Comparative Politics & International Studies - Hurst

Translated by Cynthia Schoch

Ever since independence, revolts and riots in North Africa have structured relations between society and the state. While the state has always managed to restore order, the unexpected outbreak of the Arab Spring revolts has presented a real challenge to state stability. Taking a long-term historical perspective, this book analyses how public authorities have implemented policies to manage the Maghreb’s restive societies, viewed at first as ‘retrograde’ and then as ‘radicalised’.

National cohesion has been a major concern for post-colonial leaders who aim to build strong states capable of controlling the population. Historically, North African nations found colonial oppression to be the very bond that united them, but what continues to hold these communities and nation-states together after independence? If public interest is not at the heart of the state’s actions, how can national loyalties be maintained? Luis Martinez analyses how states approach these questions, showing that the fight against jihadist groups both helps to reconstruct essential ties of state belonging and also promotes the development of a border control policy. He highlights the challenges posed by fragile political communities and weak state instruments, and the response of leaders striving to build peaceful pluralistic nations in North Africa.

Read the interview with the author

ISBN : 978-1-7873-8296-1

Translated by Cynthia Schoch & Natasha Lehrer

What has become of Israel’s peace movement? In the early 1980s, it was a major political force, bringing hundreds of thousands onto the streets; but since then, its importance has declined amid spiralling violence. Now, and especially since the second Intifada of 2000–5, the ‘doves’ of the Israel/Palestine conflict struggle to be heard over its ‘hawks’, and the days of mass mobilisation are over.

Doves Among Hawks charts the successes and failures of a beleaguered peace movement, from its formation after the Six-Day War to the current security-obsessed climate, where Israel’s ‘doves’ seem to be fighting a lost and outdated battle. Samy Cohen’s history of a peace process that once took on the Israeli settler movements exposes how that cause has been derailed and demoralised by suicide attacks.

But the peace movement isn’t dead—it has simply transformed. From human rights monitors to lobbies of the bereaved, Cohen reveals a multitude of smaller, grassroots organisations that have emerged with unexpected energy. These lawyers, doctors, army reservists, former diplomats and senior security personnel are the unsung heroes of his story.

ISBN : 978-1-7873-8024-0

Translated by Cynthia Schoch & Natasha Lehrer

Between the French defeat in 1940 and liberation in 1944, the Nazis killed almost 80,000 of France's Jews, both French and foreign. Since that time, this tragedy has been well-documented. But there are other stories hidden within it--ones neglected by historians. In fact, 75% of France’s Jews escaped the extermination, while 45% of the Jews of Belgium perished, and in the Netherlands only 20% survived. The Nazis were determined to destroy the Jews across Europe, and the Vichy regime collaborated in their deportation from France. So what is the meaning of this French exception? Jacques Semelin sheds light on this 'French enigma', painting a radically unfamiliar view of occupied France. His is a rich, even-handed portrait of a complex and changing society, one where helping and informing on one's neighbours went hand in hand; and where small gestures of solidarity sat comfortably with anti-Semitism. Without shying away from the horror of the Holocaust's crimes, this seminal work adds a fresh perspective to our history of the Second World War.

ISBN : 978-1-7873-8014-1

With the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, a major turning point in all former Soviet republics, Central Asian and Caucasian countries began to reflect on their history and identities. As a consequence of their opening up to the global exchange of ideas, various strains of Islam and trends in Islamic thought have nourished the Islamic revival that had already started in the context of glasnost and perestroika—from Turkey, Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, and from the Indian subcontinent; the four regions with strong ties to Central Asian and Caucasian Islam in the years before Soviet occupation.

Bayram Balci seeks to analyse how these new Islamic influences have reached local societies and how they have interacted with pre-existing religious belief and practice. Combining exceptional erudition with rare first-hand research, Balci’s book provides a sophisticated account of both the internal dynamics and external influences in the evolution of Islam in the region

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4968-9

Contemporary Yemen has an image problem. It has long fascinated travellers and artists, and to many embodies both Arab and Muslim authenticity; it stands at important geostrategic and commercial crossroads. Yet, strangely, global perceptions of Yemen are of an entity that is somehow both marginal and passive, yet also dangerous and problematic.

The Saudi offensive launched in 2015 has made Yemen a victim of regional power struggles, while the global ‘war on terror’ has labelled it a threat to international security. This perception has had disastrous effects without generating real interest in the country or its people. On the contrary, Yemen’s complex political dynamics have been largely ignored by international observers—resulting in problematic, if not counterproductive, international policies.

Yemen and the World offers a corrective to these misconceptions and omissions, putting aside the nature of the world’s interest in Yemen to focus on Yemen’s role on the global stage. Laurent Bonnefoy uses six areas of modern international exchange—globalisation, diplomacy, trade, migration, culture and militant Islamism—to restore Yemen to its place at the heart of contemporary affairs. To understand Yemen, he argues, is to understand the Middle East as a whole.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4966-5

Translated by Cynthia Schoch

What should states do with the bodies of suicide bombers and other jihadists who die while perpetrating terrorist attacks? This original and unsettling book explores the host of ethical and political questions raised by this dilemma, from (non-)legitimisation of the ‘enemy’ and their cause to the non-territorial identity of individuals who identified in life with a global community of believers.

Because states do not recognise suicide bombers as enemy combatants, governments must decide individually what to do with their remains. Riva Kastoryano offers a window onto this challenging predicament through the responses of the American, Spanish, British and French governments after the Al-Qaeda suicide attacks in New York, Madrid and London, and Islamic State’s attacks on Paris in 2015. Interviewing officials, religious and local leaders and jihadists’ families, both in their countries of origin and in the target nations, she has traced the terrorists’ travel history, discovering unexpected connections between their itineraries and the handling of their burials.

This fascinating book reveals how states’ approaches to a seemingly practical issue are closely shaped by territory, culture, globalisation and identity.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4885-9

Ethnic and religious identity-markers compete with class and gender as principles shaping the organisation and classification of everyday life. But how are an individual’s identity-based conflicts transformed and redefined? Identity is a specific form of social capital, hence contexts where multiple identities obtain necessarily come with a hierarchy, with differences, and hence with a certain degree of hostility. The contributors to this book examine the rapid transformation of identity hierarchies affecting Iran, Pakistan and Turkey, a symptom of political fractures, social-economic transformation, and new regimes of subjectification. They focus on the state’s role in organising access to resources, with its institutions often being the main target of demands, rather than competing social groups. Such contexts enable entrepreneurs of collective action to exploit identity differences, which in turn help them to expand the scale of their mobilisation and to align local and national conflicts. The authors also examine how identity-based violence may be autonomous in certain contexts, and serve to prime collective action and transform the relations between communities.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4372-4

South Asia is today the region inhabited by the largest number of Muslims—roughly 500 million. In the course of its Islamisation process, which began in the eighth century, it developed a distinct Indo-Islamic civilisation that culminated in the Mughal Empire. While paying lip service to the power centres of Islam in the Gulf, including Mecca and Medina, this civilisation has cultivated its own variety of Islam, based on Sufism.

