Anthem Press

“Classical Economics Today: Essays in Honor of Alessandro Roncaglia” is a collection of essays that investigates and applies the method and principles of Classical political economy to current issues of economic theory and policy.

The contributors to the volume, like all classical economists in general, regard history as a useful tool of analysis rather than a specialist object of investigation. By denying that a single, all-encompassing mathematical model can explain everything we are interested in, Classical political economy necessarily requires a comparison and integration of several pieces of theory as the only way to discuss economics and economic policy. Economists inspired by the Classical approach believe that economic theory is historically conditioned: as social systems evolve, the appropriate theory to represent a certain phenomenon must evolve too. Therefore, plurality in methods, including the history of economic thought, must be a deliberate choice, as evidenced by the essays in “Classical Economics Today: Essays in Honor of Alessandro Roncaglia.”

“Classical Economics Today” is a tribute to Alessandro Roncaglia, to his personality and his research interests. Roncaglia’s research is based on Schumpeter’s dictum that good economics must encompass history, economic theory and statistics, and therefore does not generally take the form of elegant formal models that are applicable to all and everything. In this direction, Roncaglia is inspired by the Classical economists of the past, and becomes a model for present-day Classical economists. A perceptible family air imbues the essays: all the contributors are friends of Roncaglia and see his personality and his interests as a common point of reference.

“Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance” examines expert committees established to provide science advice to multilateral environmental agreements. By focusing on how these institutions are sites of coproduction of knowledge and policy, this work brings to light the politics of science advice and details how these committees are contributing to an emerging global environmental constitutionalism.

Grounded in participant observation, elite interviews and document analysis, “Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance” uses the lenses of the body of experts, body of knowledge, and institutional body to focus on three features of design. Who are the experts being asked to provide advice? What types of knowledge are considered beyond the bounds of the committee and how is this determined? What rules and norms are developed to govern how the committee carries out its work?

The empirical chapters lay out three illustrations: controversy over the continued use of methyl bromide despite it being scheduled for a ban under the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, a series of votes by the Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) Review Committee when determining whether the pesticide endosulfan should be banned under the Stockholm Convention on POPs and a decade of institutional innovation in an effort to revamp the provision of science advice to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

Advanced study in the humanities and social sciences discloses a deep ambivalence about Theory. Structurally, of course, the professionalization of young academics is approaching extinction. There are fewer and fewer secure jobs in academia, and thus fewer and fewer students embarking upon advanced study, and, in turn, fewer and fewer programs educating these students. What is offered the remaining students is instructive. Notably, students are expected by their future colleagues to be familiar with, maybe even conversant in Theory, but the structural logic of austerity prompts educators to wonder whether instruction in Theory is an efficient use of dwindling resources, especially now that academic publishing (with important exceptions) behaves as though this future, like the “last” wormhole, is collapsing. Given the Faustian articulation of publishing and promotion can advanced study in the humanities and social sciences even be justified today? Paradoxically, students are still expected to know what is less and less on offer. How is Theory to be “handled” (fingered, worked with, fashioned) under such circumstances?

A reading of Theory that in tracing when and where Theory arises in the event of reading proposes how Theory might best be handled in the context of higher education today. Arguing against those who propose to avoid Theory in the name of its putative obsolescence, this text sets out to challenge two aspects of this avoidance. On the one hand, Theory has been set aside in the name of identity politics, that is, the proposition that its intellectual pertinence has been overshadowed by a sense of political urgency construed as at odds with Theory. Theory itself has assumed an identity, a profile. On the other hand, implicit within the avoidance of Theory is a concept of “context” that calls for reflection. Resisting the tendency to treat context as either negligible or obvious, this text sets out to trace, in the when and where of Theory, the rudiments of a “sociographic” (think “historiographic”) account of context. In relation to it, the reading that is Theory can be usefully situated as part of a politics of higher education in the era of the global crisis of the university.

This argument is advanced through a series of readings that produce eccentric, sociographic accounts of important (some quite unusual) texts or performances of Theory. As such they enact an attention to reading that is advanced as an instance of “offering” as called for in the title.

‘The WTO and its Development Obligation: Prospects for Global Trade’ presents a sound argument in favour of the WTO adhering to its long-standing development obligation. Ezeani goes further than merely highlighting the problems of developing country integration, and provides a comprehensive analysis of the underlying factors that are preventing developing countries from making meaningful gains through participation in global trade. She assesses the effectiveness of current 'development-based' programmes of the WTO as well as the DSB, and stresses the importance for developing countries of recognising the potential benefits of global trade.

Through an account of the beginnings of organised global trade, Ezeani strengthens the case against treating developing countries differently by examining the fundamental constraints of applying early economic principles to the modern environment.

In a time when mass joblessness and precarious employment are becoming issues of national concern, it is useful to reconsider the experiences of the unemployed in an earlier period of economic hardship, the Great Depression. How did they survive, and how did they fight against inhumane government policies? Americans are often thought to be a very conservative and individualistic people, but the collective struggles of the supposedly “meek” and “atomized” unemployed in the 1930s belie that stereotype. 

Focusing on the bellwether city of Chicago, this book reevaluates those struggles, revealing the kernel of political radicalism and class resistance in practices that are usually thought of as apolitical and un-ideological. From communal sharing to “eviction riots,” from Unemployed Councils to the nationwide movement behind the remarkable Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill, millions of people fought to end the reign of capitalist values and usher in a new, more socialistic society. While they failed in their maximal goal of abolishing economic insecurity and the disproportionate power of the rich, they did wrest an incipient welfare state from the ruling class. Today, their legacy is their resilience, their resourcefulness, and their proof that the unemployed can organize themselves to renew the struggle for a more just world.

The book is meticulously researched, drawing mainly on archives in the United States and Britain and includes previously unpublished photographs. It is in three parts. Part I begins with a reminder of the early days of American independence and the formation of the new nation and is a useful backdrop to the rest of the book. This was a period of rapid growth which saw the creation and development of the State Department and the Consular Service. Accounts are given of the frequent legislative changes, the major weaknesses of the early Consular Service, the Spoils System which ensured that political allies or presidential fundraisers were appointed as consuls, the calls for reform, how the Consular Service lost its separate identity in 1924 when it merged with the Diplomatic Service to form the unified Foreign Service, and the amalgamation of the State Department and the Foreign Service in 1954.

Parts II and III form the major section of the book. Part II concentrates on the consulates and the people who served in them in Britain and pre-independence Ireland and is an overview of the American consular presence from 1790 to the present day. Topics covered include the wide-ranging extent of the consular network, British nationals who served as American consuls, consular families, office accommodation, furnishings and equipment of consulates, espionage activities conducted by the consuls in Britain during the American Civil War, how Texas and Hawaii had consulates in Britain before they became States of the Union, inspections of consulates, the dangers faced by consuls during the First and Second World War blitzes, and the lengthy attempts by women to become consuls and diplomats.

Part III consists of detailed histories of consulates in fifteen towns. These include the dates on which the offices were operational, short biographies of staff who served in them and an indication of their routine activities, including a few noteworthy incidents or highlights. The accounts are of varying length reflecting the duration of the consulates’ presence. The extent and scale of the former consular network can be appreciated from the list of locations and categories of consular offices shown in the Appendix. The book concludes with a review of how the consular function has evolved and kept pace with changing demands and needs. Although the Spoils System now exists for only one consular appointment, at a post which is not in the UK but is within the London embassy’s remit, it still thrives in those embassies where career consuls and diplomats report to an ambassador who may be a political appointee. This is particularly the case in a number of European posts.

There is no lack of sensationalism in the period of Irish history 1800–1922. Large dramas played themselves out in small places. The last subsistence crisis of Europe would be enough to justify this judgement, but there is more: endemic levels of violence, the formation of the first state police force in the history of Britain, republican militancy, tithe and land wars, socialist protest, armed insurrection, war and civil war pockmark the era. The history of Ireland, particularly in its relationship to the imperial power of Britain, has been fraught to say the least. The so-called ‘Pax Britannica’ never became a genuine ‘Pax Hibernia’.

However, such an account needs to be balanced against other stories that emerge from the period. Ireland had its own ‘Victorian’ era and a more benign revolution in social mores, technology, communication and transport. Many features of twentieth-century political and social practice were then established: a system of public health, factory inspection, primary education, ordnance survey mapping, civic improvement and census taking. Sporting, musical and cultural traditions knew an intense phase of development. Moreover, Irish leaders and many of the middle-classes adapted to the Union’s constitutional arrangements and successfully exploited it to their advantage. In 1922, both north and south Ireland did inherit a certain institutional stability from the Union era.

Both of these stories need to be told together to reflect the recent scholarship on all areas of modern Irish history. This book is a historiographical synthesis, providing readers with an understanding of the nature of current arguments and debates about a past that is neither dead nor, in many ways, even past.

This new study looks at the crucial role played by audiovisual media in Hindu cultural nationalism. The application of new media technology in the context of the construction of 'Indianness' by Hindutva's main political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Party of the Indian People, BJP), is a fascinating example of in-house indoctrination and emotive mobilization that demands critical attention. At a time when public attention is focused on transnational, and mostly Islamicist, movements, 'Empowering Visions' argues that both transnationalism and nationalism have to be treated with equal attention, and to some extent ought to be seen as intertwined processes. This book is unique in its presentation and discussion of profound ethnographic data through interviews with a variety of spokesmen for the Hindutva movement. It also offers an in-depth analysis of visual and audiovisual material that has so far been unrecognized and unexplored in scholarly works.

‘The Ocean of God’conveys the proposition that the future of religions, if they will not want to contribute to the destruction of humanity, will become transreligious. Based on the assumption that the spiritual impulse of humanity cannot simply be eradicated, religiosity will persist in transreligious forms, as secularizations, naturalizations and transhumanist dreams only envision such transformations, but fall short in their ability to replace the force of spirituality to further civilized peace of human existence on Earth and its future in evolutionary, ecological and cosmological dimensions. In relating the contributions of religious pluralism to the concept of the unity of religions, which have arisen in this “new axial age” forovercoming the checkered history of religions in furthering peace, the program of a transreligious discourse, based on the insight of the fundamental relativity of (religious) truth and the special contributions of process philosophy and theology as well as the Bahá'í universe of thought, analyses and projects a new religiosity or spirit enabling religions to overcome their deepest motives of strife and warfare.

