School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSeeds and Food Sovereignty: Eastern Himalayan Experiences(North Eastern Social Research Centre, 2023-03-06)Crops and seeds are everywhere. They nourish our bodies, families, and communities, but are also taken for granted. Simultaneously, an increasing number of community organisations, farmer movements, and individuals are challenging corporate control and commodification of seeds. In the name of seed and food sovereignty, they seek to enhance local control over agriculture and ensure peoples’ rights to nutritious, ecologically-sound and culturally-appropriate food. In this book, the authors bring together resource persons, students, and researchers working across the Eastern Himalayan region, and, in doing so, they hope to facilitate new ways of learning together. The Eastern Himalayas are commonly characterised as a biodiversity hotspot, and this also applies to agrobiodiversity. The authors hope that this book will inspire further engagements with the ongoing farming initiatives and food sovereignty movements on the ground. Also featuring, Seno Tsuhah, Manorom Gogoi, Amba Jamir, Bhogtoram Mawroh, Mahan Chandra Borah, and Vilazonuo Gloria.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia(Cornell University Press, 2022-12-15)In The Made-Up State, Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, who compose one of Indonesia's trans feminine populations, have cultivated a distinctive way of captivating the affective, material, and spatial experiences of belonging to a modern public sphere. Combining historical and ethnographic research, Hegarty traces the participation of warias in visual and bodily technologies, ranging from psychiatry and medical transsexuality to photography and feminine beauty. The concept of development deployed by the modern Indonesian state relies on naturalizing the binary of "male" and "female." As historical brokers between gender as a technological system of classifying human difference and state citizenship, warias shaped the contours of modern selfhood even while being positioned as nonconforming within it. The Made-Up State illuminates warias as part of the social and technological format of state rule, which has given rise to new possibilities for seeing and being seen as a citizen in postcolonial Indonesia.
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ItemIran in the world: President Rouhani's foreign policy(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016-04-08)This book evaluates President Hassan Rouhani's foreign policy during his first two years in office, looking at the case studies of Armenia, Azerbaijan, the UAE, Turkey, and Syria, as well as the Iran-US relationship. President Rouhani came to power in Iran in 2013 promising to reform the country's long-contentious foreign policy. His top priorities were rehabilitating the Iranian economy, ending the nuclear dispute, rebuilding relations with the US, and mending ties with Iran's neighbors. It is argued here that while President Rouhani has made progress in the Iran-US relationship, in nuclear negotiations and some bilateral relationships, his broader success has been hampered by regional political developments and domestic competition. Further, it is contended that his future success will be guided by emerging regional tensions, including whether Iran's neighbors will accept the terms of the nuclear agreement.
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ItemNew Opposition in the Middle East(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018-09-27)This book uses a Contentious Politics lens to examine patterns of contestation since 2009 and 2011 among the Middle East's most important opposition actors. The volume is comprised of seven chapters that ask questions in relation to the responsiveness of opposition groups to their political environments, the long-term legacies of authoritarianism, and whether the post-2009/2011 political environment is better or worse for Middle Eastern oppositions. It interrogates the ways in which oppositions have morphed in relation to this changed operating environment, subjectively interpreting the costs and benefits of contestation in order to maximise political opportunities. To some oppositions, changes in the power balance between regime structures and opposition agents led to unprecedented opportunity for political action, while for others, structures were galvanised to restrict opposition activities. In total, the volume shows that even though the Arab Uprisings and Green Movement achieved few of their overt goals, the events unleashed smaller shifts across the region that have led to a fundamental change in the politics of contestation amongst the region�s oppositions. These patterns echo experiences in other parts of the world, including the coloured revolutions in post-Soviet states, and the political environment in Chile after Pinochet.
