In the Shadow of Violence: Politics, Economics, and the Problems of Development - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1107014212 ISBN 13: 9781107014213

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2012

Synopsis

This book applies the conceptual framework of Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast's Violence and Social Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2009) to nine developing countries. The cases show how political control of economic privileges is used to limit violence and coordinate coalitions of powerful organizations. Rather than castigating politicians and elites as simply corrupt, the case studies illustrate why development is so difficult to achieve in societies where the role of economic organizations is manipulated to provide political balance and stability. The volume develops the idea of limited-access social order as a dynamic social system in which violence is constantly a threat, and political and economic outcomes result from the need to control violence rather than promoting economic growth or political rights.

About this title

Book Description

This book helps explain how violence is limited by constructing social arrangements in which valuable economic privileges are used to coordinate political coalitions. The volume thus helps account for how and why it can be so difficult to implement development policies designed to raise the rate of economic growth or increase political and civil liberties. There is a logic to the social arrangements of societies that live in the shadow of violence. Until we understand that logic, we are unlikely to understand how to promote economic and political development.

About the Author

Douglass C. North is co-recipient of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. He is Spencer T. Olin Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and Bartlett Burnap Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor North received the John R. Commons Award in 1992. He is author of eleven books, including Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (1990), Understanding the Process of Economic Change (2005), and co-author, with John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast, of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1107014212
• ISBN 13: 9781107014213
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 376
• Editor: North Douglass C., Wallis John Joseph, Webb Steven B., Weingast Barry R.