‘The Ocean of God’is the presentation of the power to envision and prepare for meaningful prospects regarding the future of religions, neither succumbing to their mere reduction to prophecies of disappearance, nor binding us to past appearances that have contributed to the current predicaments of humanity. With new instruments of analysis of the aporias of the plurality and unity of religions, namely, negotiations of the concept of “multiplicity” and its application to a pluralism of pluralisms and the differentiation between a horizontal (synchronic) and vertical (diachronic) pluralism as well as multiple world theories, it wants to demonstrate the potential to cope with the complex incommensurabilities of plurality of worldviews and their peaceful coinherence in temporal and spatial differentiation.

‘The Ocean of God’ expands the philosophical and religious discussion on multiplicity and unity to the ecological embeddedness, evolutionary relativity and the cosmological magnitude of the human story. With the less known minority voices such as process philosophy and theology as well as the new axial perspective of the Bahá'í religion, it situates humanity in cosmological patterns of becoming instead of fixed formations, of mutuality instead of external plurality, of relationality instead of reductionisms, of processuality instead of fixations on either past sedimentations or apocalyptic fatalisms. In the end stands the thesis that the future of religion will be transreligious, or there will not be either a humanity entertaining religion or a humanity entertained by the universe.

The end of the Cold War brought new opportunities to explore the long tradition and myriad uses of humour through over two centuries of Russian literature and culture. 'Reflective Laughter' is the first book devoted to an overview of this subject. Bringing together contributions from a number of distinguished scholars from Russia, Europe and North America, this volume ranges from the classics of nineteenth-century literature through to the intellectual and popular comedic culture, both state-sponsored and official, of the twentieth-century, taking in journalism, propaganda, scholarly discourse, jokes, films and television. In doing so, it explores how our understanding remains distorted by the polarization of the East and West during the Cold War.

This comprehensive and entertaining book will be of relevance to undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Russian and comparative literature and in cultural studies, as well as a broader audience.

How much, and under what conditions, can the European Union affect democratization and democratic consolidation in prospective member states? What mechanisms does the EU employ to influence reforms in countries emerging from authoritarian rule? Focusing on Albania and Macedonia, two postcommunist countries with a legacy of internal conflict, “Conditioning Democratization” analyzes the relationship between EU accession conditionality and institutional reforms. It focuses on four sectors of reform that are often overlooked in other studies: constitutions, asylum, local decentralization and the judiciary system.

The volume critically reviews the theory of “consociational democracy,” often considered the key to stabilizing deeply divided countries, and reapplies it to the supranational institution of the European Union. In articulate, accessible prose, Ridvan Peshkopia builds on examples from multiple sectors in multiple countries to reconceptualize this theory and show that the EU can indeed use membership conditions as a tool to encourage and direct reform.

‘Russia’s Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas Doroshevich’s “Sakhalin”’ is the first English language translation of the Russian journalist Vlas Doroshevich’s 1903 account of his visit to tsarist Russia’s largest penal colony, Sakhalin, in the north Pacific. Despite the publication of Anton Chekhov’s account of his visit to Sakhalin in 1890, many Russians remained unaware of the brutality and savagery of the 'devil island'. In 1897 Doroshevich, Russia’s most popular journalist, travelled to Sakhalin and spent three months touring the island, interviewing numerous prisoners and officials, and recording his impressions. The feuilletons he wired back to his publishers were eventually collected and published in book form in 1903, under the title 'Sakhalin' (Katorga).

Doroshevich’s book was enormously popular when it first appeared, and it continues to be published in Russia, as a historical record of the striking barbarity of late nineteenth century penal practices. Despite this popularity, it has never before been translated into English, and Doroshevich remains largely unknown outside Russia. This translation introduces English-language readers to an important writer and original stylist who defined journalistic practice during the years leading up to the 1917 Revolution, by way of a book which helps explain the causes for that revolution.

The book is written for those who are interested in theoretical debates as they relate to the field of Development Studies. It is aimed at academics and all those who work in the field of development, politicians, policy-makers and civil servants who need to familiarize themselves with key historical development debates, especially those relevant to Africa. The book takes an Afrocentric intellectual standpoint, grounded in the theory of Afrocentricity, in its interrogation of the idea and processes of development in Africa. It also adopts an historical approach in its interrogation of the idea of African development as a by-product of political deliberations. This book is about how the discourse of development as a field of study needs to be re-oriented towards African-based epistemologies to dismantle coloniality, in opposition to the historical embeddedness of development discourse in Eurocentrism.

This book contests the limitation of the modern African understanding of Africa’s journey with development to the period of the aftermath of World War II, to be specific, to President Harry S. Truman’s 1949 Point Four programme. Instead, the book argues that, that journey should be understood holistically. By this, I mean that Africa’s engagement with development did not begin with the politics of the Euro-North American political bloc – the story of African development must take into consideration Africa’s classical civilization, namely, the Nile Valley civilization and its contributions to human civilization. Such an approach provides a more holistic interrogation and casts light on how Africa’s history of greatness continues to be an inspiration even in modern times. Such an approach rejects the many reductionist lies and half-truths that undergird the modernist paradigm which seeks to portray African people as dependent beneficiaries of the colonial Euro-modernity framework. This framework has undermined the humanity of non-Western people in general, and Africans in particular. The book pursues the tradition of decolonial epistemic reflections grounded on Afrocentricity as its theoretical thrust to oppose discourses that are riddled with a racist agenda towards those in the Global South, especially in Africa to enable endogeneity. In the spirit of the pursuit for cognitive justice in the 21st century, this book argues that the discourse of development must be decolonized from hegemonic Eurocentric propaganda and needs to be framed from the viewpoint of those who have been seen as being on the receiving end, those projected as “backwards” from a Eurocentric perspective.

This book assesses the extent of the authority that the Organisation of American States holds over the key issues confronting its member states. It explores the extent and significance of the transformation of the OAS since 1991: its roots, the reasons for and extent of its emergence, and the role that the organisation currently plays in the promotion of regional governance in the two key issue-areas of security and the defense and promotion of democratic norms and principles of good governance. By assessing where the OAS has succeeded and failed, Horwitz provides an in-depth explanation of how cooperation and consensus works in the Inter-American system.

This study reports on indications that the OAS is looking for ways to act multilaterally in certain security issues, for instance trying to develop a drug regime. The OAS is also actively defending and promoting democratic norms and rules. Presently, the Western Hemisphere is at a crossroads and it is too soon to tell whether the OAS will adapt and succeed or whether the efforts to integrate OAS member states through specific common security policies and the democracy paradigm will add to the list of previous regional integration failures.

This book is an important contribution to the debate on the role of International Organisations in shaping the Inter-American system. By looking at specific cases such as the defence of democracy, where the OAS is working through specific agencies and promoting cooperation and consensus, we are able to discern the successes and failures of the OAS.

In the midst of World War II, the Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings left Rio de Janeiro, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and arrived in London. The Exhibition resulted from a donation of 168 artworks by 70 of the most recognized Brazilian Modernist painters, including Tarsila do Amaral, Candido Portinari, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, and Lasar Segall. The largest collection sent abroad until that time, and still today the most remarkable show of Brazilian art ever displayed in the United Kingdom, was held firstly at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, in the end of 1944, and subsequently toured throughout other seven British galleries until September 1945. As a contribution to the Allied war effort, the funds from its sales were given to the Royal Air Force. It is noteworthy that the Olympic Games planned to be held in London during the 1944 summer were cancelled due to World War II, but a show of unknown paintings from Brazil reached the British capital and was hosted by its most traditional art institution. Notwithstanding its historical relevance and unmatched scale, this event had never been academically investigated. 

Even though it was publicized as private entrepreneurship, the dissertation proves that the Brazilian foreign service was the main propelling force of the Exhibition and addresses two fundamental questions regarding the episode. In the first place, why did the Brazilian government back a logistically complicated, politically delicate, and time-consuming idea of sending artworks to be displayed in the United Kingdom during the War? Second, how successful was the Exhibition in view of its original goals, specifically those set by Brazilian diplomacy? Conducted by a career diplomat who practices Public Diplomacy, the research pursued, by applying the hermeneutic method and theories of this field and its subset Cultural Diplomacy, to interpret the reconstructed and contextualized object. Based on its findings, the author argues that the initiative was part of a broader diplomatic program developed by Minister Oswaldo Aranha. Aiming at advancing bilateral ties with the United Kingdom, Aranha sought to foster closer relations between Brazilian and British societies. Furthermore, the Exhibition worked as a cultural component of the part in the War played by Brazil, the only Latin American nation to deploy an important contingent—25,000 troops—to fight on the European front. Both the military and artistic contributions must be understood as diplomatic attempts to amass international prestige and reposition Brazil in the postwar emerging order. Having consolidated its regional leadership, the nation aspired to be perceived as a global player that shared the prevailing Western values and aesthetics. The research further claims that the initiative was intended and managed to achieve a substantial impact on views about Brazil, by means of conveying a well-planned message of solidarity, modernization and artistic prowess, which was consistent with the country’s diplomatic goals and attuned to Britain’s wartime mindset. It focuses on the developments between the period in which Oswaldo Aranha was appointed as Brazilian minister of foreign affairs (1938–1944) and the end of World War II (1945), in order to situate the Public Diplomacy aspects of the Exhibition within Brazil’s foreign relations. It thus strives to demonstrate that decades before the coining of the concept—to this day discussed mostly between North American and European scholars—Brazilian diplomacy was able to conceive and execute an initiative in line with the twenty-first-century state-of-the-art Public Diplomacy. It achieved unprecedented press coverage; high attendance that included influential figures within local society; the entrance of at least 25 Brazilian paintings into important British collections; and the sale of around 80 artworks in benefit of the Royal Air Force. Despite these resounding short-term successes, the lasting effects on Brazil’s reputation were arguably mitigated by the diplomatic shift after the end of the War. The revision of the Brazilian foreign policy that followed the replacement of Oswaldo Aranha and President Getúlio Vargas impeded the sustaining of the Exhibition’s reputational impacts for a longer period, which is a most coveted goal of Public Diplomacy.

