RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Have Repertoire, Will Travel: Global Nonviolence as Contentious Performance.

Selina Gallo-Cruz, Cambridge University Press, 2024

Nonviolence is celebrated and practiced around the world, as a universal 'method for all human conflict.' This Element describes how nonviolence has evolved into a global repertoire, a patterned form of contentious political performance that has spread as an international movement of movements, systematizing and institutionalizing particular forms of protest as best claims-making practice. It explains how the formal organizational efforts of social movement emissaries and favorable and corresponding global models of state and civic participation have enabled the globalization of nonviolence. The Element discusses a historical perspective of this process to illuminate how understanding nonviolence as a contentious performance can explain the repertoire's successes and failures across contexts and over time. The Element underscores the dynamics of contention among global repertoires and suggests future research more closely examine the challenges posed by institutionalization.

Wartime Suffering and Survival: The Human Condition under Siege in the Blockade of Leningrad, 1941-1944

Jeffery Hass, Oxford University Press, 2023

This book explores how people survive in the face of incredible odds. When our backs are against the wall, what are our interests, identities, and practices? When are we self-centered, empathetic and altruistic, or ambivalent? How much agency do the desperate have—or want? Such was the situation in the Blockade of Leningrad, nearly 900 days from 1941 to 1944, in which over one million civilians died—but more survived due to gumption and creativity. How did they survive, and how did survival reinforce or reshape identities, practices, and relations under Stalin? Using diaries, recollections, police records, interviews, and state documents from Leningrad, this book shows average Leningraders coping with war, starvation, and extreme uncertainty. Local relations and social distance matter significantly when states and institutions falter under duress. Opportunism and desperation were balanced by empathy and relations. One key to Leningraders’ practices was relations to anchors—entities of symbolic and personal significance that anchored Leningraders to each other and a sense of community. Such anchors as food and Others shaped practices of empathy and compassion, and opportunism and egoism. By exploring the state and shadow markets, food, families, gender, class, and death, and suffering, Wartime Suffering and Survival relays Leningraders’ stories to show a little-told side of Russian and Soviet history, and to explore the human condition and who we really are. This speaks not only to rethinking the nature of the Soviet Union and Stalinism, but also the nature of social relations, practices, and people more generally.

Army Spouses: Military Families during the Global War on Terror 

Morten G. Ender, University of Virginia Press, 2023

Distilled from nearly two hundred interviews, conducted from the 2003 invasion of Iraq on, Army Spouses marshals an incredible breadth of individual experiences, range of voices, insider access, and theoretical expertise to tell the story of US Army husbands and wives and their families during wartime in this century. Morten Ender offers a contemporary study of the emotional cycle of deployment and its impact on military families in the post-9/11 world. Military spouses, as he shows, operate both near and far from the front lines, serving on the home front to support combat service in the so-called Global War on Terror that has intimately bound together soldiers, families, the military institution, the state, and society. He paints a vivid picture of army spouses’ range of responses to deployment separations that illuminates the deep sacrifices that soldiers, veterans, and their families have made over the past twenty years.

Inclusion in the American Military: A Force for Diversity

Morten G. Ender, Ryan Kelty, David E. Rohall, and Michael D. Matthews (eds.), Lexington Books, 2023 (2nd edition)

The US military is one of the largest employers in the country and is a relative microcosm of American society, bringing in people from diverse backgrounds and history to defend the nation from all enemies. Military and civilian leaders address the same challenges as those found in the civilian world, including diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging. The US military has both led and followed the nation in establishing policies of diversity and inclusion. In this second edition, the editors and contributors provide a revised, updated, and expanded overview of the ways in which diversity and inclusion are dispatched in the US military by providing information and knowledge about celebrated and contested social characteristics including race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality and three new groups comprising the military: the (dis)abled, civilians, and immigrants. Astute subject matter experts contribute contemporary, must have, go to chapters into a fresh, compelling, and insightful volume on the roles that each of these groups occupy in the US armed services as well as the laws, rules, and regulations regarding their participation. This new edition also provides eleven Lived Experiences that enliven and humanize each chapter and will assuredly inspire readers.

