This volume of original chapters is designed to bring attention to a neglected area of feminist scholarship - aging. After several decades of feminist studies we are now well informed of the complex ways that gender shapes the lives of women and men. Similarly, we know more about how gendered power relations interface with race and ethnicity, class and sexual orientation. Serious theorizing of old age and age relations to gender represents the next frontier of feminist scholarship. In this volume, leading national and international feminist scholars of aging take first steps in this direction, illuminating how age relations interact with other social inequalities, particularly gender. In doing so, the authors challenge and transform feminist scholarship and many taken for granted concepts in gender studies.

In recent years, the importance of disseminating the findings of social research has been given increased emphasis. The most effective way in which this can be done is via the mass media. However, there are frequent complaints that media coverage of social and educational research is very limited and often distorted. Through a detailed analysis of a particular case about ethnic inequalities in educational achievement, this book examines some of the processes involved in the reporting of research findings, and their implications for judgements about media distortion and bias. This volume is relevant to many fields, including education, media studies, cultural studies, sociology and social policy.

Boxing is infused with ideas about masculinity, power, race and social class, and as such is an ideal lens through which social scientists can examine key modern themes. In addition, its inherent contradictions of extreme violence and beauty and of discipline and excess have long been a source of inspiration for writers and film makers. Essential reading for anyone interested in the sociology of sport and cultural representations of gender, Boxing, Masculinity and Identity brings together ethnographic research with material from film, literature and journalism. Through this combination of theoretical insight and cultural awareness, Woodward explores the social constructs around boxing and our experience and understanding of central issues including: masculinity mind, body and the construction of identity spectacle and performance: tensions between the public and private person boxing on film: the role of cultural representations in building identities methodologies: issues of authenticity and 'truth' in social science.

Boxing is infused with ideas about masculinity, power, race and social class, and as such is an ideal lens through which social scientists can examine key modern themes. In addition, its inherent contradictions of extreme violence and beauty and of discipline and excess have long been a source of inspiration for writers and film makers. Essential reading for anyone interested in the sociology of sport and cultural representations of gender, Boxing, Masculinity and Identity brings together ethnographic research with material from film, literature and journalism. Through this combination of theoretical insight and cultural awareness, Woodward explores the social constructs around boxing and our experience and understanding of central issues including: masculinity mind, body and the construction of identity spectacle and performance: tensions between the public and private person boxing on film: the role of cultural representations in building identities methodologies: issues of authenticity and 'truth' in social science.

The comparative dimension is, all too often, missing from writing on Israeli history. Zionist ideology restricts comparisons between Zionism and other forms of nationalism. Also, Zionist claims to have initiated a radical rupture with the Jewish past mask continuities between Israel and the experiences of modern diaspora Jewry. Over the past two decades, Israeli historiography has become more critical, and a number of books have presented Israel as a variant of settler-colonialist societies such as the United States and South Africa. The framework of continuity across space commands attention, but it lacks nuance and is often built upon politicized foundations. Moreover, this framework neglects areas of continuity across time, between Israel and the Jewish past.
"Israel in History: The Jewish State in" "Comparative Perspective" seeks to address these issues. The essays in this book combine a variety of comparative schemes, both internal to Jewish civilization and extending throughout the world. These frameworks include:
- modern Jewish society, politics and culture
- historical consciousness in the 20th-century western world, and the matrix of Western colonialism,
- Third World anti-colonialism and post-colonial state-building.
The book's underlying theme is the need to study Israeli history within multiple and overlapping comparative frameworks. The benefit of comparison is not limited to a richer understanding of the circumstances under which Israel was born and has developed. Rather, an open-ended, comparative approach offers a useful means of correcting the biases found in so much scholarship on Israel, be it sympathetic or hostile. "Israel in History: The JewishState in Comparative Perspective" will appeal to scholars and students with research interests in Middle East studies and Israeli history.

