comprehensive monograph on the subject, covering all parts of the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir of interest to experts in: South Asia's political dynamics, political science, international relations, peace and conflict studies providing comprehensive knowledge on historical and contemporary dynamics of Indo-Pakistani policies and relations and the developments within both parts of Kashmir updated analysis containing the strategic dynamics in the aftermath of bifurcation of Indian-administered Kashmir

This book uses an innovative people-centered approach to the Kashmir problem to shed new light on why postcolonial partitions remain unfinished and why the wounds of postcolonial nation-state formation in South Asia continue to fester. "Kashmir" is viewed as a metaphor for the permanent internal wars of partition that mark the South Asian experience. Chapters sensitively bring Kashmiri voices to the fore to examine Kashmir in the national discourses of India and Pakistan, resistance in the Kashmiri imagination and the Kashmir conflict in a global context. The book foregrounds how the space of Kashmir as a cultural, historical and political sphere persists and continues to haunt the postcolonial national present as the people of Kashmir and their cultural, literary and artistic productions cannot be contained within the regnant paradigms of the nations across which the region is partitioned. Additionally, the book explores how long-term resolution would demand engagement with historical forces, political actors and social formations that exceed the nation-state. An important contribution to the study of this troubled region, this book will be of interest to academics and researchers of modern South Asian history and politics as well as comparative politics and international relations.

Transboundary Water from Afghanistan: Climate Change, and Land-Use Implications brings together diverse factual material on the physical geography and political, cultural, and economic implications of Southwest Asian transboundary water resources. It is the outgrowth of long-term deep knowledge and experience gained by the authors, as well as the material developed from a series of new workshops funded by the Lounsbery Foundation and other granting agencies. Afghanistan and Pakistan have high altitude mountains providing vital water supplies that are highly contentious necessities much threatened by climate change, human land-use variation, and political manipulation, which can be managed in new ways that are in need of comprehensive discussions and negotiations between all the riparian nations of the Indus watershed (Afghanistan, China, India, and Pakistan). This book provides a description of the basic topographic configuration of the Kabul River tributary to the Indus river, together will all its tributaries that flow back and forth across the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the basic elements that are involved with the hydrological cycle and its derivatives in the high mountains of the Hindu Kush and Himalaya.

This book constitutes a feminist literary analysis of motherhood as presented in selected Indian women's fictions across a diverse range of geographical, linguistic, class and caste contexts. Situated at the crossroads of motherhood studies and literary studies, this book offers a rigorous examination of the prosody and politics of motherhood in this corpus. In its five thematically focused chapters, the book scrutinises in depth such key concerns as maternal ambivalence; maternal agency and caste; mother-daughter relationships; motherhood and diaspora; and non-biological motherhood. It attempts to understand the literary ramifications of these issues in order to identify the ways in which fiction writers reconceive of the notion of motherhood and maternal identities from and against multiple perspectives. Another pressing concern is whether these Indian women writers' visions furnish readers with any different understandings of motherhood as compared to dominant Western feminist discourses. Maternal Fictions advances feminist literary criticism in the specific area of Indian women's writing and the overarching areas of motherhood and literature by acting as a launchpad into a complex constellation of ideas concerning motherhood. The fictional universe is at once ambivalent, diverse, contingent, grounded in a specific location, and yet well placed to converse with discourses emanating from other times and places.

This monograph presents a novel typology of relational and territorial perspectives on legitimacy and identity. This typology is then applied to two different political and historical contexts, namely the trajectories of the metropolitan region Amsterdam in the Netherlands and the metropolitan region Ruhr in Germany. The historical discussion spans 500 years, providing valuable depth to the study. Taken as a whole, the book provides a new perspective within the territorial-relational dichotomy and the geographies of discontent debate. Its key insights are that identity and political legitimacy are embedded in history and that both relational and territorial perspectives on these issues are time and place dependent. This book will be stimulating reading for advanced students, researchers, and policymakers working in political geography, human geography, regional studies, and broader social and political sciences.

This book critically challenges the usual territorial understanding of borders by examining the often messy internal, transborder, ambiguous, and in-between spaces that co-exist with traditional borders. By considering those less visible aspects of borders, the book develops an inclusive understanding of how contemporary borders are structured and how they influence human identity, mobility, and belonging. The introduction and conclusion provide theoretical and contextual framing, while chapters explore topics of global labor and refugees, unrecognized states, ethnic networks, cyberspace, transboundary resource conflicts, and indigenous and religious spaces that rarely register on conventional maps or commonplace understandings of territory. In the end, the volume demonstrates that, despite being "invisible" on most maps, these borders have a very real, material, and tangible presence and consequences for those people who live within, alongside, and across them.

