It seems obvious that children need to be loved, that having a loving home and upbringing is essential to a child’s emotional and cognitive development. It is also obvious that, under typical circumstances at least, for every child there are adults who should love them. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that many national and international charters and declarations specifically ascribe to children a right to be loved. But the idea that children have a right to be loved seems philosophically suspicious. Questions arise almost instantly: Could there be right to be loved? Could children hold such a right? To whom does the correlate duty to love a child fall? What would such a duty require? One might also begin to wonder: What are the implications of such a right for family, parenting, child-rearing, and adoption?

In The Right to be Loved (Oxford University Press, 2015), S. Matthew Liao works carefully and systematically through all of these questions in providing a compelling defense of the idea that children indeed have a right to be loved. This is a fascinating book with a bold thesis.

Anthony Maniscalco is the author of Public Spaces, Marketplaces, and the Constitution: Shopping Malls and the First Amendment (SUNY Press, 2015). Maniscalco is the director of the Edward T. Rogowsky Internship Program in Government and Public Affairs at the City University of New York.

What can you say in a shopping mall? Maniscalco finds not that much, or at least not as much as you were in the past. Public Spaces traces the legal history of how the courts have interpreted balanced the property rights of shopping place owners with the first amendment rights of patrons. The book offers a new vision for how public spaces might be reimagined to re-emphasize public debate and discussion in shopping malls and places of commerce.

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In Latino Heartland: Of Borders and Belonging in the Midwest (New York University Press, 2015), Sujey Vega Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University, traces the way Latina/o Hoosiers established community and belonging in Central Indiana amongst the sharp rise in anti-immigrant/Mexican sentiment after the passage of the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 (H.R. 4437). Dr. Vega foregrounds her analysis by illuminating the “pathology of forgetting” practiced by the region’s non-Hispanic White population as they have reimagined and celebrated the region’s ethnic past through the lenses of whiteness and assimilation. Thus, despite their multigenerational presence in the region and regardless of immigration status, Latina/o Hoosiers are perpetually viewed as foreign and unassimilated by many of their White neighbors. Following the passage of H.R. 4437 by the 109th U.S. Congress in Dec. 2005, Dr. Vega explains how the discourses of illegality and nativism intermixed with the region’s collective memory to “other” and “racialize” Latina/o Hoosiers as outside the bounds of community and belonging in America’s Heartland. Examining religious practices, community celebrations, sporting events, and other forms of socialization, Professor Vega details the formation of ethnic belonging among Latina/o Hoosiers as they appropriated space and claimed membership in Greater Lafayette, Indiana. Amidst the anti-immigrant fervor of the day, Vega asserts that the establishment of ethnic belonging laid the groundwork for civic engagement and political activism as Latina/o Hoosiers participated in public demonstrations of solidarity and protest, like the Immigration Reform Protests that swept across the nation between March and May of 2006.

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The nonprofit sector is growing, not just in the United States, but globally. In The Nonprofit World: Civil Society and the Rise of the Nonprofit Sector (Kumarian Press, 2015), John Casey demonstrates the extent to which nonprofits, what are sometimes called civil society organizations, charities, or community groups, participate in all sectors of the economy in countries across the world. This broad focus allows Casey to show the commonalities and differences in which issues nonprofits pursue and how this increasingly internationalized sector affects national policy and politics.

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In the late 1980s, the Baltic Soviet Social Republics seemed to explode into song as Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian national movements challenged Soviet rule. The leaders of each of these movements espoused nonviolent principles, but the capacity for violence was always there – especially as Soviet authorities engaged in violent repression. In The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution (University of Washington Press, 2015), Guntis Smidchens tackles the question “of whether it is possible to reconcile nonviolent principles with a pursuit of nationalist power” and his answer is yes. As evidence, Smidchens presents the events of 1988 to 1991 in the Baltic countries and their national song cultures, considering them through the lens of principles of nonviolence. Smidchens analyzes the role of choral, folk and rock music in the national movements, demonstrating that choral music provided mass discipline, folk songs pulled in people not already involved in song culture, and rock music integrated ideology and responsiveness to rapidly changing events in the Baltic and the Soviet Union more broadly. He also provides English translations of over 100 Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian songs, setting them in their historical, cultural and poetic contexts. The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution explains why Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians chose music as their weapon of choice to regain independence from the Soviet Union.

