States of Subsistence is a journey that leaves the reader sensing the smell of khubz ‘arabi and pondering how the state is performed in Jordan and beyond. Through an ethnographic study of subsidized bread, Martínez pursues “the conundrums that come with being governed by something we can feel, hear, smell, and discuss, but never see” (5). He works at bakeries, interviews policymakers, and spends time with average citizens to understand how subsidized bread is entangled with weighty issues of state authority. Drawing on this long-term immersion, the book shifts attention from the institutions and events that have dominated the study of bread politics to the routines of food production and distribution as sensory rituals connecting citizens to the state. Taking bread and bakeries as an analytical vantage point, Martínez shows how political subjectivities are shaped through embodied relationships to the state, and how the state itself is “a set of relations and practices that must be constantly renewed” (12). States of Subsistence is a pertinent example of how systematic engagement with the ordinary can lead to unexpected yet profound insights, demystifying that most consequential abstraction in political thought and life—the state.

Freedom Inside? is a deeply careful and caring book, humanizing the lived experiences of those subject to the systemic injustices of mass incarceration. In this unique ethnographic study of yoga and meditation in U.S. prisons, Godrej asks whether yogic traditions as they are taught in prisons pacify the incarcerated to accept their lot or urge them to resist the penal system’s messaging. Embedding herself in volunteer organizations teaching yoga and meditation in prisons, with the rare access to the incarceration system that this entailed, Godrej arrives at a more surprising and complex answer than that suggested by the binary of political passivity versus resistance. She argues that yoga practices foster dignity and internal strength for practitioners behind bars, enabling them to “pursue forms of inward-oriented spiritual pursuit denied (or possibly unknown) to many people in society” (278). This insight is developed through close engagement with the voices and ideas of those who have experienced confinement and those who volunteer to teach them yoga, making Freedom Inside? a model of the co-production of knowledge between the author and interlocutors. Through an immersive, embodied, and consistently self-reflexive examination, this book makes profound contributions to our understanding of personhood in incarceration and internal dimensions of resistance, as well as to interpretive ethnographic methods. Freedom Inside? speaks to audiences beyond academia, demonstrating both the potential and the limits of self-care practices in “total institutions” of social control.

Mobilizing in Uncertainty is a model of clear and impactful interpretive social science. It leads the reader into the anguished processes by which ordinary citizens decide whether to take up arms, take sides, hide or flee a coming war, through a sociohistorical study of mobilization during the Georgian-Abkhaz War of 1992-1993.

Bread and Freedom is a remarkable book. It brings alive the profound uncertainty and myriad aspirations that people living through times of radical political upheaval experience, and the ways such lived contingency becomes forgotten as unruly realities tamed through narratives of fait accompli.

In this meticulously researched book, Diana Kim asks: why did Western colonial powers, which had long profited from the Southeast Asian trade in opium, opt to shut it down?

Focusing on Indigenous people’s struggles against settler colonial rule, Theft is Property! is at once a genealogy of dispossession and an effort to highlight and engage with Indigenous scholarship and activist work from the nineteenth century to the present.

The book is a tour de force. Combining both archival and ethnographic methods masterfully, Riofrancos’ book stands out for its sophisticated treatment of a topic of abiding concern to political science, namely the study of resource politics. But unlike conventional accounts, Riofrancos refocuses our attention onto the field of political struggle.

South Africa is often heralded as a beacon of successful transition into democracy; yet its citizens are riddled with anxiety and insecurity, often taking to vigilantism in order to protect themselves including from the state itself. Why would citizens feel this way, especially given the fact that South Africa has a constitution with one of the most robust set of rights’ protections in the world?

Wedeen’s ethnography focuses on the case of Bashar Al Asad’s Syria, capturing the excitement and anxiety of the revolutionary aspirations that animated the uprising of 2011 followed by the complex trajectory of resistance and complacency that developed once a brutal civil war took hold.

In this dramatic reimagining of discussion of ethnographic methods as a conversation among a cast of ethnographers brought together for an ethnographic trial, Among Wolves transcends the limitations of writing a methods book in both content and form.

Fujii debunks common myths about interviews and makes us see constraints, limitations, mistakes and the resistance of subjects as “gifts” that can enhance one’s research, instead of liabilities that one must accommodate or patch over.

Through his detailed empirical “sociological portrait” of bordering practices on the US borders with Mexico and Canada, Longo successfully challenges notions of borders as “thin and vertical” lines between sovereign territories.

This concise, sophisticated book presents an imaginative reinterpretation of the body politic in international relations theory. It engages with new materialism literature and interpretive methodology by displacing realist international relations metaphors that are rooted in Eurocentric conceptions of power.

Grounded Authority is well poised to engage in broader debates about Indigenous resistance across settler colonies. Pasternak foregrounds jurisdiction and disentangles it from sovereignty while visualizing jurisdiction as a density of lines against orthodox notions of hierarchy and scale.

When the State Meets the Street is well written and provides a rich, detailed and nuanced ethnography of the state by focusing on street-level bureaucracy at the frontlines of public service. The book builds from findings and an ethnographic sensibility to inform political theorizing about bureaucratic polities.

Everyday Exposure is an interesting, surprising and outstanding text offering an exceptional interpretive analysis that takes the questions of environmental justice for the 850 Anishinabek people in the Aamjiwnaang Reserve, or Sarnia Reserve 45, in Canada's so-called Chemical Valley and makes it “home”.

Kato’s study sets out to resolve a mystery. How could the practice of public lynching co-exist with liberal democracy in the U.S.?

Bringing together events, practices, and discourses in the global cities of Rio and Cairo, from the landmark United Nations summits held in these cities (in 1992 and 1994, respectively) to the present, Amar interweaves fascinating empirical detail and provocative meta-reflection on the trajectories and paradoxes of militarism, humanitarianism, and sexuality politics in our global age.

Human Rights in Camera does that critical theoretical work Sheldon Wolin referred to as “making the familiar unfamiliar.” Sliwinski shows us that human rights are not revealed by reason alone, but through an experience of seeing, “imagined and idealized on the wings of aesthetic experience.”