I examine the political consequences of prison development in the United States. I theorize that the prison apparatus not only upholds a system of racial hierarchy and class stratification, but also links the economic stability of lower-class, rural whites to the continued penal confinement of poor, urban minorities. Analysis of an original dataset suggests that local reliance on existing prison infrastructure throughout many economically-depressed rural communities strengthens political support for harsh criminal punishments and militates against reform efforts. Political representatives have powerful interests in protecting rural prison investments, regardless of their actual economic impact in host communities. The evidence indicates that rural prison development contributes to the perceived economic viability and political power of rural areas, while reinforcing forms of punishment that destabilize poor urban neighborhoods and harm politically marginalized populations.

In the last decades, the American state has radically enlarged the array of policy instruments utilized in today’s governance of the poor. Most recently, through a process of outright “seizure,” the state now exacts revenue from low-income families, partners, and friends of those individuals who in very large numbers cycle in and out of the nation’s courts, jails, and prisons. In an analysis of legislation, judicial cases, policy regulations, blog, chat-line postings, and survey data, we explore this new form of taxation. In doing so, we endeavor to meet two objectives: The first is to document policies which pressure individuals (mostly men) entangled in the court and prison systems to rely on family members and others (mostly women) who serve as the safety net of last resort. Our second objective is to give voice to an argument not yet well explored in the sizeable incarceration literature: that the government is seizing resources from low-income families to help finance the state’s own coffers, including the institutions of the carceral state itself. Until now, no form of poverty governance has been depicted as so baldly drawing on family financial support under the pressure of punishment to extract cash resources from the poor. This practice of seizure constitutes the very inversion of welfare for the poor. Instead of serving as a source of support and protection for poor families, the state saps resources from indigent families of loved ones in the criminal justice system in order to fund the state’s project of poverty governance.

Recent political science scholarship examining the institutional features of the rights revolution has highlighted the importance of the private enforcement of civil rights. This article discusses a less well-known line of Supreme Court cases concerning government liability that have undermined effective private enforcement of constitutional rights. I examine the impact of the Court’s “procedural assault” on private civil rights enforcement and possible responses to the recent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere across the country regarding police use of force. After identifying the ways in which the Court has undermined a core strand of the rights revolution, I assess the challenges confronting the Obama administration and civil rights leaders as they respond to these developments.

In contrast to sterile forms of apology or the evasions of color-blind political discourse, calls for reparations explicitly link the realization of democratic ideals to a history of antiblack violence and exploitation. I explore three dimensions of Ida B. Wells's antilynching writings that anticipate and enrich contemporary demands for reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. First, Wells's commitment to truth-telling, a centerpiece of reparations efforts around the world, models how to criticize received understandings of both past and present and revise them in the service of more democratic ways of life. Second, her gender- and sexuality-conscious analysis of the political and economic causes and effects of antiblack violence adds a dimension that is missing from many reparations arguments. Third, Wells both advocates an active citizenry and demands collective responsibility for the protection of black citizenship; in so doing, she reveals the racial and gendered underpinnings of contemporary disavowals of responsibility for racial justice, dressed up as “personal responsibility,” and offers a powerful rebuttal.

Over the last decade, the impact of emergencies on the American state has become the subject of renewed interest. While early literature in the post-9/11 era often overlooked the historical development of crisis governance in the United States, many scholars have begun to uncover the precedents that continue to shape modern emergency management. In an effort to clarify the main analytical assumptions of the existing scholarship, I construct three models of emergency statebuilding: permanent emergency state, national security state, and contract state. The models each share an underlying framework of historical institutionalism, which defines the state as a stabilized material institutional structure that is disrupted by emergency conditions—exogenous shocks that cannot be incorporated into the normal statebuilding processes or legal order. Yet this perspective is ill-equipped to explain institutional change. I propose discursive institutionalism as an approach that emphasizes how discourse and ideas construct emergencies as objects of government management—in different ways, at different times. I then illustrate the utility of this perspective by demonstrating the influence of national planning ideas on efforts to prepare the state for emergencies before they occur.

In this Praxis Reflection, I reflect on the relationship between teaching and imprisonment. I describe a college program at a prison in Jessup, Maryland, and argue that liberal arts-style college classes should be widely available in prisons even as we work to dismantle the current system of mass incarceration.

Since 2012, the Deportation Research Clinic, part of the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University, has been pursuing research on government misconduct under the rubric of what Jacqueline Stevens calls “forensic intelligence.” The Clinic uses law and publicity, including scholarship, to create new realities, which in turn produce new facts and knowledge. Stevens draws on scholarship by S.M. Amadae, Noam Chomsky, Philip Green, Chalmers Johnson, Kenneth Osgood, Ido Oren, Michael Rogin, and Frances Saunders to explain the relation of “forensic intelligence” to the “national intelligence” paradigm now organizing mainstream political science research. The article concludes by describing how U.S. government and economic elites distort research and teaching priorities, and provides examples from Northwestern University.