Teaching and Learning the West Point Way: Educating the Next Generation of Leaders

Morten G. Ender, Raymond A. Kimball, Rachel M. Sondheimer, and Jakob C. Bruhl (editors), Routledge, 2021

Teaching and Learning the West Point Way is a unique compendium of the best teaching and learning practices from one of the most celebrated and storied undergraduate teaching and learning environments and institutions in America – the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, USA.  Drawing on the broad academic curriculum that the students follow at West Point – in addition to military leadership, character development, and competitive athletics – this book describes proven and effective undergraduate pedagogy across a number of academic disciplines. Case studies, strategies and techniques, empirical teaching and learning research results, syllabi, and assignments developed and deployed by West Point faculty are included, which faculty in other higher education institutions can adapt and apply to their own programs and courses. An accompanying companion website provides additional syllabi, course guides, lesson plans, PowerPoint activities, and lecture slides, as well as videos of the editors and authors discussing how key concepts in their chapters might be applied in different teaching and learning contexts.  This is an opportunity to gain an in-depth insight into the programs and practices inside one of the world’s premier leadership development and educational institutions. It should appeal to new and experienced faculty and administrators interested in course creation and syllabus design across a wide range of disciplines in educational institutions and military academies across the globe.

The Sociology of Privatized Security 

Ori Swed and Thomas Crosbie, eds. Palgrave MacMillan, 2019 

The first book dedicated to the sociology of privatized security, this collection studies the important global trend of shifting security from public to private hands and the associated rise of Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) and their contractors. The volume first explores the trend itself, making important historical and theoretical revisions to the existing social science of private security. These chapters discuss why rulers buy, rent and create private militaries, why mercenaries have become private patriots, and why the legitimacy of military missions is undermined by the use of contractors. The next section challenges the idea that states have a monopoly on legitimate violence and questions our legal and economic assumptions about private security. The collection concludes with a discussion of the contractors themselves, focusing on gender, race, ethnicity, and other demographic factors. Featuring a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods and a range of theoretical and methodological innovations, this book will inspire sociologists to examine, with fresh eyes, the behind-the-scenes tension between the high drama of war and conflict and the mundane realities of privatized security contractors and their everyday lives. 

Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector 

Shai M. Dromi University of Chicago Press, 2020 

From Lake Chad to Iraq, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) provide relief around the globe, and their scope is growing every year. Policy makers and activists often assume that humanitarian aid is best provided by these organizations, which are generally seen as impartial and neutral. In Above the Fray, Shai M. Dromi investigates why the international community overwhelmingly trusts humanitarian NGOs by looking at the historical development of their culture. With a particular focus on the Red Cross, Dromi reveals that NGOs arose because of the efforts of orthodox Calvinists, demonstrating for the first time the origins of the unusual moral culture that has supported NGOs for the past 150 years. Drawing on archival research, Dromi traces the genesis of the Red Cross to a Calvinist movement working in mid-nineteenth-century Geneva. He shows how global humanitarian policies emerged from the Red Cross founding members’ faith that an international volunteer program not beholden to the state was the only ethical way to provide relief to victims of armed conflict. 

Becoming Human Again

Donald E. Miller, University of California Press, 2020 

Genocide involves significant death and trauma. Yet the enormous scope of genocide comes into view when one looks at the factors that lead to mass killing, the struggle for survival during genocide, and the ways survivors reconstruct their lives after the violence ends. Over a one hundred day period in 1994, the country of Rwanda saw the genocidal slaughter of at least 800,000 Tutsi at the hands of members of the Hutu majority government. This book is a powerful oral history of the tragedy and its aftermath from the perspective of its survivors. Based on in-depth interviews conducted over the course of fifteen years, the authors take a holistic approach by tracing how victims experienced the horrific events, as well as how they have coped with the aftermath as they struggled to resume their lives. The Rwanda genocide deserves study and documentation not only because of the failure of the Western world to intervene, but also because it raises profound questions about the ways survivors create a new life out of the ashes of all that was destroyed. How do they deal with the all-encompassing traumas of genocide? Is forgiveness possible? And what does the process of rebuilding teach us about genocide, trauma, and human life?

Political Invisibility and Mobilization: Women against State Violence in Argentina, Yugoslavia, and Liberia

Selina Gallo-Cruz, Routledge, 2020 

Political Invisibility and Mobilization explores the unseen opportunities available to those considered irrelevant and disregarded during periods of violent repression. In a comparative study of three women’s peace movements, in Argentina, the former Yugoslavia, and Liberia, the concept of political invisibility is developed to identify the unexpected beneficial effects of marginalization in the face of regime violence and civil war. Each chapter details the unique ways these movements avoided being targeted as threats to regime power and how they utilized free spaces to mobilize for peace. Their organizing efforts among international networks are described as a form of field-shifting that gained them the authority to expand their work at home to bring an end to war and rebuild society. The robust conceptual framework developed herein offers new ways to analyze the variations and nuances of how social status interacts with opportunities for effective activism. This book presents a sophisticated theory of political invisibility with historical detail from three remarkable stories of courage in the face of atrocity. With relevance for political sociology, social movement studies, women’s studies, and peace and conflict studies, it contributes to scholarly understanding of mobilization in repressive states while also offering strategic insight to movement practitioners.

