Engaging Authority: Citizenship and Political Community aims to explore how authority is entailed in different versions of citizenship and political community. Who or what claims authority in the name of "a people," and to what effect? What kind and scope of authority is claimed? And who is held to be part of such a community? Such questions have long been asked by scholars across many disciplines. Engaging Authority brings together scholars from anthropology, constitutional studies, cultural studies, politics, political theory, sociology, and philosophy in a collaborative project to develop a multifaceted understanding of citizenship in political community. The volume begins with the premise that to describe or identify oneself as a citizen entails a particular relationship to authority. Citizens are understood to be members of a community which we consider "political" in that members are invoked, and may also be involved, in the business of governing. How does this relationship function? How is community invoked by those exercising authority, and in what senses do citizens partake in its exercise? In this volume, the authors explore different forms of the citizen's relationship to authority in political community, across and beyond the variations that usually concern scholars, such as the self-governing people, nation-states, popular sovereignty, and democratic citizenship.

Mexico has become notorious for crime-related violence, and the efforts of governments and national and international NGOs to counter this violence have proven largely futile. Citizens against Crime and Violence studies societal responses to crime and violence within one of Mexico’s most affected regions, the state of Michoacán. Based on comparative ethnography conducted over twelve months by a team of anthropologists and sociologists across six localities of Michoacán, ranging from the most rural to the most urban, the contributors consider five varieties of societal responses: local citizen security councils that define security and attempt to influence its policing, including by self-defense groups; cultural activists looking to create safe 'cultural' fields from which to transform their social environment; organizations in the state capital that combine legal and political strategies against less visible violence (forced disappearance, gender violence, anti-LGBT); church-linked initiatives bringing to bear the church’s institutionality, including to denounce 'state capture'; and women’s organizations creating 'safe' networks allowing to influence violence prevention.

It is not only a paradox but something of an intellectual scandal that, in an era so shaken by radical actions and ideologies, social science has had nothing theoretically new to say about radicalism since the middle of the last century. Breaching the Civil Order fills this void. It argues that, rather than seeing radicalism in substantive terms - as violent or militant, communist or fascist - radicalism should be seen more broadly as any organized effort to breach the civil order. The theory is brilliantly made flesh in a series of case studies by leading European and American social scientists, from the destruction of property in the London race riots to the public militancy of Black Lives Matter in the US, the performative violence of the Irish IRA and the Mexican Zapatistas to the democratic upheavals of the Arab Spring, and from Islamic terrorism in France to Germany's right-wing populist Pegida.

What is history? And why do people value it? Basing his inquiry on fieldwork near Guadalajara in west Mexico, anthropologist Trevor Stack focuses on one reason for which people commonly value history--knowing history is said to make for better citens, which helps to explain why history is taught at schools worldwide and history questions are included in citizenship tests. Stack combines his Mexican fieldwork with his personal experience of history in Scottish schools and at Oxford University to try to pinpoint what exactly it is that makes people who know history seem like better citizens.

Much has been written about national history and citizenship; Stack concentrates instead on the history and citizenship of towns and cities. His Mexican informants talked (and wrote) not only of Mexican history but of their towns' histories, too. They acted, at the same time, as citizens of their towns as well as of Mexico. Urban history and citizenship are, the book shows, important yet neglected phenomena in Mexico and beyond.

Rather than setting history on a pedestal, Stack treats it as one kind of knowledge among many others, comparing it not just to legend but also to gossip. Instead of focusing on academic historians, he interviewed people from all walks of life--bricklayers, priests, teachers, politicians, peasant farmers, lawyers, laborers, and migrants--as well as drawing on a talk about history by the famous Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo.

As an ethnography, Knowing History in Mexico provides a vivid portrait of ethnicity, lands, migration, tourism, education, religion, and government in a dynamic region of west Mexico that straddles the urban and rural, modern and traditional.