Comparative Politics and International Studies Series - Böcker
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7 produkter
7 produkter
Insecure Guardians
Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
549 kr
Skickas
The police force is one of the most distrusted institutions in Pakistan, notorious for its corruption and brutality. In both colonial and postcolonial contexts, directives to confront security threats have empowered law enforcement agents, while the lack of adequate reform has upheld institutional weaknesses. This exploration of policing in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city and financial capital, reveals many colonial continuities. Both civilian and military regimes continue to ensure the suppression of the policed via this institution, itself established to militarily subjugate and exploit in the interests of the ruling class. However, contemporary policing practice is not a simple product of its colonial heritage: it has also evolved to confront new challenges and political realities.Based on extensive fieldwork and around 200 interviews, this ethnographic study reveals a distinctly 'postcolonial condition of policing'. Mutually reinforcing phenomena of militarisation and informality have been exacerbated by an insecure state that routinely conflates combatting crime, maintaining public order and ensuring national security. This is evident not only in spectacular displays of violence and malpractice, but also in police officers' routine work. Caught in the middle of the country's armed conflicts, their encounters with both state and society are a story of insecurity and uncertainty.
342 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
Dr Bhimrao R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) was one of India's greatest intellectuals and social reformers; his political ideas continue to inspire and mobilise some of the world's poorest and most socially disadvantaged, in India and the global Indian diaspora. Ambedkar's thought on labour, legal rights, women's rights, education, caste, political representation and the economy are international in importance. This book explores his lesser-known period of London-based study and publication during the early 1920s, presenting that experience as a lens for thinking about Ambedkar's global intellectual significance. Some of his later canon on caste, and Dalit rights and representation, was rooted in and shaped by his earlier work around the economy, governance, labour and representation during his time as a law student and as a doctoral candidate at the London School of Economics. The Indian diaspora in the UK is the country's single largest national minority. This volume connects Ambedkar's influence during his lifetime, and his legacy today, to this early phase of his career and intellectual life in London, and its immediate aftermath. It contains new material on the establishment of the city's Ambedkar Museum, explores Britain's Ambedkarite movement, and charts the campaign to outlaw caste discrimination in the UK.
Insecure Guardians
Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi
Häftad, Engelska, 2025
208 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
The police force is one of the most distrusted institutions in Pakistan, notorious for its corruption and brutality. In both colonial and postcolonial contexts, directives to confront security threats have empowered law enforcement agents, while the lack of adequate reform has upheld institutional weaknesses.This exploration of policing in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city and financial capital, reveals many colonial continuities. Both civilian and military regimes continue to ensure the suppression of the policed via this institution, itself established to militarily subjugate and exploit in the interests of the ruling class. However, contemporary policing practice is not a simple product of its colonial heritage: it has also evolved to confront new challenges and political realities.Based on extensive fieldwork and around 200 interviews, this ethnographic study reveals a distinctly 'postcolonial condition of policing'. Mutually reinforcing phenomena of militarisation and informality have been exacerbated by an insecure state that routinely conflates combatting crime, maintaining public order and ensuring national security. This is evident not only in spectacular displays of violence and malpractice, but also in police officers' routine work. Caught in the middle of the country's armed conflicts, their encounters with both state and society are a story of insecurity and uncertainty.
479 kr
Kommande
Across the world, religious and cultural identities are being weaponised for political gains. South Asia is no exception, with frequent conflicts between faith communities strengthening politico-religious organisations, and severely straining social cohesion. Yet this region also has a history of religious intermingling, exemplified by shared sacred sites such as saints' tombs, temples, churches, and natural elements serving as places of worship.Such 'sites in common' offer rich insights into the dynamics of religious interaction. This book investigates them through two key questions. First, it examines what shared places of worship can reveal about plural societies in the midst of persistent religious and ethnic nationalism. Are they exceptional? Do they reflect or transcend socio-religious fault lines? The authors approach coexistence as a tensile equilibrium, in which conflict is no stranger to sharing: South Asia's shared sacred sites are seen as social laboratories, where communities experiment with pluralism and its challenges. Second, the contributors consider the politics of belonging, questioning the boundaries between groups and religions. They examine the logics at work in people's visits to places outside their own religious affiliation, challenging theoretical frameworks of religious demarcation and showing the importance of other markers, such as caste, class, language and gender.
246 kr
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This book is a major reinterpretation of Pakistani politics. Its focus is conflict among groups, communities, classes, ideologies and institutions, which has shaped the country's political dynamics. Mohammad Waseem analyses the millennium-long conflict between Hindus and Muslims as separate nations but intermingled faiths, and the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh renaissances that created a twentieth-century clash of communities and led to partition.Political Conflict in Pakistan addresses multiple clashes: between the high culture as a mission to transform society, and the low culture of the land and the people; between those committed to the establishment's institutional constitutional framework and those seeking to dismantle the 'colonial' state; between the corrupt and those seeking to hold them to account; between the political class and the middle class; and between civil and military power. Waseem exposes how the ruling elite centralised power through the militarisation and judicialisation of politics, rendering the federalist arrangement an empty shell and grossly alienating the provinces. He sets all this within the contexts of education and media as breeders of conflict, the difficulties of establishing an anti-terrorist regime, and the state's pragmatic attempts at conflict resolution, under pressure from minorities. This is a wide-ranging account of a country of contestations.
762 kr
Kommande
A revelatory look at the predicament of unrecognised entities and their place in the modern world.Taiwan is a fully independent state that controls its borders, maintains its own defence, is integrated into the international trading system, and holds free and regular elections within a multi-party framework.Notwithstanding these achievements, almost all national governments and international organisations worldwide do not recognise the Taiwanese state.Since its founding in 1949, the People’s Republic of China has consistently asserted its sovereignty over Taiwan, and there has been a notable escalation in Chinese military and diplomatic pressure on the island since the early 2020s. As a result, it is more important than ever to understand the origins of Taiwan’s unrecognised statehood, the methods by which it is denied, and its practical implications. How does the global system accommodate the exclusion of a sovereign state? And what means does the latter deploy to compensate for this exclusion?Unrecognised Statehood combines vital historical background with up-to-date analysis, drawing on multi-site fieldwork as well as on primary sources from the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund. It is essential reading for anyone interested in China and Taiwan, and in international relations, law and diplomacy more broadly.
573 kr
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On 11 September 2012, over 250 workers of Ali Enterprises, which produced jeans for the German discount retailer KiK, perished in a fire in their Karachi factory. Was this an accident or an arson attack? Straight away, the tragedy gave rise to contradictory interpretations. While some blamed the exploitative logics of fast fashion, others suspected foul play by the political parties preying on the city and its business class.Taking as a starting point the controversy caused by this disaster, Gunpoint Capitalism plunges us into the murky waters of globalisation. Exploring the back alleys of Pakistan's industrial capital city, it shows how the manufacturing economy makes order out of disorder, and profit out of conflict--to the detriment of workers. In Karachi, as elsewhere, petty criminals and ex-servicemen prove to be formidable enforcers of economic order. A comparison with Europe, the United States and Latin America confirms the central place of such henchmen in the dynamics of capitalism. These shock troops of anti-unionism are now participating in the dismantling of the social state.This probing, sometimes shocking, book sheds new light on the power structures, organised violence and daily labour struggles underpinning the production of our consumer goods.