Social Life in the Movies: How Hollywood Imagines War, Schools, Romance, Aging, and Social Inequality

James J. Dowd, Routledge, 2020 

Through an analysis of hundreds of Hollywood movies, this book examines some of the most contentious social issues of our time, including racism, social inequality, sexism, and gerontophobia. With studies of some of the most enduring film genres in Hollywood’s history, including romantic films such as Casablanca, war movies from World War II through the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, alienation films, including Five Easy Pieces and Lost in Translation, the school movie, from Goodbye, Mr. Chips to other films set in academia, including Dead Poets Society and Dangerous Minds, the book outlines and demonstrates the sociological approach to viewing films and highlights the socially conservative nature of much Hollywood movie production, which draws on common stereotypes and reinforces dominant cultural values - but is also capable of challenging and serving to change them.

Unconventional Combat: Intersectional Action in the Veterans’ Peace Movement

Michael A. Messner, Oxford University Press

In Unconventional Combat, Michael A. Messner traces a generational shift of the US veterans’ peace movement.  Centering on life-history interviews with six veterans of color, Messner shows how their experiences of sexual and gender harassment, sexual assault, racist and homophobic abuse during their military service has shaped their political views and action. Drawing upon participant observation with the Veterans For Peace and About Face organizations and interviews with older male veterans as his backdrop, Messner shows how veterans’ military experiences form their collective “situated knowledge” of intersecting oppressions. This knowledge, Messner argues, further shapes their intersectional praxis, which promises to transform the veterans’ peace movement and potentially link their anti-militarist work with other movement groups working for change. As intersectionality has increasingly become central to the conversation on social movements, Unconventional Combat is not only a story about the US veterans’ peace movement, but it also offers broad relevance to the larger world of social justice activism. 

Kadivar, M., Ketchley N., Sotoudeh-Sherbaf, A., and Barrie, C. 2024. “Online Calls for Protest and Offline Mobilization in Autocracies: Evidence from the 2017 Dey Protests in Iran.” European Sociological Review jcae017. doi: 10.1093/esr/jcae017.

Swed, O; Ridwan, M. 2024. "The Ideology That Binds Us: Homophily in Ideology and Terrorists Collaborations" Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2024.2336895

Yohanani, L. 2023.Fighting to belong: drivers for transnational diaspora military service in Israel and beyond. CMS 12, 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-024-00363-6

Turkoglu, Oguzhan, Ruth Ditlmann, and Berenike Firestone. 2023. “Commemorating Local Victims of Past Atrocities and Far-Right Support over Time”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120(28), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2221158120.

Ketchley, Neil, and Gilad Wenig. 2023“Purging to Transform the Post-Colonial State: Evidence From the 1952 Egyptian Revolution.” Comparative Political Studies. 1–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231209966.

Hass, Jeffey K. 2023. “Making Sense of Suffering, Soviet Politics, and the Human Condition.” Noveishaia istoriia Rossii, vol. 13, #4: 840-860.

Hass, Jeffey K. and Nikita Lomagin. 2023. “Unseen Roots of an Unexpected Revolution: Party Elites, Economic Reforms, and Expectations versus Outcomes in Late 1980s Leningrad.” Noveishaia istoriia Rossii, vol. 13, #2: 412-429 (https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu24.2023.210).

Hass, Jeffrey K. 2023. “Power and Culture.” Pp. 739-743 in SAGE Encyclopedia of Leadership Studies, edited by George R. Goethals, Scott T. Allison, and Georgia J. Sorenson. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE (DOI: 10.4135/9781071840801)

Hass, Jeffrey K. 2023. “Resilience of the Simple? Lessons from the Blockade of Leningrad.” Pp. 237-258 in How Worlds Collapse: What History, Systems, and Complexity Can Teach Us About Our Modern World and Fragile Future, edited by Miguel Centeno, Peter W. Callahan, Paul Larcey, and Thayer Patterson. New York: Routledge. (DOI: 10.4324/9781003331384-15)

Buck, Andrew and Jeffrey K. Hass. 2022. “Understanding the War in Ukraine.” Trajectories, vol. 33, #1: 9-12.

