Recent books from 91探花 faculty and staff include those from legal studies at 91探花Tacoma, international studies, political science, history, and Asian languages and literature.聽

91探花Tacoma assistant professor collaboration with Policing in Chicago Research Group

鈥�鈥� was collaboratively authored by , assistant professor of legal studies at 91探花Tacoma, and the Policing in Chicago Research Group. They developed the book in dialogue with those on the front lines of struggles against racist policing in Black, Latinx and Arab/Muslim communities.

鈥淚mperial Policing鈥� analyzes the connections between three police 鈥渨ars鈥� 鈥� on crime, terror and immigrants 鈥� with a focus on the weaponization of data and the coordination between local and national agencies to suppress communities of color and undermine social movements. Topics include: high-tech, data-based tools of policing; racialized archetypes; the manufacturing of criminals and terrorists; the subversion of sanctuary city protections; and abolitionist responses to policing, such as the Erase the Database campaign.

The book contains analysis and ideas for solutions at a critical political moment, and serves as a rare, vital example of scholars working directly with community organizations to map police networks and intervene in policing practices.

鈥溾�業mperial Policing鈥� is an important offering that decenters normative modes of knowledge production and the academy itself and instead provides a model for collaborative knowledge production and change work that academics ought to take up and consider,鈥� Ravichandran said. 鈥淭his book deepens abolitionist analyses of U.S. Empire and broadens abolition as a necessary global coalitional framework.鈥�

Modern Taiwan through an agrarian lens

鈥�鈥� is a recent book by , associate professor of international studies at the UW.

The book recounts the history of modern Taiwan through the lens of agrarian development. Starting in the 1950s, Taiwan sent international development missions to over two dozen nations across the Global South. From the 1950s to 1990s, Taiwan鈥檚 GDP per capita grew by 800%. While researching this growth, an article caught Lin鈥檚 attention: a report of how Taiwan鈥檚 efforts surrounding improved varieties of broccoli rabe would solve hunger, famine and malnutrition.

鈥淗ow could broccoli rabe make the world a better place?鈥� Lin wrote in a blog post about his book. 鈥淥ver the next decade, I traced the arc of agricultural development in libraries and archives across the world, from Ithaca, New York to Shanhua, Taiwan. The more I delved into this question, the more I unearthed a time when Taiwan鈥檚 contributions to the world weren鈥檛 in advanced semiconductors, but rather rice and vegetables.鈥�

In 鈥淚n the Global Vanguard,鈥� Lin examines how Taiwanese technicians and agricultural scientists introduced new crop varieties, extended new agricultural technologies and extolled the virtues of a Taiwanese approach to development across the Global South.聽

Lin argues the missions eventually shaped how the Taiwanese conceived their place in the world. At the same time, the Nationalist party-state of Taiwan co-opted agrarian science to position Taiwan as a modern nation, legitimizing the government’s authoritarian rule by martial law.

Ordinary people and the global legal order

鈥�鈥� examines an important, and often underappreciated, actor in international law.聽

Written by , professor of political science at the UW, the book is of interdisciplinary interest due to its combination of constitutional and international law theories and a wide range of quantitative and qualitative data.

When considering who counts in the international legal order, most answers focus on governments, leaders, generals, lawyers or other elites. Wallace integrates insights from law and political behavior to advance the idea of 鈥減opular international law,鈥� where ordinary people are considered important legal actors.

鈥淒rawing on a blend of experiments, conventional polling, media coverage and historical cases, this book shows the ways in which national publics can have an impact on core functions of international law,鈥� Wallace said. 鈥淚nsights from the book offer an account of international legal politics from below 鈥� taking seriously the place of ordinary people in international affairs.

Co-authored book began with love of 18th century poetry

鈥�鈥� is a new book co-authored by the UW鈥檚 , associate professor of history, and , professor of Asian languages and literature. True to its subtitle, the book emerged from friendly conversations they had about early 18th century poetry in Urdu 鈥� a language that was called Rekhtah at the time.

Their interdisciplinary conversations led to the growing conviction that the diverse roots of this important vernacular tradition had become obscured through selective attention to a handful of poets associated with rarified imperial courtly environments. Poetic networks had become erased as poems were taken out of their social contexts and isolated in separate tomes by author.聽聽

鈥淰ali Dakhani and the Early Rekhtah Networks鈥� presents the evidence to reconstruct these lost literary networks of Urdu’s formative past. The book reframes the history of Urdu within the diverse context from which it emerged: lively social gatherings, bazaars, shrines and multiple courts of 18th-century South Asia, highlighting its engagement with diverse regional cultures and communities in South Asia.聽

The cover illustration, an 18th-century canvas by Mughal painter Chitarman II, vividly depicts the many literary references to “Lovers and Beloveds” featured in the poetry of this period, inviting the reader to join the authors in sharing its pleasures.

For more information, contact Lauren Kirschman at lkirsc@uw.edu

The positive effects of military service on public opinion are strongest among Republicans and conservatives often viewed as opposed to immigration reforms seeking to expand access to citizenship. That support also remains strong when the military service pathway is paired with less-popular options such as requiring would-be citizens to pursue a college education.

The research, from 91探花political science associate professors and , was in March in the journal International Migration Review; their paper is titled “Who Gets to Have a DREAM? Examining Public Support for Immigration Reform.”