It is significant that no other show of Brazilian art in the United Kingdom would ever emulate the Exhibition magnitude, devised in the challenging context of War. The coherence between narrative and diplomatic objectives, the powerful and tailor-made message and its appeal to receptors, the involvement of non-official players as well as the high-level political support made the Exhibition, in the author’s evaluation, a role model for the cultural category of Public Diplomacy avant la lettre. First of all, the Brazilian government had clearly defined its foreign goals, with stepping up its political stature on the world stage being the first priority. Furthermore, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was able to develop a solid judgment of Brazil’s own international stance, of its reputation among British society, and of the United Kingdom’s cultural environment. Hence, it was accordingly defined a compelling narrative compatible with the emerging hegemonic values in the West. In this sense, the choice of the modern idiom and its cosmopolitanism to represent Brazilian art abroad suited the radical aesthetic rupture that would mark the victors’ new artistic patterns. In addition, the underlying message of the initiative, the solidarity with distant brothers-in-arms—well represented by the Royal Air Force, a symbol of British pride in those dramatic times of War—was extremely attractive and efficient. The combination of top-tier political backing, without which it would not have been possible to accomplish the feat of sending the artworks across the ocean, and the participation of nongovernmental cultural figures, lending credibility to the initiative, made the Exhibition a successful case of outreach. Finally, the engagement of key Brazilian and British individuals and institutions was the result of a two-way Public Diplomacy action, which involved listening to the receiver and conveying a world-class, coherent, and appropriate message, aligned with and serving diplomatic objectives. 

By uncovering and studying the Exhibition, the research will hopefully trigger interest in the identification of a Brazilian strain of Public Diplomacy—whose discussion is still very incipient among Brazilianists and researchers in general—with its own subjects and methods, thus contributing to further this field’s theoretical development. A desired indirect outcome of the dissertation is thus to foster an academic concern about a Brazilian distinctiveness in the field, with regard not only to themes and objects of study but also by developing new and useful analytical contributions to the theoretical debate and to the diplomatic praxis. The work sheds light on these Public Diplomacy aspects and contributes, through a relevant case study, to incorporate them into the studies of Brazilian diplomacy. The advantages for Brazil of valuing and perfecting its congenital aptitude for Public Diplomacy are many and evident. As a regional power with limited economic and military assets, its place on the international stage benefits greatly from its capacity to persuade and captivate foreign societies. By doing so, Brazil has better conditions to deal with more powerful nations, to function as a bridge between developed and developing countries, to add value to its products, to receive investments, students, and tourists, to participate in global forums, to shape and influence agendas, and to ensure better treatment of its citizens abroad. Brazil’s traditional social consensus around pacifism, embodied in its constitution, and its historic reliance on multilateralism reinforce the convenience of the country’s scholars and practitioners advancing Public Diplomacy theory and praxis. 

‘Before Einstein’ examines the discourse of hyperspace philosophy and its position within the network of ‘new’ ideas at the end of the nineteenth century. Hyperspace philosophy grew out of the concept of a fourth spatial dimension, an idea that became increasingly debated amongst mathematicians, physicists and philosophers during the 1870s and 80s. English mathematician and hyperspace philosopher Charles Howard Hinton was the chief populariser of the fourth dimension in Europe and North America. The influence of his writings, many of which were published as a series under the title of ‘Scientific Romances’, ranged surprisingly wide.

‘Before Einstein’ offers, for the first time, an extended examination of Hinton’s work and – crucially – the influence of his ideas on contemporary writers and thinkers. Increasingly over the past three decades, critical attention has been given to the relevance of pre-Einsteinian theories of the fourth dimension within the shifting aesthetic and cultural values at the turn of the twentieth century. For the first time in a full-length literary study, ‘Before Einstein’ addresses the cultural life of the fourth dimension at the turn of the century. ‘Before Einstein’ begins by tracing the development of spatial theories of the fourth dimension out of the ‘new’, non-Euclidean geometries of the mid-nineteenth century, and proceeds to analyse Hinton’s role as four-dimensional theorist and populariser of hyperspace philosophy. Hinton's ‘Scientific Romances’ are examined in detail, not simply as documents of interest for historians of science and ideas, but for their intrinsic literary value as well. Additionally, ‘Before Einstein’ captures the work of H. G. Wells, Henry James and William James through the lens of Hinton’s writing, identifying what can be described as a four-dimensional literary aesthetic. The book addresses the existing gap in literary studies of the fourth dimension, while also providing scholars of the James brothers and Wells with new ways of approaching their subject matter.

Iconomy: Towards a Political Economy of Images argues that imagery of all kinds—from visual icons in social media, advertising, news broadcasting and political campaigns, in architecture and art through to more private realms such as dreams—has become a definitive force in the shaping of contemporary life. It has become a vital part, often a primary medium, in most of the many economies operative within contemporary societies, in commercial exchange, public politics, cultural contestation, and subject formation. They have become, substantially, iconomic. Yet this imagery is generated and flows, accretes, shifts, and swops, runs free or is managed, according to its inherent potentials and limits—that is, for all its immersion in wider economies, however much it saturates them, it is an economy of its own, an iconomy.

Part I traces conceptualizations of links between seeing and planning, images and economies, through Plato’s cave allegory, medieval iconoclasm, Marx’s theories of commodity, and Debord’s spectacle society, up to interpretations of the systemic saturation of contemporary imaginaries by images (mostly visual), ostensive performances, and exhibitionary exchanges deployed through widely shared yet intensely managed screen and surveillance technologies. 

The implicit politics of this economy become explicit in Part II, which explores the iconopolitics of (i) the (mis)management of imagery associated with SARS-CoV-19; (ii) the ubiquity, retreat and possible resurgence of the image regime centered on Donald J. Trump, along with the Biden response; (iii) the nature and impact of the video of the murder of George Floyd; (iv) the similarities and differences between the videos of the beating of Rodney King in 1991 and the killing of George Floyd in 2020; (v) BLM ignition of imagery around intersectional struggle; (vi) the war of images within the current civil war in the United States; (vii) the potentialities for building community while image wars rage; and (viii) the recent rise of “black aesthetics” within predominantly white artworlds. The book concludes with a reflection on usefulness, and the limitations, of iconomic analyses of contemporary societies. Having arrived at the term “iconomy” in the years just prior to 9/11, and tracking its growing relevance since, Smith argues that its study does not require a discipline serving nation state and globalizing capitalism but, instead, a deconstructive interdiscipline that contributes to planetary world-making. 

This book will explore several critical connections between Black African objects and white Western aesthetics and artwork in the United States from the late 1800s until 1939. Drawing from primary source materials and various scholarship in the field (philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, museum studied, art history, cultural studies), it provides an analysis of the threads of white supremacy which run through early scholarship and understandings of Black African object within the United States and how scholars use the objects to reinforce narratives of “primitive” Black Africa and civilized, advanced white Europe and the United States.

To do this, the book (1) explores white Western aesthetic ideas and contrasts them with Black African aesthetic ideas, (2) explores the history of the use of Black African objects by white Western collectors, artists in and around the Harlem Renaissance, (3) explores the history of the influence of white Western aesthetics on Black collectors, artists, and groups in and around the Harlem Renaissance, and (4) explores how Black African aesthetics as white mythology impacts aesthetics beyond the art world through advertising, commercial popularization with Black Power moment, and today with films like Black Panther and videos starring Beyonce.

This book seeks to bring together previous scholarship, white Western and Black African aesthetic theory, historical documents, and archival research for primary documents that highlight how white supremacy runs through Western scholarship and ideology and how this presents a distorted, degraded view of Black Africa and its people not only for white people but for Black people as well.

Advanced study in the humanities and social sciences discloses a deep ambivalence about Theory. Structurally, of course, the professionalization of young academics is approaching extinction. There are fewer and fewer secure jobs in academia, and thus fewer and fewer students embarking upon advanced study, and, in turn, fewer and fewer programs educating these students. What is offered the remaining students is instructive. Notably, students are expected by their future colleagues to be familiar with, maybe even conversant in Theory, but the structural logic of austerity prompts educators to wonder whether instruction in Theory is an efficient use of dwindling resources, especially now that academic publishing (with important exceptions) behaves as though this future, like the “last” wormhole, is collapsing. Given the Faustian articulation of publishing and promotion can advanced study in the humanities and social sciences even be justified today? Paradoxically, students are still expected to know what is less and less on offer. How is Theory to be “handled” (fingered, worked with, fashioned) under such circumstances?

A reading of Theory that in tracing when and where Theory arises in the event of reading proposes how Theory might best be handled in the context of higher education today. Arguing against those who propose to avoid Theory in the name of its putative obsolescence, this text sets out to challenge two aspects of this avoidance. On the one hand, Theory has been set aside in the name of identity politics, that is, the proposition that its intellectual pertinence has been overshadowed by a sense of political urgency construed as at odds with Theory. Theory itself has assumed an identity, a profile. On the other hand, implicit within the avoidance of Theory is a concept of “context” that calls for reflection. Resisting the tendency to treat context as either negligible or obvious, this text sets out to trace, in the when and where of Theory, the rudiments of a “sociographic” (think “historiographic”) account of context. In relation to it, the reading that is Theory can be usefully situated as part of a politics of higher education in the era of the global crisis of the university.

This argument is advanced through a series of readings that produce eccentric, sociographic accounts of important (some quite unusual) texts or performances of Theory. As such they enact an attention to reading that is advanced as an instance of “offering” as called for in the title.

This book constructs an anthropological history of a subaltern religious formation, Mahima Dharma of Orissa, a large province in eastern India. Tracking the contingent making of a critical community over a hundred and forty year period, Religion, Law and Power explores the interplay of distinct expressions of time and history, innovative reformulations of caste and Hinduism and distinct engagements with state and nation. This serves to unravel the wider entanglements of religion, history, law, modernity and power. Ishita Banerjee-Dube provides a situated and critical analysis of the different trajectories of Mahima Dharma, bringing to the fore a clutch of empirical and theoretical issues. Understandings of the articulation and institutionalization of a subaltern religious order are not marked off from, but reveal the techniques and textures of, the modern state and dominant Hinduism. Such moves foreground subaltern and ascetic expressions and negotiations of modernity in institutional and everyday arenas, and further question widespread propositions of a singular Hinduism, especially in India today. ‘Religion, Law and Power’ should be of interest to historians, anthropologists and religious studies scholars as well as general readers interested in religion, politics, community and state. It will be of particular interest to students of South Asia concerned with Hinduism and religious sects, history and law, and power and resistance.

