This volume brings together important work at the intersection of politics and performance studies. While the languages of theatre and performance have long been deployed by other disciplines, these are seldom deployed seriously and pursued systematically to discover the actual nature of the relationship between performance as a set of behavioural practices and the forms and the transactions of these other disciplines. This book investigates the structural similarities and features of politics and performance, which are referred to here as 'grammar', a concept which also emphasizes the common communicational base or language of these fields. In each of the chapters included in this collection, key processes of both politics and performance are identified and analyzed, demonstrating the critical and indivisible links between the fields. The book also underlines that neither politics nor performance can take place without actors who perform and spectators who receive, evaluate and react to these actions. At the heart of the project is the ambition to bring about a paradigm change, such that politics cannot be analyzed seriously without a sophisticated understanding of its performance. All the chapters here display a concrete set of events, practices, and contexts within which politics and performance are inseparable elements. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars in both International Relations and Performance Studies.

Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament breaks new ground in the study of legislatures. It combines mainstream historical and social science approaches with cultural theory to consider how parliamentary ritual is constructed through ceremony, space and socialisation. The focus is on the marginalised groups especially women and members of ethnic minorities who seek inclusion as representatives in democratic legislatures. This book assesses aspects of the role that ceremony and ritual in legislatures play, especially but not exclusively, in their gendered and racialised dimensions. Within this broad frame, it considers the impact of space, identity, ritual and/or ceremony on the institutional form of parliament, how power is shaped within it, how the behaviour of members is facilitated, constrained and shaped, how power and rituals interact to and how they impinge upon the relationships between representative institutions and citizens. Contributions are theoretical and empirical, comparative or single-country studies of national or sub-national legislatures. They have interdisciplinary, historical, or postcolonial perspectives that contribute to this emerging field in the study of parliaments. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Legislative Studies.

Rethinking Empowerment looks at the changing role of women in developing countries and calls for a new approach to empowerment. An approach that adopts a more nuanced, feminist interpretation of power and em(power)ment, recognises that local empowerment is always embedded in regional, national and global contexts, pays attention to institutional structures and politics and acknowledges that empowerment is both a process and an outcome. Moreover, the book warns that an obsession with measurement rather than process can undermine efforts to foster transformative and empowering outcomes. It concludes that power must be restored as the centrepiece of empowerment. Only then will the term and its advocates provide meaningful ammunition for dealing with the challenges of an increasingly unequal, and often sexist, global/local world.

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This volume brings together important work at the interstection of politics and performance studies. While the languages of theatre and performance have long been deployed by other disciplines such as psychology (Freud's primal 'scene'), sociology (Goffman's 'backstage'), and politics (politicians 'play' to the public, stage debates), this metaphorical attribution has seldom been taken seriously and pursued systematically to discover the actual nature of the relationship between performance as a set of behavioural practices and the forms and the transactions of these other realms. Rather than take these for granted, this book investigates the relationship between politics and performance to discover structural similarities we are calling 'grammar'. Designed to mean that certain features of political transactions shared by performances are fundamental to both disciplines, the concept of grammar also emphasizes the common communicational base or language of these fields. Neither politics nor performance can take place without actors who perform and spectators who receive, evaluate and react to these actions.In each of the essays included in this collection, key processes of both politics and performance are identified and analyzed, demonstrating the critical and indivisible links between the fields. At the heart of the project is the ambition to bring about a paradigm change, such that politics cannot be analyzed seriously without a sophisticated understanding of its performance. These essays were chosen for the volume because they display a concrete set of events, practices, and contexts within which politics and performance are inseparable elements. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars in both International Relations and Performance Studies.

This book traces the Indian Left's engagement with the international communist debates of the 1960s and 1970s, shedding new light on the fault lines within the Left as well as on its international solidarities. Lajpat Rai argued for rethinking established leftist positions, seeking inspiration in experiment and developing creative approaches for the sustainability of socialist ideas and ideals. The contemporary relevance of these debates is significant as the Left remains without a sharp response to the rise of neoliberalism and right-wing populism in India, and a failure of the Left to recognize the challenges emanating from a strongly integrated and organized finance capital on the one hand and the increasingly self-aware identity politics on the other. Democratic opposition rather than a bureaucratic thinking needs to be the backbone of any meaningful Left struggle. Lajpat Rai's passionate writing gives expression to the spirit and intensity of political debates at the time and the role of the Left intelligentsia in comprehending, from a committed socialist angle, the shifting paradigms of an unstable world to help bring about progressive change.

In The Gender Politics of Development Shirin Rai provides a comprehensive assessment of how gender politics has emerged and developed in post-colonial states. In chapters on key issues of nationalism and nation-building, the third wave of democratization and globalization and governance, Rai argues that the gendered way in which nationalist statebuilding occured created deep fissures and pressures for development. She goes on to show how women have engaged with institutions of governance in developing countries, looking in particular at political participation, deliberative democracy, representation, leadership and state feminism. Through this engagement, Rai claims, vital new political spaces have been created. Though Rai focuses in-depth on how these debates have played out in India, the book's argument is highly relevant for politics across the developing world. This is a unique and compelling synthesis of gender politics with ideas about development from an authoritative figure in the field.