Over the last fifty years, pan-Islamic ties have intensified between these two regions. Gathering together some of the best specialists on the subject, this volume explores these ideological, educational and spiritual networks, which have gained momentum due to political strategies, migration flows and increased communications.

At stake are both the resilience of the civilisation that imbued South Asia with a specific identity, and the relations between Sunnis and Shias in a region where Saudi Arabia and Iran are fighting a cultural proxy war, as evident in the foreign ramifications of sectarianism in Pakistan.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4818-7

Translated by Cynthia Schoch

How has ISIS been able to muster support far beyond its initial constituency in the Arab world and attract tens of thousands of foreign volunteers, including converts to Islam, and seemingly countless supporters online? In this compelling intervention into the debate about ISIS’ origins and future prospects, the renowned French sociologist, Olivier Roy, argues that while terrorism and jihadism are familiar phenomena, the deliberate pursuit of death has produced a new kind of radical violence. In other words, we’re facing not a radicalization of Islam, but the Islamization of radicalism.

Jihad and Death is a concise dissection of the highly sophisticated narrative mobilised by ISIS: the myth of the Caliphate recast into a modern story of heroism and nihilism. According to Roy, this very contemporary aesthetic of violence is less rooted in the history of Islamic thought than it is entrenched in a youth culture that has turned global and violent.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4698-5

This book examines the political landscape that took shape in Myanmar after the 2010 elections and the subsequent transition from direct military rule to a quasi-civilian ‘hybrid’ regime. Striking political, social, and economic transformations have indeed taken place in the long-isolated country since the military junta was disbanded in March 2011. To better construe — and question — what has routinely been labelled a ‘Burmese Spring’, Egreteau examines the reasons behind the ongoing political transition, as well as the role of the Burmese armed forces in that process, drawing on in-depth interviews with Burmese political actors, party leaders, parliamentarians and retired army officers.

The study also takes its cue from comparative scholarship on civil-military relations and post-authoritarian politics, to look at the ‘praetorian’ logic explaining the transitional moment. Myanmar’s road to democratic change is, however, still paved with daunting obstacles. As the book suggests, the continuing military intervention in domestic politics, the resilience of bureaucratic, economic and political clientelism at all levels of society, the iconification of Aung San Suu Kyi, the shadowy influence of regional and global powers, as well as enduring concerns about interethnic and interreligious relations, all are strong reminders of the series of elemental conundrums with which Myanmar will have to deal in order to achieve democratization, sustainable development and peace.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4658-9

Translated by Cynthia Schoch

Published in English for the first time, this book defends the idea that nationhood remains a central aspect of modernity. After the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the following decade confirmed this hypothesis with the rise of independence movements in Europe (in Scotland and Flanders) and the persistence of claims to nationhood the world over (for example, in Kurdistan and Tibet).

A dual perspective informs Dieckhoff’s analysis: to understand the hidden social and cultural underpinnings of post-Cold War identity dynamics, from Kosovo to Catalonia and from Flanders to Corsica, and to examine how societies can meet the challenge of national pluralism. Finding liberalism, republicanism and multiculturalism unequal to this task, he argues that only by building ‘multi-nation’ democratic states can the issues be properly addressed and secessions prevented.

Contemporary liberal discourse often treats nationalism as an archaic aberration — as a primitive form of tribalism astray in the modern world. Dieckhoff’s sensitive and clear-headed analysis shows why nationalism is in fact a fundamental facet of modernity, which must be dealt with as such by states vulnerable to breakup.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4657-2

Translated by Gregory Elliott

In an age of uncertainty, those who can anticipate revolution, the outbreak of wars, or which states might default are much in demand. The marketplace of ideas about the future is huge, and includes ‘wonks’, scholars and pundits who produce scenarios, predictions and ratings. The more opaque the future seems to be, the further the relationship between knowledge and power intensifies — above all the nexus between those who sell their expertise and those who consume it.

In his investigation of the paradoxes of forecasting, Ariel Colonomos interrogates today’s knowledge factories to reveal how our futures are shaped by social scientists, think-tanks and rating agencies. He explains why conservative and linear predictions prevail, and why the future, especially when linked to national interest, reflects a systematic search for stability. The notion of a globalised world whose main characteristic is speed, and where predictions have accelerating, self-fulfilling effects, is obsolete. Those who are supposed to know reassure those who are supposed to act. Their preferences converge, and thus the industry of the future has a decelerating effect on world politics. These ‘lords of knowledge’ reinforce pre-existing beliefs, create expectations about the future, while obstructing its vision when — inevitably — it diverges from its orderly path.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4553-7

Spared by the Arab revolts, Bouteflika’s Algeria continues to intrigue observers. How does its political system function? Who really governs? Who are behind the protests? How strong are the Islamists? Are there alternatives to dependence on hydrocarbons? And how will the regime securitise its vast and unstable Sahara hinterland?

Algeria has been depicted for many years as politically opaque, incomprehensible, and under the control of powerful, occult-like intelligence agencies. While these caricatures are all partly true, they understate how much the country has changed since the 1990s. Algeria today is complex, and challenging to comprehend; but it is no longer opaque.

Algeria Modern analyses the complexity of state and society and the strategies that social and political actors employ. It demonstrates how interest groups that constitute the core of the regime are linked to both the security and business sectors, which while defending their turf and united by shared values are in perennial competition.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4587-2

The Republic of China that retreated to Taiwan in 1949 maintains its de facto, if not de jure, independence yet Beijing has consistently refused formally to abandon the idea of reunifying Taiwan with China. As well as growing military pressure, the PRC’s irredentist policy is premised on encouraging cross-Strait economic integration. Responding to preferential measures, Taiwanese industrialists have invested massively in the PRC, often relocating their businesses there. Fragments of a nation torn apart by contradictory claims, these entrepreneurs are vectors of a new form of unification imposed by the Chinese Communist Party, promoted but postponed on the island by the Nationalist Party, and rejected by Taiwanese pro-independence parties.
Within what can be described as an unfinished civil war, socio-economic dynamics remain embedded in conflicts over sovereignty. Transnational actors have freed themselves from security constraints, thereby benefiting economically from reforms in China and ultimately restructuring politics in Taiwan itself, and, in so doing, relations between Beijing and Taipei. A fictitious depoliticization has governed the opening of the Sino-Taiwanese border in order to postpone any resolution of the sovereignty issue. Mengin’s startlingly original book highlights the competing, and fragmented, elements within one of the world’s most intractable territorial disputes.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4470-7