“We find that the military pathway is very convincing, even if you pair it with something else,” said Jord谩n Wallace.

“That’s really important, because what it tells us is that there is so much benefit and value assigned to military service, it’s able to essentially carry another pathway that people wouldn’t necessarily be as inclined to support.”

Their findings may have implications for crafting immigration legislation that could attract enough bipartisan support to pass both houses of Congress. Immigration is also among the leading issues in the coming 2020 presidential race.

The (short for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act), taken up by Congress first in 2001 and voted on in 2010, offered a path to citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. before the age of 16, had passed background checks and lived in the country for at least five years. Eligible immigrants were further required to have completed at least two years of college education or military service. In 2010 the legislation passed the House but died in the Senate.

Public opinion polls on the DREAM Act, Jord谩n Wallace said, have tended to ask whether or how strongly respondents support it. “But that doesn’t really tell us what the component or pathway is that people do support.”

The researchers wondered: “What are strategies that can be employed if your goal is to pass immigration reform in the Trump era? Might you have to frame things in a specific way to build a coalition for support?”

To study this, they contracted for survey space with the Harvard-administered Congressional Cooperative Election Study. Of this nationally representative survey of 20,000 overall respondents, their study, with questions tailored to their inquiries, involved 1,000 respondents and was conducted between November 2011 and January 2012.

Respondents in the control group were told only that Congress had recently considered legislation to allow undocumented immigrants to apply for citizenship if they were brought to the U.S. as children by their parents, but did not specifically mention the DREAM Act or any additional limiting criteria.

The survey then asked, “Do you support or oppose that such people should be allowed to become citizens?鈥� Respondents answered on a four-point scale ranging from “strongly support” to “strongly oppose” extending citizenship to this immigrant group.

“Because the study centered on attitudes toward immigration reform,” the researchers write, “we considered this the most appropriate control

group since it provided a broader policy to which each of the more restrictive treatment conditions could be compared.”

The control condition was compared to support among three treatment conditions stating additional delimiting criteria, or possible pathways to citizenship. These were “enroll in college,” “join the military” or “join the military or enroll in college,” the latter of which mirrors the configuration of the 2010 DREAM Act.

Across the entire sample group, the researchers write, about 65% of all respondents “either supported or strongly supported” a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.

“Not surprisingly,” they write, “Republicans are much less supportive of immigration reform in general, with just over 50%, overall, supporting a pathway to citizenship compared with almost 80% among Democrats.”

The researchers tasked themselves with learning “whether respondents were more supportive of certain subgroups 鈥� military service only, college only, or military and college combined 鈥� within this undocumented population than others.”

The findings were seen, the researchers said, in the difference between answers from respondents in the control group and those in the three choices.

The results, they said, showed a clear preference for military service as a pathway to citizenship for undocumented youth: Those given the military-only option were 11 percentage points more likely to support the immigration reform compared with the control group, 72% versus 61%.

Wallace and Jord谩n Wallace also found that this effect is strongest among “those groups who are traditionally viewed as being most opposed to immigration reforms expanding access to citizenship,” in particular Republicans and conservatives.

• Republicans were 25 percentage points more likely to support a military-only option than the control group (65% versus 40%), and conservatives 23 percent more likely (62% versus 39%).
• When education is combined with military service, support among Republicans and conservatives still saw a 21% increase over the control group for Republican respondents, and a 17% increase among conservatives.

The findings, the researchers write, “(are) consistent with the view that the public is willing to reward those who have volunteered to serve directly in defense of the country. The soldier-civilian imperative used by numerous marginalized veteran groups in the past to claim greater citizenship rights shows several signs of having a welcome audience among the wider citizenry.”

To get immigration legislation passed, Jord谩n Wallace said, “It’s going to be critical to think about: Are there ways that you could convince Republicans in Congress to move forward to support a bill? Because even if every single Democrat in the Senate votes in favor, you still need some Republicans, and the question is, how do you do that? There are going to be more strategic ways to frame legislation that will appeal, I think, to those members. That is something that’s worth thinking about if your goal is actual passage of meaningful immigration reform.”

It’s possible, she noted, that the activists originally promoting the DREAM Act 鈥� often on college campuses 鈥� may have felt it was “too high of a burden” to suggest military service, which historically has disproportionately enrolled and thus endangered people of color as a pathway to citizenship.

But they might have been more successful turning opposition into approval had they “at least combined college with military in a way that would have appealed to Republicans or conservatives.”

Although the survey was conducted several years ago, the researchers argue the findings remain relevant for the present moment as public attitudes toward immigration, as well as the military, have remained relatively stable.

Geoffrey Wallace said, “There has been a tradition not only in the U.S. but in other societies as well 鈥� the citizen-soldier ideal 鈥� that citizenship brings certain benefits but also certain responsibilities, foremost among these is a martial one. And that was one of the reasons for conscription 鈥� not only in terms of national military capabilities, it was also to build citizens.”

Even with conscription long past and an all-volunteer army today in the U.S. and often elsewhere too, he added, “What we find is that, especially among Republicans and the public writ large 鈥� among the existing citizenry 鈥� the notion of the citizen-soldier ideal still resonates.”

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For more information, contact Sophia Jord谩n Wallace at 206-543-5701 or sophiajw@uw.edu, or Geoffrey Wallace at 206-685-5580 or gprwall@uw.edu.