Over at least the past quarter century, observers, historians, and journalists have painted a damning picture of the treatment that African Americans have received from their government and fellow citizens, not only during slavery and the era of segregation but far into the twentieth century. Yet many of these observations and reports have simply been ignored and, although others received some attention for a time, none has become part of the country’s standard public history. My premise is that the continued failure in the United States to incorporate these observations and reports into its standard history has a profound effect on its political culture. I therefore begin by briefly recalling some aspects of post-Civil War African American history and consider the American antipathy to confronting this history by looking at Charles Mills’s account of “white ignorance.” While some theorists have tried to supplement Mills’s realist framework with a more sophisticated one indebted to Critical Theory, I move in a different direction, drawing out some of the implications of the distinctive approach known as philosophical hermeneutics. By doing so, I hope to demonstrate how a hermeneutic perspective can contribute to serious discussion among U.S. political scientists and political educators about the links between racial inequality and historical understanding and its absence.

The legitimacy claims of liberal democratic states are typically couched in the language of individual rights and the rule of law. But contemporary liberal democratic states increasingly appeal to a logic of security, law and order, and the need to combat “political extremism.” This logic plays out in Ukraine, Egypt, and Turkey, and in Greece and Germany, but also in the U.S., France, and the UK. It is an increasingly important feature of politics in societies that may be experiencing a rough “transition to democracy,” but also in societies that are conventionally regarded as “consolidated democracies.” The normative and practical challenges presented by this situation are fundamental. Alexander S. Kirschner’s A Theory of Militant Democracy: The Ethics of Combatting Political Extremism offers one interesting take on these issues, which cut to the core of political science as a discipline. We have thus invited a range of political scientists from a variety of subfield and methodological perspectives to comment on the book and on the broader topic the book engages—the ethics of combatting political extremism and indeed the very political construction of “political extremism.” — Jeffrey C. Isaac

The legitimacy claims of liberal democratic states are typically couched in the language of individual rights and the rule of law. But contemporary liberal democratic states increasingly appeal to a logic of security, law and order, and the need to combat “political extremism.” This logic plays out in Ukraine, Egypt, and Turkey, and in Greece and Germany, but also in the U.S., France, and the UK. It is an increasingly important feature of politics in societies that may be experiencing a rough “transition to democracy,” but also in societies that are conventionally regarded as “consolidated democracies.” The normative and practical challenges presented by this situation are fundamental. Alexander S. Kirschner’s A Theory of Militant Democracy: The Ethics of Combatting Political Extremism offers one interesting take on these issues, which cut to the core of political science as a discipline. We have thus invited a range of political scientists from a variety of subfield and methodological perspectives to comment on the book and on the broader topic the book engages—the ethics of combatting political extremism and indeed the very political construction of “political extremism.” -- Jeffrey C. Isaac

The legitimacy claims of liberal democratic states are typically couched in the language of individual rights and the rule of law. But contemporary liberal democratic states increasingly appeal to a logic of security, law and order, and the need to combat “political extremism.” This logic plays out in Ukraine, Egypt, and Turkey, and in Greece and Germany, but also in the U.S., France, and the UK. It is an increasingly important feature of politics in societies that may be experiencing a rough “transition to democracy,” but also in societies that are conventionally regarded as “consolidated democracies.” The normative and practical challenges presented by this situation are fundamental. Alexander S. Kirschner’s A Theory of Militant Democracy: The Ethics of Combatting Political Extremism offers one interesting take on these issues, which cut to the core of political science as a discipline. We have thus invited a range of political scientists from a variety of subfield and methodological perspectives to comment on the book and on the broader topic the book engages—the ethics of combatting political extremism and indeed the very political construction of “political extremism.” -- Jeffrey C. Isaac

The legitimacy claims of liberal democratic states are typically couched in the language of individual rights and the rule of law. But contemporary liberal democratic states increasingly appeal to a logic of security, law and order, and the need to combat “political extremism.” This logic plays out in Ukraine, Egypt, and Turkey, and in Greece and Germany, but also in the U.S., France, and the UK. It is an increasingly important feature of politics in societies that may be experiencing a rough “transition to democracy,” but also in societies that are conventionally regarded as “consolidated democracies.” The normative and practical challenges presented by this situation are fundamental. Alexander S. Kirschner’s A Theory of Militant Democracy: The Ethics of Combatting Political Extremism offers one interesting take on these issues, which cut to the core of political science as a discipline. We have thus invited a range of political scientists from a variety of subfield and methodological perspectives to comment on the book and on the broader topic the book engages—the ethics of combatting political extremism and indeed the very political construction of “political extremism.” -- Jeffrey C. Isaac