Covering topical issues concerning the nature of the Israeli state, this engaging work presents essays that combine a variety of comparative schemes, both internal to Jewish civilization and extending throughout the world, such as:

• modern Jewish society, politics and culture
• historical consciousness in the twentieth century
• colonialism, anti-colonialism and postcolonial state-building.

With its open-ended, comparative approach, Israel in History provides a useful means of correcting the biases found in so much scholarship on Israel, be it sympathetic or hostile. This book will appeal to scholars and students with research interests in many fields, including Israeli Studies, Middle East Studies, and Jewish Studies.

"US-China Relations in the 21st Century" addresses the bilateral relations of these two nations on an international, domestic, societal and individual level between 1990 and 2005. Peaceful power shift remains a central dilemma in world politics, since historically power transition from a dominant nation to a challenger has been associated with international wars. This book examines whether China and the US can learn from history and manage a potential power transition peacefully. Grounding his research on contemporary US-China relations with thorough theoretical, historical and policy exploration, Zhu selects two important cases of power transitions in history as the background for this study: power rivalry between Great Britain and Germany (1871-1914) that led to World War I, and the peaceful power transition from Great Britain to the United States (1865-1945).
"US-China Relations in the 21st Century" contributes to the current IR theory by proposing a new analytical model on global power transition and provides recommendations for peacefully handling a potential power transition from the US to China in the future. This original and comprehensive study is essential reading for scholars of US and Chinese foreign policy, world politics and international relations.

Taking ideas and frameworks from philosophy, psychology, political science, cultural studies and anthropology, this book tells the larger 'truth' about the Singapore state. This book argues that this strong hegemonic state achieves effective rule not just from repressive policies but also through a combination of efficient government, good standard of living, tough official measures and popular compliance. Souchou Yao looks at the reasons behind the hegemonic ruling, examining key events such as the caning of American teenager Michael Fay, the judicial ruling on fellatio and unnatural sex, and Singapore's 'war on terror' to show the ways in which the State manages these events to ensure the continuance of its power and ideological ethos. Lively, and well-written, this book discusses key subject areas such as: leftist radicalism and communist insurgency nation-building as trauma Western 'yellow culture' and Asian Values judicial caning and the meaning of pain the law and oral sex food and the art of lying cinema as catharsis Singapore after September 11.

Regionalism has played an increasingly important role in the changing international relations of East Asia in recent decades, with early signs of integration and growing regional cooperation. This in-depth volume analyzes various historical approaches to the construction of a regional order and a regional identity in East Asia. It explores the ideology of Pan-Asianism as a predecessor of contemporary Asian regionalism, which served as the basis for efforts at regional integration in East Asia, but also as a tool for legitimizing Japanese colonial rule. This mobilization of the Asian peoples occurred through a collective regional identity established from cohesive cultural factors such as language, religion, geography and race. In discussing Asian identity, the book succeeds in bringing historical perspective to bear on approaches to regional cooperation and integration, as well as analyzing various utilizations and manifestations of the pan-Asian ideology. Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History provides an illuminating and extensive account of the historical backgrounds of current debates surrounding Asian identity and essential information and analyses for anyone with an interest in history as well as Asian and Japanese studies.

Leftist thought and activism stands as a defining force in the articulation of political culture and policy in modern Japan. Operating from the periphery of formal political power for the most part, the Japanese Left has had an impact that extends far beyond their limited success at the ballot box. This book focuses attention on the influence exerted by the Left on the political landscape of Japan in the modern era, and assesses the reasons for its successes and failures in terms of its impact on enduring dimensions of Japanese political thought, activism and policy. This is the first book of its kind to engage in the deeper issues of pacifist idealism, the dynamics of opposition politics in Japan, and distinguishing features of Japanese Leftist policy such as opposition to liberalisation of agricultural trade and positive relations with North Korea. With essays from an international team of contributors, this text will provide a fresh and much-needed interpretation of the modern sweep of Japanese politics.

