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Political Exiles Reckon With Rising China And A Lost Cause, Han Chen

Capstones

This capstone explores the overseas Chinese democracy movement in the United States. English-language coverage about the movement has been limited, and little systemic coverage exists. However, the exile movement is fundamental to understanding how China’s most prominent political opposition is faring as China became the second largest world economy. It will also detail human drama and infighting in this exile community. I interviewed more than a dozen U.S.-based political exiles, journalists and experts, in both Chinese and English.

Link to my capstone project: https://hanchen.atavist.com/chinese-exiles

“It’S A Kind Of Killing:” Afghan Refugees In Shadow Of The Eu Fear They’Re Forgotten, Kyle Mackie

Capstones

For Karimi Wahab, an Afghan refugee currently accommodated at a center for asylum seekers in Sjenica, Serbia, watching refugees from other war-torn countries get moved along into the European Union has become routine. Afghans make up nearly two thirds of Serbia’s stranded migrants and refugees. In Sjenica, it’s been more than a year since any Afghan got onto the list maintained by Hungarian immigration authorities that allows 10 migrants to enter the country from Serbia each business day. Compared to Syrians and Iraqis, Afghans have also been granted asylum less frequently across the EU, on average, every year since 2014. …

Without A Caveat: How An Ethiopian Immigrant Deconstructs Race In America, Priscilla Alabi

Capstones

The story is about how an Ethiopian immigrant, Mariya Abdulkaf is dealing with the effects of the racism she experienced while growing up in Texas. However, she is one of many women of color who continue to educate and awaken the communities to which they belong. In a social climate where, according to a study done by the Pew Research Center, 60 percent of Americans believe race relations have worsened a year into the Trump Administration; and groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and others assert that women of color are “bearing the brunt of a mass of …

Latino Voter Registration And Participation Rates In The November 2016 Presidential Election, Laird W. Bergad

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction:

The Latino electorate, citizens 18 years of age and older, has increased impressively between 1992 when it stood at approximately 8.8 million eligible voters and 2016 when there were 26.6 million eligible Latino voters. Yet, in every presidential election from 1992 through 2016 about 47% to 48% of all potential Latino voters actually went to the polls.

Methods:

These data are based on the data presented by the U.S. Census Bureau for each presidential election and accessible on the Bureau’s Voting and Registration web site at https://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/voting/data/tables.html. The 2016 data, released on May 11, 2017 are based on samples …

The Punishment Marketplace: Competing For Capitalized Power In Locally Controlled Immigration Enforcement, Daniel L. Stageman

Publications and Research

Neoliberal economics play a significant role in US social organization, imposing market logics on public services and driving the cultural valorization of free market ideology. The neoliberal ‘project of inequality’ is upheld by an authoritarian system of punishment built around the social control of the underclass—among them unauthorized immigrants. This work lays out the theory of the punishment marketplace: a conceptualization of how US systems of punishment both enable the neoliberal project of inequality, and are themselves subject to market colonization. The theory describes the rescaling of federal authority to local centers of political power. Criminal justice policy activism by …

Multiple Baskets: Diverse Racial Frames And The 2016 Republican Primary, Michael Lee

Publications and Research

A strain of racist, xenophobic populism is sweeping through many democracies, jumping from the fringes of political discourse to the mainstream. Understanding how Donald Trump was able to take power while making explicitly racist appeals is vital to understanding this phenomenon. This article examines the 2016 Republican primary, drawing on data from the National Election Study pilot survey to explore how, and why some voters favored Trump over other Republicans. Were Trump voters reacting to the adverse economic effects of globalization, or the 2008 financial crisis? Were they traditional “Southern Strategy” Republicans? Were they white nationalists? While I find evidence …

Advocate, Fall 2017, Vol. 29, No. 2, Advocate

The Advocate

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Editorial:

- The Rebel’s Time: Remembering Vidrohi’s Poetry of Revolution. Bhargav Rani (p. 3)

Features:

- The Revolutions Should not be Televised: The Oeuvre of Peter Watkins. Curtis Russell (p. 12)

- “The Siege” Comes to NY. Ashley Marinaccio (p. 17)

- Orwell’s Revolution. Harry Blain (p. 22)

