This book, - presents a comprehensive overview of the contemporary experiences of democracy in India. It explores the modes by which democracy as an idea, and as a practice, is interpreted, enforced, and lived in India's current political climate. - employs 'case studies' as a methodological vantage point to evolve an innovative conceptual framework for the study of democracy in India. - is a key critical intervention on contemporary politics in South Asia, and will be essential reading for scholars and researchers of political studies, political science, political sociology, comparative government and politics, sociology, social anthropology, public administration, public policy, and South Asia studies.

Autocracies not only resist the global spread of democracy but are sources of autocratic influence and pressure. This book presents a conceptual model to understand, assess, and explain the promotion and diffusion of authoritarian elements. Employing a cross-regional approach, leading experts empirically test the concept of authoritarian gravity centers (AGCs), defined as "regimes that constitute a force of attraction and contagion for countries in geopolitical proximity." With an analysis extending across Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Asia, these AGCs are shown to be effective as active promoters (push) or as neutral sources of attraction (pull). The authors contend that the influence of exogenous factors, along with international and regional contexts for the transformation of regime types, is vital to understanding and analyzing the transmission of autocratic institutional settings, ideas, norms, procedures, and practices, thus explaining the regional clustering of autocracies. It is the regional context in which external actors can influence authoritarian processes most effectively. Authoritarian Gravity Centers is a vibrant and comprehensive contribution to the growing field of autocratization, which will be of great interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of comparative area studies, illiberalism, international politics, and studies of democracy.

Despite carefully constructed conservation interventions, deforestation in Indonesia is not being stopped. This book identifies why large-scale international forest conservation has failed to reduce deforestation in Indonesia and considers why key stakeholders have not responded as expected to these conservation interventions. The book maps the history of deforestation in Indonesia in the context of global political economy, exploring the relationship between international trade, the interests and ideology behind global sustainability programmes and the failures of forest conservation in Indonesia. Global economic and political ideologies are shown to have profoundly shaped deforestation. The author argues that the same forces continue to prevent positive outcomes. Case study chapters analyse three major international programmes: Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), the Norway-Indonesia bilateral partnership, and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Indonesia. The findings provide insight into the failures of global climate change policy and suggest how the book's theoretical model can be used to analyse other complex environmental problems. The book is a useful reference for students of environmental science and policy, political theory, international relations, development and economics. It will also be of interest to forestry professionals and practitioners working in NGOs.

This much anticipated volume looks at the historical evolution of towns and cities in medieval India from the early thirteenth to the late eighteenth century. The selection is based on the availability of documents. These include the narratives of European travellers in English, French, Italian, Dutch, and German with the exception of Ibn Battuta in mid-fourteenth century and also Middle Bengali literature in case of towns in Bengal. While the coastal towns and cities have been looked at, the interior ones are also described on the basis of the writings of later historians and archaeologists. Care has been taken to explain the rise, growth and the decline of some towns and cities in which the changing courses of rivers had played a crucial role. Attempts have been made to search other factors responsible for such eventualities. The delineation of physical features within the city has been given due emphasis including the different quarters of the city and the manners and customs of the local population with reference to craft production and commercial links. The morphological differences between the cities of eastern and those of the western or northern India have also been described. This is clear from the observations of port towns described here. All these would show that India was one of the most urbanized area in the medieval period before advent of the British.

This book is a detailed analysis of the food scarcity and epidemics among the womenfolk and other vulnerable sections of society in colonial Orissa. Its major significance lies in the fact that the food crisis, mass exodus and adverse sex ratio continue to raise questions in the contemporary world. Studies of such experiences help in re-designing strategies to meet the challenges arising from natural disasters, wars, pandemics, besides poverty and uncertain production outcomes. The study of Orissa Famine of 1866 explodes the myth upheld by the colonial administrators that women died at a lower rate than men in famines, because they could easily adapt to food scarcity and were supposedly less prone to infectious diseases. Evidence based on historical, sociological and biological factors showed that increasing male migration, much of it, leading to high mortality, explains the change in sex ratio during the colonial period. This work also shows that many of today's consumption preferences, linguistic usages and cultural habits of people, carry traces of cataclysmic experiences. This book also highlights the fact that most famines are the result of policy failures and, are often rooted in structural inequalities with serious consequences for women, lower castes and the poor alike. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

This book presents a new perspective on how Russia projects itself to the world. Distancing itself from familiar, agency-driven International Relations accounts that focus on what 'the Kremlin' is up to and why, it argues for the need to pay attention to deeper, trans-state processes over which the Kremlin exerts much less control. Especially important in this context is mediatization, defined as the process by which contemporary social and political practices adopt a media form and follow media-driven logics. In particular, the book emphasizes the logic of the feedback loop or 'recursion', showing how it drives multiple Russian performances of national belonging and nation projection in the digital era. It applies this theory to recent issues, events, and scandals that have played out in international arenas ranging from television, through theatre, film, and performance art, to warfare.