In his disturbing and timely political history of the ‘Deep State’ in the Middle East, Jean-Pierre Filiu reveals how the autocracies of Syria, Egypt, and Yemen crushed the democratic uprisings of the ‘Arab Revolution’. They did so by turning to the shadowy intelligence agencies and internal security arms of the so-called ‘Deep State’ — emulating strategies pioneered in Kemalist Turkey — who had decades of experience in dealing with internal dissent, as well as to street gangs (the Baltaguiyya in Egypt) or death squads (the Shabbiha in Syria) to enforce their will.
Alongside intimidation, imprisonment and murder, the Arab counter-revolutionaries released from prison and secretly armed and funded many hardline Islamists, thereby boosting Salafi–Jihadi groups such as Islamic State, in the hope of convincing the Western powers to back their dictatorships. They also succeeded in dividing the opposition forces ranged against them, going so far as to ruthlessly discard politicians and generals from among their own elite in the pursuit of absolute, unfettered, power.
The impact of the Arab counter-revolution surprised most observers, who thought they had seen it all from the despots and security mafias of the Middle East: their perversity, their brutality, their voracity. But the wider world underestimated their ferocious readiness to literally burn down their countries in order to cling to absolute power. Bashar al-Assad clambered to the top of this murderous class of tyrants, driving nearly half of the Syrian population into exile and executing tens of thousands of his opponents. He has set a grisly precedent, one that other Arab autocrats may yet resort to.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4546-9

Translated by Cynthia Schoch

Pakistan was born as the creation of elite Urdu-speaking Muslims who sought to govern a state that would maintain their dominance. After rallying non-Urdu speaking leaders around him, Jinnah imposed a unitary definition of the new nation state that obliterated linguistic diversity. This centralisation — ‘justified’ by the Indian threat — fostered centrifugal forces that resulted in Bengali secessionism in 1971 and Baloch, as well as Mohajir, separatisms today.

Concentration of power in the hands of the establishment remained the norm, and while authoritarianism peaked under military rule, democracy failed to usher in reform, and the rule of law remained fragile at best under Zulfikar Bhutto and later Nawaz Sharif.

While Jinnah and Ayub Khan regarded religion as a cultural marker, since their time theIslamists have gradually prevailed. They benefited from the support of General Zia, while others, including sectarian groups, cashed in on their struggle against the establishment to woo the disenfranchised.

Today, Pakistan faces existential challenges ranging from ethnic strife to Islamism, two sources of instability which hark back to elite domination. But the resilience of the country and its people, the resolve of the judiciary and hints of reform in the army may open

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4329-8

Translated by Gregory Elliott

Jean-Louis Rocca’s admirably concise Sociology of Modern China wears its scholarship lightly and paints an intimate and complex portrait of Chinese society in little more than a 130 pages, all the while avoiding clichés and simplifications. He delves into China’s history and examines the country’s many different social strata so as to better understand the enormous challenges and opportunities with which its people are confronted.

After discussing the ‘long march toward reform’ and the crises along the way — among them the 1989 protests which culminated in the events in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere — Rocca dedicates the second half of the book to the major questions facing the country (or, at the very least, its political elites) today: new forms of social stratification; the interaction between the market and the state; growing individualism; and the pressures exerted by social conflict and political change. In eschewing culturalist visions, Rocca thoroughly and successfully deconstructs received wisdom about Chinese society to reveal a thriving nation and its people.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4361-8

Translated by John King

Through its millennium-long existence, Gaza has often been bitterly disputed while simultaneously and paradoxically enduring prolonged neglect. Jean-Pierre Filiu’s book is the first comprehensive history of Gaza in any language.

Squeezed between the Negev and Sinai deserts on the one hand and the Mediterranean Sea on the other, Gaza was contested by the Pharaohs, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Fatimids, the Mamluks, the Crusaders and the Ottomans. Napoleon had to secure it in 1799 to launch his failed campaign on Palestine. In 1917, the British Empire fought for months to conquer Gaza, before establishing its mandate on Palestine.

In 1948, 200,000 Palestinians sought refuge in Gaza, a marginal area neither Israel nor Egypt wanted. Palestinian nationalism grew there, and Gaza has since found itself at the heart of Palestinian history. It is in Gaza that the fedayeen movement arose from the ruins ,of Arab nationalism. It is in Gaza that the 1967 Israeli occupation was repeatedly challenged, until the outbreak of the 1987 intifada. And it is in Gaza, in 2007, that the dream of Palestinian statehood appeared to have been shattered by the split between Fatah and Hamas. The endurance of Gaza and the Palestinians makes the publication of this history both timely and significant.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4401-1

With a population exceeding twenty million, Karachi is one of world’s largest ‘megacities’. It is also one of the most violent.

Since the mid-1980s, Karachi has endured endemic political conflict and criminal violence, which revolve around control of the city and its resources (votes, land and bhatta — ‘protection’ money). These struggles for the city have become ethnicised. In the process, Karachi, often referred to as a ‘Pakistan in miniature’, has become increasingly fragmented, socially as well as territorially.

Despite this chronic state of urban political warfare, Karachi remains the cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. In contrast to the ‘chaotic’ and ‘anarchic’ city portrayed in journalistic accounts, there is indeed order of a kind in the city’s permanent civil war.

Far from being entropic, Karachi’s polity is predicated upon relatively stable patterns of domination, rituals of interaction and forms of arbitration, which have made violence manageable for its population—even if this does not exclude a pervasive state of fear, which results from the continuous transformation of violence in the course of its updating. Whether such ‘ordered disorder’ is viable in the long term remains to be seen, but for now Karachi works despite—and sometimes through—violence.

More information

See reviews in The Indian Express and on Academia.edu

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4311-3

Translated by Ros Schwartz

What has become of the Russian state twenty years after the collapse of Communism? Why have the rulers and the ruled turned away from democratic institutions and the rule of law? What explains the Putin regime’s often uncooperative policies towards Europe and its difficult relations with the rest of the world? These are among the key issues discussed in this essential book on contemporary Russia.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4113-3

Since the start of the 2000s, the People's Republic of China has become an increasingly important player on the Central Asian scene, both diplomatically and strategically, in particular through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. At the economic level, China has positioned itself among the largest traders and investors in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. This growing Chinese presence has drastically challenged the traditional influence of Russia and weakened that of the United States and Europe. This book goes beyond a geopolitical analysis by discussing China as an external influential factor in the domestic order in neighbouring Central Asia. It engages in an analysis of the contemporary transformations that are occurring within the systems and societies of Central Asia. It demonstrates that China has become a subject of public debate, academic and expert knowledge. New cultural mediators, petty traders, lobby groups, migrants, and diasporas, have also emerged. China's rise to power has worked as a catalyst to the anxieties and phobias associated with the major social transformations that have occurred in Central Asia over the last two decades, meaning that Sinophobia and Sinophilia are now closely associated.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4179-9