Hass, Jeffey K. and Nikita Lomagin. 2021. “Seeing Like a Starving State: The Soviet Political Economy of Death (and Life) in the Blockade of Leningrad.” Noveishaia istoriia Rossii, vol. 11, #2: 324-338. (https://doi.org/10.21638/11701/spbu24.2021.202)

Chávez, Kerry., & Swed, Ori. (2023).  How Hamas innovated with drones to operate like an army. Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists.

Chávez, Kerry., & Swed, Ori. (2023). Emulating underdogs: Tactical drones in the Russia-Ukraine war. Contemporary Security Policy, 44(4), 592-605.

Swed Ori, Maria Caparini, and Sorcha Macleod. (2023). Private military and security companies in armed conflict. SIPRI Yearbook 2023.

Corey Payne, Swed Ori, (2023). Disentangling the US military's climate change paradox: An institutional approach. Sociology Compass.

Swed Ori. (2023). Where the bombs fell: Measuring compliance with humanitarian treaties. Social Science Research. 10.

Chavez Kerry, Ori Swed. (2023). The Empirical Determinants of Violent Nonstate Actor Drone Adoption. Armed Forces & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X231164570

Dassanayaka, Sachith Eranga, Ori Swed, and Dimitri Volchenkov. (2023). Mapping the Russian Internet Troll Network on Twitter using a Predictive Model. Journal of Vibration Testing and System Dynamics. 7 (02), 113-128

Swed Ori. (2023). Fighting Someone Else’s War. Footnotes, 51(1).

Swed Ori. (2023). The Afghanistan War’s Legacy: The Reimagining of the Outsourcing of War and Security. Armed Forces & Society, 49(4)

Jaster Daniel, Swed Ori, and Bruno Frere. (2022). The critical masses: The rise of contemporary populism and its relation to solidarity, systems, and lifeworlds. Society, 59(6).

Chavez Kerry, Ori Swed. (2022). Weak States and Loose Arms: Lessons and Warnings from Afghanistan to Ukraine. War on the Rocks.

Chavez Kerry, Ori Swed. (2022.) Conflict contagion via weapons proliferation out of collapsed states. Small Wars & Insurgencies, 1-37

Hajjar, R.M. & Ender, M.G. (2021). “Boredom, Fragmentation, and a U.S. Army Unit in Eastern Europe,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 48(2):223-254.

Kelty, R., De Angelis, K.A., Ender, M.G., Matthews, M.D., & Rohall, D.E. (2023). “American Attitudes Toward Military Service of Transgender People,” in James E. Parco, David A. Levy, Daphne DePorres, and Alfredo Sandoval (editors). Attitudes Aren’t Free: A Call to Action (Volume II). Palmer Lake, CO: Enso Books, pp. 305-323 (Chapt. #39). Volume available online Open Access: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/James_E_Parco_Attitudes_Aren_t_Free?id=UFzEEAAAQBAJ.

Ender, M.G. (2022). Book review essay of Hellfire from Paradise Ranch. On the Front Lines of Drone Warfare by Joseba Zulaika (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2020). Contemporary Sociology, 51(1): 80-81.Kriesberg, Louis,. 2022. “Conflict Transformation, Constructive,” Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict, Lester R. Kurtz, Ed., 3rd ed. Amsterdam, Elsevier, 

Leader Maynard, Jonathan and Aliza Luft. (2023). Humanizing Dehumanization Research.​ Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cresp.2023.100102

Strader, E., & Smith, C. M. (2022). Some Parents Survive and Some Don't: The Army and the Family as “Greedy Institutions”. Public Administration Review.

Youssef, M. (2021). Unlikely Feminist Coalitions: Islamist and Secularist Women’s Organizing in Tunisia. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society.

Swed, O. (2021). Implausible sovereigns and their organizational logic: violent non-state actors’ response to COVID-19. Small Wars & Insurgencies, 1-30.

Swed, O., & Materne, A. (2021). No Accounting for Bad Contracting: Private Military and Security Contracts and Ineffective Regulation in Conflict Areas. Studies in Comparative International Development, 1-27.

Swed, O., & Davis, A. P. (2021). The Domestic Terrorist Profile. In Terrorism inside American Borders. 27-36

Acosta, L. (2021). Victimhood dissociation and conflict resolution: evidence from the Colombian peace plebiscite. Theory and Society, 1-36.