‘Tokyo Seven Roses’ is set in Japan during the waning months of WWII and the beginning of the Occupation. It is written as a diary kept from April 1945 to April 1946 by Shinsuke Yamanaka, a fifty-three-year-old fan-maker living in Nezu, part of Tokyo's shitamachi (old-town) district. After the war, Shinsuke learns by chance that the Occupation forces are plotting a nefarious scheme: in order to cut Japan off from its dreadful past, they intend to see that the language is written henceforth using the alphabet. To fight off this unheard-of threat to the integrity of Japanese culture, seven beautiful women – the Seven Roses – take a stand. They include Tomoe, whose husband perished in a B29 raid and whose stepfather has gone mad; Fumiko and Takeko, whose elder sister died in an air raid; Sen, another war widow; Tokiko, who lost her parents and older brother; and Kyoko and Fumiko, whose entire families were wiped out.

The seven, while resentful of Japan's leaders for having lured the country down the path to war and, painfully aware of their own responsibility in being so gullible, hate the United States. They set their sights on three powerful members of the education delegation who have come to finalize official policy regarding the Japanese language. The year portrayed was a bleak and painful time for Japan. Shinsuke's diary, however, is surprisingly cheerful, filled with a wealth of details of ordinary people's openhearted lives. The author draws a lively portrait of Japanese who, despite privation, find relief in laughter.

This new study looks at the crucial role played by audiovisual media in Hindu cultural nationalism. The application of new media technology in the context of the construction of 'Indianness' by Hindutva's main political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Party of the Indian People, BJP), is a fascinating example of in-house indoctrination and emotive mobilization that demands critical attention. At a time when public attention is focused on transnational, and mostly Islamicist, movements, 'Empowering Visions' argues that both transnationalism and nationalism have to be treated with equal attention, and to some extent ought to be seen as intertwined processes. This book is unique in its presentation and discussion of profound ethnographic data through interviews with a variety of spokesmen for the Hindutva movement. It also offers an in-depth analysis of visual and audiovisual material that has so far been unrecognized and unexplored in scholarly works.

How did the rich countries really become rich? In this provocative study, Ha-Joon Chang examines the great pressure on developing countries from the developed world to adopt certain 'good policies' and 'good institutions', seen today as necessary for economic development. Adopting a historical approach, Dr Chang finds that the economic evolution of now-developed countries differed dramatically from the procedures that they now recommend to poorer nations. His conclusions are compelling and disturbing: that developed countries are attempting to 'kick away the ladder' with which they have climbed to the top, thereby preventing developing counties from adopting policies and institutions that they themselves have used. This book is the winner of the 2003 Myrdal Prize, European Association of Evolutionary Political Economy.

For more information please see the book website: http://kickingawaytheladder.anthempressblog.com

‘The Ocean of God’conveys the proposition that the future of religions, if they will not want to contribute to the destruction of humanity, will become transreligious. Based on the assumption that the spiritual impulse of humanity cannot simply be eradicated, religiosity will persist in transreligious forms, as secularizations, naturalizations and transhumanist dreams only envision such transformations, but fall short in their ability to replace the force of spirituality to further civilized peace of human existence on Earth and its future in evolutionary, ecological and cosmological dimensions. In relating the contributions of religious pluralism to the concept of the unity of religions, which have arisen in this “new axial age” forovercoming the checkered history of religions in furthering peace, the program of a transreligious discourse, based on the insight of the fundamental relativity of (religious) truth and the special contributions of process philosophy and theology as well as the Bahá'í universe of thought, analyses and projects a new religiosity or spirit enabling religions to overcome their deepest motives of strife and warfare.

‘The Ocean of God’is the presentation of the power to envision and prepare for meaningful prospects regarding the future of religions, neither succumbing to their mere reduction to prophecies of disappearance, nor binding us to past appearances that have contributed to the current predicaments of humanity. With new instruments of analysis of the aporias of the plurality and unity of religions, namely, negotiations of the concept of “multiplicity” and its application to a pluralism of pluralisms and the differentiation between a horizontal (synchronic) and vertical (diachronic) pluralism as well as multiple world theories, it wants to demonstrate the potential to cope with the complex incommensurabilities of plurality of worldviews and their peaceful coinherence in temporal and spatial differentiation.

‘The Ocean of God’ expands the philosophical and religious discussion on multiplicity and unity to the ecological embeddedness, evolutionary relativity and the cosmological magnitude of the human story. With the less known minority voices such as process philosophy and theology as well as the new axial perspective of the Bahá'í religion, it situates humanity in cosmological patterns of becoming instead of fixed formations, of mutuality instead of external plurality, of relationality instead of reductionisms, of processuality instead of fixations on either past sedimentations or apocalyptic fatalisms. In the end stands the thesis that the future of religion will be transreligious, or there will not be either a humanity entertaining religion or a humanity entertained by the universe.

Contemporary understandings of inter-generational relations assume that the balance of power has shifted from adults towards children in recent years. The rise of children’s rights, the trend towards more child centred pedagogies and practices within schools and the incorporation of children within a global free market as consumers have all been interpreted as the loss of adult power and the consequent growth of kid power. 

This book critically examines these ideas and reframes the zero-sum conceptions of power implicit within these assumptions. It draws on Lukes’ three dimensions of power and Foucault’s theory of power and knowledge in advancing the view that kid power is inter-generational, multi-dimensional and distributed variably across the child population. The book illustrates this theory through selected themes, including children’s political activism with respect to climate change, the varied roles that children play within their families as mediators, the involvement of children in research and the rise of digital kid power. 

In a post-script, the theory of kid power within the current context of the global Covid-19 pandemic is examined. This final part of the book questions what the impact of the virus will be on the different manifestations of kid power and considers the implications of lockdowns and potential long-term social distancing measures for inequalities, inter-generational relations and our interpretation of kid power.

'Men and Masculinities in South India' aims to increase understanding of gender within South Asia and especially South Asian masculinities, a topic whose analysis and ethnographising in the region has had a very sketchy beginning and is ripe for more thorough examination. This is, in short, an almost empty field dominated so far by short articles and collections and the time is right for the first full-length ethnographic study of masculinities. This ground-breaking monograph covers a range of areas including work, cross-sex relationships, sexuality, men's friendships, religious practices and leisure. This book is especially concerned with issues arising from debates which broadly argue over the differences and merits of approaches to gender and identity - rooted in essentialism versus performativity. Questions about the tensions between essentialist and performative theories of self and gender are therefore highlighted throughout the book and explored in relation to various bodies of theory and to South Asian understandings of personhood.

“An Outline of Financial Economics” presents a systematic treatment of theory and methodology of finance and economics. It begins by discussing financial instruments, which form the basis of the theory of finance and are defined as legal documents recording monetary transactions. The text then goes on to analyze bonds – which are regarded as fixed income securities – in a simple framework, and to discuss the valuation of stocks and cash flows in detail.

The text follows an analytical and geometric methodology, explaining technical terms and mathematical operations in nontechnical language. It also provides intuitive explanations of the mathematical results of questions concerning important issues such as risk aversion, uncertainty, prospect theory and the theory of stochastic dominance.

The text also covers two alternative approaches to portfolio analysis – namely the mean-variance and mean-Gini approaches – and features an analysis of the Modigliani–Miller theorem, which has played a major role in the development of business finance. It discusses the capital asset pricing model and the intricacies of the methods for determining prices of different types of options, which give the right to buy or sell an asset. Conditions for non-arbitrage that do not allow advantage of price discrimination between markets are also developed.

Because of its wide coverage and analytical, articulate and authoritative presentation, “An Outline of Financial Economics” will be an indispensable book for finance researchers and undergraduate and graduate students in fields such as economics, finance, econometrics, statistics and mathematics.

Have neoliberal policies truly yielded beneficial effects for India? ‘Two Decades of Market Reform in India’ presents a collection of essays that challenge the conventional wisdom of Indian market reforms, examining the effects of neoliberal policies enacted by the Indian government and exploding the myths that surround them.

The volume addresses three key areas. Firstly, it investigates how the high growth rate of the Indian economy has made it uneven, vulnerable and liable to poor employment generation and agrarian crises. The text refutes the hypothesis that growth in India has been driven by domestic factors, and argues against the notion that the Indian economy has remained unaffected by the global economic meltdown. The volume also investigates the reduced demand for food grain during the reform period, questioning whether it was indeed a result of increased income, as suggested by the government, or rather a consequence of increasing poverty and agrarian crisis. [NP]Secondly, the text counters the neoliberal myth that a fiscal deficit is essentially bad, and examines how the government’s focus on preventing a deficit caused a large-scale decline in development expenditures, which in turn had a negative impact on the well-being of the poor. Finally, the volume also argues that there is no evidence that supports denationalization as an effective way to reduce fiscal deficit, as the public sector, it argues, is not necessarily less efficient than the private sector.

Striving to hold India’s market reforms – and those responsible for their implementation – to account, ‘Two Decades of Market Reform in India’ bravely shines a light on the true implications of India’s neoliberal governmental policies. With its rich and insightful analysis, it provides a revealing indication of how policy reform since 1991 has, at times, detrimentally affected the Indian populace, and will serve as an invaluable resource for students, professionals, activists and policymakers interested in the socioeconomic future of the country. 

Multiculturalism has been a topic of scholarly exploration for almost fifty years. Most recently, these explorations have sought to respond to growing public sentiment that the multicultural ideal, borne out of Western liberalism, has failed. Indeed, ‘multiculturalism is dead’ has been a popular catch cry in Anglo- and Western-European countries for the past decade. Significantly, the continued discussion about the success or otherwise of multiculturalism registers the topic as alive as ever (albeit in a mode of crisis) and one that shows no signs of disappearing.

