Charles Brockett

Sewanee: The University of the South · Political Science

This ebook meant for the common citizen portrays trends in public opinion about immigration in 21 easily read graphs, many of which extend into late 2019 and some through 2020. This report also relates these trends in public opinion to their broader context, such as the successful immigration reforms of 1965 and 1986 and the failures during the adm...

Friendly relations between the United States and Costa Rica were strained during the early 1970s as the latter sought the recall of the US ambassador and CIA station chief amidst rumours of coup plots against influential social democratic president José Figueres. Figueres’s efforts to normalise relations with the Soviet bloc while legalising the Co...

This study analyzes whether Guatemalan success with the kingpin decapitation strategy of bringing major drug traffickers to justice has accomplished its greater objectives of reducing cocaine trafficking and drug-related violence. The analysis finds little evidence of success for the first objective in Guatemala but notable success for the second....

This essay reviews the following works: Mobilizing Democracy: Globalization and Citizen Protest. By Paul Almeida. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 191. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9781421414096. Nicaragua: Navigating the Politics of Democracy. By David Close. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. Pp. vii + 254. $59.95 clo...

Julie MarieBunck and Michael RossFowler, Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation: Drug Trafficking and the Law in Central America (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2012), pp. xii+431, $89.95, hb. - Volume 45 Issue 3 - CHARLES D. BROCKETT

The differing perspectives and actions of US government, business and labour towards the Guatemalan government and Guatemalan trade unionists themselves in the half-decade or so following the overthrow of the Arbenz administration in 1954 are the focus of this study. Few areas were more important to the US project for Guatemala following the Castil...

This book offers an in-depth analysis of the confrontation between popular movements and repressive regimes in Central America during the three decades beginning in 1960, particularly in El Salvador and Guatemala. Examining both urban and rural groups as well as both nonviolent social movements and revolutionary movements, this study has two primar...

Concerns about the preservation of farm and forest land in the United States in the face of development pressures have led to many land preservation policies, including preferential, or use-value (UV), taxation of property. Use-value taxation permits landowners to continue deriving income from their land without having to pay the higher taxes occas...

Over the past two decades, forests in the southeastern United States have undergone dramatic changes as the result of urban sprawl and conversion to intensively managed pine plantations. The Cumberland Plateau, an important ecoregion in the southeastern United States, contains some of the largest remaining tracts of privately owned, native hardwood...

This study of Tennessee's tax incentive program for nonindnstrial forest preservation on private lands provides perhaps the most thorough empirical analysis available of this type of public program. First, the program's equity consequences are analyzed by examining both the concentration of land ownership and of subsidy benefits among program parti...

Based primarily on declassified U. S. government documents, this study analyzes the U. S. effort to build a “showcase for democracy” in Guatemala following the U. S. -engineered regime change of 1954. The effort was doomed, for the U.S. government lacked both unity of purpose and the necessary continuous commitment at the top. The documents also de...

Based primarily on declassified U.S. government documents, this study analyzes the U.S. effort to build a "showcase for democracy" in Guatemala following the U.S.-engineered regime change of 1954. The effort was doomed, for the U.S. government lacked both unity of purpose and the necessary continuous commitment at the top. The documents also demons...

This study evaluates the impact of state policies on forest cover in Costa Rica, focusing on the influence of public policies on private incentives for preserving forest cover. Three periods are analyzed: the "laissez-faire period" when high rates of deforestation were largely unrestrained; the "interventionist period" when state policies created p...

Survey research is used to evaluate how property tax reductions affect the land-use practices and attitudes of nonindustrial private forest landowners in rural Tennessee. The comparison between participants and nonparticipants in the Tennessee Greenbelt program (rather than the determinants of participation itself) provides a basis for evaluating t...

The Osa Peninsula and its Golfo Dulce Forest Reserve, which contain the largest remaining forest on Costa Rica's Pacific coast, currently experience great pressures from smallholders clearing for agriculture and gold mining. The paper compares the sustainability of Costa Rica's current model of extensive government intervention on the Osa, combined...

Many people [in Guatemala] did begin to join the guerrillas, while many more were sympathetic or quietly supportive. The guerrillas are the only remaining source of defense left to a community or family. I know of villages that experienced actual massacres against innocent campesinos , who were not even members of coops. The survivors of these mass...

The value of cross-national quantitative studies of the relationship between mass political violence and land inequality is challenged along three lines. First, gross and systematic errors in the political violence data of the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (the usual data source for empirical studies) render them worthless for C...

The literature on the determinants of popular mobilization and social movements is rich with theoretical insights concerning the role of a variety of factors, from the generation of grievances by changing socioeconomic structures to the assistance of outside agents to the mobilization of resources. The crucial conditioning role of political systems...

For approximately the last two-and-a-half decades it has been a stated goal of both Honduran and U.S. policy to improve the welfare of the Honduran people, both directly through the provision of services and indirectly through the promotion of economic development. The need is great; Honduras has the lowest per capita GNP in Central America ($660 i...

onduras is a very poor country. On standard measures of socioconomic development, Honduras typically ranks third from the bottom among Latin American nations. Not surprisingly, the greatest concentrations of its poor are found in the rural areas. In the two and one-half decades since socio-economic development became an object of Honduran public po...

This essay utilizes Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral, or justice, reasoning to address the issue of international distributive justice. Kohlberg's theory is used to clarify the logical and ethical differences between two "postconventional" perspectives on international obligations, the interdependence perspective and the shared humanity perspect...

Widespread malnutrition persists in Guatemala despite substantial economic growth since 1960. Indeed, there was a deterioration in the living standards of many (for example, the Indians in the Western highlands) even prior to the destruction caused by the government's pacification campaigns of the early 1980s. Chronic and widespread malnutrition ha...

To establish an objective conception of human rights, one must first identify basic needs intrinsic to all people and then determine whether these needs are or can be hierarchically ordered. Many scholars have conducted research on the concept of human needs, particularly in the area of human rights. Among these scholars are Abraham H. Maslow ("The...