This book chronicles the rise and the development of postcolonial agency since Africa's encounter with Western modernity through African and African diaspora literature and film. Using African and African diasporic imaginaries (creative writings, autobiographies, polemical writings, and filmic media), the author shows how African subjects have resisted enslavement and colonial domination over the past centuries, and how they have sought to reshape "global modernity". Authors and film makers whose works are examined in detail include Olaudah Equiano, Haile Gerima, Amma Asante, George Washington Williams, William Sheppard, Wole Soyinka, Dani Kouyate, Chris Abani, Chimamanda Adichie, and Leila Aboulela. Providing a critical study of nativism, hybridity and post-hybrid conjunctive consciousness, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of African and African diasporic literature, history, and cultural studies.

A must-have quick guide to the future torchbearers of Indian cinema for scholars, students, early career researchers, and a global audience interested in intersecting aspects of cinema, culture, politics, and society in contemporary India This book offers a concise and cutting-edge repository of essential information on new independent Indian films, which have orchestrated a recent renaissance in the Bollywood-dominated Indian cinema sphere The book spotlights a specific timeline from the Indies' consolidated emergence in 2010 across a decade of their development Takes note of recent transformations in the Indian political, economic, cultural, and social matrix and the concurrent release of unflinchingly interrogative and radically evocative films that traverse LGBTQ issues, female empowerment, caste discrimination, populist politics and religious violence A combination of essential Indie-specific information and concise case-studies

This book explores the impact of globalization, especially in the context of trade and investment policies, on the key economic outcomes, including innovation, productivity, employment, and wages, using Thai manufacturing as a case study. The book looks at the impacts of the shift of manufacturing share from industrialized to emerging countries and emergence of 'global value chains' (GVCs) as well as liberalization through the proliferation of free-trade agreements (FTAs) on key economic outcomes. The book highlights that globalization, through trade (including the parts and components trade) and investment, continues in Thailand amid the anti-globalization sentiment since the onset of the new millennium, especially the US-China trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic. Thailand has gained considerable benefit from trade and investment liberalization in various forms, including innovation, firm productivity improvements, and workers' skills enhancement. Although the country has prospered in these areas, several further enhancements are needed in order to effectively harness the benefits available from globalization, including continued trade and investment policy reforms. Key policy inferences are provided in the last chapter. The book will appeal to those with an interest in international economics, especially issues relating to the economic consequences of globalization. It will also appeal to policymakers and practitioners responsible for international trade and investment regulations.

The book unravels the dynamics of capitalist development, critically assesses the socialist experiment in charting out a course of development different from capitalism, explains the contradictions in the post-Independence development process in India, evaluates other efforts outside the state towards ushering in 'development', and then proposes an alternative path to progress - an employment based ecologically sustainable model of decentralized development based on local resource endowment and heightened mass consciousness which will take the country out of the dependency paradigm. This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Considering the Mekong region as an aggregation of various commons, the contributors to this volume investigate the various commons across the boundaries of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. The book incorporates the specialized fields of political science, area studies, public policy, international relations, international development, geography, economics, business administration, public health, engineering, agricultural economics, tropical agriculture, and biotechnology. The contributions to the book cover various issues including innovation and technology, transport and logistics, public health and literacy, traditional medicine, infectious diseases, advanced agricultural technologies, irrigation, water resources, labor migration, human trafficking, and counterfeiting. They examine various commons and goods related to these issues, and discuss practices, policies, decision-making processes and governance strategies for imagining a future Mekong Community that will avoid the tragedy, and explore the comedy of the commons/anti-commons. A valuable resource for scholars of the Mekong region, and more broadly for academics working on the interdisciplinary study of transboundary governance issues.

This book analyses the impact that stabilization clauses have on the development of human rights and gender laws in resource rich nations. Given the fact that stabilization clauses freeze the law for as long as the contract subsists there has been debate on the negative impact stabilization clauses have on the progressive development of human rights in the host State. Firstly, the book examines the mechanisms investors utilise in protecting themselves from host State prerogatives. It then explores the theoretical basis on which stabilization clauses are applied and upheld by arbitral tribunals, and assesses how they can be drafted in a way that protects human rights, particularly in relation to gender discrimination, without forcing the resource rich nations to lose momentum in attracting foreign direct investment. Using Zambia and the Gender Equity and Equality Act of 2015 as a case study, the book explores the compatibility of the legislation with the stabilization clauses contained in the country's Development Agreements. The book will be of interest to practitioners, scholars and students of international investment law, human rights law and contract law.