CUNY Life:

- Whose Community?: A Scalar Report from Graduate Center Grounds. Angela Dunne and Conor Tomás Reed (p. 28)

100 Years of the Russian Revolution:

- Women and the Russian Revolution. Tatiana Cozzarelli (p. 38)

Review:

- Between Value and Valor: Review of Corey Robin’s “The Reactionary Mind: …

Advocate, Fall 2017, Vol. 29, No. 1, Advocate

The Advocate

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Editorial:

- “To Revolution, or not to Revolution.” Bhargav Rani (p. 3)

Features:

- Why de Blasio’s Commission Reviewing NYC’s Monuments Matters. Anthony Ramos (p. 12)

- Boycott the NFL! Shame on Them! Jeff Suttles (p. 16)

- Free the Media! Campaign to Rehire Marisa Holmes. Conor Tomás Reed (p. 20)

CUNY Life:

- Dude, Where’s my Cohort? Sarah Hildebrand (p. 26)

- PSC Rank-and-File Take Independent Action for a $7k Adjunct Minimum Wage. CUNY Struggle (p. 30)

- Practicing Consent in the Classroom. Jenn Polish (p. 34)

Review:

- Up from Below Review of China Mieville’s …

Introduction To "Migration And The Crisis Of The Modern Nation State", Frank Jacob, Adam Luedtke

Publications and Research

Introduction to an anthology dealing with the interrelationship between migration and a supposedly existing crisis of the modern nation state.

Dinosaurs For The Digital Age: Democratic Party Organization In The Twenty-First Century, Aaron B. Shapiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces Democratic Party organization roughly over the Obama era. It conceptualizes the party at the national, state, and local level, with a particular focus on Ohio. This project seeks to reconcile changes in the political environment that incentivize strengthening party structures, with American electoral institutions that complicate party organizational development. I suggest that while demographic change, polarization, and big data are powerful incentives to focus Democratic electoral strategy on an Obama-like organizational model and campaign strategy, institutionalization remains hampered by significant structural impediments. These are institutional as well as coalitional. While party integration has been uneven, I find …

Liberal Translations: Secular Concepts, Law, And Religion In Colonial Egypt, Jeffrey Culang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a conceptual history of Egypt’s national formation between the 1880s and the 1930s. This period involved the convergence of nationalism, colonial rule, missionary activity, and new modes of governance at the national and international levels. Drawing on state and missionary archival material, periodicals, legal compendia, laws, and parliamentary transcripts, and adapting methods developed by Reinhart Koselleck, I trace shifts within Egypt’s socio-political lexicon through processes of translation and demonstrate their effects upon social experience and political aspiration. I focus on a set of liberal-secular concepts critical to national politics—religious freedom, public interest, nationality, and the minority—as they …

The Bourgeois Crown: Capitalism And The Monarchy In Thailand, 1946–2016, Puangchon Unchanam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the age of capitalism, monarchy has been treated as if it were an irrelevant institution. Once capitalism becomes the dominant mode of production in a state, it is argued, monarchy must be either abolished or transformed into a constitutional monarchy, a ceremonial institution that plays no significant role in a capitalist state that is ruled by the bourgeoisie. The monarchy of Thailand, however, fits neither of those two narratives, as it enjoys hegemonic status in the capitalist state, preeminent status in the market, and popular support from the urban bourgeoisie. What explains the resilience of the Thai monarchy in …

Underrepresentation Of Women In Politics: Focus On New York City, Yuliya Szczepanski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how the factors that account for underrepresentation of women in American politics play out in New York City. Although women comprise more than a half of the country’s population, and more women than men are registered and turn out to vote, the United States is below average in terms of percentage of women politicians as compared to other countries, and keeps dropping in those ratings. Further, New York City, arguably one of the most diverse and liberal cities in the U.S., has never elected a female mayor, and, in 2017, only about a quarter of the city …

