'If political economy, i.e. the interdisciplinary study of interrelationships between political institutions and economic systems, has ever made sense, it is exactly now. Hardly any better example of mutual influence and co-determination between political action and economic behavior can be conceived than the historic transformation of a politically supercharged and embedded system into an...

This book is about long-term changes to class and inequality in Poland. Drawing upon major social surveys, the team of authors from the Polish Academy of Sciences offer the rare comprehensive study of important changes to the social structure from the communist era to the present. The core argument is that, even during extreme societal transformations, key features of social life have...

This book presents pieces of evidence, which – taken together – lead to an argument that goes against the grain of the established Cold War narrative. The argument is that a “long détente” existed between East and West from the 1950s to the 1980s, that it existed and lasted for good (economic, national security, societal) reasons, and that it had a profound impact on the outcome of the conflict...

The common critique of media- and ratings-driven politics envisions democracy falling hostage to a popularity contest. By contrast, the following book reconceives politics as a speculative Keynesian beauty contest that alienates itself from the popular audience it ceaselessly targets. Political actors unknowingly lean on collective beliefs about the popular expectations they seek to gratify,...

This book compares the results of twenty years of international media assistance in the five countries of the western Balkans. It asks what happens to imported models when they are applied to newly evolving media systems in societies in transition. The book offers valuable insights into the nature and effects of media assistance and the strategies of international aid agencies, local political...

Market Society in the Visegrad States. Karl Polanyi’s “substantivist” critique of market society has found new popularity in the era of neoliberal globalization. The author reclaims this polymath for contemporary anthropology, especially economic anthropology, in the context of Central Europe, where Polanyi (1886–1964) grew up. The Polanyian approach illuminates both the communist era, in...

This book is the first attempt to bridge the divide between studies addressing “economic nationalism” as a deliberate ideology and movement of economic “nation-building,” and the literature concerned with more diffuse expressions of economic “nationness” – from national economic symbols and memories to the “banal” world of product advertising. The editors draw attention to the importance of...

Vor über hundert Jahren entzündete sich auf dem westlichen Balkan der Erste Weltkrieg. Verantwortlich dafür waren die Großmächte, die ihr Ringen um Vormacht in der Region austrugen. Heute baut China dort Straßen, Russland spornt Nationalisten an, die Türkei und die Golfstaaten investieren in Moscheen und Hotels. Sie alle sehen darin einen Weg, Einfluss auf Europa zu nehmen. Wiederholt sich die...

The rise of authoritarian rhetoric in America is no longer news, but the right’s affinity for foreign autocrats continues to baffle. Why does Tucker Carlson keep figures like Viktor Orbán and Jair Bolsonaro (and now Argentina’s Javier Milei) on his speed dial? Why does Ron Desantis embrace the kind of illiberal democracy in Turkey, Hungary, and the Phillipines? And why is Trump incapable of...

The Ukraine is a collection of 26 pieces that deliberately blur the line between nonfiction and fiction, conjuring the essence of a beloved country through its tastes, smells, and sounds, its small towns and big cities, its people and their compassion and indifference, simplicities and complications.