Configurations: Critical Studies of World Politics

The book series Configurations: Critical Studies of World Politics seeks to publish the best social-scientific monographs utilizing a logic of explanation that emphasizes the ways in which causal processes and mechanisms come together in case-specific ways to generate particular empirical outcomes. Regardless of substantive focus, monographs in this series utilize a wide variety of techniques in order to empirically detail the ways that important phenomena operate in world politics broadly understood.

“Broadly understood,” in this context, does not mean that the series is limited to studies of politics on a large spatial or temporal scale. Indeed, both macro and micro analyses would find a home in this series. Rather, “broadly understood” means that the series is not substantively limited to what we might call politics in a formal sense (the activities of legislatures, ambassadors, state bureaucracies, or sovereigns), but also encompasses landscapes, artifacts, performances, and encounters that may or may not be explicitly about politics in this formal sense (e.g., airports, advertisements, religious services). The series seeks to develop and demonstrate novel research techniques that will allow scholars to connect these formal and informal realms, and to disclose the political import of a wide panoply of activities—including meaning-making activities and the negotiation of everyday patterns of authority and control—appropriate to an increasingly globalized world. It is therefore open to studies of “governance” alongside “government,” everyday cultural practices alongside authoritative declarations of policy, and the inter-personal alongside the inter-state.