Ordering Power

Dan Slater is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His published articles can be found in disciplinary journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, the American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, and Studies in Comparative International Development, as well as Asia-oriented journals such as Indonesia and the Taiwan Journal of Democracy. He is also a co-editor of Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis (2008). Professor Slater has conducted fieldwork since the late 1990s in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand.

• Part I. The Puzzles and Arguments: 1. To extract and to organize; 2. States and the regimes that run them; Part II. Contentious Politics and the Institutions of Order: 3. Colonialism, cleavages, and the contours of contention; 4. Mobilization and countermobilization amid colonial retreat; 5. Varieties of violence in authoritarian onset; Part III. The Foundations and Fates of Authoritarian Leviathans: 6. Protection and provision in authoritarian leviathans; 7. Contentious politics and the struggle for democratization; Part IV. Extending the Arguments: 8. Congruent cases in Southeast Asia; 9. The consequences of contention.

'Three cheers for Dan Slater! One for showing that elite opposition to democracy has taken quite different forms in Southeast Asia. Another for revealing how different kinds of counterrevolutionary politics have been a response to different types of political challenges. And the third for demonstrating how comparative-historical analysis can brightly illuminate just these kinds of large and consequential processes. All serious students of state formation and democratization will want to read Ordering Power.' Jeff Goodwin, New York University