Association of Asian Studies Book Deal

The ‘War on Terror’ ushered in a new era of anti-Muslim bias and racism. Anti-Muslim racism, or Islamophobia, is influenced by local economies, power structures and histories. However, the War on Terror, a conflict undefined by time and place, with a homogenised Muslim ‘Other’ framed as a perpetual enemy, has contributed towards a global Islamophobic narrative. This edited international volume examines the connections between interpersonal and institutional anti-Muslim racism that have contributed to the growth and emboldening of nativist and populist protest movements globally. It maps out categories of Islamophobia, revealing how localised histories, conflicts and contemporary geopolitical realities have textured the ways that Islamophobia has manifested across the global North and South. At the same time, it seeks to highlight activism and resistance confronting Islamophobia.

This book offers a nuanced snapshot of the complex geopolitical dynamics in the Persian Gulf, underlining the interaction between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the US. Examining their interwoven relations since the 1970s, Luíza Cerioli's framework reveals how changes in US-Saudi ties have ripple effects on Iran-US and Iran-Saudi relations and vice versa. Using a historical lens, she explores how enduring US-Saudi connections hinge on order expectations, delves into the cognitive factors shaping US-Iran enmity and traces the source of oscillation in the Saudi-Iran ties. Employing Neoclassical Realism, the book investigates status-seeking, national identities and leadership preferences, offering a deeper understanding of the region's multipolar system. By combining International Relations and Middle East Studies, Cerioli's work contributes to both fields, unravelling the intricate interplay between international structures, regional nuances and agency in shaping Persian Gulf geopolitics.

This book provides a novel analysis of the conceptual sources and ideological contours of the Assad regime. The book documents the Baathists’ fascination with Romanticized and 'muscular' ideas of the nation that emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European social philosophy, and traces the implementation and impacts of these ideologies in the Syrian context. Emphasising the emergence of new forms of public gendered identity in Syria as a unifying feature of nationalism bound closely with the stability of the regime, the book shows how Romantic, muscular nationalism first rose to hegemony and then was shattered by its inherent violence, contradictions and inequalities. The final chapter closes by considering how a new vision of pluralism and civic belonging is today challenging the Romanticized Baathist ideal in contention for Syria’s future.

This book examines the transformation of untouchability into a political idea in India during the first half of the twentieth century. At its heart is Ambedkar’s role and the concepts he used to champion untouchability as a political problem. Ambedkar’s main objective was to comprehend the numerous avatars of untouchability in order to eradicate this practice. Ambedkar understood untouchability beyond aspects of ritual purity and pollution by stressing its complex nature and uncovering the political, historical, racial, spatial and emotional characteristics contained in this concept. Ambedkar believed the abolition of untouchability depended on a widespread alteration of India’s political, economic and cultural systems. Ambedkar reframed the problem of untouchability by linking it to larger concepts floating in the political environment of late colonial India such as representation, slavery, race, the Indian village, internationalism and even the creation of Pakistan.

Both India and South Africa have shared the infamy of being labelled the world’s ‘rape capitals’, with high levels of everyday gender-based and sexual violence. At the same time, both boast long histories of resisting such violence and its location in wider cultures of patriarchy, settler colonialism and class and caste privilege.

Through the lens of the #MeToo moment, the book tracks histories of feminist organising in both countries, while also revealing how newer strategies extended or limited these struggles. Intimacy and injury is a timely mapping of a shifting political field around gender-based violence in the global south. In proposing comparative, interdisciplinary, ethnographically rich and analytically astute reflections on #MeToo, it provides new and potentially transformative directions to scholarly debates this book builds transnational feminist knowledge and solidarity in and across the global south.

Egypt and the rise of fluid authoritarianism focuses on the sub-upgrade of the regime in Egypt and the struggle of political authorities for internal political legitimacy after 2013. It is an interdisciplinary work that develops a complex theoretical framework for exploring the microstructural and macrosystemic dynamics of leadership, power, political ecology, and the process of authority formation in illiberal systems that have undergone subsystemic transformations after shockwaves, also beyond Egypt. The book offers a complex, groundbreaking socio-political and economic analysis of how the forging of an internal claim to political legitimacy in Egypt eventually transformed the regime along the authoritarian spectrum, morphing into a fluid autocracy that approximates what the book defines as a 'non-exclusivist personalist regime', thereby fragmenting elites. In the second part, the book offers an economic analysis in which legitimacy and political ecology are closely intertwined. In this regard, the Social Development Goals are employed as a prism.

This book traces the patterns of capital accumulation and the changes in class and state formation emanating from it in Iran during the global neoliberal era. It demonstrates how there are inner connections between the nature of contemporary development in Iran, the form of the state, the ongoing sociopolitical transformations in society and the geopolitical tensions with the West. Simultaneously, it highlights that these issues should be explored in terms of their internal relations to the motions and tendencies of neoliberal global capitalism and resulting geopolitics. Accordingly, the book demonstrates that Iranian neoliberalisation has brought about new contested class dynamics that have fundamentally reconstructed the Iranian ruling class, aggressively shaped and reshaped the working class and the poor, and drastically impacted the state form and its foreign policy.

In this eye-opening ethnography, we learn about the experiences of Muslim migrant husbands from Pakistan and Kashmir, who marry their British counterparts in the hope of marital and global social mobility bliss. For many, the parallel and intertwined migration and marital journeys do not pan out in the way they had hoped. Many experience precarity and vulnerability within the household and/or in employment, with some even being subjected to harrowing forms of domestic violence. Migrant husbands navigate an increasingly hostile British immigration system not only in public but also in private, at the hands of their wives and in-laws. The ethnography demonstrates how citizenship can be deployed as a performance of white power within single group identity, differentiated through colonial legacies of ‘Britishness’.