Amanda Jeanne Swain is executive director of the Humanities Commons at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in Russian and East European history at the University of Washington. Her research interests include the intersections of national, Soviet and European identities in the Baltic countries. Recent publications include articles in Ab Imperio and Cahiers du Monde Russe.

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What does it mean to be free? How can paying attention to the relationship between freedom and slavery help construct a concept and practice of freedom that is “perpetual, unfinished, and rooted in acts of flight” (181)? In his book Freedom as Marronage University of Chicago Press, 2015), Neil Roberts (Africana Studies, Religion, and Political Science, Williams College) explores this and many other questions. Proceeding from and working with the concept and practice of marronage – modes of escape from slavery emerging from the Caribbean – Roberts articulates a theory of freedom that is historically specific while having trans-historical reverberations, and that is attentive to lived experiences of freedom and slavery. In doing so, he engages histories of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, diaspora, the Haitian Revolution, and American slavery. Arguing for the need to creolize political theory and philosophy, Roberts also takes up the thought and practice of W.E.B. DuBois, Hannah Arendt, Philip Petit, Frederick Douglass, Angela Davis, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Edouard Glissant, Rastafari, and much more.

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Interrogation, Intelligence and Security: Controversial British Techniques (Manchester University Press, 2015) by Samantha Newbery examines issues of history, efficacy, and policy in her thorough examination of British authorities’ use of the “Five Techniques” in Aden, Northern Ireland, and Iraq. Dr. Newbery carefully scrutinizes the historical record, and offers a balanced perspective on controversial interrogation activities throughout the monograph. I look forward to reading her most recent publication, Why Spy?, co-authored with the late, highly decorated former British intelligence officer Brian Stewart.

Alice J. Kang has written Bargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Kang is assistant professor of political science and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Much attention is paid to Muslim-majority countries across the Middle East, especially the contentious role of women’s rights in those countries. Less attention has been paid to Muslim democracies in Africa. Kang’s book focuses on the politics of women’s rights in one such country: Niger. Women’s rights activists in Niger have fought to participate in democratic governance, but haven’t won every recent battle. Kang highlights several successes as well as policy areas where women’s organizations have failed to win policy victories. The book has much to say about social movements and also the evolving way Muslim majority democracies grapple with human rights.

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Mark A. Smith is the author of Secular Faith: Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Smith is professor of political science at the University of Washington.

The provocative central thesis of this book is that religion is not the unchanging institution of tradition we might sometimes think. Smith argues that religion in the U.S., especially the Christian church, responds to changing political and cultural values rather than shaping them. Smith makes his case by charting five contentious issues in America’s history: slavery, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and women’s rights. For each, he shows how the political views of even the most conservative Christians evolved in the same direction as the rest of society–perhaps not as swiftly, but always on the same arc. During periods of cultural transition, Christian leaders may resist prevailing values and behaviors, yet those same leaders eventually change–often by reinterpreting the Bible–if their positions become no longer tenable. Secular ideas and influences thereby shape the ways Christians read and interpret their scriptures.

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Back in the early 70s, Eli Zaretsky wrote for a socialist newspaper and was engaged to review a recently released book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism by Juliet Mitchell. First, he decided, he’d better read some Freud. This started a life-long engagement with psychoanalysis and leftist politics, and his new book Political Freud: A History (Columbia University Press, 2015) conveys the richness of his decades of reading Freud. Following his 2004 Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis, Zaretsky’s latest book, some would call it a companion, is comprised of five essays analyzing the complexity of the mutual influencing of capitalism, social/political history, and psychoanalysis, with particular attention to how and whether people conceive of their own interiority as political. (Particularly timely is chapter two: “Beyond the Blues: the Racial Unconscious and Collective Memory” which explores African American intellectual engagement with psychoanalysis as a tool for understanding oppression.) “Whereas introspection did once define an epoch of social and cultural history– the Freudian epoch– there were historical reasons for this, and it was bound to pass” says Zaretsky. But Political Freud is also a compelling argument for how badly we still need a conception of the self–or ego– with a critical and non-normalizing edge.

Eli Zaretsky is a professor of history at The New School, writes and teaches about twentieth-century cultural history, the theory and history of capitalism (especially its social and cultural dimensions), and the history of the family. He is also the author of Why America Needs a Left, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis and Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life.

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