There are currently two main scholarly approaches to the so-called crisis of multiculturalism. The first approach retains the importance of multiculturalism by inflating and promoting its positive attributes. The second approach problematizes multiculturalism by retexturing its meaning and attempting to reconnect its political/theoretical domain with its ordinary manifestations. In some instances, the second approach renounces the concept of multiculturalism altogether, positioning it as a past phenomenon. Both approaches frequently mirror broader trends in cultural studies and artistic domains by turning to ‘the everyday’, using on-the-ground experiences as a tool to redefine the meaning of multiculturalism. But what work is done in the name of the everyday? Is ‘the everyday’ really a sanctioned, authentic space where cultural difference exists beyond the State? These are questions that neither approach takes seriously nor appropriately addresses. 

This modern book addresses this oversight by taking the everyday of everyday multiculturalism to task and doing so via the increasingly popular and everyday medium: digital storytelling. The ‘digital’ is an important node of analysis, not only because it has so far been overlooked in studies of everyday multiculturalism, but because its immateriality often affords it a distance from critical analyses pertaining to material effects. This book forefronts the materiality of digital storytelling by closely considering how the genre enables racialization to manifest at the level of the body. How does the genre compel the creators of digital stories to embody and/or reject racialized structures associated with concepts of multiculturalism? What do these stories tell us about the way multiculturalism is mediated and, importantly, how it might be re-mediated?

As we enter an era of unprecedented global mobility, discussions pertaining to cultural difference and the systems used to negotiate it become more frequent and more complex. This book makes a timely intervention into these discussions to both consolidate and reimagine the rocky terrain of multiculturalism, providing a valuable resource for scholars in cultural studies, media and internet studies, and ethnic and race studies. Additionally, the book provides a foundation for rethinking digital narrative production pertaining to cultural difference, giving it a practical purpose for educators and digital practitioners alike.

Attention to the ‘security-development nexus’ has become commonplace in national and global policy-making, and yet the exact nature of the term remains undefined. This study approaches the subjects of development and security from a variety of different perspectives, offering an array of interpretations of the nexus along with an analysis of its potentially related issues. Particular attention is paid to studies of conflict and peace, with a focus upon the linkage between these subjects and the topic of the nexus itself.

Specific areas of investigation include the role of diasporas in peace building, the relationship between the nexus and challenges to liberal state-building, and the part played by external parties in the peace processes of the Aceh and Sri Lankan conflicts. The inclusion of case studies from Africa, Asia and Europe provides the text with a strong geographical focus, and constructs a panoramic view of the nexus that encompasses the globe. Further country-based chapters – focusing on China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa – underline this worldwide perspective.

The volume’s collected essays thus provide a detailed and comprehensive view of this fluid, contemporaneous topic, both theoretically and empirically. ‘The Security-Development Nexus’ is a vital appraisal of both the present issues and current thought concerning conflict, security and development.

Over the past decade, the impending environmental crisis has given birth to an international consensus on the need to address climate change, accompanied by a renewed interest in carbon emissions, energy consumption and energy production. Many Western countries are now set to transition towards a low-carbon economic structure. Energy choices have become, now and more than ever, highly critical questions due to their fundamentally political, strategic, geopolitical, economic, social and cultural impacts.

Since the mid-2000s, the British government has been actively involved in reforming the country’s energy strategy by encouraging the development of renewables and promoting the revival of the national nuclear industry, which had laid almost dormant until then. Seeing the UK government take back control of its energy strategy represented a rather bold and surprising political move, given the neoliberal dynamics which had spread in the energy sector during the privatisation era of the 1980s and1990s. There are currently about seventy reactors under construction in the world; yet, the British programme is the only one building nuclear reactors (Hinkley Point C) in a liberalised energy market. Consequently, many doubts were raised on the ability of the government to reshape the country’s energy mix through the revival of nuclear power, an industry historically blighted by financial difficulties and its controversial legacy. 

Nuclear Power Policies in Britain analyses the UK state’s capacity to shape energy decision-making using a diverse toolbox of political instruments ranging from legislative, regulatory and communication levers to financial incentives. This case study determines how the current UK public policy on nuclear energy has been debated, legitimised, negotiated and implemented within the constraints of a neoliberal environment. By taking a holistic approach to the nuclear venture, it offers valuable insight on the British approach to energy policy-making and contributes to redefining the country’s ‘technopolitical regime’ in this day and age.

Overthrowing communism in 1989 and joining the European Union in 2004, the Polish people hold loyalties to region, country and now continent – even as the definition of what it means to be ‘European’ remains unclear. This book uses the life-story narratives of rural and urban southern Poles to reveal how ‘being European’ is considered a fundamental component of ‘being Polish’ while participants are simultaneously ‘becoming European’.

Close attention to the individual lives of Poles allows the author to identify cultural patterns and grasp the impact of the EU on its member states, paying particular attention to how the EU has affected the life experiences of Poles who came of age in the earliest years of the neoliberal and democratic transformations. In exploring what it means to be Polish by tracking these parallel processes of change, the author traces Poland’s path from state socialism to European integration and Polish identities as they are reinscribed, revised and reinvented in the face of historic, political and economic processes.

Ultimately, this study demonstrates how the EU is regarded as both an idea and an instrument, and how ordinary citizens make choices that influence the shape of European identity and the legitimacy of its institutions.

The book explores the era of space collaboration (from 1970 to the present). This period has been largely ignored by historians in favor of a focus on the earlier space race. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a key program and catalyst for Détente, marked the transition to the new age of space collaboration, which continued through the Soviet Interkosmos missions, the Mir-Shuttle dockings of the early 1990s, and on through the International Space Station. Europeans, Americans, and Russians envisioned space collaboration as a way to reconfigure political and international relations. 

The shift toward collaboration was a result of a new focus on safety, which displaced the earlier emphasis on risk-taking in the first phase of the space race, when military imperatives often overshadowed peaceful goals. Apollo-Soyuz (ignored by Cold War historians) was thus imagined as a test project for a docking mechanism that would allow a manned-capsule stranded in orbit to dock with another capsule and provide an escape hatch back to earth (it was actually inspired, in part, by the 1969 Hollywood film “Marooned” with Gene Hackman). The focus on engineering for safety grew out of the broader concerns about environmental degradation and nuclear war that in turn reflected a growing sense in the 1970s and 1980s of the dangers associated with excessive risk-taking in politics and engineering. Few historians or social scientists have examined the social construction of safety and its use in engineering and politics. 

The book draws on the Russian Academy of Sciences Archives, Nixon and Reagan libraries and National Archives Collections, NASA headquarters library documents, and various memoirs and other published sources in English and Russian.

What is culture? The history of our discipline – whether we call it ethnology or social anthropology – shows that there is not a constant answer to this question or even a constant object of study. How can we search for a unifying answer to what makes us human even as we observe how immensely varied we are? And how can we explain that such difference is the very core of what makes us similarly human?

This book explores the idea of ethnography as a method for understanding cultural flow in particular contexts and suggests that anthropology can do its most important work by tracing the history of social formations. Nothing about culture is static, yet something best-called culture sustains itself over time. At the heart of anthropology is the attempt to understand the concept of culture, even as we continue to challenge its definition in our field.

 This short volume presents the Jensen Memorial Lectures delivered at the Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology at Goethe University, Frankfurt, in 2019. The lectures reflect on the current moment in – and the capacity of – contemporary anthropology to consider the discipline’s basic premises, through the lens of its classical thinkers. Through a set of four lectures and an introduction, this book takes up anthropology’s most basic question – the meaning of culture – and asks how it is that our unique method is able to elicit both fine-grained particularities about specific social orders and speak to the definition of that which makes us human.

Russia Washed in Blood, first published in full in 1932, is the longest and best-known work by Nikolai Kochkurov (1899–1938), who wrote under the pen-name Artyom Vesyoly. The novel, more a series of extended episodes than a connected narrative with a plot and a hero, is a vivid fictionalised account of the events from the viewpoint of the ordinary soldier. The title of the novel came to symbolise the tragic history of Russia in the 20th century.

The novel’s main theme is the relation between freedom and dictatorship, reflecting a view that the cruelty which comes with elemental freedom destroys that freedom and prepares the ground for dictatorship. Vesyoly’s writings belong to the literature of moral resistance to Stalinism. For his failure to recognise the ‘leading organisational role’ of the Communist Party he would be executed in Stalin’s Great Purge. 

Born in Samara, on the banks of the Volga, the son of a waterside worker, Artyom Vesyoly was the first member of his family to learn to read and write. He took part in the Civil War of 1918–1921 on the Red side, and at its conclusion, began a prolific literary career. Vesyoly took as his main theme the horrific events he had witnessed and participated in during the fierce fighting in Southern Russia between the contending forces – Red, White, Cossack, anarchist and others – and the effects of these on the participants and unfortunate civilians caught between them.

This book constructs an anthropological history of a subaltern religious formation, Mahima Dharma of Orissa, a large province in eastern India. Tracking the contingent making of a critical community over a hundred and forty year period, Religion, Law and Power explores the interplay of distinct expressions of time and history, innovative reformulations of caste and Hinduism and distinct engagements with state and nation. This serves to unravel the wider entanglements of religion, history, law, modernity and power. Ishita Banerjee-Dube provides a situated and critical analysis of the different trajectories of Mahima Dharma, bringing to the fore a clutch of empirical and theoretical issues. Understandings of the articulation and institutionalization of a subaltern religious order are not marked off from, but reveal the techniques and textures of, the modern state and dominant Hinduism. Such moves foreground subaltern and ascetic expressions and negotiations of modernity in institutional and everyday arenas, and further question widespread propositions of a singular Hinduism, especially in India today. ‘Religion, Law and Power’ should be of interest to historians, anthropologists and religious studies scholars as well as general readers interested in religion, politics, community and state. It will be of particular interest to students of South Asia concerned with Hinduism and religious sects, history and law, and power and resistance.

Doctors, engineers, lawyers, architects, designers, managers, artists, scientists, innovators, inventors, farmers and all other professions and walks of life have the immense possibilities of making it big. And such immense possibilities represent in terms of scale, value, excellence, and tremendous impact upon the larger society. However, quite often, it is observed that the efforts and impact of making it big fail to live up to the expectations of self and others and do not take off the way envisaged. 