The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies provides diverse and cutting-edge perspectives on this fast-changing field. For 30 years the world has been caught in a long 'global interregnum,' plunging from one crisis to the next and witnessing the emergence of new, vibrant, multiple, and sometimes contradictory forms of popular resistance and politics. This global 'interregnum' - or a period of uncertainty where the old hegemony is fading and the new ones have not yet been fully realized - necessitates critical self-reflection, brave intellectual speculation and (un)learning of perceived wisdoms, and greater transdisciplinary collaboration across theories, localities, and subjects. This Handbook takes up this challenge by developing fresh perspectives on globalization, development, neoliberalism, capitalism, and their progressive alternatives, addressing issues of democracy, power, inequality, insecurity, precarity, wellbeing, education, displacement, social movements, violence and war, and climate change. Throughout, it emphasizes the dynamics for system change, including bringing post-capitalist, feminist, (de)colonial, and other critical perspectives to support transformative global praxis. This volume brings together a mixture of fresh and established scholars from across disciplines and from a range of both Northern and Southern contexts. Researchers and students from around the world and across the fields of politics, sociology, international development, international relations, geography, economics, area studies, and philosophy will find this an invaluable and fresh guide to global studies in the 21st century.

This book focuses on the regional political ecologies (RPEs) of environmental conflicts in India. It explores broadly, landscape-based analyses of political, economic and social issues, which impact environmental changes, challenges and conflicts at local and micro-local levels. The chapters in this volume examine the intervention of different stakeholders in the management of various regional ecological landscapes in India, including forests, rivers, canals, creeks and wetlands. The volume is an interdisciplinary endeavour, weaving together contextual narratives through a combination of approaches from sociology, anthropology, geography, political studies and environmental history. Using such core approaches, the book studies the place-based dynamisms within the regional environmental conflicts in the selected conservation landscapes. It provides empirical reflections on transboundary issues, rural-urban transitions, middle-class environmentalism, identity conflicts, decentralized natural resource management and the role of political institutions. Regional Political Ecologies and Environmental Conflicts in India will be of great interest to students and scholars of Political Ecology and South Asian Environmental Studies.

Presidentialism and Democracy in East and Southeast Asia examines the impact of presidential systems on democracies by examining three distinct literatures - the perilousness of competing legitimacies of the executive and legislative branches, issues of institutional design (particularly regarding semi-presidentialism), and the rise of executive aggrandizement. Despite often intense political conflict and temporary instability in the East and Southeast Asia, presidential systems of various types - from relatively "pure" forms to semi-presidentialism and other hybrids - have largely been resilient. Although there are signs of growing autocratization in several cases, presidentialism, associated with both accommodation and conflict, has usually not driven it. This book's contributions to presidentialism debates will be of interests to students and scholars of comparative politics while it also offers detailed analysis of the presidency in these East and Southeast Asian cases.

This volume is devoted to aspects of space that have thus far been largely unexplored. How space is perceived and cognised has been discussed from different stances, but there are few analyses of nomadic approaches to spatiality. Nor is there a sufficient number of studies on indigenous interpretations of space, despite the importance of territory and place in definitions of indigeneity. At the intersection of geography and anthropology, the authors of this volume combine general reflections on spatiality with case studies from the Circumpolar North and other nomadic settings. Spatial perceptions and practices have been profoundly transformed by new technologies as well as by new modes of social and political interaction. How do these changes play out in the everyday lives, identifications and political projects of nomadic and indigenous people? This question has been broached from two seemingly divergent stances: spatial cognition, on the one hand, and production of space, on the other. Bringing these two approaches together, this volume re-aligns the different strings of scholarship on spatiality, making them applicable and relevant for indigenous and nomadic conceptualizations of space, place and territory.

