In this book, theoretical analysis and real life case studies are combined to explore the nature of the standoff.

Using eye-witness accounts to narrate the terrifying, failed efforts at communication during the standoffs at Ruby Ridge and in Waco, TX, Haskin offers a psycho-social theory for militant white movements influenced by political economics. The heart-stopping dialogues as the authorities in both cases make their erroneous calculations are dramatic, but so is the idea that such events can furnish essential clues to success for those who are responsible for de-fusing such conflicts. The Ruby Ridge standoff and the Branch Davidian siege were symptoms of a broader battle between the goals of Corporate Governance and the hatred of white supremacists. Haskin show that by instilling insecurity, the Corporate power makes a mockery of citizens' free will. Bred by a different set of goals and grievances, white supremacists would use and sacrifice anyone (whites included) to achieve their "whites-only" world. What if white supremacists and those who favor Corporate Governance find common ground? The worst of both their goals--grotesque levels of deprivation, debt peonage, survival slavery, ethnic cleansing, and racial and religious violence--may be our future.

With the US having the highest incarceration rate in the world, prisons have become sites of radical political discourse and resistance. Dylan Rodriguez examines the work of a number of imprisoned intellectuals, such as Angela Davis and Leonard Peltier, and looks at how imprisonment has shaped their writing.

""Lawfare" describes the systematic use and abuse of legal procedure for political ends which, in post-genocide Rwanda, contributed to the making of dictatorship. Jens Meierhenrich explains how and why Paul Kagame's Tutsi-led government in the period 1994-2019 learned to substitute law for war in its consolidation of authoritarian rule"--

Finding ways to understand the nature of social change and social order-from political movements to market meltdowns-is one of the enduring problems of social science. A Theory of Fields draws together far-ranging insights from social movement theory, organizational theory, and economic and political sociology to construct a general theory of social organization and strategic action. In a work of remarkable synthesis, imagination, and analysis, Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam propose that social change and social order can be understood through what they call strategic action fields. They posit that these fields are the general building blocks of political and economic life, civil society, and the state, and the fundamental form of order in our world today. Similar to Russian dolls, they are nested and connected in a broader environment of almost countless proximate and overlapping fields. Fields are mutually dependent; change in one often triggers change in another. At the core of the theory is an account of how social actors fashion and maintain order in a given field. This sociological theory of action, what they call "social skill," helps explain what individuals do in strategic action fields to gain cooperation or engage in competition. To demonstrate the breadth of the theory, Fligstein and McAdam make its abstract principles concrete through extended case studies of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise and fall of the market for mortgages in the U.S. since the 1960s. The book also provides a "how-to" guide to help others implement the approach and discusses methodological issues. With a bold new approach, A Theory of Fields offers both a rigorous and practically applicable way of thinking through and making sense of social order and change-and how one emerges from the other-in modern, complex societies.

A comprehensive new collection covering the principal traditions and critical contemporary issues of social theory. Builds on the success of The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, second edition with substantial revisions, entirely new contributions, and a fresh editorial direction Explores contemporary areas such as actor network theory, social constructionism, human rights and cosmopolitanism Includes chapters on demography, science and technology studies, and genetics and social theory Emphasizes key areas of sociology which have had an important impact in shaping the discipline as a whole

This book shows that a concept of activity timespace drawn from the work of Martin Heidegger provides new insights into the nature of activity, society, and history. Although the book is a work of theory, it has significant implications for the determination and course, not just of activity, but of sociohistorical change as well. Drawing on empirical examples, the book argues (1) that timespace is a key component of the overall space and time of social life, (2) that interwoven timespaces form an essential infrastructure of important social phenomena such as power, coordinated actions, social organizations, and social systems, and (3) that history encompasses constellations of indeterminate temporalspatial events. The latter conception of history in turn yields a propitious account of how the past exists in the present. In addition, because the concept of activity timespace highlights the teleological character of human action, the book contains an extensive defense of the teleological character of such allegedly ateleological forms of activity as emotional and ceremonial actions. Since, finally, the book's ideas about timespace and activity as an indeterminate event derive from an interpretation of Heidegger, the work furthers understanding of the relevance of his thought for social and historical theory.