Everyone has desires. Spiritual leaders too give up the mundane life. However, they carry the deeply rooted desire to attain insights and enlightenment, eventually. Irrespective of what life one leads, one core but common desire is to enjoy the autonomy to make decisions. However, life introduces one to several ups and downs resulting in both successes and failures. Nonetheless, one desires to be happy throughout and enjoy whatever is in possession. Also, one aspires to achieve all that one feels capable of achieving, thus driving oneself to take risks against the opportunities identified. 

In the backdrop, the present book is for every individual who is either an aspiring entrepreneur or serial entrepreneur, irrespective of the domain expertise or industry one represents. The book attempts to focus and address a pressing pain point of entrepreneurs: the pain point happens to be one of the major gaps towards successful and sustainable entrepreneurship in one’s life. 

A strong but subtle factor impacting in this context is the failure to achieve entrepreneurial success through great deals in all stages, at all levels of entrepreneurial journey. The present book attempts to bridge the gap through the power (soft) skill – ‘negotiation’ for entrepreneurs!

Unlike many partisan accounts of the nineteen sixties this book aims to give a considered explanation of the context in which the sixties radical movements arose and, also, their significance from the standpoint of various nations' actors, often ignored by North American and West European standpoints. Secondly, it examines how the radical decade sowed the seeds of various liberation or 'rights movements' – initially in the West but also globally as movements became increasingly diffused. Contributors' varied international backgrounds and specialities provide expertise in examining the international context. Thirdly, many nineteen sixties' radicals' values and strategies recur in contemporary social movements; albeit in different technological and, post 9/11, political and cultural environments. Unravelling similarities and differences is a key theme. Fourthly, many participants in sixties radicalism saw it as 'cultural' as well as 'political' and in some historical treatments as primarily or 'only' cultural. Detailed examinations of this perspective involve critical discussion – particularly in the light of the allegedly 'mere' (i.e. apolitical) cultural hedonism and escapism of youth in the nineteen eighties and nineties. Contrarily, the contributions here assess resonances between the radical/libertarian emphasis on civil society 'freedoms' in sixties' cultural radicalism and, arguably, today’s more self-consciously political global human rights movement. The conclusion suggests that, in some senses, the sixties live on today in discursive and political themes.

This collection of essays incorporates the insight of an international group of experts to explore the impact of neoliberal ideology upon political, social and economic domains, as well as institutions such as the prison, healthcare and education systems and the voluntary sector. Examining the effects of the emergence of late-modern capitalism in the 1970s, the articles look at how the reaction against post-war Keynesian ideology manifested itself in each of these areas. This neoliberal resurgence has been characterised by competition and free markets, individual and family responsibility, and socioeconomic policies that engender social insecurity, resulting in economic freedom for the few and a strong law-and-order state for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Abandoning the all-encompassing, supportive attitude deemed necessary in the immediate aftermath of wartime instability, the neoliberal emphasis on individual responsibility has resulted in numerous social and moral dislocations, including harsher attitudes toward crime and punishment. The essays included in ‘Organising Neoliberalism: Markets, Privatisation and Justice’ explore how neoliberal ideology permeates nearly all aspects of modern life, and produce strong arguments for resistance against it.

‘Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786–1945’ is a study of readers’ interactions with the works of one of England’s most enduringly popular novelists. Employing an innovative approach made possible by new research in the field of the history of reading, the volume discusses Austen’s own ideas about books and readers, the uses she makes of her reading, and the relationship of her style to her readers’ responses. It considers the role of editions and criticism in directing readers’ responses, and presents and analyses a variety of source material related to readers who read Austen’s works between 1786 and 1945.

Previous studies of Austen’s influence on her readers and literary successors have either presupposed a hypothetical reader, or focused on the texts of the critical tradition, ignoring the views, reactions and thoughts of the common reader. This volume discusses the responses of ordinary readers to Austen’s novels, responses that offer insights into both Jane Austen’s particular appeal, and the nature of the act of reading itself.

‘Politics, Media and Campaign Language’ is an original, groundbreaking analysis of the story of Australian identity, told through Australian election campaign language. It argues that the story of Australian identity is characterised by recurring cycles of anxiety and reassurance, which betray a deep underlying feeling of insecurity. Introducing the concept of identity security, it takes electoral language as its focus, and demonstrates that election campaigns provide a valuable window into an overlooked part of Australia’s political and cultural history.

This book reclaims Australian campaign speech and electoral history to tell the story of changing national values and priorities, and traces the contours of our collective conversations about national identity. Rare in Australian politics, this approach is more common in the United States where campaign language is seen as providing a valuable insight into the continuing cultural negotiation of the collective values, priorities and concerns of the national community. In this conception, political leaders have significant influence but must function within and respond to the complex and shifting dynamics of public and media dialogue, and to changing social, political and economic conditions.

In this way, the book uses elections to provide a fresh perspective on both Australian political history and the development of Australian identity, bringing together, for the first time, a wide range of primary sources from across Australian electoral history: campaign speeches, interviews, press conferences and leaders’ debates. The book grounds analysis of campaign communication in a range of textual examples and detailed case studies. These vivid case studies bring the narrative journey to life, drawing on those leaders who have successfully aligned themselves with the nation’s values, priorities and plans for the future. The book also reintroduces readers to the alternative visions of those who were not successful at the ballot box, tracing campaign battles between competing narratives of what it means to be Australian.

'Colonial Childhoods' is about the politics of childhood in India between the 1860s and the 1930s. It examines not only the redefinition of the 'child' in the cultural and intellectual climate of colonialism, but also the uses of the child, the parent and the family in colonizing and nationalizing projects. It investigates also the complications of transporting metropolitan discourses of childhood, adulthood and expertise across the lines of race. Focused on reformatories and laws for juvenile delinquents, and boarding schools for aristocratic children, it illuminates a vital area of conflict and accommodation in a colonial society.

In the past four or so decades, a significant amount of research efforts has been made to examine the rapid and constant social changes taking place in China and the dynamics behind the process, resulting in a rich research literature on a wide range of issues and aspects of China’s recent social transformations. However, most of the literature has largely focused on either the political, ideological and policy issues at the macro level or the various forms of spontaneous resistance and protest at the micro level. What has not been adequately analysed is how the majority of ordinary Chinese people has reacted to and influenced the many changes in society over a long time period. This analytical partiality has given an impression that China consists of only two opposing types of people: the oppressing ruling class and the angry oppressed adversaries, restricting our thinking and understanding of Chinese society, its dynamics and its changing trends to the perspectives of elites and their adversaries.

Drawing upon a new perspective of competitive social repositioning, and based on the evidence recorded in numerous recently published personal memories and other published accounts, as well as the evidence collected through in-depth interviews, this book seeks to re-analyse the ever-changing, but still under-researched, societal dynamics driving social transformations in China from 1964, when Mao Zedong publicly put forward and propagated his ‘Five-Requirements’ for selecting heirs to the Chinese communist cause, to 2000 when Jiang Zemin formulated his ‘Three-Represents’ theory to modify the ideological political thinking and practices of China’s ruling elites. Of course, Chinese society has not been evolving exactly in the way that Mao and Jiang anticipated. Instead, China has been driven by a high proportion of its aspirational citizens who have kept repositioning themselves in China’s shifting distribution patterns of social resources and changing social structure. This book analyses what had been driving the changes in the attitudes and behaviours of many everyday Chinese over time in recent decades, what characteristics of their preferences and choices were at different stages, and how their choices had resulted in the zig-zag patterns of China’s recent social change.

The fact that Luc Boltanski is widely regarded as one of the most influential French sociologists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries should be reason enough for putting together a collection of essays concerned with the major intellectual contributions that he has made to the humanities and social sciences. Boltanski has emerged as the most prominent, and also most innovative, French sociologist since the death of Pierre Bourdieu in 2002. It is ironic that, despite both the magnitude and the originality of Boltanski’s oeuvre, one finds only few systematic commentaries, let alone edited books, on his work in the vast industry of contemporary sociological enquiry. The purpose of this volume is to fill this gap in the literature by creating opportunities for debate capable of representing the wide range of discussions that Boltanski’s writings have sparked amongst researchers in the humanities and social sciences over the past decades.

Have neoliberal policies truly yielded beneficial effects for India? ‘Two Decades of Market Reform in India’ presents a collection of essays that challenge the conventional wisdom of Indian market reforms, examining the effects of neoliberal policies enacted by the Indian government and exploding the myths that surround them.

The volume addresses three key areas. Firstly, it investigates how the high growth rate of the Indian economy has made it uneven, vulnerable and liable to poor employment generation and agrarian crises. The text refutes the hypothesis that growth in India has been driven by domestic factors, and argues against the notion that the Indian economy has remained unaffected by the global economic meltdown. The volume also investigates the reduced demand for food grain during the reform period, questioning whether it was indeed a result of increased income, as suggested by the government, or rather a consequence of increasing poverty and agrarian crisis. [NP]Secondly, the text counters the neoliberal myth that a fiscal deficit is essentially bad, and examines how the government’s focus on preventing a deficit caused a large-scale decline in development expenditures, which in turn had a negative impact on the well-being of the poor. Finally, the volume also argues that there is no evidence that supports denationalization as an effective way to reduce fiscal deficit, as the public sector, it argues, is not necessarily less efficient than the private sector.

Striving to hold India’s market reforms – and those responsible for their implementation – to account, ‘Two Decades of Market Reform in India’ bravely shines a light on the true implications of India’s neoliberal governmental policies. With its rich and insightful analysis, it provides a revealing indication of how policy reform since 1991 has, at times, detrimentally affected the Indian populace, and will serve as an invaluable resource for students, professionals, activists and policymakers interested in the socioeconomic future of the country. 

‘Frank Norris and American Naturalism’ brings together in one volume Donald Pizer’s lifelong exploration of Frank Norris’s work, ranging from his 1955 discussion of point of view in ‘The Octopus’ to his 2010 essay on the thematic unity of that novel. The essays as a whole seek to demonstrate both the coherence of Norris’s thought and his contribution toward the establishment of a specific form of naturalism in America. The collection’s principal focus is Norris’s most enduring works, the novels ‘McTeague’ and ‘The Octopus’, though his other fiction and literary criticism are also discussed.