This book focuses on news silence in Zimbabwe, taking as a point of departure the (in)famous blank spaces (whiteouts) which newspapers published to protest official censorship policy imposed by the Rhodesian government from the mid-1960s to the end of that decade. Based on archived news content, the author investigates the cause(s) of the disappearance of blank spaces in Zimbabwe's newspapers and establishes whether and how the blank spaces may have been continued by stealth and proposes a model of doing journalism where news is inclusive, just and less productive of blank spaces. The author explores the broader ramifications of news silences, tacit or covert on society's sense of the world and their place in it. It questions whether and how news media continued with the practice of epistemic deletions and continue to draw on the colonial archive for conceptual maps with which to define and interpret contemporary postcolonial realities and challenges in Zimbabwe. This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and academics researching the press in contemporary Africa, critical media analysis, media and society studies, and news as discourse.

This book focuses on the Indo-Pacific region's growing prominence as the world's major powers gravitate toward this space to expand their influence. With dynamic shifts taking place in the globe's most strategically volatile region, Indo-Pacific Strategies aims at clarifying the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific, expounded both as a strategic concept and nascent region, thus contributing to the burgeoning policy and academic debate. The book offers indispensable insights and appropriate remedies to maintain the rules-based international order as threatened by China's increasingly assertive and bellicose posturing. It offers up-to-date analyses of Covid-19-related geopolitical trends, the strategies of various Indo-Pacific states against the backdrop of great power competition, the increasingly confrontational stance of Indo-Pacific states against China and the 2020 US election results. This unique book presents deep insights into the roles of Eurasia, small island states, the Middle East and Africa, in addition to Australia, India, Japan and the US, thereby providing much needed comparative studies. It also closely investigates the strategic and tactical operationalization of the Indo-Pacific, making it an essential read for scholars, policymakers, students, and strategists in the field of international politics and Area Studies. Excerpt from the foreword by ABE Shinzo, (former) Prime Minister of Japan "I think this book is the timeliest attempt to bring together the wisdom of eleven people to present a multifaceted view of the FOIP [Free and Open Indo-Pacific]. As a reader, I would like to express my gratitude to the editors and contributors for their valuable intellectual contributions." See the preview function on this website to access the full text.

This book proposes the idea of interstitial space as a theoretical framework to describe and understand the implications of in-between lands in urban studies and their profound transformative effects in cities and their urban character. The analysis of the interstitial spaces is structured into four themes: the conceptual grounds of interstitial spaces; the nature of interstices; the geographical scale of interstices; and the relationality of interstices. The empirical section of the book introduces seven cases that illustrate the varied nature of interstitiality to finally discuss its implications in the broader field of urban studies. Reflections upon further lines of enquiry and theories of urbanisation, urban sprawl, and cities are highlighted in the conclusion chapter. This is the ideal text for scholars of urban planning, strategic spatial planning, landscape planning, urban design, architecture, and other cognate disciplines as well as advanced students in these fields.

African legal realities reflect an intertwining of transnational, regional, and local normative frameworks, institutions, and practices that challenge the idea of the sovereign territorial state. This book analyses the novel constellations of governance actors and conditions under which they interact and compete. The work follows a spatial approach as the emphasis on normative spaces opens avenues to better understand power relations, processes of institutionalization, and the production of legitimacy and normativities themselves. Selected case studies from thirteen African countries deliver new empirical data and grounded insights from, and into, particular normative spaces. The individual chapters explore the interrelationships between various normative orders, diverse actors, and their influences. The encounters between different normative understandings and actors open up space and multiple forums for negotiating values. The authors analyse how different doctrines, institutions, and practices are constructed, contested, negotiated, and adapted in translation processes and thereby continuously reshape Africa's multidimensional normative spaces. The volume delivers nuanced views of jurisprudence in Africa and presents an excellent resource for scholars and students of anthropology, legal geography, legal studies, sociology, political sciences, international relations, African studies, and anyone wishing to gain a better understanding of how legal constellations are shaped by unreflected assumptions about the state and the rule of law.

For the first century-and-a-half of its nearly 275 year existence, the English East India Company remained ostensibly a mercantile enterprise, satisfied to simply trade, competing with other European traders. In the middle of the eighteenth century, as a response to French expansion in India, the East India Company redefined itself, becoming an active participant in India's 'game of thrones'. Through the use of its military might, only tentatively supported by the English Crown and Parliament, the Company dominated trade, became a king-maker, and ultimately a colonial administrator over much of the Indian Subcontinent. The Company had become a state in the guise of a merchant. The Company consolidated its position in Bengal, then began to exert its power by toppling local potentates and absorbing one princely state after another. Confronted with a land system that was built on custom and tradition, and not law, with no tradition of land ownership, the British were forced to formulate a new land tenure and revenue system for India, one based on British principles of property. Permanent Settlement was the new government's first attempt at creating a new revenue system. Through its creation, for the first time, private property rights were conferred on the formerly non-landowning zamindars. Which, as this authoritative volume notes in turn, created a land market, destabilizing the political and social structure of India irretrievably.

