In late-socialist Romania, the state sought to govern economic crisis by demanding market-like conduct from cultural institutions while continuing to bind them to the political structures of socialism. Drawing on archival planning reports, media accounts, and post-socialist recollections, this article traces the emergence of a “self-financing regime” that reorganized cultural production around revenue generation, entrepreneurial conduct, and managerial accountability. I argue that self-financing constituted neither a retreat of socialism nor an incipient transition to capitalism, but an experiment in governing crisis by relocating the burdens of economic survival onto institutions themselves. This shift generated a contradictory institutional world: cultural actors were compelled to pursue economic self-sufficiency and become self-optimizing subjects even as markets remained ideologically repudiated, socialist obligations endured, and nominal decentralization extended bureaucratic oversight. Yet contradiction did not simply signal the incoherence of late socialism. As these tensions became embedded in everyday institutional practice, contradiction provided the very means through which austerity was rendered governable. The Romanian case thus shows how market-like rationalities could emerge from within socialist crisis management and crystallize into historically distinct forms of governance. By situating these entanglements before the so-called “end of history,” the article unsettles teleological narratives of socialist-capitalist rupture and reconsiders crisis as a historically contingent site where seemingly opposed political-economic logics can be made and remade in practice.

Through comparative analysis of two historical cases of transition from hierarchical to competitive international orders—from the Han dynasty to the Period of Disunion in third-century China, and from the Abbasid Caliphate to the Islamic Commonwealth in the tenth century—we consider how social movements have long been significant facilitators of international change. With reference to the contributions to these transitions of early Daoist and Sunni movements respectively, we offer a comparative framework for understanding how social movements may undermine established hierarchies and induce legitimacy contests that contribute toward the emergence of new international orders. Moreover, by contrasting these cases against the role of the Reformation movement in the development of European international order, the article both decenters the European experience and illuminates how social movements can be central to crafting fundamental, yet varying, relationships between political authority and society across highly diverse cultural and temporal contexts.

Decolonization left the future of small, city-states uncertain. Without large domestic markets to turn to, some city-states developed financial industries. Comparing Kuwait and Singapore, I examine how these states developed their financial sectors after decades of colonial underdevelopment. While both states sought to develop international financial centers, Singapore was far more successful in doing so. Kuwait opened numerous merchant-owned, domestic commercial banks but with sluggish rates of growth, while Singapore saw the emergence of new state-run banks; the consolidation, modernization, and growth of privately owned banks; and the establishment of a rapidly growing global financial center. I identify three processes to explain this divergence: (1) the state’s ability to discipline merchant-capitalists; (2) the institutional legacies of colonialism and postcolonial maneuvering; and (3) the incorporation of transnational experts into ruling coalitions. By unearthing the mechanisms of financial development, this article contributes to sociologies of development, finance, expertise, and small states.

Few social scientists expected another major inter-state war in Europe. The dominant positions either confine warfare to the dustbin of European history or downplay its significance in late modernity. Sociologists of war have been less surprised by recent developments, however. In a wider socio-historical context warfare remains a crucial catalyst of social change. No other social phenomenon has continuously influenced the social world to such an extent and this has been particularly the case in European history. In this article, I critically review recent developments in the sociology of war. I also look at the ways in which existing analytical tools can be deployed to explain the return of inter-state warfare in Europe. I argue that the integration of longue durée comparative historical sociology with micro-sociological scholarship on everyday behaviour in war is the best way forward to understanding the long-term dynamics of war and society.

This article poses a synthetic analytical approach to casing migratory projects that set out to effectuate a redistribution of power and resources: migration as contentious politics. Contentious migration is presented as an attempt by a collective to mobilize adequate political leverage to advance claims in the location of immigration through spatial relocation and demographic change. To demonstrate the analytical leverage of this approach, this article then conducts a case study of the under-examined Hechalutz settlement movement active in North America between 1905 and 1953, which facilitated the settler migration of American youth to rural agricultural colonies on the colonial frontiers of late-Ottoman and British Mandatory Palestine. It draws on extensive, original findings in colony and national archives, examining official movement publications, correspondences, emissary notes, meeting minutes and daily records from the training farms across North America, diaries, and obituaries. Through eventful analysis, the article explicates three salient mechanisms of the mobilization for contentious migration: (1) environmental (attributing political opportunity and threat); (2) relational (forging networks, as a proxy for diffusion and organizational cohesion); and (3) cognitive (devising resonant diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framings).

Scholars have paid minimal attention to the political and practical objectives that guided Tuskegee Institute’s sociological program and institutional interventions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Leveraging a multi-modal, historical sociological approach grounded in primary and secondary analyses of biographical data, narratives, and archival data, I show that Tuskegee’s institutional interventions illustrate three abolitionist tactics: (1) building consciousness through research dissemination and place-based investment, (2) galvanizing Southern Whites and political elites to abolish lynching locally, and (3) countering the propaganda used to justify lynching to inspire divestment from lynching and carceral punishment. Booker T. Washington’s commitment to eradicating structural racism and resource deprivation in the aftermath of slavery led to Tuskegee Institute’s formation of the first department of applied rural sociology in the United States, and the Negro Farmers’ conference and Movable School interventions supported a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy. Likewise, the research activism of Monroe Work, disseminated via The Negro Year Book and individual publications, sought to galvanize the abolition of lynching and carceral punishment. In the wake of re-emerged visibility of White supremacist terrorism and commitments to practicing Du Boisian sociology across the United States, I argue that reviving the memory of Tuskegee’s institutional practices makes a case for reconsidering the place of abolition in academic sociology in the twenty-first century.

Recent years have seen the development of a range of approaches concerned with theorizing and empirically demonstrating the significance of “transboundary entanglements” – patterns of connections between and across social sites. This work, spanning disciplines from sociology to international relations, and including subfields from postcolonial scholarship to global history, seeks to transcend the methodological nationalism associated with much preexisting historical social science by examining how, and with what effect, transboundary entanglements are formed and transformed over time. To date, however, the rich theoretical and substantive contributions made by these approaches have not been matched by comparable attention to the methodological principles and transposable procedures that can be used to analyze transboundary entanglements. This article contributes to this task. We make the case for a principle we call “global methodological relationalism” and explore how this principle can be operationalized through a three-step procedure: first, track relations across a boundary; second, follow these relations over time and across cases to establish variation; and third, provide an explanation of this variation. We highlight sites of overlap and contrast with existing methods for case selection, tracing historical processes, and making causal claims in small-N research, and establish the ways in which a “global historical sociology” oriented around “global methodological relationalism” can assess the significance of “transboundary entanglements.”