The purpose of the book is to elaborate a planning theory which departs from the plethora of theories which reflect the conditions of developed countries of the North-West. The empirical material of this effort is derived from a country, Greece, which sits on the edge between North-West and South-East, at the corner of Europe. No doubt, there is extensive international literature on planning theory in general from a bewildering variety of viewpoints. The interested professional or student of urban and regional planning is certainly aware of the dizzying flood of books, articles and research reports on planning theory and of their never-ending borrowing of obscure concepts from more respectable scientific disciplines, from mathematics to philosophy and from physics to economics, human geography and sociology. He or she probably observed that there is a growing interest in theoretical approaches from the viewpoint of the so-called "Global South". The author of the present book has for many decades faced the impasse of attempting to transplant theories founded on the experience of the North-West to countries with a totally different historical, political, social and geographical background. He learned that the reality that planners face is unpredictable, patchy, and responsive to social processes, frequently of a very pedestrian nature. Planning strives to deal with private interests which planners are keen to envelop in a single "public interest", which is extremely hard to define. The behaviour of the average citizen, far from being that of the neoclassical model of the homo economicus, is that of an individual, a kind of homo individualis, who interacts with the state and the public administration within a complex web of mutual dependence and negotiation. The state and its administrative apparatus, i.e., the key-determinants and fixers of urban and regional planning policy, bargain with this individual, offer inducements, exemptions, derogations and privileges, deviate unhesitatingly from their grand policy pronouncements, but still defend the rationality and comprehensiveness of the planning system they have legislated and operationalized. It is by and large a successful modus vivendi, but only thanks to a constant practice of compromise. Hence, the term compromise planning, which the author coined as an alternative to all the existing theoretical forms of planning. This is the sort of planning, and of the accompanying theory, with which he deals in this book. It is the outcome of experience and knowledge accumulated in a long personal journey of academic teaching in England and Greece, research, and professional involvement.

This book explores the development, decline and resurgence of parliaments in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Although the three parliaments formally have a common origin and follow almost similar rules and procedures, substantial variations can be observed in their behavior. By analyzing the nature of memberships, processes of legislation and oversight of the executive, the book assesses the impact of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi parliaments. In addition to identifying the ways in which different institutional actors, particularly the parliament and the judiciary, define their roles and relationships, the book investigates the role of committees and the significance and effect of female legislators. While showing that the parliament in India has had a steady growth since its inception, notwithstanding the allegation that it has declined in recent years, the author also demonstrates the differential performance of the parliaments in Bangladesh and Pakistan. In particular, the parliament in Pakistan is shown to likely be able to upgrade its status from a 'minimal' to at least a 'marginal' legislature, while the Bangladesh parliament risks becoming a 'minimal' legislature. A valuable resource to use when comparing strategies and outcomes of postcolonial developments in the operation of parliaments, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of political and economic development, governance and South Asian Studies.

This book explores the politics of gendered labor migration in Southeast Asia through the stories and perspectives of Indonesian and Filipina women presented in films, fiction, and performance to show how the emotionality of these texts contribute to the emergence and vitality of women's social movements in Southeast Asia. By placing literary and filmic narratives of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore within existing conversations concerning migration policies, the book offers an innovative approach towards examining contemporary issues of Asian migration. Furthermore, through rich ethnographic accounts, the book unpacks themes of belonging and displacement, shame and desire, victimhood and resistance, sacrifice, and grief to show that the stories of Filipina and Indonesian migrant women don't just depict their everyday lives and practices but also reveal how they mediate and make sense of the fraught politics of gendered labor diaspora and globalization. Contributing to the "affective turn" of feminist and transnational scholarship, the book draws insight from the importance and centrality of affect, emotions, and feelings in shaping discourses on women's subjectivity, labor, and mobility. In addition, the book demonstrates the issues of vulnerability and agency inherent in debates on social exclusion, human rights, development, and nation-building in Southeast Asia. Offering an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to analyses of Asian migration, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of Asian Studies, literary and cultural studies, film studies, gender and women's studies, and migration studies.

This book examines the distinctive formation of Christianity in Nagaland, Northeast India, since 1947. It argues that an understanding of the history of Christianity in the region can be found in its cultural milieu and the changing political, social and religious environment. In Nagaland, almost 90 per cent of the population are Christians. This book shows that segmentation as a cultural characteristic of Naga society inspired both unity and divisiveness in the Naga churches, which subsequently shaped the beliefs and practices of the churches in the region. Using the methodology of cultural history, the author examines ecclesiastical events and suggests that the history of Christianity should be examined in the light of its interaction with its cultural context rather than as an isolated phenomenon. The book demonstrates that the ethnic status which the Christian faith assumed, the extent of its identification with the local culture, and the scope of the mission of the Naga churches as key stakeholders in society, offers a new angle on the history of Christianity in India. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian history, particularly those concerned with Northeast India and Christian history, historiography, cultural history, history of Christianity in India and faith-culture interface, religious studies, history and South Asian Studies.