Human Rights in Asia considers how human rights are viewed and implemented in Asia. It covers not just civil and political rights, but also social, economic and cultural rights. This study discusses the problems arising from the fact that ideas of human rights have evolved in Western liberal democracies and examines how far such values are compatible with Asian values and applicable in Asian contexts. Core chapters on France and the USA provide a benchmark on how human rights have emerged and how they are applied and implemented in a civil law and a common law jurisdiction. These are then followed by twelve chapters on the major countries of East Asia plus India, each of which follows a common template to consider the context of the legal system in each country, black letter law, legal discussions and debates and key current issues concerning human rights in each jurisdiction.

This new study revisits the work of the late Ernst Haas, assessing his relevance for contemporary European integration and its disparities.
With his seminal book, "The Uniting of Europe" Haas laid the foundations for one of the most prominent paradigms of European integration neo-functionalism. He engaged in inductive reasoning to theorize the dynamics of the European integration process that led from the Treaty of Paris in 1951 to the Treaty of Rome in 1957. The Treaty of Rome set the constitutional framework for a Common Market.
Today, a second Treaty of Rome may lay the foundation for a European Constitution that embeds the Common Market in a European polity. Unfortunately, Haas will not be able to witness this path-breaking step in the development of a European political community, which he so aptly theorized almost five decades ago. This is all the more regrettable since students of European integration are more than ever challenged to tackle a major empirical puzzle: After50 years of European integration, the member states managed to adopt a single currency and to develop common policies and institutions on justice and home affairs. The integration of foreign policy and defense, by contrast, is still lagging behind. This text delivers sharp insights into these issues.
This book, previously published as a special issue of the "Journal of European Public" "Policy," will be of great interest to all students and scholars of international relations, the European Union, European politics and Public Policy.

This is an impressive work that traces the relationship between the Soviet Union and Turkey on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and the Turkish Communist Party on the other, from the consolidation of the communist regime in Moscow until its fall. The book considers how 'Soviet Eastern Policy' was formed, how it changed over time, what the Soviet leaders hoped to gain in Turkey, and what impact Soviet policy had on the development of the Turkish communist movement. It is a valuable resource for students and scholars with an interest in Russian and Soviet poltics and international relations.

Aktuelle Medientexte mutieren immer mehr zum visuellen Erlebnis. Durch die Ausbeutung der verschiedensten Zeichenressourcen werden den bildverwöhnten Konsumenten der Informationsgesellschaft Botschaften möglichst augenfällig, anziehend und eingängig vermittelt: diese grundsätzlich multimodale Textualität sollte für die Sprachwissenschaft eine Öffnung von der Textlinguistik auf die Textsemiotik bedeuten. Die Beiträge reflektieren mögliche theoretische und methodische Grundlagen dieser Disziplin in statu nascendi und zeigen anhand von kritischen Analysen unterschiedlicher Textsorten aus Print- und Bildschirmmedien, welche Verknüpfungsformen visueller und verbaler Code miteinander eingehen können und welche Funktionen, Bedeutungen und Ziele in der heutigen promotional text culture damit verbunden sind.

Over the last twenty years the proportion of development cooperation resources earmarked for agricultural development has dwindled to between six and seven per cent of total bi- and multilateral Official Development Assistance. This is despite the fact that eighty per cent of the world's poor live in rural agricultural areas and that the poor are disproportionately affected when political, military and natural events lead to regional or global food shortages. Brandt and Otzen's key book fills a gap in current literature, undertaking a wide-ranging conceptual reorientation of development cooperation, criticizing the current orthodoxy and its bias towards urban areas, and arguing that in order to effectively alleviate poverty across the world, agricultural and rural development measures need to be implemented both by central and subnational governments, aid agencies and the private sector. The authors investigate the world food question, the current pressures it is under and its link to rural poverty, and set out the policies that need to be undertaken to reduce global poverty.