The Impact Of State-Promoted Participation In Democracy And Development: A Comparison Of Venezuela And Mexico, Domenico Romero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the past two decades participatory democracy policies came to be seen as a useful alternative to address high inequality and lack of meaningful political representation allowed by clientelist politics in various parts of the world. This project explores the question: what is the impact that state-promoted participation has on democracy and development, the two key areas that political reformers in Latin America attempted to improve at the turn of the millennium? The hypotheses that this project proposes in response to that question are that participatory policies do not underperform neoliberal policies on macroeconomic or human development; that state-promoted participation …

The Politics Of Shorter Hours And Corporate-Centered Society: A History Of Work-Time Regulation In The United States And Japan, Keisuke Jinno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shorter working hours drew much attention as a means of fighting unemployment and crisis in capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, shorter work-time is rarely considered a policy option to fix economic or social issues in the United States and Japan. This dissertation presents a history of work-time regulation in the United States and Japan to examine how and why its developments and stalemate took place.

In the big picture, developments of work-time regulation during the first half of the twentieth century were a part of concessional modifications of class relations, a common phenomenon in many …

The New American Slavery: Capitalism And The Ghettoization Of American Prisons As A Profitable Corporate Business, David A. Liburd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The labor of enslaved Africans and Black Americans played a large part in the history of colonial America, with the American plantation being the epicenter for all that was to be produced. While the two have never been completely tied together, capitalism and modern day slavery have been linked with one another. Some analysis sees slavery as a remote form of capitalism, a substitute, to an antiquated form of labor in the modern world.

Slave plantations adopted a new concentration in size and management, referred to by W.E. DuBois as a change "from a family institution to an industrial system."1 …

Stayin' Alive: Transnational Sanctuary And Insurgency, Matthew Murray

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The conventional wisdom of counterinsurgency runs that insurgent groups with bases in neighboring states (transnational sanctuaries) are relatively more difficult to defeat than comparable groups without such bases. Insurgents with transnational sanctuaries benefit from relative protection from attack by counterinsurgents, they may recruit, train, and arm safely in their sanctuaries, transmit propaganda into their target state, and use these sanctuaries as staging points for infiltration or raids into their target state. Counterinsurgents have gone to great lengths to disrupt or destroy insurgent bases in neighboring countries based on the belief that this is necessary to defeating insurgents. However, several groups …

Trumping Norms: Whither The International Liberal Order?, Maureen Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper’s main objective is to develop potential theories on the future of American foreign policy within the Trump Administration. The paper will begin by evaluating the norm of statehood and will discuss the contributions of John Meyer to the statehood discourse. Through analysis of Meyer’s work, this paper will develop a standardized structure of statehood within the global order. Furthermore, the paper will analyze the Westphalian international order and discuss the viability of this system leading up to 2017. The Westphalian international system has been the primary system for which nation-states aim to gain acceptance and its norms provide …

Affective Afterlives: An Ethnography Of Activism Between Movements, Manissa Maharawal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic project starts at the end of Occupy Wall Street in New York City and ends at the beginning of Black Lives Matter in Oakland, CA. In between these two movements it looks at a variety of political projects that focused on issues of housing and anti-gentrification in New York City and San Francisco. Throughout I favor a view of social movements that understands the messy trajectories of activism. This methodological privileging of what activists are doing, and the places and spaces in which they ground their work seeks to de-center bounded social movements in the study of politics …

Genealogy Of The Concept Of "Hate Crime": The Cultural Implications Of Legal Innovation And Social Change, Roslyn Myers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The term "hate crime" is new to legislative and public discourse, as well as legal and social science scholarship. A decade after the concept of a "hate crime" was introduced in Congress, the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA), to punish criminal actors who target victims because of their characteristics (race, color ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, gender, gender identity, or disability). Using relevant archival sources, this project uses genealogical qualitative methods to examine the interplay of cultural elements manifested in this provocative term, which reflect dominance and subjugation among social groups (In- and Out-Groups) …

Syllabus For American Government Course With Openstax - Zero Textbook Cost, Theodora Leontaridis

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Plsc 2260 (Introduction To Comparative Government), Anh Tran

Open Educational Resources

Why do states wield violence against its citizens? Does the expansion of state power always threaten individual freedom? When do ordinary people create social change peacefully, and when do they go to war? Is democratization an inevitable force in our world? Is there a trade-off between economic growth and economic equality? These are the types of puzzles we will be exploring through various theoretical and methodological lenses. We will compare variations in political behaviors, processes, and structures at work in different countries around the world. Each week, we focus on a different topic in comparative politics, then dig deeper into …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Paf 1250 (Citizenship And Public Affairs), Aaron M. Zack

Open Educational Resources

This course is a critical introduction to American political institutions and behavior. Attention is given to constitutional theory and principles, the constitutional system, political institutions (congress, the presidency, the judiciary, the bureaucracy), and political participation (public opinion, the mass media, elections, political parties, groups and interests.)