Although Iran's Islamic Revolution had an electrifying effect on Shiite movements in Lebanon, Iraq, the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, there exists a tendency to explain away much of Shiite politics in the Middle East as inextricably linked to Iranian foreign policy. Laurence Louër challenges this view, arguing that, in the end, local political imperatives have been the crucial factor determining the direction of Shiite states in the Middle East.
In this timely book, completed before the current outbreak of unrest in Bahrain that has formed part of the Arab Spring, Laurence Louër explains, the background of the Bahraini conflict in the context of the wider issue of Shiism as a political force in the Arab Middle East, amongst other issues relating to the role of Shiite Islamist movements in regional politics. Her study shows how Bahrain's troubles are a phenomenon based on local perceptions of injustice rather than on the foreign policy of Shiite Iran.
More generally, the book shows that, though Iran's Islamic Revolution had an electrifying effect on Shiite movements in Lebanon, Iraq, the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, local political imperatives have in the end been the crucial factor in the direction they have taken. In addition, the overwhelming influence of the Shiite clerical institution has been diminished by the rise to prominence of lay activists within the Shiite movements across the Middle East and the emergence of Shiite anti-clericalism. This book contributes to dispelling the myth of the determining power of Iran in the politics of Iraq, Bahrain and other Arab states with significant Shiite populations.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4202-4

Translated by Cynthia Schoch

During the 1970s, owing to their oil 'rents', Algeria, Iraq and Libya all seemed engaged in a swift modernisation process. Oil was the godsend that would enable these states to catch up economically. Algeria was a 'Mediterranean dragon,' Libya an 'emirate' and Iraq 'the rising military power' of the Arab world. From a political perspective, progressive socialism suggested that profound changes were underway: women's liberation, urbanisation, education for all, longer life expectancy and so on.
A few decades later, the disillusion is a cruel one. A sense of wealth led these countries to undertake political, economic and military experiments that would lead to impasses with disastrous consequences which they are still trying to overcome.
How did it all happen? Can these countries dispense with far-reaching reforms? Can the EU export its norms and values and protect its gas supply? This book offers the first global approach to the subject.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4174-4

At more than 150 million people, Muslims are the largest Indian minority but are facing a significant decline in socio-economic as well as political terms – while waves of communal violence have affected them over the last twenty-five years.
In India's cities, these developments find contrasting expressions. While Muslims are lagging behind, local syncretic cultures have proved to be resilient in the South and in the East (Bangalore, Calicut, Cuttack). In the Hindi belt and in the North, Muslims have met a different fate, especially in riot-prone areas (Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Jaipur, Aligarh) and in the former capitals of Muslim states (Delhi, Hyderabad, Bhopal, Lucknow).
These developments have resulted in the formation of Muslim ghettos and Muslim slums in places like Ahmedabad and Mumbai. But (self-)segregation also played a role in the making of Muslim enclaves, like in Delhi and Aligarh, where traditional elites and the new Muslim middle class searched for physical as well as cultural protection through their regrouping.
This book supplements an ethnographic approach to Muslims in eleven Indian cities with a quantitative methodology in order to give a first- hand account of this untold story.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4176-8

After Independence the Nehruvian approach to socialism in India rested upon three pillars: secularism and democracy in the political domain; state intervention in the economy; and diplomatic Non-Alignment mitigated by pro-Soviet leanings after the 1960s. These features defined the ‘Indian model’, and even the country’s political identity. From this starting point Christophe Jaffrelot explores the manner in which India has been transformed, more especially since the 1980–90s. The world’s largest democracy has sustained itself by making more room, not only for the vernacular politicians of the linguistic states, but also for Dalits and OBCs. But the simultaneous—and related—rise of Hindu nationalism has put the minorities—and secularism—on the defensive, and in many ways the rule of law is on trial too.

The liberalisation of the economy has resulted in growth but not necessarily in development. India has also acquired a new global status, that of an emerging power seeking new political and economic partnerships in Asia and in the West, where the United States remains the first choice of the Indian middle class.

The traditional Nehruvian system is giving way to a less cohesive but more active India, a country which has already become what it is against all the odds. Christophe Jaffrelot’s book tracks India’s tumultuous journey of recent decades, exploring the role of religion, caste and politics in weaving the fabric of a modern democratic state.

ISBN :978-1-8490-4137-9

Translated by Adrian Shaw

The twenty-first century will doubtless be that of Asia, which by 2030 will be home to three of the world's four mightiest economies, including India. This stimulating book aims to open a debate on the question of leadership in Asia for which China and Japan are competing. It assesses the two rivals' strengths and weaknesses as well as the major challenges which they will face in that battle for supremacy. On this basis, it proposes the most probable scenario for the next two decades in the light of the dialectical relationship between economics and strategic power. Without neglecting the strategic aspects that give advantage to China, priority is given to an economic approach, because that is the primary arena in which Asian integration is taking place and the one in which a resilient Japan still firmly maintains its leadership, based on productivity, competitiveness and technological edge

ISBN :978-1-8490-4172-0

Translated by Roger Leverdier

In analyzing how economic crime was managed in Russia, from the Brezhnev era to the Yeltsin years, this book reveals the historical roots of the 'criminal problem' that has marked Russian politics since the late 1980s. During the closing decades of the Soviet regime, the daily struggle against shortages of goods and services precipitated a rapid increase in the black market and other underground practices, visible to all, but still deemed illegal. How did Soviet police officers and judges select the cases they dealt with on a daily basis? And how were the funds and manpower dedicated to combating 'economic crime' actually deployed? Law enforcement agencies also had to deal with the aftermath of Mikhail Gorbachev's liberal economic reforms. Russia's economy underwent far-reaching change, its judicial framework proved obsolete to combat the new challenges and its police woke up to the possibility of privatising or selling their professional knowhow. Drawing on first hand research and interviews with criminals and police officers, this scrupulous study investigates the changing nature of criminal law and policing before and after the fall of the Soviet state.

ISBN : 978-1-8490-4065-5

Translated by Emma Bentley and Cynthia Schoch

Every genocide in history has been notable for the minority of brave individuals and groups who put their own lives at risk to rescue its would be victims.
Based on three case studies - the genocides of the Armenians, the Jews and the Rwandese Tutsi - this book is the first international comparative and multidisciplinary attempt to make rescue an object of research, while breaking free of the notion of 'The Righteous Among the Nations'. The result is an exceptionally rich and disturbing volume. While it is impossible to distill or describe what makes an individual into a rescuer, acts of rescue reveal a historical fact: the existence of an informal, underground network of rescuers - however fragile - as soon as genocides get underway, and in every geographical and social context.