A fresh analysis of policy convergences across nations, which identifies their key driving forces.
To what extent and in which direction can we empirically observe a convergence of national policies? In which areas and for which patterns of policy is convergence more or less pronounced? This text addresses these central questions with clarity and rigor.
With growing economic and institutional interlinkages between nation states, it is often assumed that there is an overall trend towards increasingly similar policies across countries. Comparative research on the domestic impact of globalization and European integration, however, reveals that policy convergence can hardly be considered as a dominant and uniform tendency which can be taken for granted. Although a number of factors have been suggested in order to account for the rather mixed empirical picture, we still have limited knowledge about the causes and conditions of cross-national policy convergence. In particular, the central mechanisms and conditions affecting both degree and level of cross-national policy convergence are yet not well understood.
This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of the European Union, European politics, and international relations. This is a special issue of the leading" Journal of European Public Policy,"

This book surveys a 'cluster' of works that seek to explore the cultures of cyberspace, the Internet and the information society. It introduces key ideas, and includes detailed discussion of the work of two key thinkers in this area, Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway, as well as outlining the development of cyberculture studies as a field. To do this, the book also explores selected 'moments' in this development, from the early 1990s, when cyberspace and cyberculture were only just beginning to come together as ideas, up to the present day, when the field of cyberculture studies has grown and bloomed, producing innovative theoretical and empirical work from a diversity of standpoints. Key topics include:

• 
  
• life on the screen
• 
  
• network society
• 
  
• space of flows
• 
  
• cyborg methods.

Cyberculture Theorists is the ideal starting point for anyone wanting to understand how to theorise cyberculture in all its myriad forms.

There are many different kinds of sub-national conflicts across Asia, with a variety of causes, but since September 11, 2001 these have been increasingly portrayed as part of the global terrorist threat, to be dealt with by the War on Terror. This major new study examines a wide range of such conflicts, showing how, despite their significant differences, they share the role of the media as interlocutor, and exploring how the media exercises this role. The book raises a number of issues concerning how the media report different forms of political violence and conflict, including issues of impartiality in the media's relations with governments and insurgents, and how the focus on the 'War on Terror' has led to some forms of violence - notably those employed by states for political purposes - to be overlooked. As the issue of international terrorism remains one of the most pressing issues of the modern day, this is a significant and important book which will interest the general reader and scholars from all disciplines.

More girls are producing media today than at any other point in U.S. history, and they are creating media texts in virtually every format currently possible--magazines, films, musical recordings, and websites.
Girls Make Media explores how young female media producers have reclaimed and reconfigured girlhood as a site for radical social, cultural, and political agency. Central to the book is an analysis of Riot Grrrl--a 1990s feminist youth movement from a fusion of punk rock and gender theory-and the girl power movement it inspired. The author also looks at the rise of girls-only media education programs, and the creation of girls' studies.
This book will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand contemporary female youth in today's media culture.

Medieval Andalusian Courtly Culture discusses the unicum manuscript of the Hadith Bayad wa Riyad, the only illustrated manuscript known to have survived for more than eight centuries of Muslim and Arabic-speaking presence in present-day Spain. The manuscript is of paramount importance as it contains the only known surviving version, both in terms of text and of image, of the love story of Bayad wa Riyad. This study will place this manuscript within the context of late medieval Mediterranean courtly culture, offering: an annotated translation into English of the entire text reproductions of its images an analysis of both text and images in a series of progressively broader contexts including that of al-Andalus(Arabic-speaking); of "reconquista" Iberia; and the larger Mediterranean world. Cynthia Robinson broadens understanding of the Mediterranean region during the Middle Ages, making this text an invaluable resource for scholars with interests in Medieval Spain, art and Mediterranean courtly culture.

Law reform in developing countries has become an increasingly topical subject in recent years. A critical issue is why so many law reform projects in developing economies are regarded by their sponsors and recipients as unsuccessful. This informative book:

• examines examples of law reform projects in post-socialist and post-authoritarian states in Asia
• identifies common problems
• proposes analytical frameworks for understanding the problems identified.