Zahar, A. (2021). "From Recognition to Redistribution? Protest Movements in Iraq in the Age of ‘New Civil Society" Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding

Gosnell, C. L., Kelly, D. R., Ender, M. G., & Matthews, M. D. (2020). Character strengths and performance outcomes among military brat and non-brat cadets. Military Psychology, 32(2), 186-197.

De Angelis, K. K., Kelty, R., Ender, M. G., Rohall, D. E., & Matthews, M. D. (2020). Ubiquity with a Dark Side: Civil-Military Gaps in Social Media Usage. In Social Media and the Armed Forces (pp. 15-30). Springer, Cham.

Luft, A. (2020). How Do you Repair a Broken World? Conflict (ing) Archives after the Holocaust. Qualitative Sociology, 43(3), 317-343.

Savelsberg, J. J. (2020). Writing biography in the face of cultural trauma: Nazi descent and the management of spoiled identities. American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 1-31.

Bloom, J. (2020). The Dynamics of Repression and Insurgent Practice in the Black Liberation Struggle. American Journal of Sociology, 126(2), 195-259.

Chavez K., & Swed, O. (2020). "The proliferation of drones to violent nonstate actors". Defence Studies.

Chavez K., & Swed, O. (2020). "Off the Shelf: The violent nonstate actor drone threat". Air & Space Power Journal. 34, 1.

Golubović, Jelena. (2019). “‘One Day I Will Tell This to My Daughter’: Serb Women, Silence, and the Politics of Victimhood in Sarajevo.” Anthropological Quarterly 92 (4): 1173-1199. 

Kamenou, N. (2020). “When one doesn't even exist': Europeanization, trans* subjectivities, and agency in Cyprus.” Sexualities, forthcoming. 

Kamenou, N. (2020). “Difficult Intersections: Nation (alism) and the LGBTIQ Movement in Cyprus.” Pp. 162-82 in E. Evans & E. Le pinard, eds, Intersectionality in Feminist and Queer Movements: Confronting Privileges. London & New York: Routledge. 

Kamenou, N. (2019). “Feminism in Cyprus: women’s agency, gender, and peace in the shadow of nationalism.” International Feminist Journal of Politics. DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2019.1687000 

Kamenou, N. (2019). “Sexuality, gender and the (re) making of modernity and nationhood in Cyprus.” Women's Studies International Forum, 74. 

Kamenou, N. (2019). “The LGBTI Movement in Cyprus: Activism, Law, and Change Across the Divide” (with E. Ethemer, C. Gavrielides & O. Bullici). Published in English, Greek, Turkish & German. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2019. ISBN: 9789963202164 

Krase, Jerome and Judith N. DeSena (Eds.) (2020). Gentrification around the World, Volume 1: Gentrifiers and the Displaced, Palgrave-Macmillan. 

Krase, Jerome and Judith N. DeSena (Eds.) (2020). Gentrification around the World, Volume 2: Innovative Approaches, Palgrave-Macmillan. 

Swed, O., Kwon, J., Feldscher, B., & Crosbie, T. (2020). The corporate war dead: New perspectives on the demographics of American and British Contractors. Armed Forces & Society, 46(1), 3-24.

Swed, O., & Burland, D. (2020). Contractors in Iraq: Exploited Class or Exclusive Club?. Armed Forces & Society, 0095327X20927471. 

Swed, O; & Burland, D. (2020). “The Global Expansion of PMSCs: Trends, Opportunities, and Risks” Working Group on the use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights and impeding the exercise of the right of peoples to self-determination.

Swed, O., Sheehan, C. M., & Butler, J. S. (2020). The Digital Divide and Veterans’ Health: Differences in Self-Reported Health by Internet Usage. Armed Forces & Society, 46(2), 238-258. 

Swed, O; & Burland, D. (2020).  "Outsourcing War and Security".  Oxford Encyclopedia of the Military in Politics. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.ORE_POL-01925.R1

Swed, O. The path to outsourcing security in Southeast Asia. (2020). NYU SPS CGA Working Paper No. 2/2020.

Swed, O. (2020). Breaking the Order: The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Countersurveillance on the West Bank. Surveillance & Society, 18(1), 48-60.

Swed, O. (2020). When Ideology Replaces the Market: Gentrification in East Jerusalem. In Gentrification around the World, Volume I (pp. 265-290). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Swed, O., & Stubblefield, S. F. (2020). 9 Resisting or appropriating. in Limited Statehood and Informal Governance in the Middle East and Africa.

Tubi, O. (2020). "Kill me a mosquito and I will build a state: political economy and the socio-technicalities of Jewish colonization in Palestine, 1922–1940." Theory and Society: 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09402-4