ISBN :978-1-8490-4059-4

Translated by Ros Schwartz

Olivier Roy, world-renowned authority on Islam and politics, finds in the modern disconnection between faith communities and socio-cultural identities a fertile space for fundamentalism to grow. Instead of freeing the world from religion, secularization has encouraged a kind of holy ignorance to take root, an anti-intellectualism that promises immediate, emotional access to the sacred and positions itself in direct opposition to contemporary pagan culture.
The secularization of society was supposed to free people from religion, yet individuals are converting en masse to fundamentalist faiths, such as Protestant evangelicalism, Islamic Salafism, and Haredi Judaism. These religions either reconnect adherents to their culture through casual referents, like halal fast food, or maintain their momentum through purification rituals, such as speaking in tongues, a practice that allows believers to utter a language that is entirely their own. Instead of a return to traditional religious worship, we are now witnessing the individualization of faith and the disassociation of faith communities from ethnic and national identities.
Roy explores the options now available to powers that hope to integrate or control these groups; and whether marginalization or homogenization will further divide believers from their culture.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5992-1

Translated by Cynthia Schoch, Gregory Elliott and Roger Leverdier

There seems to be no end to the growing number of victims of civil war, terrorism, guerrilla warfare and military repression on the Indian subcontinent, despite the absence of interstate wars over the past ten years. These conflicts often involve armed paramilitary militias or insurgents of one sort or other, and it is their ideology, sociology and strategies that the contributors to this book investigate. Whether based on ideological motives -the Maoists and Naxalites in Nepal and India; or invested with a fundamentalist religious mission -the Hindu nationalist Bajrang Dal in India; the Sunni SSP in Pakistan; or Islamist militias in Bangladesh - all these movements use violence to exercise social control, challenge the authority of the state and impose their own particular worldview. Although they seek also to undermine the state, depriving it of the monopoly on legitimate violence that it supposedly holds, governments are equally adept at exploiting them to make them serve their own ends. For the authorities, these movements can be useful tools for their pursuit of both moral and social order. However delegating power to such groups for short-term political gains can be an extremely risky enterprise, as demonstrated by Indira Gandhi's patronage of the Sikh militant group that later assassinated her. Armed Militias of SouthAsia is the first comprehensive book of its sort and will be required reading for all those interested in the politics of the subcontinent and Myanmar.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5976-1

When Sultan Qaboos overthrew his father as ruler of the Persian Gulf state of Oman in 1970 with the help of British advisers, few expected him to survive long. He was unknown to his own population, and the country was poor and plagued by civil wars. Yet he has built his regime's legitimacy on a policy of national unification, the assimilation of all of Oman to the oil rentier state framework, and then of this state to the person of the sultan, the incarnation of the country's 'renaissance'.
Based on several years' research, the book's comparative interest is to understand the mechanisms of social and political perpetuation of authoritarianism in post-colonial states. It shows how one monarchical power has built and constantly renewed its basis to meet the internal and external challenges threatening its stability. Yet Marc Valeri also raises the question of what happens when one part of this model, namely an oil-rent economy, falters, with half the population under fifteen years of age and when the privileges enjoyed till recently by previous generations may no longer be tenable. In particular, his book examines the possibilities and obstacles to the creation of an alternative model. These reside as much in the nature of the network of power and privilege that have developed alongside the construction of the polity, as they do in technical or economic issues as such. At the same time, different and overlapping identities - ethnic, religious and historical or a combination thereof - have not been wholly submerged and are in some cases re-emerging in ways that intertwine with current challenges to the wider state- and nation-building exercise and the regime's legitimising strategies.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5933-4

Laurence Louër, author of Hurst's critically acclaimed To Be An Arab in Israel, brings her extensive knowledge of the Middle East to an analysis of the historical origins and present situation of militant Shia transnational networks. She focuses on three key countries in the Gulf: Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, whose Shia Islamic groups are the offspring of various Iraqi movements that have surfaced over recent decades. Louër explains how these groups first penetrated local societies by espousing the networks of Shiite clergymen. She then describes the role of factional quarrels and the Iranian revolution of 1979 in defining the present landscape of Shiite Islamic activism in the Gulf Monarchies.
The reshaping of geopolitics after the Gulf War and the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003 had a profound impact on transnational Shiite networks. New political opportunities encouraged these groups to concentrate on national issues, such as becoming fierce opponents of the Saudi monarchy. Yet the question still remains: How deeply have these new beliefs taken root in Islamic society? Are Shiites Saudi or Bahraini patriots?
Louër's book also considers the transformation of Shia movements in relation to central religious authority. She argues that the Shia will one day achieve political autonomy, especially since, in order to retain transnational religious authority, the marja needs to avoid meddling in the domestic political affairs of other countries.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5911-2

Translated by Ros Schwartz

Olivier Roy argues that the unintended and unforeseen consequences of the'war on terror' have artificially conflated conflicts in the Middle East such that they appear to be the expression of a widespread 'Muslim anger' against the West. In this new book he seeks to restore the individual logic and dynamics of each of these conflicts, the better to understand the widespread political discontent that sustains them. Instead of two opposed sides, an 'us' and a 'them', he warns that the West faces an array of'reverse alliances': in Pakistan the West backs General Musharraf, whose military intelligence services support the Taliban; in Iraq the United States shores up a government that has close links to its archenemy, Iran; the Iraqi Kurds, allies of the Americans, give sanctuary to an adversary (the PKK) of a fellow NATO member, Turkey; while the Saudis support the Iraqi Sunnis who are fighting Coalition forces. If these issues were not enough to contend with, the Shia-Sunni divide has emerged as one of the leading strategic factors in the Middle East.
But the 'war on terror' is not merely the geopolitical blunder of a lunatic conservative fringe in Washington; it is also deeply rooted in Western perceptions of the Middle East. Chief among these is the belief that Islam, rather than politics, is the overarching factor in all such conflicts, which in turn explains the West's support for either would be secular democrats or more or less benign dictators. Roy concludes by arguing that the West has no alternative but to engage in a dialogue with the political forces that count, namely the Islamo-nationalists of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5894-8

Translated by John Atherton, Ros Schwartz and William Snow

The debate surrounding Islamist violence remains locked in oppositional sterility. Are such attacks perpetrated by Islamists as a matter of belief or do they reflect socio-economic realities? Is the suicide bomber a pathological case, as the psychologist maintains, or a clever strategist, as those steeped in the geopolitical approach claim? This book aims to transcend both the culturalist or underdevelopment explanations by focusing on the highly variegated nature of the phenomenon. For example, suicide attacks are relatively common in Kashmir and Israel/Palestine but almost non-existent in Algeria and Yemen, both of which have experienced long-running campaigns by violent Islamist groups. However a more nuanced reading, based on a series of case studies, reveals a less obvious set of meanings for suicidal political violence. These bring us closer to the Islamists' political mindset: a quest for purity in the next world that replaces the justice here on earth of which the militant despairs; the distress caused by the degeneracy of a failing ethno-nationalist rebellion, which encourages a shift in the struggle to the timelessness of death; or the paradoxical desire to assert one's individuality when the wider group is powerless by carrying out an 'exemplary' act of war against an enemy that is increasingly imagined rather than real. These are among the complex motivations of suicide attacks that this book brings to light

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5836-8

Translated by John King

In 1992 United Nations sanctions were imposed on Libya after it refused to hand over for judgement in an international court two Libyan citizens suspected of involvement in the bombing of a passenger plane over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988. The sanctions were not suspended until 2003, by which time Libya had undergone fundamental changes. After the sanctions were lifted, those changes accelerated rather than going into reverse. The newly militant attitude of the United States after the events of 1 1 September 2001, and the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, conveyed to the Libyan leadership that opposition to the West was potentially disastrous. Libya stepped back from the development of nuclear weapons and opened its economy to the West. Meanwhile Colonel Gaddafi, the leader of the Libyan Revolution, has found ways to consolidate his hold on the country. The author suggests that the future of Libya now lies in becoming what he calls paradoxically-an authoritarian liberal state.