Drawing upon insights from international socialization theory and social psychology, this book examines China's efforts to multipolarize - and hence potentially de-liberalize - the international system from the local perspective of a non-democratic (yet democratizing) nation and then applies these insights to Beijing's current global agency in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative. Specifically, the book scrutinizes Beijing's normative engagement in Kazakhstan, a nation that evolved from an enthusiastic supporter of the West's normative domination of international affairs into an overt critic - after having institutionalized relations with Beijing through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Tracing and juxtaposing the respective patterns of Kazakhstan's political identity development before the SCO entered the region and after, this book not only yields unexpected conclusions about the quality of post-Soviet democratization outcomes, but also about Beijing's local and global influence potentiality for the time to come - and its limits. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of China's normative power, democratization studies, post-Soviet studies, and International Relations.

This book studies the economic history of India and traces the Indian path of development from a Latin American framework and perspective. Despite sharing many historical and geological similarities, dialogue between the young democracies of Latin America and the Indian subcontinent is still extremely scarce. The volume builds a common research agenda for the economic development of the Global South. It offers Latin American insights and highlights novelties and commonalities the region shares with India's economic development. It pays special attention to the (geo)political, technological, financial, and institutional aspects related to the specific geographical and demographical features of the Indian subcontinent. A step towards strengthening the dialogue on economic development in the Global South, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of heterodox economics, Indian economy, comparative economics, macroeconomics, political economy, economic history, development studies, Latin American studies, and South Asian studies.

Of the world's refugees, more than a third live in Africa, displaced from their homelands by war, poverty, famine and political persecution. In this book, contributors explore key issues related to these refugee populations. The first section looks at the legal framework for defining and assisting refugees, and the second deals with the issue of relief by considering specific cases, the general problems faced and particular relief efforts. Subsequent chapters examine forced migration, resettlement and repatriation, conflict with local populations, integration of refugees, and sustainable development.

This book is the English version of Chandi Purana, written in Odia by Sarala Das. Indigenous and secular, the Chandi Purana is a shastra for laymen, a bold step towards fulfilling their right to knowledge. Based on the legend of Durga's incarnation of Chandi, as narrated in the Vishnu Purana, Sarala Das's Chandi Purana, written in Odia, marks the beginning of the era of classical Odia literature. It is not, however, just a renewed vernacular edition of an old story told in Sanskrit long ago; its objective is to communicate one of the great themes of Indian mythology to the common folk whom myth marginalizes and history excludes. And in doing so, the poet administers certain changes, based on local religions, beliefs, and customs. He introduces the Odia legend of Chandi by interpreting her as Sarala Chandi of Kanakpur, Odisha, where she has been 'worshipped for one lakh and thirty-two thousand years of Kaliyuga'. Second, in Sanskrit texts, the story is told by Sage Medha to King Suratha and Samadhi Vaisya. In Chandi Purana, Sage Shuka is the narrator and King Parikshit is the listener, which reflects the poet's adherence to Vaishnavism. Essentially, a war story, it presents Durga not only as a goddess in war, but also as a mother figure who tears apart the patriarchal frame in which women are treated as subordinates.

1) This book presents the changing nature of urbanity in the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh. 2) It is rich in ethnographic case studies from Dhaka. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of South Asian studies, sociology, anthropology, area studies and urban studies.

This book looks at the representation and practice of chastity in selective ancient Indian texts. It studies how and when the concept originated and in what ways it was intertwined with the social, cultural, and economic notions of Indian society. Drawing on seminal Indian texts such as the MahaPuranas, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Sattasai and the Jatakas, the volume delves into the social and reproductive rights of women through an examination of the norms of chastity, virginity, and Pativratya, which were construed according to a patriarchal hierarchy of the society and implemented as a means of strengthening patriarchal authority. It also examines the interinfluence of various religious traditions that emerged on the very concept of chastity and the ideologies they later gave rise to. A comprehensive study of sexuality and gender in early India, the book will be indispensable to students, teachers, and researchers of gender studies, literature, women's studies, women's rights, feminism, South Asian studies, and social history of Ancient India.

