Love Aiding Democracy Abroad? Readers share 100 books like Aiding Democracy Abroad...

Short and accessible, this is a book that I consistently return to when considering how the rule of law has been understood in different places and times from Ancient Greece through the Medieval World to today.

In my view, there simply isn’t a better starting point for understanding what the rule of law means and why it is so contested. At the same time, Tamanaha shows why the rule of law remains both a useful concept and an ideal worth aspiring to. I would recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand the rule of law and its complexities.

Few places face a more dire need for the rule of law than states prone to conflict. These are almost invariably some of the trickiest places to actually promote the rule of law. At the same time, post-conflict states offer opportunities rarely found in more stable political environments.

I first reviewed this book for the Stanford Journal of International Law back in 2007, and it has consistently repaid rereading ever since. It shows the good, the bad, and the ugly about international attempts to promote the rule of law after conflict. It is a great book for anyone who wants to understand what has been done in the past, why efforts so often disappoint, and how future activities might be improved.

This book helped spark my own interest in the relationship between legal pluralism and the rule of law. Despite decades of transnational legal support for the rule of law, scholars and practitioners alike have overwhelmingly focused on state courts. Isser’s edited volume is an early and enduring corrective to that trend.

This highly accessible book offers an invaluable primer for understanding a wide range of customary legal systems, how external actors have approached these authorities, and how non-state justice can influence the development of the rule of law.

The rule of law often equates with peace at home and peaceful relations abroad. Yet, as Caplan shows, peace–and determining when we can confidently say peace prevails–is far from obvious. Measuring Peace clarifies the pitfalls and opportunities of peacebuilding.

The book shows why peace is often difficult to maintain but never loses sight of why it is such an important goal–both for society as a whole and as a foundation for the rule of law. 

I recently opened this required high school read, seeking insight into the darkness that taps at the human soul, and this bok did not disappoint. It’s darker than I remember from high school and full of amazing symbolism and foreshadowing.

I think this tragic story hit a lot harder for me as an adult than it ever could have as a teenager.

In this tour de force history of Great Britain’s 19th century ‘liberal empire,’ Elkins demonstrates the glaring contradiction between the official claim that British society and its colonies were governed by liberal principles of ‘the rule of law’ and the systematic violence that lay at its core. “Violence,” Elkins argues, “was not just the British Empire’s midwife; it was endemic to the structures and systems of British rule.”

In an age when liberal rights were ostensibly universal, race became how the empire was able to exclude black and brown people (which included ‘racialized’ groups such as the Irish and Afrikaners) from the ranks of ‘civilized’ peoples. The so-called ‘civilizing mission,’ in which ‘uncivilized’ peoples would be welcomed into the ranks of the ‘civilized’ at some unspecified point, was draped in the trappings of noble enterprise and moral duty. However, while this thinly veiled ideology may have served the interests of… show more.

Merridale uses archival material and interviews with Soviet war veterans to personalize the war on the Eastern Front. This work moves beyond the number of combatants and tanks to focus on real life at the frontlines. She talks about issues that help the reader “feel” the war: what did soldiers eat given the well-known shortages and privations throughout the USSR; how did soldiers get warm clothes and boots; how did they obtain ammunition and artillery shells and new guns despite the long supply lines; was stealing accepted in the army; what behaviors were tolerated and which ones were punished; how did hierarchy allow officers to get first choice of captured enemy equipment. She reveals how officers might not report all the dead in their unit so they would not lose the lost soldier’s food ration. While Alexander Werth’s Russia at War provides a sweeping view of Soviet organization, suffering, and… show more.

I hardly imagined the Soviet Union, a place of grey and black, with the only sparks of color being red, to be a place for hippie culture to flourish. Juliane Fürst’s book taught me otherwise. It leads into a world of people like Azazello and Ofelia, who look like “angels, creatures from another world, blots of color on a grey canvas, flowers in a concrete desert.”

The book traces how these hippies, against all odds, found ways to distance themselves from the Soviet System, not through open opposition but through dreaming of and living a different life, communally, spiritually, and often on the road. And Fürst’s book does more than merely portray Soviet hippies in a fundamentally sympathetic way: It also reveals what we can learn about a larger society by studying those at the margins. It is an unusual but highly illuminating perspective on the late Soviet Union.

There are many excellent histories of the Russian Revolution that chronicle the main events, but none convey the complexity of experiences in Tsarist Russia during its final years and the Soviet regime in its initial phase as Mark Steinberg’s short but powerful and original work. This book gives us the bird’s-eye view of developments as they unfold, but also places them under the microscope to give us personal stories and experiences from different wakes of life. Using contemporary journalism and diaries, Steinberg recovers the voices of a range of ethnic groups in various regions of the empire—Jews, Ukrainians, and Central Asians--as well as workers, peasants, women, and members of the intelligentsia. As we witness their lives being thrown into upheaval by rapid political and economic transformation in the first years of the 20th century, followed by World War I, the two revolutions of 1917, and civil war, we gain… show more.

This book was extremely important for helping us to understand the myths of the Russian Revolution. In a semi-literate country with strict censorship, how did ordinary people form negative opinions about Rasputin or come to believe that Grand Duchess Anastasia survived the massacre of the royal family?

Rumors spreading by word of mouth! Scurrilous pamphlets circulating from hand to hand! Rasputin’s braggadocio! People’s desire for scapegoats! The book answered so many of our questions about how myths in this era were formed and propagated.