This volume combines ethnographic accounts of fieldwork with overviews of recent anthropological literature about the region on topics such as Islam, gender, youth, and new media. It addresses contemporary debates about modernity, nation building, and the link between the ideology of power and the production of knowledge. Contributors include established and emerging scholars known for the depth and quality of their ethnographic writing and for their interventions in current theory. -- Indiana University Press

"Reformatting Politics" examines the ways in which new information and communication technologies (ICTs) are being used by civil society organizations (CSOs) to achieve their aims through activities and networks that cross national borders. These new ICTs--the internet, mobile phones, satellite radio and television--have allowed these civil society organizations to form extensive networks linking the local and the global in new ways and to flourish internationally in ways that were not possible without them.
The book consists of four sections containing essays by some of the top scholars and activists working at the intersections of networked societies, civil society organizations, and information technology. The book also includes a section that takes a critical look at the UN World Summit of Information Society and the role that global governance has played and will play in the use and dissemination of these new technologies. Finally, the book aims to influence this important and emerging field of inquiry by posing a set of questions and directions for future research. In sum, "Reformatting Politic"s is a fresh look at the way critical network practice through the use of information technology is reformatting the terms and terrains of global politics.

"It is difficult to imagine a more thoughtful, balanced, orcomprehensive treatment of this extremely elusive and difficult subject." --Digest of Middle East Studies

This second edition of a widelyacclaimed collection of essays reports on how new media -- fax machines, satellitetelevision, and the Internet -- and the new uses of older media -- cassettes, pulpfiction, the cinema, the telephone, and the press -- shape belief, authority, andcommunity in the Muslim world. The chapters in this work, including new chaptersdealing specifically with events after September 11, 2001, concern Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, the Arabian Peninsula, and Muslim communities inthe United States and elsewhere. The extent to which today's new media havetranscended local and state frontiers and have reshaped understandings of gender, authority, social justice, identities, and politics in Muslim societies emerges fromthis timely and provocative book.

When originally published in 1984, Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan provided the first focused consideration of the 1978 Saur Revolution and the subsequent Soviet invasion and occupation of the country. Nearly four decades later, its conclusions remain crucial to understanding Afghanistan today. In this much-anticipated re-release, Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan offers an opportunity for fresh insight into the antecedents of the nation's enduring conflicts. A new foreword by editors M. Nazif Shahrani and Robert L. Canfield contextualizes this collection, which relies on extensive fieldwork in the years leading up to the Soviet invasion. Specific tribal, ethnic, and gender groups are considered within the context of their region, and contributors discuss local responses to government decrees, Islamic-inspired grassroots activism, and interpretations of jihad outside of Kabul. Long recognized as a vital ethnographic text in Afghan studies, Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan provides an extraordinary chance to experience the diversity of the Afghan people on the cusp of irrevocable change and to understand what they expected of the years ahead.

This volume combines ethnographic accounts of fieldwork with overviews of recent anthropological literature about the region on topics such as Islam, gender, youth, and new media. It addresses contemporary debates about modernity, nation building, and the link between the ideology of power and the production of knowledge. Contributors include established and emerging scholars known for the depth and quality of their ethnographic writing and for their interventions in current theory. -- Indiana University Press