A trenchant assessment of Narendra Modi's BJP government and its impact on India.

This Companion presents a detailed assessment of Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia and analyses its contribution to political philosophy.

How do states respond to minority nations’ demands? Are state nationalism and majority nationalism the same? This book brings together the leading lights in nationalism studies to turn their attention to the neglected role of the state in nationalist disputes. The aspirations of state and majority nationalists often conflict with the aspirations of substate nationalist movements, leading to disputes over resources, symbolic recognition, and the structure of the state. State elites are then forced to supply arguments defending the political union and to articulate strategies for its continuation. In the process, they make explicit what being ‘national’ means and the symbolic repertoires for doing so. With case studies from China, Spain, the United Kingdom, Canada, India, and Nepal, this edited volume examines state and majority nationalism in all its guises, asking how states respond to nationalist challenges from below. It is particularly timely at a moment when territorial and secessionist crises are reshaping politics. State and Majority Nationalism in Plurinational States will be relevant reading for students and researchers of comparative politics and international relations, including those with a deep interest in territorial politics, national identities, group rights, and representation. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.

In Confessions Of A Secular Fundamentalist, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Crusader For A Secular Credo, Calls For An Unambiguous And Decisive Restoration Of Secularism To The Core Of Our Nationhood. In Doing So, He Revisits Every Dimension Of Our Secular Ethos And Exposes The Various Myths Perpetuated By Communal Elements Of All Hues. Putting Under The Scanner Contentious Issues Like Conversions, Uniform Civil Code And Article 370, He Nails The Falsehood Underlying Terms Like Pseudo-Secularism , Appeasement And Soft Hindutva . And He Places The Domestic Debate Over Secularism In India In The Wider External Dimension By Discussing The Experiences Of Countries Like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Israel And Erstwhile Yugoslavia. Admitting To Wearing His Secularism On His Sleeve, Aiyar Reasons That Only A Determined And Inflexible Adherence To Secularism Can Counter Religious Bigotry And Fundamentalism. Clear In His Convictions, With History, Logic And Persuasive Argument At His Command, This Is Mani Shankar Aiyar At His Best, On A Subject That We Can Ignore Only At Our Own Peril.

A comprehensive introduction to the important economic, social and political processes and development issues in this extremely popular region. South Asia provides one of the world's most challenging development contexts and The authors take a different approach to most traditional development texts, making the latest research teacher friendly and presenting material in an accessible manner for non-specialists.

Democracy is widely accepted today, perhaps as never before, as the most suitable form of government. But what is democracy, and does it always produce good government? Democracy is often associated with the existence of competitive elections. But theory and experience suggest that these are not sufficient for democracy to function reasonably well. In this book, which was originally published in 2003, a number of experts from North America and Europe use a rational choice approach to understand the 'foundations' of democracy - what makes democracy successful, and why. In doing so, they consider diverse problems of democratic governance such as the importance of morals or virtue in political life, negative advertising, the role of social capital and civil society in sustaining democracy, the constitutional and cultural prerequisites of democracy, and the interaction of democracy and markets.

This book introduces the reader to the Italian Constitution, which entered into force on 1 January 1948, and examines whether it has successfully managed the political and legal challenges that have occurred since its inception, and fulfilled the three main functions of a Constitution: maintaining a community, protecting the fundamental rights of citizens and ensuring the separation of powers.

A powerful contribution to the debate on intellectual property Knowledge as Commons traces the historical path towards the privatization of knowledge, situating science, technology and the emergence of modern nations in a larger historical framework. Author Prabir Purkayastha asks: Do the needs of society drive science and technology? Or do developments in science and technology provide the motor force of history? Has this relationship changed over time? Purkayastha shows us that, with profit as its sole aim, capital claims to own human knowledge and its products, fencing them in with patents and intellectual property rights. Neoliberal institutions and policy diktats from the West have installed a global system in which knowledge, that limitless resource, is made artificially scarce—while limited resources such as water and clean air are treated as though they were infinite. Arguing that rapid technological change, from pharmaceuticals to electronics, should be an opportunity to deliver quicker cures, affordable access, and global cooperation in the production of knowledge, Purkayastha examines the consequences of this privatization for universities, healthcare, distributive justice, the domestic politics of developing countries, and their prospects vis-à-vis the West.

Armed separatist insurgencies have created a real dilemma for many national governments of how much freedom to grant aggrieved minorities without releasing territorial sovereignty over the nation-state. This book examines different approaches that have been taken by seven states in South and Southeast Asia to try and resolve this dilemma through various offers of autonomy. Providing new insights into the conditions under which autonomy arrangements exacerbate or alleviate the problem of armed separatism, this comprehensive book includes in-depth analysis of the circumstances that lead men and women to take up arms in an effort to remove themselves from the state's borders by creating their own independent polity.

Feminist Subversion and Complicity interrogates a specific form of feminist practice, that which has involved engaging with state and international institutions to insert gender knowledge in their development interventions. Bringing together contributions from eight feminists located in very different kinds of institutions and spaces from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India, this book is the outcome of a deeply reflexive process to produce a critique from within of this present day feminist practice. An array of experiences and encounters are scrutinised - from bringing feminist perspectives to governmental projects on education, health, and legal reform to transformations in the discourses and practices of women's movements and feminisms as they encountered developmentalisms. The writers show that feminist politics is not merely assimilated in governmental projects but that it interrupts these projects even as it is assimilated; a feminist politics in which complicity is often a subversive activity, is destabilizing and contesting of meaning.