Though parallels between Asian models and those in developing states elsewhere in the world are strong, the book has been developed to avoid suggestion that the issues covered are somehow peculiarly a ~Asiana (TM)- indeed, it is shown that cultural relativist approaches to Asia are unsustainable. This is an invaluable reference for those involved in the areas of development economics, Asian studies and comparative politics.

Since the victory of 1949 revolution the incumbency of the Chinese Communist Party has been characterized by an almost relentless struggle to legitimize its monopoly on political power. During the Mao era, attempts to derive legitimacy focused primarily on mass participation in political affairs, a blend of Marxist and nationalist ideology and the charismatic authority of Mao Zedong which was reinforced by a widely propagated cult of personality. The dramatic failure of the Cultural Revolution forced the post-Mao leadership to discard these discredited paradigms of legitimacy and move towards an almost exclusively performance based concept founded on market economic reform.
Whilst this went some way towards resurrecting the popularity of the CCP, the reforms during the 1980s spawned a number of unwelcome but inevitable side effects such as official corruption, high unemployment and significant socio-economic inequality. These (and other) factors detracted from the party's legitimacy and culminated ultimately in the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and throughout China. Since Tiananmen the party has sought to diversify the basis of its legitimacy by adhering more closely to constitutional procedures in decision making and to a certain extent reinventing itself as a conservative nationalist party.
This probing study of post communist revolution Chinese politics sets out to discover if there is a plausible alternative to the electoral mode or if legitimacy is the exclusive domain of the multi party system.

The end of communist rule in the Soviet Union brought with it a brave new world of media and commerce. Formerly state-owned enterprises were transformed, often through private ownership, and new corporations sprung up overnight to take advantage of the new atmosphere of freedom. Until now, most research on media and news production in Russia has focused on the scope of government control and comparisons with the communist era. However, extra-governmental controls and the challenges of operating in a newly capitalist environment have been just as important - if not more so - in the formation of the new media climate. Filling the gap in the literature, this book examines the various agents who 'make' the news, and discusses the fierce struggle among the various agents of power involved. Drawing on existing theories and scholarship, the book provides a wealth of detail on the actual daily practices of news production in Russia. Original research is combined with compelling first-hand accounts of news production and dissemination to provide an incisive look at the issues and power structures Russian journalists face on a daily basis.

This is a new analysis of recent changes in important Japanese institutions. It addresses the origin, development, and recent adaptation of core institutions, including financial institutions, corporate governance, lifetime employment, and the amakudari system. After four decades of rapid economic growth in Japan, the 1990s saw the country enter a prolonged period of economic stagnation. Policy reforms were initially half-hearted, and businesses were slow to restructure as the global economy changed. The lagging economy has been impervious to aggressive fiscal stimulus measures and has been plagued by ongoing price deflation for years. Japan's struggle has called into question the ability of the country's economic institutions, originally designed to support factor accumulation and rapid development, to adapt to the new economic environment of the twenty-first century. This book discusses both historical and international comparisons including Meiji Japan, and recent economic and financial reforms in Korea, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and New Zealand, placing the current institutional changes in perspective. The contributors argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom that Japanese institutions have remained relatively rigid, there has been significant institutional change over the last decade.

Adib-Moghaddam examines the causes and consequences of conflict in one of the most important regions of the world. Bridging the gap between critical theories of international relations and the empirical study of the Gulf area, this book expands on the many ideologies, cultural inventions and ideational constructs that have affected relations in the past three decades.

Key issues explored include:

• the rise and fall of Arab and Persian nationalism
• the international repercussions of the Islamic revolution in Iran
• the events surrounding the three Gulf Wars
• the 'mindset' of terrorist networks such as al-Qaeda
• why US neo-conservatism is threatening regional order.

Provocatively written, persuasively researched and conclusively argued, The International Politics of the Persian Gulf presents the first comprehensive analysis of international relations in the Gulf from an explicitly multidisciplinary perspective.