming of Chance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Also see Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). In different but interconnected ways, each invention opened up an extensive and untraversed terrain of corporeal and organic knowledge which it alone was capable of deciphering. Guided by the logic of germ theory, scientists used the microscope to translate invisible pathogens into classifiable bacilli and facilitated the manufacture of large-scale cures such as anti-toxins and vaccines. If the microscope and its appurtenances of slides and cultures exposed a hidden bacterial world which had previously existed only in the abstract, statistical methods and normal curves inductively abstracted from the concrete “to a postulated reality,”Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 109. originating prototypes and endowing them with enough distributive power to stand for the whole.

Hasan Kayali brings his obvious talents for narrative and description and knowledge of the extant literature on the relations between the Arabs and the Turks in Arabic and Turkish to bear on the important but understudied topic of the Arabs of the Young Turks. In this relatively short volume, consisting of an introduction and six chapters, he covers this topic from the period of the Tanzimat through to the end of the Ottoman Empire. He is aware of the fact that the feelings that were and still are at the bottom of this complex relationship did not end in 1922 but that would be the subject of an entirely different book.

Philip Bull's book is best described as a thoughtful essay on Irish nationalism and the land question. The basic argument can be summarized as follows. The Irish and the British had two incompatible models of land tenure, the Irish customary model, which recognized the proprietary rights of tenants, versus the British capitalist model, which recognized only the absolute property rights of owners. In the period immediately after the Great Famine, British legislators sought to strengthen the position of Irish landlords, hoping that they would make the investments necessary to modernize Irish agriculture. When it became clear that this was not working, the British shifted to legislation that recognized the fights of Irish tenants but repeatedly did too little too late, with the result that land agitation in Ireland became increasingly more radical and fused with the movement for Irish self-government. Since most landlords were Protestant and most tenants were Catholic, the fusion of the national question with the land question made the nationalist movement sectarian. The resolution of the land question by the Wyndham Act of 1903 offered the opportunity to separate the two and therefore also the opportunity to broaden support for Irish nationalism to include Protestants as well as Catholics. But the failure of Irish nationalist leaders to take up this opportunity preserved the sectarianism of the nationalist movement. In this way the fusion of the land question and the national question determined “the breakdown of pluralism in modem Ireland” (p. 4) and helped to bring about the partition of the country, which “is the most tangible legacy of the land question” (p. 191).

In an intriguing essay on colonialism in India, Appadurai (1993:316) draws attention to the importance of “number in the colonial imagination.” He argues that previous work on the colonial history of India has focused on modes of bureaucratic classification but has paid less attention to issues “of numbers, measurement, and of quantification in this enterprise” (Appadurai 1993:316). His argument suggests that the capacity to count, whether bodies or resources, was intrinsically connected with particular classificatory schemes such as castes or races. In their related ways each engendered an “illusion of bureaucratic control and a key to a colonial imaginaire in which countable abstractions . . . at every imaginable level and for every conceivable purpose, created sense of a controllable indigenous reality” (Appadurai 1993:317; cf. Anderson 1991:163–78; Gellner 1983:139–40; Kula 1986:120–22). Together these colonial procedures “had the effect of redirecting important indigenous practices in new directions” (Appadurai 1993:316). Subsequent (often violent) events in Indian colonial and postcolonial history, Appadurai argues, attest to this illusion, and the disjunction between the imagination of the governed and the governing.

The intifada, or uprising, that began in the Occupied Territories in December 1987 and ended about four years later was a watershed in that it profoundly transformed the rules of the game for Palestinian politics locally, regionally, and internationally. Glenn E. Robinson's Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) discusses the precedents, processes, and aftermath of the intifada by focusing on the role of elites in this trajectory. The book is structured around three questions: First, what compels aggrieved individuals to turn to sustained collective action? In the Palestinian context, the author argues that this became possible only when national leadership in the territories was transferred, beginning in the late 1970s, from a class of politically accommodating, wealthy, conservative, urban, landowning elites to a younger generation of more radical, university- educated, lower-middle class and middle-class village, refugee camp, and urban residents who sought social as well as political transformation. As a number of other scholars have argued, this leadership transfer was facilitated by Israeli land confiscations and restrictions on land and water use, the concomitant rise of a migrant wage-labor force largely dependent on manual work in Israel, and the expansion of Palestinian universities after the 1967 Israeli occupation of the territories. Robinson argues that these universities were particularly important for the rise of the counter-elite because their student bodies largely came from the non- and small-landowning residents of villages, towns, and refugee camps (the children, particularly male, of the wealthy were more likely to be educated abroad).

In State and Status, Samuel Clark surveys the rise of the state and its relationship to aristocratic power in two zones in western Europe, the British Isles and France and its eastern periphery. The core of Clark's argument examines the ways in which ruling aristocracies were restructured by state formation, particularly the emergence of political centers. As monarchs became more important arbiters of the manifold flows of resources, the exercise of power, status awards, and cultural grammars, older and more dispersed forms of feudal lordship were unevenly transformed. Lordship eventually declined, but meanwhile the actions of centralizing monarchs could shore it up or retool it as aristocracies were rearticulated into emergent states. This was a two-way street, for the decline and restructuring of lordship also sped state formation (pp. 153–4). There were other factors at issue, and the book discusses some of them—for example, commercialization as tied up with statemaking—but the emergence of political centers has been neglected, Clark thinks, and deserves more emphasis.

Like the city streets, performative commemorations, and cacophony of democratic politics it chronicles, this book teems with energy. Manifestly uneasy with the constraints imposed both by older forms of political history and newer anti-narratives which abjure attempts at authoritative statements, Mary Ryan probes the fashioning of a democratic public in New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco before, during, and after the Civil War.

“Our public sphere, which should have displayed and preserved the grandeur and beauty of our civic ideals and moral excellences, is instead inane and vacuous when it is not utterly mean, ugly, or indecent” (p. 4). Troubled by the tawdry nonsense circulating in the public sphere—and she wrote before learned enquiries into whether the President's genitals had any distinguishing characteristics—Rochelle Gurstein turns to history to understand how we arrived at such a sorry destination. Hers is a tale of decline: The Victorians “we moderns” so routinely deride for their Puritanical repressiveness understood full well that certain things have to remain private, even shameful, in order to retain their sacred value-and in order to protect a public sphere worth having.