This book attempts a representation of society in contemporary India through an ethnography woven around long-standing intractable conflicts - of displacement and rehabilitation, patriarchy, insurgency and counter-insurgency operations, and climate change. Each chapter in this volume offers a critical transformative narrative in response to these conflicts. It asks how social justice and equality is to be constructed and provides a fresh perspective. It is argued that social movements can no longer be concerned only with itemizing a checklist of demands; it is now necessary to be free of the hegemony of current frames, categories, concepts and principles, and to rethink the 'promise'. The volume maintains that this effort to step out of the 'endless waiting' for delivery of a 'promised value' draws out the labour of transformative action. A valuable contribution to understanding social movements in India, this work challenges the established discourses around grassroots politics, progressive policies and legislations as well as radical mass movements. The book will interest students and researchers of social movements, conflict and peace studies, sociology and social anthropology, political science and development studies. It will also be useful to those working in the areas of human rights, social exclusion and inclusive policies.

This volume attempts to show the emerging contours oftransformative action in social movements across South Asia. It argues that these contours have been shaped by contestations over questions of equity, justice and well-being on the one hand, and the nature and scope of new and classical social movements on the other. This is manifest in divers

This book attempts a representation of society in contemporary India through an ethnography woven around long-standing intractable conflicts - of displacement and rehabilitation, patriarchy, insurgency and counter-insurgency operations, and climate change. Each chapter in this volume offers a critical transformative narrative in response to these conflicts. It asks how social justice and equality is to be constructed and provides a fresh perspective. It is argued that social movements can no longer be concerned only with itemizing a checklist of demands; it is now necessary to be free of the hegemony of current frames, categories, concepts and principles, and to rethink the 'promise'. The volume maintains that this effort to step out of the 'endless waiting' for delivery of a 'promised value' draws out the labour of transformative action. A valuable contribution to understanding social movements in India, this work challenges the established discourses around grassroots politics, progressive policies and legislations as well as radical mass movements. The book will interest students and researchers of social movements, conflict and peace studies, sociology and social anthropology, political science and development studies. It will also be useful to those working in the areas of human rights, social exclusion and inclusive policies.

Mapping the development of social movements in South Asia, this book offers a penetrating study of the nature and modes of protest and dissent as manifest in people's struggles in securing equity, justice and security in labour, gender, human and environmental rights. Amid significant changes in society, economy and polity, combined with far-reaching consequences of globalization and neoliberalism, it situates the understanding of social movements within concrete experiences and examples of diversified resistances, collective dissensions and radical transformative mobilizations. Through case studies and examples from across South Asia, that reinforce vibrant democratic dissent, this volume challenges the view that in recent years there has been a decline of mass movements in the region. Besides drawing attention to the interconnections between New Social Movements (NSMs) and Classical Labour Movements (CLMs), it discusses the patterns of development of growing NSMs, particularly in South Asia, such as the Zapatistas' revolution; anti-capitalist movements; protests against globalization, Statism and difference feminism; and roles of language, money and legal opportunity in struggles. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, social movements, politics, gender and feminist studies, labour studies, as well as the general reader.