This book investigates how borders in former Soviet Union territories have evolved and shifted in the thirty years since the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to fifteen independent states and numerous de facto states; but this process of rebordering is not finished, and social, economic, infrastructural, cultural and political networks and spaces continue to develop. This book explores the intersection between these geopolitical shifts and the individual lived experience, drawing on cases from across border regions in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Throughout, the book introduces and frames the case studies with well-informed theoretical, conceptual and methodological overviews that situate them within border studies in general and post-Soviet border spaces in particular. Overall, the book demonstrates that like a kaleidoscope, the dynamic elements in these newly evolved border regions are similar yet strikingly different in their juxtapositions, with the appearance of new configurations often dependent on changing geopolitical constellations. This timely guide to the post-Soviet world thirty years after the Cold War will be of interest to researchers across border studies, politics, geography, social anthropology, history, Eastern European Studies, Central Asian Studies, and Caucasian Studies.

This book focuses on the ECOWAS Commission, both as an autonomous actor, as well as a policy-making nexus for its member states and external actors. Drawing from a variety of never-before analyzed sources, unpublished internal documents and over 120 interviews with staff from the ECOWAS Commission, its member states, and external actors supporting the organization, this book presents a comprehensive portrait of ECOWAS's institutional capabilities, challenges, and reforms. It utilizes a policy studies approach focusing on the areas of political affairs, peace, and regional security, as well as trade and customs to illustrate concrete cases of policy making. In doing so, the book provides practice-oriented insights into the policy-making agency within the organization, arguing for the significance of the ECOWAS Commission as an actor. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of West Africa and its international relations, comparative regionalism, international organization studies, development studies, policy-making, peace and conflict studies, governance and more broadly to African politics and international relations.

This book examines and establishes connections between Italian Fascism and Hindu nationalism, connections which developed within the frame of Italy's anti-British foreign policy. The most remarkable contacts with the Indian political milieu were established via Bengali nationalist circles. Diplomats and intellectuals played an important role in establishing and cultivating those tie-ups. Tagore's visit to Italy in 1925 and the much more relevant liaison between Subhas Chandra Bose and the INA were results of the Italian propaganda and activities in India. But the most meaningful part of this book is constituted by the connections and influences it establishes between Fascism as an ideology and a political system and Marathi Hindu nationalism. While examining fascist political literature and Mussolini's figure and role, Marathi nationalists were deeply impressed and influenced by the political ideology itself, the duce and fascist organisations. These impressions moulded the RSS, a right-wing, Hindu nationalist organisation, and Hindutva ideology, with repercussions on present Indian politics. This is the most original and revealing part of the book, entirely based on unpublished sources, and will prove foundational for scholars of modern Indian history.

Asian countries are among the largest contributors to climate change. China, India, Japan and South Korea are among the top ten largest carbon emitters in the world, with South Korea, Japan and Taiwan also some of the largest on a per capita basis. At the same time, many Asian countries, notably India, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines and Thailand are among those most affected by climate change, in terms of economic losses attributed to climate-related disasters. Asia is an extremely diverse region, in terms of the political regimes of its constituent countries, and of their level of development and the nature of their civil societies. As such, its countries are producing a wide range of governance approaches to climate change. Covering the diversity of climate change governance in Asia, this book presents cosmopolitan governance from the perspective of urban and rural communities, local and central governments, state-society relations and international relations. In doing so it offers both a valuable overview of individual Asian countries' approaches to climate change governance, and a series of case studies for finding solutions to climate change challenges.

This book explores the nature of parliamentary representation within the autocratic regimes of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. It argues that although many parliaments are elected under flawed or non-competitive elections, autocratic governments are nevertheless aware of the need to appear representative and accessible to the demands of citizens and that even limited parliaments manage to represent their voters, sometimes in ways not intended by the regime. The book examines how elites structure, manage and organize representation; how they foster the desired kind of representation; and how they limit the ways in which parliaments fulfil their representative functions. The book concludes that Kazakhstan is a more hegemonic form of autocracy and the Kyrgyz Republic a more competitive form and that the degree to which parliaments fulfil their representational functions and how much room for manoeuvre individual MPs have depends largely on how much parties control candidate selection and the daily schedule and administrative resources of parliaments.