In 1947, British India-the part of South Asia that is today's India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh-emerged from the colonial era with the world's largest centrally managed canal irrigation infrastructure. However, as vividly illustrated by Tushaar Shah, the orderly irrigation economy that saved millions of rural poor from droughts and famines is now a vast atomistic system of widely dispersed tube-wells that are drawing groundwater without permits or hindrances. Taming the Anarchy is about the development of this chaos and the prospects to bring it under control. It is about both the massive benefit that the irrigation economy has created and the ill-fare it threatens through depleted aquifers and pollution. Tushaar Shah brings exceptional insight into a socio-ecological phenomenon that has befuddled scientists and policymakers alike. In systematic fashion, he investigates the forces behind the transformation of South Asian irrigation and considers its social, economic, and ecological impacts. He considers what is unique to South Asia and what is in common with other developing regions. He argues that, without effective governance, the resulting groundwater stress threatens the sustenance of the agrarian system and therefore the well being of the nearly one and a half billion people who live in South Asia. Yet, finding solutions is a formidable challenge. The way forward in the short run, Shah suggests, lies in indirect, adaptive strategies that change the conduct of water users. From antiquity until the 1960‘s, agricultural water management in South Asia was predominantly the affair of village communities and/or the state. Today, the region depends on irrigation from some 25 million individually owned groundwater wells. Tushaar Shah provides a fascinating economic, political, and cultural history of the development and use of technology that is also a history of a society in transition. His book provides powerful ideas and lessons for researchers, historians, and policy

In 1955, the same year Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus to a white man, President Eisenhower brought down from the hills of northwest Alabama a young U.S. attorney to sit as a federal District Court judge in Montgomery. His name was Frank M. Johnson, Jr., and at thirty-seven he was the youngest federal judge in the country. Thrust by fate into the center of a raging storm of controversy, this quietly determined judge would turn the tide of white resistance to integration with a stream of decisions that upheld the claims of black Southerners to their civil rights. In his twenty-four years on the District Court, Judge Johnson declared segregated public transportation unconstitutional, ordered the integration of public facilities, and required that blacks be registered to vote. He ordered Governor George Wallace, his former law school classmate, to allow the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery and brought about comprehensive statewide school desegregation. His precedent-setting decisions extended to discrimination against women, rights of prison inmates, and the right of patients in mental institutions to treatment. Judge Johnson paid heavily for his judicial vision. Ostracized from his community, subjected to death threats by the Ku Klux Klan, and labeled by George Wallace as "an integrating, scalawagging, carpet bagging, race mixing, bald faced liar who should be given "a barbed-wire enema", he was called by some "the most hated man in the South". In 1967 his mother's house was bombed in the belief that it was his. Despite it all, he did not waver in administering justice by applying his concept of the Constitution as a charter of liberty.Martin Luther King, Jr., called him a man who "gave true meaning to the word justice". Judge Frank Johnson endured the outrage of a society that felt itself and its values under siege, and he prevailed, eventually winning honor even in his home state. Taming the Storm is the story of an authentic American hero, and the era that he did so much to define.

In this book, James Stoner's purpose is to recover the common law basis of American constitutionalism. American constitutionalism in general, he argues, and judicial review in particular, cannot be fully understood without acknowledging their roots in both common law and liberal political theory. But for the most part, the common law underpinnings of constitutionalism have received short shrift.

Argues for the democratisation of international government. Rejects the idea that globalisation can or should be wound back and proposes a ten-point plan to transform the way we respond to it. Identifies the problem of crucial decision-making being carried out by unelected bodies like the IMF and World Bank at the expense of democracy and accountablity. Includes tables and figures, notes, bibliography and index. Author is a federal Labor MP and Opposition spokesperson on justice and customs, population, immigration, multicultural affairs, the environment, and the arts. He served as Attorney General and minister for Justice in the Keating Labor government.