UCHRI

In When Rebels Win (2025), Kai M. Thaler (UC Santa Barbara) explains why post-victory rebel groups govern in strikingly different ways. This book was supported in part by UCHRI’s Junior Faculty Manuscript Workshop in 2021-22. To learn more about our Faculty Manuscript Workshop Grant, please visit the link in our bio.

1. Image text: Title page reading “UCHRI Junior Faculty Manuscript Workshop 2021-22, Kai M. Thaler (UC Santa Barbara), Manuscript Workshop Book Highlight.” Cover of Thaler’s book, When Rebels Win.
2. Image text: “What determines how a rebel group will govern once in power? Does it retain characteristics from the civil war period once it moves from opposing the state to controlling it?”
3. Image text: “From the publisher: With rich evidence from Africa, Latin America, and Asia, When Rebels Win rethinks accounts of rebel behavior and post-war governance emphasizing factors such as resource availability or international intervention. Wartime rebel ideology, Thaler demonstrates, is not just ‘cheap talk’—and civil war can, counterintuitively, lead to stronger states.”

In Concrete Encoded (2025), Nathaniel Wolfson (UC Berkeley) examines concrete art and poetry, its implications, and its influence in Brazil. This book was supported in part by UCHRI’s Junior Faculty Manuscript Workshop in 2021-22. To learn more about our Faculty Manuscript Workshop Grant, please visit the link in our bio.

1. Image text: Title page reading “UCHRI Junior Faculty Manuscript Workshop 2021-22, Nathaniel Wolfson (UC Berkeley), Manuscript Workshop Book Highlight.” Cover of Wolfson’s book, Concrete Encoded.
2. Image text: “Concrete Encoded takes up key moments from the 1940s to 1970s, during a period of rampant and accelerated technological industrialization in which digital tools and newly accessible computer technologies began to emerge and national culture in Brazil was reconfigured under the sign of the global.”
3. Image text: “The following chapters involve figures who, in distinct ways, related to—embraced, resisted, mythologized—a nascent digital era...I examine these phenomena against a background in which a dictatorship harnessed informatics to control and manage citizens, and artists challenged persisting messianic beliefs in technological progress in the tropics.”