What does liberal order actually amount to outside the West, where it has been most institutionalised? Contrary to the Atlantic or Pacific, liberal hegemony is thin in the Indian Ocean World; there are no equivalents of NATO, the EU or the US-Japan defence relationship. Yet what this book calls the 'Global Indian Ocean' was the beating heart of earlier epochs of globalisation, where experiments in international order, market integration and cosmopolitanisms were pioneered. Moreover, it is in this macro-region that today's challenges will face their defining hour: climate change, pandemics, and the geopolitical contest pitting China and Pakistan against the USA and India. The Global Indian Ocean states represent the greatest range of political systems and ideologies in any region, from Hindu-nationalist India and nascent democracy in Indonesia and South Africa, to the Gulf's mixture of tribal monarchy and high modernism. These essays by leading scholars examine key aspects of political order, and their roots in the colonial and pre-colonial past, through the lenses of state-building, nationalism, international security, religious identity and economic development. The emergent lessons are of great importance for the world, as the 'global' liberal order fades and new alternatives struggle to be born.

The spectres of Marx and Lenin have long loomed prominently in Africa and Asia and they still do so in the 21st century. Many of the founding fathers of postcolonial republics believed socialism could transform their societies. Yet what socialism meant in theory and in practice has always been highly heterogeneous and differed markedly from the European experience. African and Asian movements did not simply mimic the ideas and institutions of Soviet or European Marxists, but endeavoured to define their own, experimenting with a variety of interpretations and in the process adapting doctrines and templates to their unique contexts. This volume brings together anthropologists, historians and political scientists from around the world to reflect on three great challenges which various types of socialists in Africa and Asia have had to simultaneously contend with in their articulations of liberation: how to build up empirical and juridical statehood, how to forge a nation after colonial divide-and-rule, and how to position themselves in an international order not of their making. In a post-colonial world, this helps centre a key question running through the different chapters: what can African and Asian imaginaries, institutions and practices tell us about socialism as a global phenomenon? The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

The spectres of Marx and Lenin have long loomed prominently in Africa and Asia and they still do so in the 21st century. Many of the founding fathers of postcolonial republics believed socialism could transform their societies. Yet what socialism meant in theory and in practice has always been highly heterogeneous and differed markedly from the European experience. African and Asian movements did not simply mimic the ideas and institutions of Soviet or European Marxists, but endeavoured to define their own, experimenting with a variety of interpretations and in the process adapting doctrines and templates to their unique contexts. This volume brings together anthropologists, historians and political scientists from around the world to reflect on three great challenges which various types of socialists in Africa and Asia have had to simultaneously contend with in their articulations of liberation: how to build up empirical and juridical statehood, how to forge a nation after colonial divide-and-rule, and how to position themselves in an international order not of their making. In a post-colonial world, this helps centre a key question running through the different chapters: what can African and Asian imaginaries, institutions and practices tell us about socialism as a global phenomenon? The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

This book investigates how ecology and politics meet in the Middle East and how those interactions connect to the global political economy. Through region-wide analyses and case studies from the Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf of Aden, the Levant and North Africa, the volume highlights the intimate connections of environmental activism, energy infrastructure and illicit commodity trading with the political economies of Central Asia, the Horn of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. The book's nine chapters analyse how the exploitation and representation of the environment have shaped the history of the region--and determined its place in global politics. It argues that how the ecological is understood, instrumentalised and intervened upon is the product of political struggle: deconstructing ideas and practices of environmental change means unravelling claims of authority and legitimacy. This is particularly important in a region frequently seen through the prism of environmental determinism, where ruling elites have imposed authoritarian control as the corollary of 'environmental crisis'. This unique and urgent collection will question much of what we think we know about this pressing issue.