ISBN :978-1-8506-5835-1

Translated by Cynthia Schoch

How can we comprehend the sociopolitical processes that give rise to extreme violence, ethnic cleansing or genocide? A major breakthrough in comparative analysis, Purify and Destroy demonstrates that it is indeed possible to compare the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia Herzegovina while respecting the specificities of each of these appalling phenomena. Jacques Semelin achieves this, in part, by leading his readers through the three examples simultaneously, the unravelling of which sometimes converges, but most often diverges. His method is multidisciplinary, relying not only on contemporary history, but also on social psychology and political science.
Based on the seminal distinction between massacre and genocide, Purify and Destroy identifies the main steps of a general process of destruction, both rational and irrational, born of what Semelin terms 'delusional rationality' He describes a dynamic structural model with, at its core, the matrix of a social imaginaire which, responding to fears, resentments and utopias, carves and recarves the social body by eliminating 'the enemy'. The author identifies the main stages that can lead to a genocidal process, and explains how ordinary people can become perpetrators.
Finally, Semelin develops an intellectual framework to analyse the entire spectrum of mass violence in the twentieth century and before, including terrorism. He is strongly critical of today's political instrumentalisation of the 'genocide' notion and urges genocide research to stand back from legal and normative definitions to allow it to come of age as a discipline in its own right in the social sciences.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5817-7

Qigong-a regimen of body, breath, and mental training exercises-was one of the most widespread cultural and religious movements of late-twentieth-century urban China. The practice was promoted by senior Communist Party leaders as a uniquely Chinese healing tradition and as a harbinger of a new scientific revolution, yet the movement's mass popularity and the almost religious devotion of its followers led to its ruthless suppression.
In this absorbing and revealing book, David A. Palmer relies on a combination of historical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives to describe the spread of the qigong craze and its reflection of key trends that have shaped China since 1949, including the search for a national identity and an emphasis on the absolute authority of science. Qigong offered the promise of an all-powerful technology of the body rooted in the mysteries of Chinese culture. However, after 1995 the scientific underpinnings of Qigong came under attack, its leaders were denounced as charlatans, and its networks of followers, notably Falungong, were suppressed as "evil cults"
According to Palmer, the success of the movement proves that a hugely important religious dimension not only survived under the CCP but was actively fostered, if not created, by high-ranking party members. Tracing the complex relationships among the masters, officials, scientists, practitioners, and ideologues involved in Qigong, Palmer opens a fascinating window on the transformation of Chinese tradition as it evolved along with the Chinese state. As he brilliantly demonstrates, the rise and collapse of the Qigong movement is key to understanding the politics and culture of postMao society.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5841-2

Translated by Ros Schwartz

The Iranian regime is in the midst of a dangerous nuclear poker game with the West, playing for the highest possible stakes. In this, hard-hitting analysis of Tehran's intentions, Thérèse Delpech, one of the world's leading authorities on international nuclear security, outlines how Iran has successfully beguiled the international community for years, aided and abetted by China and Russia, both of which are eager to benefit commercially from Iran acquiring nuclear power. She dissects Iran's nuclear programme in minute detail, drawing on her inside knowledge.
The first section of the book retraces the history of Iran's nuclear project from the 1970s - one that was launched by the former Shah with help from several Western countries - till today, when national pride, exemplified by'Ahmadinejad's bellicose rhetoric, makes it highly unlikely that Tehran will bow to the diktats of the international community. She also examines the period when the programme was resumed, during Iran's war with Iraq (1985-90). The second section picks apart the strategy of the various actors in this global crisis: Iran, the EU '3', the United States, Russia, China and the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency). In the third section, she sets out the various possible solutions in terms of their feasibility, practically and politically: dismantling by force, supervised third party reprocessing, referral to the Security Council, Iranian appeasement ...
In conclusion, Delpech unravels the tangled regional and international dimensions of the crisis, setting out the enormous impact it is having on the Persian Gulf, Turkey, Israel, America's presence in Iraq and the wider Middle East and the future of the much weakened Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NTP).

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5844-3

The introduction of the secret ballot is thought to be an essential prerequisite of a genuine political transition and many donor countries and NGOs assure us that it leads inexorably to democracy and transparency. But the social history of the secret ballot, a fascinating cultural phenomenon, has rarely been investigated, till now. While it may indeed offer opportunities for broader participation in politics, on some occasions its introduction limited the electorate and excluded certain groups, while in others it precipitated violence and social discord. Drawing on examples from Mexico, Africa, France, the USA, India, Indonesia and Iran, Cultures of Voting is an innovative analysis of the cultural history of the West's democratic norms and practices and their imposition on other societies.

ISBN :978-1-8506-5867-2

To Be an Arab in Israel fills a long-neglected gap in the study of Israel and the contemporary Arab world. Whether for ideological reasons or otherwise, both Israeli and Arab writers have yet to seriously consider Israel's significant minority of non-Jewish citizens, whose existence challenges common assumptions regarding Israel's exclusively Jewish character.
Arabs have been a presence at all levels of the Israeli gorvernment since the foundation of the state. Laurence Louër begins her history in the 1980s, when the Israeli political system began to take the Arab nationalist parties into account for the political negociations over coalition building. Political parties – especially Labour – sought the votes of Arab citizens by making unusual promises such as ownership and access to land.
The continuing rise of nationalist sentiments among Palestinians, however, threw the relationship between the Jewish state and the Arab minority into chaos. But as Loüer demonstrates, 'Palestinisation' did not prompt the Arab citizens of Israel to set aside their Israeli citizenship. Rather, Israel's Arabs have sought to insert themselves into Israeli society while simultaneously celebrating their difference, and these efforts have led to a confrontation between two conceptions of society and two visions of Israel.
Louër's fascinating book embraces the complexity of this history, revealing the surprising collusions and compromises that have led to alliances between Arab nationalists and Israeli authorities. She also addresses the current role of Isreal's Arab elites, who have been educated at Hebrew-speaking universities, and the continuing absorption of militant Islamists into Israel's bureaucracy.
To Be an Arab in Israel is a discerning treatment of an enigmatic, little known, but nevertheless highly influential people. Their effect on the balance of power in the Middle East seems destined to grow in the twenty-first century.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5798-9

Cambodia, Somalia, Mozambique, El Salvador, Bosnia, Haiti, Sierra Leone: all have been the subject of interventions by UN peacekeeping forces sent to stabilize these societies torn by political and ethnic conflict. Yet little is known or has been investigated about how local inhabitants interact with and respond to peacekeepers in their midst. In Peace Operations Seen From Below, Béatrice Pouligny argues that much of what is being rebuilt in societies emerging from war — or in some cases what is continuing to be destroyed — often lies in the daily lives of both local populations and the staff of UN peacekeeping missions. Pouligny's close analysis of UN interventions, based on firsthand observation of how local people intermingle with UN soldiery and civilians, sheds light on a neglected but crucial dimension of international peace enforcement. By foregrounding the experiences of "ordinary" people, she renders visible those who are often hidden within the fog of both war and peace.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5840-5

Translated by Jonathan Derrick

In this politically incorrect essay Samy Cohen, one of France's leading specialists in international relations, attacks an established sacred cow: the theory of state decline. According to this received wisdom, states are on the wane under the impact of globalisation and frontiers are being gradually abolished. The outcome could be at worst an unregulated and anarchic world, at best international civil society whose powers exceed those of local institutions and established political authority.
Cohen demonstrates that the situation is not like this at all: that what he ironically calls the 'transnational-state-decline' theory is a fashionable fable at university seminars, but does not correspond With reality. A good illustration of this, he says, is what happens to NGOs. Those valiant moral organisations seem at the outset to herald a world without borders, but few of them are independent of states or even of armies, and even fewer are capable of autonomous or even 'free' expression..