The Triumph Of The Lie: How Honesty And Morality Died In Right-Wing Politics, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Cohen Looks At The Influence Of Politics On Art, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

“I’m a professor of politics and I’ve been politically concerned since I was a teenager, and music has always been of great interest to me, along with the tensions between what is created artistically and what political ideas are embedded or may be embedded— sometimes consciously, sometimes not so consciously—in various types of artworks.”

This opening statement may surprise many, but it shows how professors like Dr. Mitchell Cohen cross disciplinary boundaries to explain how the world works.

Remotivating The Black Vote: The Effect Of Low-Quality Information On Black Voters In The 2016 Presidential Election And How Librarians Can Intervene, Andrew P. Jackson, Denyvetta Davis, James Kelly Alston

Publications and Research

In a phenomenon that was surprising to many, given the racially charged nature of the 2016 presidential election, black voter turnout was significantly lower than the previous two elections. Donald Trump’s victory is attributable to many factors, one of which was the lower participation of black voters in several swing states. To a lesser extent, black support for third-party candidates also aided Trump’s victory. The lower black turnout itself is attributable to several factors, but one factor specifically in the LIS realm was the prevalence of low-quality information and rhetoric and a susceptibility that some black voters had to this …

Swords Into Ploughshares: Agricultural Recovery And Postwar Institutional Development In Sub-Saharan Africa, Jinu R. Abraham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Civil wars have long been characterized in the comparative politics literature as having profoundly negative economic effects for both individual households and countries on a larger scale. However, variation in postwar economic outcomes indicates that conflict may indeed have some curative effects. I argue political settlements in the aftermath of civil wars can shape postwar economic outcomes by transforming institutions critical to agricultural productivity. The structure of the state postwar can shape land tenure security, local government participation, and the management of preexisting social divisions. I employ a case study method controlling for differences on the independent variable in order …

Thine Is The Kingdom: The Political Thought Of 21st Century Evangelicalism, Joanna Tice Jen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite renewed attention to religion and ethics in political theory, there is a notable absence of inquiry into evangelicalism. Social scientists have studied Christian right policy in the late 20th century, but how has the movement shifted in the new millennium and what are the theoretical beliefs that undergird those shifts? By reading popular devotional writings as political texts, this dissertation distills a three-part evangelical political thought: 1) a theory of time in which teleological eternity complements retroactive re-birth; 2) a theory of being wherein evangelicals learn to strive after their godly potential through a process of emotional self-regulation; and …

The Variation In Russia’S Foreign Policy In Near Abroad After The Disintegration Of The Ussr, Nataliia Donchenko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This master thesis sets out to explain the complex nature and variation in Russian foreign policy in Near Abroad states from the collapse of the USSR in December 1991 and the accession of Boris Yeltsin to the end of Vladimir Putin’s third term as President of the Russian Federation. I analyze Russian foreign policy through the lenses of cultural, external, domestic and institutional determinants. Due to the limit of the paper, I look at three “frozen” conflicts that Russia got involved into since the dissolution of the USSR – Transnistria (Moldova) in 1992, Abkhazia (Georgia) in 2008, Crimea (Ukraine) in …

Social Order And The Culture Of Corruption In India, Arunodhaya Jebamani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Corruption is rampant in India and is prevalent in every sector of the Indian society. The purpose of this paper is to discuss selected cases to understand the widespread corruption that occurs in various sectors of the society such as academia, business, banking, law enforcement and other everyday services. This paper will address how the social order contributes to these corrupt practices, and tries to shed some light on how corrupt practices have been socially accepted and have become an unavoidable norm in many cases. The paper also studies the structures that exist and aide in augmenting corruption in India …