Although Norris died at 32, his literary output during his brief career has played an important role in efforts to interpret the nature of American naturalism. He was one of the few naturalists to write literary criticism, a body of writing which casts much light on his self-conception as a naturalist, and his novels ‘McTeague’ and ‘The Octopus’ rely on two of the most distinctive forms of naturalistic fiction—the sensationalistic novel of violence and the panoramic novel of social protest. Furthermore, though he was deeply indebted to Zola’s fiction, he broke free of Zolaesque themes in ways which are significant for most later American naturalists. Thus, despite the brevity of his career, Norris is a seminal figure in the history of American literary naturalism.

What happens when the dramatic art of Molière is unleashed onto the stage and explodes into new life? ‘Molière on Stage’ takes the reader onstage, backstage and into the audience of Molière’s plays, analyzing the performance of his works in both his own time and ours. Written by a professional stage director with over fifty years of experience directing and translating Molière, this original, in-depth study allows the reader to see how the playwright’s lines have been brought to new life on stage throughout the centuries.

The text explores how Molière strove to create a communal experience of shared laughter that fulfilled the universal need for union, and focuses on four key topics: the elements of Molière’s early life that are evidenced in his later theater works; his great central plays that focus on love and lust; his comedic genius and his passion for the theater; and the final words and performances of his vivid and exceptional life. Inspired by the actions of the great French masters, the text pays homage to the interpretations of Molière offered by the playwright himself, Louis Jouvet, Jacques Copeau and Jean-Louis Barrault, as well as those staged by American actors and directors such as Ron Leibman, Stephen Epp, Steven Wadsworth, Robert Falls and the author.

Aphra Behn (1640–1689), a prolific and popular playwright, poet, novelist, and translator, has an extensive corpus of literature that plays a key role in literary history as the work of a female author. Based upon word counts, Quantitative Literary Analysis of the Works of Aphra Behn chronicles Behn’s obsession with the mystery and power of love and early modern passions through her entire oeuvre. Love, for Behn, is an external power, sometimes figured as the boy god Cupid or an abstraction, that enters the body with pain and pleasure and leaves the victim searching for understanding. The book follows two threads of argument: one using quantitative measures to indicate passages for significant close reading of preferred language and the other focused upon her use of small words like thou, sir, or said. Situating her writings in the conflicts of Early Modern discourses on the passions, the book demonstrates that Behn’s language reveals generic patterns for representing love that include a warning about its potential to destroy the body and condemn the soul. Taken as a whole, Behn’s literary production is an extraordinary examination of the early modern concept of love at a moment of change in the language and meaning of the passions.

Each chapter focuses on one type of writing: poetry, drama, and prose. Her poetry conjures love as an extremely powerful, disabling force, conveyed through the eyes, ears and hands, and acting on the heart and soul. The recipient of love’s force is essentially passive except for the need to reflect and decide if the love is worthy or to regret the passion after abandonment. Language from the pastoral mode structures her love poetry; the shady greenery and responsive nature provide a context of ideal love in a golden age with the everlasting fulfilment of mutual desires or a suitably moody place to die. The physical progression of love remains the same in her drama: an external force entering the body with pain and sweet desire stimulating the power of reason to preserve honor and determine the quality of desire. The trail of betrayed lovers and broken vows in her comedies testifies to the prevailing force of love. In the dramatic context, love is unsurprisingly comic and active. Operating in the same way on the body, Behn’s stage version of love is overblown, farcical and stagey. In her prose, the genre of writing most noted for her amatory style, Behn once again adopts the configuration of love as a powerful and mysterious external force operating on passive victims who respond in conversations with their hearts. Opposite to the succinct style of Behn’s love poetry, love in her prose is characterized by amplitude and repetition. It shares with poetry, however, love’s contradictory nature, and her love aphorisms have the balanced antithesis of her verse.

Each chapter also features a unique comparative study that illustrates Behn in a specific context. The poetry chapter compares Behn's Poems Upon Several Occasions to a corpus of six contemporary poetry collections by Ephelia (1679), the Earl of Rochester (1680), Nahum Tate (1684), Anne Killigrew (1684), Edmund Waller, fifth edition, 1686, and Philomela or Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1696). The Drama comparison includes plays by Thomas Killigrew, William Davenant, John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell, George Etherege, Edward Ravenscroft, Thomas Durfey, Thomas Otway, Thomas Southerne, and Mary Pix. Behn's Fiction corpus is compared to Aretina by George McKenzie (1660), The Blazing World, by Margaret Cavendish (1668), Five Love-Letters to a Cavalier translated by Roger L'Estrange (1678), John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), The Princess of Cleves by Madame de La Fayette (1679), Don Tomazo by Thomas Dangerfield (1680), The Royal Loves, by Mademoiselle (Anne) Roche-Guihen (1680), The Martyrdom of Theodora and Didymus by Roger Boyle (1687), Incognita by William Congreve (1692) and The Inhumane Cardinal by Mary Pix (1696).

‘Tokyo Seven Roses’ is set in Japan during the waning months of WWII and the beginning of the Occupation. It is written as a diary kept from April 1945 to April 1946 by Shinsuke Yamanaka, a fifty-three-year-old fan-maker living in Nezu, part of Tokyo's shitamachi (old-town) district. After the war, Shinsuke learns by chance that the Occupation forces are plotting a nefarious scheme: in order to cut Japan off from its dreadful past, they intend to see that the language is written henceforth using the alphabet. To fight off this unheard-of threat to the integrity of Japanese culture, seven beautiful women – the Seven Roses – take a stand. They include Tomoe, whose husband perished in a B29 raid and whose stepfather has gone mad; Fumiko and Takeko, whose elder sister died in an air raid; Sen, another war widow; Tokiko, who lost her parents and older brother; and Kyoko and Fumiko, whose entire families were wiped out.

The seven, while resentful of Japan's leaders for having lured the country down the path to war and, painfully aware of their own responsibility in being so gullible, hate the United States. They set their sights on three powerful members of the education delegation who have come to finalize official policy regarding the Japanese language. The year portrayed was a bleak and painful time for Japan. Shinsuke's diary, however, is surprisingly cheerful, filled with a wealth of details of ordinary people's openhearted lives. The author draws a lively portrait of Japanese who, despite privation, find relief in laughter.

The book’s importance rests firmly on two strong contributions: Its content and its approach. Its content – delivered in the Judge’s own words – provides audiences with a unique view of many seminal moments in American twentieth-century legal history, including the Supreme Court under Earl Warren, the Watergate controversy, the growth of the Big Law firms, First Amendment litigation, and the Cameras in the Courtroom movement. It closely details the significant changes in law firm culture and the legal profession since the 1960s. It uniquely provides a rare behind-the-scenes account of the Senate Confirmation process for a Federal judicial nominee, at the process of judging on the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, what life is like for a Federal judge, and how the court manages its docket. Taken individually, each of one of these insights is worthy of attention – but together in the same book, it is a one-of-a-kind volume.

Employing an innovative approach, the book sits at the crest of a brand new wave of US legal research, which focuses on the role of lower federal courts in shaping the “life” of US law. Biographies of Supreme Court Justices abound and regularly find large audiences for obvious and very good reasons. The personalities and decisions reached by that great institution have a clear impact on the functioning and structure of the United States. However, at the turn of the twenty-first century, legal historians have begun to turn away from the Supreme Court as the exclusive focus of their attention. The latest trends in legal history point to rapidly growing interest in lower court histories, their judges, and the process by which they adjudicate individual cases. While various biographies of lower court judges exist, few meet the breadth and importance of Dyk’s experiences, and none is delivered in the judge’s own words.

In a time when mass joblessness and precarious employment are becoming issues of national concern, it is useful to reconsider the experiences of the unemployed in an earlier period of economic hardship, the Great Depression. How did they survive, and how did they fight against inhumane government policies? Americans are often thought to be a very conservative and individualistic people, but the collective struggles of the supposedly “meek” and “atomized” unemployed in the 1930s belie that stereotype. 

Focusing on the bellwether city of Chicago, this book reevaluates those struggles, revealing the kernel of political radicalism and class resistance in practices that are usually thought of as apolitical and un-ideological. From communal sharing to “eviction riots,” from Unemployed Councils to the nationwide movement behind the remarkable Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill, millions of people fought to end the reign of capitalist values and usher in a new, more socialistic society. While they failed in their maximal goal of abolishing economic insecurity and the disproportionate power of the rich, they did wrest an incipient welfare state from the ruling class. Today, their legacy is their resilience, their resourcefulness, and their proof that the unemployed can organize themselves to renew the struggle for a more just world.

This is a collection of essays on Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinian themes that appeared between 1996 and 2019. It is divided into three parts, with a common trajectory laid out in a substantial introduction. The first part links meaning, necessity and normativity. It defends and modifies Wittgenstein’s claim that the idea of a ‘grammatical rule’ holds the key to understanding linguistic meaning and its connection to necessary propositions. The second part elucidates the connections between meaning, concepts and thought in Wittgenstein and beyond. It shows how he laid the grounds for a sound understanding of four contested issues—radical interpretation, concepts, nonsense and the scope and limits of animal thought. The third part provides a qualified defence of Wittgenstein’s influential yet extremely controversial idea that philosophical problems are conceptual, and thereby rooted in confusions concerning the meanings of and semantic relations between linguistic expressions. Against irrationalist interpretations, Glock demonstrates that Wittgenstein’s method is argumentative rather than therapeutic.

The essays reconstruct Wittgenstein’s writings in a way that identifies the often cryptic problems and arguments in his work. This sets them apart from a currently popular trend of therapeutic interpretations, as in the ‘New Wittgenstein’ school. By contrast to other critics of such interpretations, Glock acknowledges that they are to a limited extent warranted by some aspects of Wittgenstein’s work, e.g. concerning the notion of nonsense or what he calls ‘the myth of mere method’. At the same time the essays convincingly criticize these aspects and show that they are not presupposed by the more important lessons that Wittgenstein still has to teach. 