ISBN :978-1-8506-5776-7

Nationalism has become a major topic in social science research, and the contributors to Revisiting Nationalism seek to sharpen the theoretical focus of what is now a crowded field of intellectual enquiry.
Their approach is fourfold. First, they question dominant theories. Second, they discuss the 'identity checklist' used to gauge whether language, folklore, history, and religion can be mobilized on behalf of nationalism. Third, they examine nationalism's dark side, when it precipitates populism or political violence. And finally, they revisit debates concerning the nature of post-nationalism and cosmopolitanism.
Unlike most readers on nationalism, this book is organised not by means of country-centred or regional case studies; instead it has a thematic and transversal structure that allows the contributors to discuss theoretical, normative, or analytical issues. It also profiles in one volume some of the key research by leading Francophone authors who have reinvigorated scholarly research into nalionalism.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5763-7

Translated by Steven Rendall, Janet Roitman and Jonathan Derrick

After an ironical and sometimes comic journey through the political imaginaires and passions of the contemporary world, this probing work invites the reader to reinvent the democratic concept in its entirety in order to confront those engaged in contemporary identity conflicts or movements. The murderous force of the communal riots in South Asia and of such wars as those in the former Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, Algeria, and Africa derives from the belief that for each imagined cultural identity there exists a corresponding political identity. This is an illusion, for these identities are often fairly recent constructions. There is no such thing as a native identity that imposes itself through force of circumstances. There are only strategies pertaining to identities-which are rationally pursued by identifiable actors-and identity - related dreams or nightmares to which we adhere due to their power to seduce or terrify us. Bayart argues that we are not condemned to remain in thrall to these enchantments, and that the "clash of civilizations" is not inevitable.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5660-9

Having traveled, observed, and researched intensively in Afghanistan since 1988, Gilles Dorronsoro is a uniquely well-informed analyst of the country and its peoples, with unrivaled knowledge, especially of its non-Pashtun areas.

While not underestimating the oft-cited "ethnic factor" in Afghan politics, especially Pashtun dominance, Dorronsoro argues that class and the competition for employment and education are key factors in explaining the country's recent past. The 1990s saw a confrontation between the educated and the religious authorities (the ulema) and the marginalization of the traditional elites. Contrary to the glib optimism of world politicians, this conflict may periodically go into quiet phases, but it has not ended.
With coalition intervention and the subsequent deposition of the ulema-dominated Taliban government, the educated elites are back in power. However, as Dorronsoro argues, patching up the country by means of short-term ethnic alliances and a new division of the spoils will only perpetuate the schisms in society. He believes, on a very sound factual and analytical basis, that the Afghan civil war is set to continue and perhaps worsen over time, despite Western intervention since 9/11.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5683-8

Translated by Ros Schwartz

The spread of Islam around the globe has blurred the connection between a religion, a specific society, and a territory. One-third od the world's Muslims now live as members of a minority. At the heart of this development are the voluntary settlement of Muslims in Western societies and the pervasiveness and influence of Western cultural models and social norms. The revival of Islam among Muslims populations in the last twenty years is often wrongly seen as a backlash against westernisation rather than as one of its consequences. Neofundamentalism has been gaining ground among a rootless Muslim youth and this phenomenon is feeding new forms of radicalism, ranging from support for Al Qaeda to outright rejection of integration into Western societies.
In this exegesis of the movement of Islam beyond traditional borders and its unwitting westernisation, Olivier Roy argues that Islamic revival, or 're-Islamisation', results from the efforts of westernised Muslims to assert their identity in a non-Muslim context. A schism has emerged between mainstream Islamist movement in the Muslim world and the urprooted militants who strive to establish an imaginary ummah, or Muslim community, not attached to any particular society or territory. Roy provides a detailed comparison of these transnational movements, whether peaceful like Tablighi Jama'at and the Islamic brotherhoods, or violent, like Al Qaeda. He shows how neofundamentalism acknowledges without nostalgia the loss of pristine cultures, constructing instead a universal religious identity that transcends the very notion of culture. Thus contemporary Islamic fundamentalism is not a simple reaction against westernisation but a product and an agent of the complex forces of globalisation.
'This book extends the argument of Roy's Failure of Political Islam', by both talking into account the momentous impact ot new jihad movements like Al Qaeda and by looking closely at the development of immigrant groups in the West. [...] Brilliant insights on almost every page.' (Faisal Devji, Yale University)
'Olivier Roy is perhaps the most provocative and innovative writer on Islamism today. [...] There is no more reliable guide to this labyrinth.' (Martin Kramer, Middle East Quarterly)

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5593-0

Translated by Jonathan Derrick

The essays in Privatising the State are among the most original, provocative, and useful assessments of the intersection of public and private power that I have read in the last decade. [...]' Hibou's own contribution offers especially powerful challenges to the conventions of both neo-liberal and leftist discourse on globalisation and privatisation as the dominant international trend for the relation between governments and the economy [...] She takes apart a whole series of dichotomies - public and private, political and economic, state and society - and shows how such rhetorical (or ideological) binaries obscure the actual practices of power, particularly collaborations between state officials and ruling elites […] The critical analytic approach that she and her colleagues take, brilliantly bringing Weber and Foucault together, is simply not represented in most American or British scholarship on either privatisation or state formation. […] The contributors call for precision in place of sweeping generalisation, intellectual honesty in place of political ideology, and a high tolerance for historical contingency and strategic practices that do not conform to abstract classifications of behaviors, spaces, or functions.' (Professor Elizabeth Blackmar, Columbia University)
'Privatising the State' is an exciting book that will appeal to readers across many disciplines and to specialists on Africa, the Middle East, East and Southeast Asia, China, Russia, and Eastern Europe. The audience will include students in political economy, development economics, economic anthropology, critics of the IMF and the World Bank (including many from within those institutions), and almost anyone interested in making sense of the supposed "failures" of neo-liberal reform, the powers attributed to the processes of globalisation, or the current political and economic crises that appear to characterise so many regions of the world.' (Professor Timothy Mitchell, New York University)
Privatisation is supposed to bring about the retreat of the state. But what happens when the state privatises itself, and even its core functions are delegated to private actors? Does this imply a weakening of the state? Or, rather, does it lead to a re-composition of the state and is perpetuation via new forms of scrutiny and control? The contributors to this book argue that we are witnessing not the eclipse of the state under the impact of globalisation, but the end of the relatively short era of the 'development state' and its commanding role. Privatisation leads to new, and often more informal, forms of interference and influence, and it is these that are scrutinised in this volume.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5689-0