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ItemThe Muslim Brotherhood in Syria(Cambridge University Press, 2019)Having played a role in every iteration of Syrian politics since the country gained independence in 1946, the Muslim Brotherhood were the most prominent opposition group in Syria on the eve of the 2011 uprising. But when unrest broke out in March 2011, few Brotherhood flags and slogans were to be found within the burgeoning protest movement. Drawing on extensive primary research including interviews with Brotherhood members, Dara Conduit looks to the group's history to understand why it failed to capitalise on this advantage as the conflict unfolded, addressing significant gaps in accounts of the group's past to assess whether its reputation for violence and dogmatism is justified. In doing so, Conduit reveals a party that was neither as violent nor as undemocratic as expected, but whose potential to stage a long-awaited comeback was hampered by the shadow of its own history.
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ItemThe Barbarity of Our Own Countrymen(Working Papers, 2020)The ghost of Charles Throsby haunts south-west Sydney, the Illawarra, and the regions south to Lake George and west to Bathurst. He opposed the pattern of violence that would extend from Sydney to Tasmania and to the Port Phillip district (Victoria). The words of his Glenfield Farm letter of 5 April, 1816 reflect on Australia' s original sins: of barbarous violence, appropriation of Aboriginal lands, environmental destruction and subjugation of Aboriginal culture. "The barbarity of our fellow countrymen" is a 30,000 word reflection on the so-called "Sydney Wars" of 1814-1816 which set a pattern for the brutal usurpation of Aboriginal lands in Van Diemens Land (Tasmania), the Port Phillip district (Victoria) and other colonial settlements across the nation.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableUnequal Lives: Gender, Race and Class in the Western Pacific(ANU Press, 2021)This collection is a major contribution to academic and political debates about the perverse effects of inequality, which now ranks among the greatest challenges of our time. The inspiration for this volume derives from the breadth and depth of Martha Macintyre’s remarkable scholarship. The contributors celebrate Macintyre’s groundbreaking work, which exemplifies the explanatory power, ethical force and pragmatism that ensures the relevance of anthropological research to the lives of others and to understanding the global condition.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCeasefire City Militarism, Capitalism, and Urbanism in Dimapur(Oxford University Press, 2021-01-30)While residents of Dimapur often talked about the crumbling infrastructure of the city, musicians and performers connected with everyday challenges that were not limited to power failures, load shedding, and unemployment, but also with ...
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSocial Standards in EU and US Trade Agreements(Routledge, 2020)This book examines the causes and consequences of social standards in US and EU preferential trade agreements (PTAs). PTAs are the new reality of the global trading system. Pursued by both developed and developing countries, they increasingly incorporate labor and environmental issues to prevent a race to the bottom in social regulation and counter-protectionism. Using principal-agent theory to explore why US PTAs have stricter social standards than those signed by the EU, Postnikov argues that the level of institutional insulation of trade policy executives from interest groups and legislators determines the design of social standards. In the EU, where institutional insulation is high, social standards mirror the normative preferences of the European Commission leading to a softer approach. In the US, where such insulation is low, social standards are driven by interest groups and legislators they control, resulting in a stricter approach. This book shows that both approaches can be effective but work through different causal mechanisms. To test his argument, Postnikov draws on original data collected in Brussels, Washington, Santiago, Bogota, and Seoul.
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ItemVietnamese Migrants in Russia: Mobility in Times of Uncertainty(Amsterdam University Press, 2020-06-03)Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at Moscow's wholesale markets from 2013 to 2016 , this book provides original insights into how uncertainty shapes social practice, identity and belonging in the context of irregular migration from Vietnam to Russia. The uncertainties examined here are not just social, economic, and political, but also psychological and moral. The study speaks to various debates in migration and mobility studies - particularly those focused on brokerage networks, the political economy of sexuality, and social belonging - deepening our knowledge of how the core social values and cultural logics that underpin Vietnamese personhood are challenged and reconstituted by the ethos of the market economy. This book sheds important light on processes of mobility and social change in post-socialist societies that continue to grapple with yawning chasms between old and new ways of life, the local and the global, policy and practice, and obsolete governance techniques and rapidly changing socio-economic realities.