Partha Chatterjee begins Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986) with an epigraph from Bertold Brecht’s Galileo: where “there are obstacles the shortest line between two points may well be a crooked line.” This is a fitting metaphor for Chatterjee’s subject of political revolution.

Mobilizing in Uncertainty is a model of clear and impactful interpretive social science. It leads the reader into the anguished processes by which ordinary citizens decide whether to take up arms, take sides, hide or flee a coming war, through a sociohistorical study of mobilization during the Georgian-Abkhaz War of 1992-1993.

Bread and Freedom is a remarkable book. It brings alive the profound uncertainty and myriad aspirations that people living through times of radical political upheaval experience, and the ways such lived contingency becomes forgotten as unruly realities tamed through narratives of fait accompli.

Through her extensive research, mentorship, and teaching, Dr. Mary Fainsod Katzenstein has intentionally and imaginatively explored issues including (but not limited to) ethnic politics, social movements, feminism, and mass incarceration. By epitomizing how political scientists may elucidate and critically challenge enduring political questions and concepts for and with many communities, Mary’s work is exemplary within the interpretivist community.

“Engaged Silences” illuminates how marginalized people exercise strategic agency in oppressive contexts. The chapter presents, more concretely, a close examination of how the poor widow of a Hutu participant in the Rwandan genocide navigates life post-genocide.

Natasha Behl’s Gendered Citizenship presents a fascinating and moving analysis of gendered violence. From an interpretive vantage point, this study asks why there exists pervasive genderbased discrimination, exclusion, and violence in India when the Indian constitution seemingly builds an inclusive democracy committed to gender and caste equality.

In this meticulously researched book, Diana Kim asks: why did Western colonial powers, which had long profited from the Southeast Asian trade in opium, opt to shut it down?

Focusing on Indigenous people’s struggles against settler colonial rule, Theft is Property! is at once a genealogy of dispossession and an effort to highlight and engage with Indigenous scholarship and activist work from the nineteenth century to the present.

The book is a tour de force. Combining both archival and ethnographic methods masterfully, Riofrancos’ book stands out for its sophisticated treatment of a topic of abiding concern to political science, namely the study of resource politics. But unlike conventional accounts, Riofrancos refocuses our attention onto the field of political struggle.

From The Concept of Representation (1967) to The Attack of the Blob (1998), Hanna Pitkin’s work has elucidated the multiple meanings of concepts and the implications ordinary language use analysis holds for revealing how we think and act in the world. Inspired in large part by the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hannah Arendt, Pitkin’s fine-grained analyses of terms such as representation, justice, judgment, and membership have operated, as the sand metaphor suggests, as an irritant within the academy, perturbing conventional modes of thinking— challenging us all to unsettle existing assumptions, as she did, and to view our tacit knowledge critically.

South Africa is often heralded as a beacon of successful transition into democracy; yet its citizens are riddled with anxiety and insecurity, often taking to vigilantism in order to protect themselves including from the state itself. Why would citizens feel this way, especially given the fact that South Africa has a constitution with one of the most robust set of rights’ protections in the world?

Wedeen’s ethnography focuses on the case of Bashar Al Asad’s Syria, capturing the excitement and anxiety of the revolutionary aspirations that animated the uprising of 2011 followed by the complex trajectory of resistance and complacency that developed once a brutal civil war took hold.

In this meticulously researched and theoretically sophisticated work, Professor Jana Krause explores key factors that contribute to the escalation of communal violence to the threshold of civil war and contrasts them with forces that succeed in preventing such escalation.

In this dramatic reimagining of discussion of ethnographic methods as a conversation among a cast of ethnographers brought together for an ethnographic trial, Among Wolves transcends the limitations of writing a methods book in both content and form.

Fujii debunks common myths about interviews and makes us see constraints, limitations, mistakes and the resistance of subjects as “gifts” that can enhance one’s research, instead of liabilities that one must accommodate or patch over.

Through his detailed empirical “sociological portrait” of bordering practices on the US borders with Mexico and Canada, Longo successfully challenges notions of borders as “thin and vertical” lines between sovereign territories.

Dr. Lee Ann Fujii passed away unexpectedly in March 2018, and if she would cringe at anything, it would be an award citation that begins with a long and detailed summary of her (vast) research accomplishments. As a gifted presenter who helped so many of us craft talks and manuscripts, Lee Ann always encouraged us to “Start with a good story!” and “Get people interested!” Taking her advice, this citation begins with a number of stories, because it is impossible to choose only one about someone as vibrant and brilliant as Lee Ann.