Translated by John King

The book is concerned with those movements, based in Pakistan and Central Asia, which advocate the establishment, by armed struggle if necessary, of an Islamic state within an existing state, or of a supranational Caliphate. The latter, while forming part of transnational networks of solidarity and militancy, like those of Bin Laden, would also operate beyond those geographical regions.
Ideologically these movements share two characteristics: they are "jihadist", arguing the necessity of jihad, holy war, to recover "occupied" Muslim lands, or to fight Muslim regimes viewed as traitorous; and they are "salafist", demanding a return to strict Islam, stripped of local customs and cultures.
The passage to "jihadism" is primarily strategic and political, with one particular state designated as the Muslims' principal enemy. Today it is the U.S.A. that has been so designated. This is true to a lesser extent of Israel and India.
The book enables the reader to appreciate the extent to which the jihadist movements of Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, after starting within a purely national framework or with the single purpose of liberating Afghanistan, have come to form a transnational network with the U.S.A. as its special target.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5704-0

Since the 1960s a new assertiveness has characterized India's formerly silent majority, the lower castes that comprise more than two-thirds of the population. Today India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, is controlled by lower-caste politicians, as is Bihar, and lower-caste representation in national politics is growing inexorably.
Jaffrelot argues that this trend constitutes a genuine "democratization" of India and that the social and economic effects of this "silent revolution" are bound to multiply in the years to come.

ISBN :978-1-8506-5670-8

Translated by Jonathan Derrick

Jews reacted to the challenge of modernity in very different ways. While some contributed to the development of capitalism and put their talents at the service of European states, others threw themselves into revolutionary movements. Yet others imagined ways of `re-nationalising' Jews by transforming them into a nation. Thus the Jews were formidable experimenters who participated in causes with contradictory agendas: assimilation (bourgeois or socialist) on the one hand and nationalism on the other.
The Invention of a Nation recounts the tortuous ordeal through which the Jews chose the path of nationalism. Indeed the vulnerability which is the lot of any nation without a state was experienced in particularly extreme form by the Jews. With the destitution and persecution of many Jewish communities in the 19th century, especially in Eastern Europe, Jews demanded an end to their uprootedness. This required a state.
The book provides a comprehensive account of the various ideologies that make up Zionism, ranging from Marxist to National Religious Zionism and the far-right Abba Achimeir. Unlike other studies, it makes explicit the debt the Zionists owed to European thinkers and ideologues, both Eastern and Western.
The objective of Zionism - the creation of a sovereign state for the Jews in Palestine - meant defining a secularised and territorial Jewish identity, via military power, and building a national language. This was especially difficult because the national project was faced with persisting religious communitarianism. But the enterprise was at least pardy successful: this process of politicisation makes Israel a paradigmatic example of the invention of a nation state.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5595-4

Translated by Jonathan Derrick

On publication in France, Jean-Marie Bouissou's depiction of modern Japan was acclaimed as 'the best of its kind'. This English translation is updated to cover events up till mid-2001, and augmented by an overview of Japan's pre-1945 historical legacy.
In the tradition of French scolarship, which rejects a narrowly focused approach, the book encompasses all the aspects of the transformation that raised Japan from the ashes of defeat in 1945 to the status of an economic model. Bouissou closely relates economic growth to social change and politics - of which he gives a particularly detailed account. lie shows how these upheavals affected the Japanese value system, collective mind, way of living and culture, illustrating his argument with copious references to post-war literature and cinema.
The combination of this unusually broad approach, detailed narrative and provocative analysis, which emphasises social dislocation rather than the much-vaunted Japanese predilection for social harmony, distinguishes this book from many in the field.

ISBN : 978-1-5882-6017-8

Translated by Jonathan Derrick

Are international relations as we have known them coming to an end to be replaced by 'global politics', in which the power game and the exercise of authority are no longer defined within national borders, and the distinction between states and non-state actors will no longer be relevant?
In this volume three generations of international affairs specialists, brought together under the auspices of the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI) in Paris, explore the new prospects opened up by the combined impact of globalisation and the end of the Cold War. They summarise the state of knowledge about the major questions of the present age - nationalism, the building of Europe, the international political economy, a fresh look at conflicts, the narrow-ing of time and space, the role of international networks - and suggest how they can be understood.
An educative and innovative work, the book throws light in a new way on the most important trends in the world at the turn of the century.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5432-2

Translated by Jonathan Derrick

Algeria was formerly a beacon for the Third World under Boumedienne's leadership and a testing-ground for democratic transition after the 1988 riots. Then it descended into civil war follow-ing the annulment of the December 1991 parliamentary elections. The Islamist radicals of FIS and GIA bear the main responsibility for this tragedy, since their main aim was to win power and enrich themselves. The army, on the other hand, took advantage of the violence to main-tain its hegemony and reinforce its increasingly spurious claim to legitimacy. This was especially the case in the international arena, where it posed as the guarantor of 'secular values' against the 'funda-mentalist tenor' of radical Islam.
The principal focus of this book is the political economy of the war, as manifested in the lives of the many ordinary Algerians whom the author interviewed and whose experiences and thoughts on their country's predicament give this book its extraordinary immediacy. Martinez adds to the professional technique of a political sociologist the human insight and flair of a novelist.

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5517-6

Translated by Jonathan Derrick

Iran is once again in the international spotlight. It determination to pursue its nuclear program despite Western opposition has initiated a serious diplomatic crisis which, it is justifiably feared, could lead to foreign military intervention. Moreover, Iranian voters, eight years after the unanticipated election of Mohammed Khatami, again created surprise in June 2005 by voting in a fairly obscure politician, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, whose negationist and vehemently anti-Zionist remarks soon attracted attention.
In the first edition of this book the author had revealed an unknown face of post-revolutionary Iran. Its society is dynamic, diversified and detached from the regime, while remaining in constant interaction with its institutions. A civil society at odds with a totalitarian state? Rather we are witnessing the formation of a public sphere bearing a multitude of religious, athletic, consumer, economic and political practices. Attesting to this is the remaking of a lifestyle, that of the man of integrity, who sees himself as a "being in society". Does Mahmud Ahmadinejad's taking office contradict this evolution? In a new preface, Fariba Adelkhah shows that Iran's new president is not necessarily the ultraconservative he is assumed to be. He himself fits in with the problematics of the reformers he defeated at the polls. But his election does mark the end of an era, if only because it hails the rise of a new generation in politics.

A new and augmented edition of this classic work, out of print for two years, became necessary to understand the social and political background of the current nuclear crisis..

ISBN : 978-1-8506-5518-3