Critically examines the role of humanitarian aid and disaster reconstruction Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami addresses the ways in which natural disasters impact the strategies and priorities of neoliberalizing states in the contemporary era. In the light of growing scholarly and public concern over 'disaster capitalism' and the tendency of states and powerful international financial institutions to view disasters as 'opportunities' to 'build back better,' Raja Swamy offers an ethnographically rich account of post-disaster reconstruction, its contested aims, and the mixed outcomes of state policy, humanitarian aid, and local resistance. Using the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as a case study, Swamy investigates the planning and implementation of a reconstruction process that sought to radically transform the geography of a coastal district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Drawing on an ethnographic study conducted in Tamil Nadu's Nagapattinam District, Swamy shows how and why the state-led, multilaterally financed, and NGO-mediated reconstruction prioritized the displacement of coastal fisher populations. Exploring the substantive differences shaping NGO action, specifically in response to core political questions affecting the well-being of their ostensible beneficiaries, this account also centers the political agency of disaster survivors and their allies among NGOs in contesting the meanings of recovery while navigating the process of reconstruction. If humanitarian aid brought together NGOs and fishers as givers and recipients of aid, it also revealed in its workings competing and sometimes contradictory assumptions, goals, interests, and strategies driving the fraught historical relationship between artisanal fishers and the state. Importantly, this research foregrounds the ambiguous role of NGOs involved in the distribution of aid, as well as the agency and strategic actions of the primary recipients of aid-the fishers of Nagapattinam-as they struggled with a reconstruction process that made receipt of the humanitarian gift of housing conditional on the formal abandonment of all claims to the coast. Building Back Better in India thus bridges scholarly concerns with disasters, humanitarianism, and economic development with those focused on power, agency, and resistance.

'Here we drink three cups of tea to do business; the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything - even die.' Haji Ali, Korphe Village Chief, Karakoram mountains, Pakistan In 1993, after a terrifying and disastrous attempt to climb K2, a mountaineer called Greg Mortenson drifted, cold and dehydrated, into an impoverished Pakistan village in the Karakoram Mountains. Moved by the inhabitants' kindness, he promised to return and build a school. Three Cups of Tea is the story of that promise and its extraordinary outcome. Over the next decade Mortenson built not just one but fifty-five schools - especially for girls - in remote villages across the forbidding and breathtaking landscape of Pakistan and Afghanistan, just as the Taliban rose to power. His story is at once a riveting adventure and a testament to the power of the humanitarian spirit.

Funding Philanthropy investigates Dr Barnardo's work and philanthropic 'empire' as early manifestations of promotional and branding mechanisms in the mid- to late-Victorian period, processes that would seem commonplace by the mid- to late-twentieth century. Barnardo possessed a strategic sense of what would excite people's interest and pity, as well as a seemingly unfailing capacity to package and promote evangelical philanthropy on behalf of children, the nation and the Empire. Thus, the book explores Barnardo as creative promoter and 'showman,' a savvy entrepreneur in an evangelical context that overtly mandated against privileging business principles generally, and the practice of direct appeal specifically. To manage the business of philanthropy, Barnardo operated as narrator, orchestrator, and showman, depending upon artfully constructed bodies, images and stories as imperatives for emotional engagement and collective participation. Funding Philanthropy offers new knowledge to anyone interested in Victorian history, conceptualising children, literary modes, and marketing practices. The book also considers how Barnardo's conception of charity is closely aligned with principles of unconditional hospitality, precisely at a moment in time when the English were intent on centralising philanthropy and on meting out support according to measures Barnardo regarded as punitive and unchristian. Part One explicates how institutional branding evolved according to the properties associated with the metaphor of the 'open door'; Part Two elucidates how narrative devices associated with fiction raise both affect and funds; Part Three concentrates on how Barnardo exploited strategies associated with dramatic performance in public spectacles, despite his adamant strictures against the theatre itself. Discussion burrows down to elucidate such events as highly ritualised Annual General Meetings, child picnics, as well as ubiquitous 'bazaars' and self-denial drives. Extensive research in Barnardo's vast archive of periodical publication for children, youth and adults and the wider public press underpin the discursive analysis.