The collection brings out the abiding relevance of Wittgenstein’s reflections to contemporary debates on central themes such as the importance of normativity, the foundations of meaning and necessity, the nature of concepts, the possibility of animal thought and the proper method of philosophy. 

Unfortunately, developing countries and less developed countries in general have not yet entered the digital era. Most of them have not yet developed the back-office components that are fundamental prerequisites for conducting e-applications. In many situations, e-government systems have been adopted solely as window dressing, as it is considered improper for governmental agencies not to have a web portal, email address and/or a Facebook or Twitter account. But these government web portals are of no real use to the citizens. This volume seeks to help rectify this issue.

Drawing lessons from the eFez Project in Morocco, “E-Government for Good Governance in Developing Countries” offers practical supporting material to decision makers in developing countries on information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D), specifically e-government implementation. It documents the eFez Project experience in all of its aspects, presenting the project’s findings and the practical methods developed by the authors (a roadmap, impact assessment framework, design issues, lessons learned and best practices) in their systematic quest to turn eFez’s indigenous experimentations and findings into a formal framework for academics, practitioners and decision makers. The volume also reviews, analyzes and synthesizes the findings of other projects to offer a comparative study of the eFez framework and a number of other e-government frameworks from the growing literature.

Given the lack of practical books that target decision makers guiding the design and implementation of e-government for good governance and any other sector-specific ICT4D, the authors hope that the eFez Project’s great success in Morocco, and the outcomes and methods described in this volume, will prove a useful model for practitioners and decision makers in other developing countries around the world. 

Contemporary understandings of inter-generational relations assume that the balance of power has shifted from adults towards children in recent years. The rise of children’s rights, the trend towards more child centred pedagogies and practices within schools and the incorporation of children within a global free market as consumers have all been interpreted as the loss of adult power and the consequent growth of kid power. 

This book critically examines these ideas and reframes the zero-sum conceptions of power implicit within these assumptions. It draws on Lukes’ three dimensions of power and Foucault’s theory of power and knowledge in advancing the view that kid power is inter-generational, multi-dimensional and distributed variably across the child population. The book illustrates this theory through selected themes, including children’s political activism with respect to climate change, the varied roles that children play within their families as mediators, the involvement of children in research and the rise of digital kid power. 

In a post-script, the theory of kid power within the current context of the global Covid-19 pandemic is examined. This final part of the book questions what the impact of the virus will be on the different manifestations of kid power and considers the implications of lockdowns and potential long-term social distancing measures for inequalities, inter-generational relations and our interpretation of kid power.

Other Canon Economics: Essays in the Theory and History of Uneven Economic Development brings together key essays on development economics from one of the most prolific and important development economists and historians of economic policy today. Erik S Reinert argues through essays ranging from 1994 to 2020 that neo-classical economics damages developing countries: the theory of comparative advantage leaves out a number of factors which make economic activities qualitatively different as carriers of economic growth. Based on a long intellectual tradition – started by the Italian economists Giovanni Botero (1589) and Antonio Serra (1613) and later used in virtually all presently industrialised countries – Reinert shows that the country which exports increasing returns goods – e.g. high-end manufacture – has advantages over the country which exports diminishing returns goods – e.g. commodities. This has important implications for today’s development strategies that, Reinert argues, should be seen as industrial strategies.

This collection of essays incorporates the insight of an international group of experts to explore the impact of neoliberal ideology upon political, social and economic domains, as well as institutions such as the prison, healthcare and education systems and the voluntary sector. Examining the effects of the emergence of late-modern capitalism in the 1970s, the articles look at how the reaction against post-war Keynesian ideology manifested itself in each of these areas. This neoliberal resurgence has been characterised by competition and free markets, individual and family responsibility, and socioeconomic policies that engender social insecurity, resulting in economic freedom for the few and a strong law-and-order state for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Abandoning the all-encompassing, supportive attitude deemed necessary in the immediate aftermath of wartime instability, the neoliberal emphasis on individual responsibility has resulted in numerous social and moral dislocations, including harsher attitudes toward crime and punishment. The essays included in ‘Organising Neoliberalism: Markets, Privatisation and Justice’ explore how neoliberal ideology permeates nearly all aspects of modern life, and produce strong arguments for resistance against it.

Over the last 20 years, the world has gone through economic crisis, geopolitical tensions, a looming climate emergency and most recently, Covid-19, with all that it brought with it. The years 2020 and 2021, in particular, have seen tremendous advances in digitalization while at the same time have seen millions of people leave their jobs for one reason or another.

In these turbulent times many people struggle to chart a career path which will provide for themselves and their families while at the same time give them a real sense of purpose.

Learning to Fly: How to Manage Your Career in a Turbulent and Changing World offers a practical and tested framework with which to chart one’s own path towards the future. The book will challenge assumptions as well as help in thinking about career options that are likely to be future proof. It will also help find balance between career aspirations and other aspects of one’s life that may be more important such as family, health and the purpose for which one is on the planet in the first place.

Transition in international relations means moving from war to peace, dealing with an economic crisis or changing from one system of government to another. One of the key means by which this occurs is the diplomatic process of bargaining, compromising, settlement or trading. There is, however, a danger that in order to secure political objectives or preferences, negotiators or decision-makers may ‘trade away’ the interests of vulnerable or emerging social forces, sometimes knowingly, more often without due appreciation of the interests at threat.

Trading Women's Rights in Transitions is about how women’s rights are traded away by negotiators directly in exchange for immediate political or other settlements, and indirectly in terms of being left off the international agenda with long-term consequences.

The book provides a heterodox and critical view of the gender politics of transitions, focused on conflict-affected states. Susan Rimmer examines the link between negotiation processes around the globe and outcomes for social groups who struggle to gain access to power, focussing on the rights of women and girls. The struggle between actors in reformist groups can also trade away women’s rights before the agenda with international actors is agreed. The aim of this book is to assess ideas and discourse about the ‘tradeability’ of a group’s rights in states experiencing a seismic transition, such as in Afghanistan or Myanmar. What does diplomacy look like ‘from below’ in these situations?

Attention to the ‘security-development nexus’ has become commonplace in national and global policy-making, and yet the exact nature of the term remains undefined. This study approaches the subjects of development and security from a variety of different perspectives, offering an array of interpretations of the nexus along with an analysis of its potentially related issues. Particular attention is paid to studies of conflict and peace, with a focus upon the linkage between these subjects and the topic of the nexus itself.

Specific areas of investigation include the role of diasporas in peace building, the relationship between the nexus and challenges to liberal state-building, and the part played by external parties in the peace processes of the Aceh and Sri Lankan conflicts. The inclusion of case studies from Africa, Asia and Europe provides the text with a strong geographical focus, and constructs a panoramic view of the nexus that encompasses the globe. Further country-based chapters – focusing on China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa – underline this worldwide perspective.

The volume’s collected essays thus provide a detailed and comprehensive view of this fluid, contemporaneous topic, both theoretically and empirically. ‘The Security-Development Nexus’ is a vital appraisal of both the present issues and current thought concerning conflict, security and development.

The Inner World of Research is a book about the misery and joy of life as a researcher. It deals with essential but rarely spoken of topics in the everyday life of a researcher, focussing in particular on the role of emotions and social relations in research. It stretches from the individual researcher, to the ‘micro-cosmos’ of the research team and to the broader policy environment in which research takes place.

The book is to a large extent based on autobiographical material from the author’s long career as a leading social scientist. But it also derives from extended interviews with researchers from a variety of disciplines, and with authors, artists and musicians. It delves into the mysteries of creativity; the joys and frustrations of collaboration; and the role of fear, anger, and boredom in the life of a researcher. It is driven by a quiet fury about how research as a practice is so little understood and so poorly administrated and communicated.

Neither a standard research monograph nor a typical memoir or autobiography, The Inner World of Research belongs to the academic essay genre. It is a book based on the author’s frustrations, experiences and curiosity but all through written in dialogue with colleagues supported by adequate scholarship. It is personal and self-reflexive yet authoritative and offers significant insights into the heaven and hell of contemporary academic life in general. And in contrast to many other contemporary books on ‘the decline of the university’, this book is not only critical but also self-critical and constructive.

The book consists of a volume of essays in honor of the outstanding sociologist, Edward A. Tiryakian; whose work has spanned a considerable number of countries, regions and topics. He has been highly influential, particularly in American and French sociology.

The contributors include such luminaries as Alan Sica, Bryan Turner, George Ritzer, John Simpson, Piotr Sztompka, Hans Joas, Roland Robertson and John Torpey.

The contributions range across the numerous works of Tiryakian. These include his relationship with the great scholar Pitirim Sorokin, his existentialist sociology, metasociology, his contribution to modernization theory, his important work on civilizations, and his mediation between European and American sociology. Other contributions include chapters on global studies, Max Weber, multiple modernities and the axial age and the work of Robert Bellah on human evolution.

The book’s importance rests firmly on two strong contributions: Its content and its approach. Its content – delivered in the Judge’s own words – provides audiences with a unique view of many seminal moments in American twentieth-century legal history, including the Supreme Court under Earl Warren, the Watergate controversy, the growth of the Big Law firms, First Amendment litigation, and the Cameras in the Courtroom movement. It closely details the significant changes in law firm culture and the legal profession since the 1960s. It uniquely provides a rare behind-the-scenes account of the Senate Confirmation process for a Federal judicial nominee, at the process of judging on the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, what life is like for a Federal judge, and how the court manages its docket. Taken individually, each of one of these insights is worthy of attention – but together in the same book, it is a one-of-a-kind volume.

Employing an innovative approach, the book sits at the crest of a brand new wave of US legal research, which focuses on the role of lower federal courts in shaping the “life” of US law. Biographies of Supreme Court Justices abound and regularly find large audiences for obvious and very good reasons. The personalities and decisions reached by that great institution have a clear impact on the functioning and structure of the United States. However, at the turn of the twenty-first century, legal historians have begun to turn away from the Supreme Court as the exclusive focus of their attention. The latest trends in legal history point to rapidly growing interest in lower court histories, their judges, and the process by which they adjudicate individual cases. While various biographies of lower court judges exist, few meet the breadth and importance of Dyk’s experiences, and none is delivered in the judge’s own words.