In 1989, a secretive movement of Islamists allied itself to a military cabal to violently take power in Africa's biggest country. Sudan's revolutionary regime was built on four pillars - a new politics, economic liberalisation, an Islamic revival, and a U-turn in foreign relations - and mixed militant conservatism with social engineering: a vision of authoritarian modernisation. Water and agricultural policy have been central to this state-building project. Going beyond the conventional lenses of famine, 'water wars' or the oil resource curse, Harry Verhoeven links environmental factors, development, and political power. Based on years of unique access to the Islamists, generals, and business elites at the core of the Al-Ingaz Revolution, Verhoeven tells the story of one of Africa's most ambitious state-building projects in the modern era - and how its gamble to instrumentalise water and agriculture to consolidate power is linked to twenty-first-century globalisation, Islamist ideology, and intensifying geopolitics of the Nile.

Places Sudan's oil industry (examined here in macro, micro and political terms), its economy, external relations and changing politics under the impact of the Darfur conflict and the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, in the wider context of the expansion of Asia's global economic strength. By successfully turning to China, Malaysia and India from the mid-1990s, amidst civil war and political isolation, Khartoum's 'Look East' policy transformed Sudan's economy and foreign relations. Sudan, in turn, has been a key theatre of Chinese, Indian and Malaysian overseas energy investment. What began as economic engagements born of pragmatic necessity later became politicized within Sudan and without, resulting in global attention. Despite its importance, widespread sustained interest and continuing political controversy, there is no single volume publication examining the rise and nature of Chinese, Malaysian and Indian interests in Sudan, their economic and political consequences, and role in Sudan's foreign relations. Addressing this gap, this book provides a groundbreaking analysis of Sudan's 'Look East' policy. It offers the first substantive treatment of a subject of fundamental significancewithin Sudan that, additionally, has become a globally prominent dimension of its changing international politics. Daniel Large is research director of the Africa Asia Centre, Royal African Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and founding director of the Rift Valley Institute's digital Sudan Open Archive. Luke A. Patey is a Research Fellow at the Danish Institute for International Studies.

In 1989, a secretive movement of Islamists allied itself to a military cabal to violently take power in Africa's biggest country. Sudan's revolutionary regime was built on four pillars - a new politics, economic liberalisation, an Islamic revival, and a U-turn in foreign relations - and mixed militant conservatism with social engineering: a vision of authoritarian modernisation. Water and agricultural policy have been central to this state-building project. Going beyond the conventional lenses of famine, 'water wars' or the oil resource curse, Harry Verhoeven links environmental factors, development, and political power. Based on years of unique access to the Islamists, generals, and business elites at the core of the Al-Ingaz Revolution, Verhoeven tells the story of one of Africa's most ambitious state-building projects in the modern era - and how its gamble to instrumentalise water and agriculture to consolidate power is linked to twenty-first-century globalisation, Islamist ideology, and intensifying geopolitics of the Nile.

In October 1996, a motley crew of ageing Marxists and unemployed youth coalesced to revolt against Mobutu Seso Seko, president of Zaire/Congo since 1965. The rebels of the AFDL marched over 1500km in seven months to crush the dictatorship, heralding liberation as a second independence for Central Africa as a whole. US President Bill Clinton toasted AFDL leader Laurent-Desire Kabila and his regional allies - having developed a unique camaraderie and personal trust on the region's battlefronts -- as a 'new generation of African leaders' ushering in an 'African Renaissance.' Within months, however, the Pan-Africanist alliance fell apart. The AFDL's collapse triggered a cataclysmic fratricide between the heroes of liberationthat became the deadliest conflict since the Second World War, drawing in eight African countries. This book draws on hundreds of interviews with protagonists from Africa and the international community to offer a novel theoretical and empirical account of Africa's Great War. Bridging the gap between comparative politics and international relations, it argues that the renewed outbreak of calamitous violence in August 1998 was a function of the kind of regime the AFDL was and how its leaders saw Congo, theregion and themselves. As a Pan-Africanist liberation movement, the collapse of the AFDL government internally and the unravelling of regional order externally were inextricably linked.