SPECIALIZED RESEARCH HANDBOOKS
Handbooks are useful for obtaining background information about contemporary theories, concepts, issues, events, or topics and for understanding how scholars have debated a specific area of study. These handbooks are available either electronically and/or located on the book shelves in the Medicine Crow Center Library for International and Public Affairs.
LATIN AMERICA
Kaltmeier, Olaf, Anne Tittor, Daniel James Hawkins, and Eleonora Rohland, editors. The Routledge Handbook to the Political Economy and Governance of the Americas. Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2020.
This handbook examines the direct and indirect political interventions, geopolitical imaginaries, inequalities, interlinked economic developments and the forms of appropriation of the vast natural resources in the Americas. Forty-six chapters cover a range of Inter-American key concepts and dynamics This includes analysis of the flow of peoples, goods, resources, knowledge, and finances that have promoted interdependence as well as integration across borders that links the countries of North and South America (including the Caribbean) together as well as how these dynamics have contributed to profound asymmetries between different places. Contributors give a comprehensive overview of the theories, practices, and geographies that have shaped the economic dynamics of the region and their impact on both the political and natural landscape.
MIDDLE EAST
Cammett, Melani Claire, and Pauline Jones, editors. The Oxford Handbook of Politics in Muslim Societies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.
This volume utilizes real-world events and newly available data to more fully integrate the study of politics in Muslim societies into mainstream comparative analytical frameworks. Moreover, it explores the extent to which theories about core topics of inquiry in political science apply to Muslim societies. The aim is to interrogate rather than presume both whether and how Islam and Muslims are distinct from other religions and religious communities. Through forty chapters by leading specialists, the book examines a wide range of topics concerning regimes and regime change, electoral politics, political attitudes and behavior beyond voting, social mobilization, economic performance and development outcomes, and social welfare and governance. It also shifts focus away from the Arab world as the barometer of politics in the Muslim world, recognizing that the Islamic world spans several regions, including Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia, enabling a thorough investigation of which relationships, if any, hold across Muslim majority states in different regions of the world.
Cavatorta, Francesco and Valeria Resta, editors. Routledge Handbook on Elections in the Middle East and North Africa. Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2023.
This handbook analyzes elections in the Middle East and North Africa and seeks to overcome normative assumptions about the linkage between democracy and elections. Structured using five thematic sections, contributors provide chapters detailing how their case studies speak to this broad theme. Authors disentangle the various aspects informing elections as process in the Middle East through taking into account the different contexts where the electoral contest occurs and placing these into a broader comparative context. The findings from this handbook connect with global electoral developments, empirically demonstrating that there is very little that is exceptional about the Middle East and North Africa when it comes to electoral contests.
Kamrava, Mehran, editor. Routledge Handbook of Persian Gulf Politics. Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2020.
This work provides a comprehensive analysis of Persian Gulf politics, history, economics, and society. The volume begins its examination of Ottoman rule in the Arabian Peninsula, exploring other dimensions of the region's history up until and after independence in 1970. The book demonstrates how the Persian Gulf's current, complex politics is a product of interwoven dynamics rooted in historical developments and memories, profound social, cultural, and economic changes underway since the 1980s and the 1990s, and inter-state and international relations among both regional actors and between them and the rest of the world. The book is divided into the following six sections: Historical Context, Society and Culture, Economic Development, Domestic Politics, Regional Security Dynamics, The Persian Gulf and the World.
Sadiki, Larbi, editor. Routledge Handbook of Middle East Politics. Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2020.
Drawing on various perspectives and analysis, the handbook addresses political, social, and historical questions around themes that include secularity and religion, gender, democracy, authoritarianism, and new "borderline" politics of the Middle East. Contributions by forty-four scholars rethink knowledge frames, conceptual categories, and fieldwork praxis around themes that include secularity and religion, gender, democracy, authoritarianism, and new "borderline" politics placed in cultural, spatial, and temporal contexts.
SOUTH ASIA
Descriptions of resources are adapted or quoted from vendor websites.