This book addresses important and under-researched issues such as, the role of young people in democratization processes, the role of new democracies in sharing their transition experience, and the effectiveness of aid. A major theme of the book is democracy assistance efforts by the NGOs from Central and Eastern Europe to support young people in Eastern Europe, the Western Balkans, and Central Asia. It examines this theme in a comparative perspective and with a deeper analysis of reasons and ways to support young people, the need to support them and the effectiveness of these efforts. Bringing together a wide range of material on democracy assistance of Central and Eastern European countries that includes surveying the providers and beneficiaries of aid and looking for better methods of impact evaluation, the book advances a framework for assessing democracy assistance efforts. It concludes with implications of the impact of democracy assistance on young people and democracy diffusion from Central and Eastern European democracies to other countries. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of democracy, democratization, Central and Eastern Europe, Post-Soviet studies, and European and Comparative Politics, as well as for practitioners (donors, NGOs) who want to know what works best, and why and when in aid provision.

1. This is a comprehensive book dealing with cultural history of Ayurveda Medicine. 2. The book has rich archival material and extensive primary data from the field. 3. With popularity of alternative medicine, Yoga and emergence of indigenous studies, this book will have a good market in both UK and USA.

1. This is a comprehensive book dealing with cultural history of Ayurveda Medicine. 2. The book has rich archival material and extensive primary data from the field. 3. With popularity of alternative medicine, Yoga and emergence of indigenous studies, this book will have a good market in both UK and USA.

This book examines how women in Guinea articulate themselves politically within and outside institutional politics. It documents the everyday practices that local female actors adopt to deal with the continuous economic, political, and social insecurities that emerge in times of political transformations. Carole Ammann argues that women's political articulations in Muslim Guinea do not primarily take place within women's associations or institutional politics such as political parties; but instead women's silent forms of politics manifest in their daily agency, that is, when they make a living, study, marry, meet friends, raise their children, and do household chores. The book also analyses the relationship between the female population and the local authorities, and discusses when and why women's claim making enjoys legitimacy in the eyes of other men and women, as well as representatives of 'traditional' authorities and the local government. Paying particular attention to intersectional perspectives, this book will be of interest to scholars of African studies, social anthropology, political anthropology, the anthropology of gender, urban anthropology, gender studies, and Islamic studies.

This book explores the meaning and practice of empowering methodologies in organisational and social research. In a context of global academic precarity, this volume explores why empowering research is urgently needed. It discusses the situatedness of knowing and knowledge in the context of core-periphery relations between the global North and South. The book considers the sensory, affective, embodied practice of empowering research, which involves listening, seeing, moving and feeling, to facilitate a more diverse, creative and crafty repertoire of research possibilities. The essays in this volume examine crucial themes including: * How to decolonise management knowledge * Using imaginative, visual and sensory methods * Memory and space in empowering research * Empowerment and feminist methodologies * The role of reflexivity in empowering research By bringing postcolonial perspectives from India, the volume aims to revitalise management and organisation studies for global readers. This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of management studies, organisational behaviour, research methodology, development studies, social sciences in general and gender studies and sociology.

1) This is a data rich comprehensive volume on elections in India from 1952-2019. 2) It discusses important facets of institutions and voting analysis in both regional and national elections. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of South Asian studies and India studies across UK and USA.

1) This book presents the women's perspective of displacement through literature, culture and societal experiences in South Asia. 2) It attempts to fill the gap in the existing literature on women & displacement and, women & rehabilitation. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of South Asian studies and cultural studies across UK and USA.

This book presents the first systematic critical exploration of the philosophical and political thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo, both pioneers of modern Indian thought. Bringing together experts from across the world, the volume examines the thoughts, ideas, actions, lives and experiments of Mahatma Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo on themes such as radical politics and human agency; ideals of human unity; social practices and citizenship; horizons of sustainable development and climate change; inclusive freedom; conceptions of swaraj; interpretations of texts; Sri Aurobindo's views on Indian culture; integral yoga; transformative leadership; Anthropocene and alternative planetary futures. The book discusses the contemporary legacies and works of the two influential thinkers. It offers insights into historical, philosophical, theoretical, literary and sociological questions that establish the need for transdisciplinary dialogues and the relevance of their visions towards future evolution. This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of political science, Indian political thought, comparative politics, philosophy, Indian philosophy, sociology, anthropology, modern Indian history, peace studies, cultural studies, religious studies and South Asian studies.