Regional / International studies Books

The importance of the Chinese diaspora is widely recognized. Wanning Sun examines the key role of the media in the Chinese diaspora. She focuses especially on the media's role in communication, in fostering a sense of community, in defining...

Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China is the richest exploration to date of late imperial Chinese literati interest in male love. Employing primary sources such as miscellanies, poetry, fiction and 'flower guides', Wu Cuncun argues that male...

Recent concern about mainland China's intentions towards Taiwan, and more general concern about the risk of instability in the region, has led to growing interest in Taiwan's military strategy. This book brings together a range of experts from the West...

Yes, In My Lifetime is a collection of selected articles and essays by Haroub Othman, written over the span of his career of nearly four decades. Originally appearing in a wide range of fora, the writings reflect Othman's growth as an intellectual and an...

In 1999 (August 30 - September 2) the Pan African Anthropological Association (PAAA) marked the 10th anniversary of its creation by holding its 9th Annual Conference in Yaounde, Cameroon - the city and country of its birth. The conference, themed "The...

What kind of experience is incarceration? How should one define its constraints? The author, who conducted extensive fieldwork in a maximum-security jail in Papua New Guinea, seeks to address these questions through a vivid and sympathetic account of...

The lower Mississippi River winds past the city of New Orleans between enormous levees and a rim of sand, mud, and trees called "the batture." On this remote and ignored piece of land thrives a humanity unique to the region--ramblers, artists, drinkers,...

In the early 1960s the Middle East suffered from political instability, inefficiency of government, widespread poverty and inequality, low productivity, and a mounting population pressure on the region's resources. With the exception of some of the...

Pre-eminent among the requisites for economic integration is monetary integration. It is the premise of the chapters in this book that if the Arab world is to achieve a closer degree of cooperation in economic and political spheres, the issue of monetary...

The shock discovery of oil in the Gulf States thrust them from relative obscurity to the forefront of international finance and politics. It coincided with the breakdown of the international monetary system and the twin food and energy crisis, all of...

Since the early 1970s the oil producing countries of the Gulf have become a focus of intense interest worldwide. Most of this interest has centred on the oil giants, Saudi Arabia, Iran, even Iraq and Kuwait. Yet the United Arab Emirates is also among the...

The book explains Sadrā's theory of the nature of afterlife. It presents Sadrā's philosophical premises concerning the nature of human beings and their physical and psychological developments through which Sadrā shows how the afterlife is intimately...

Small states are often believed to have been resigned to the margins of international politics. However, the recent increase in the number of small states has increased their influence and forced the international community to incorporate some of them...

Key changes have emerged in Bollywood in the new millennium. Twenty-First Century Bollywood traces the emerging shifts in both the content and form of Bollywood cinema and examines these new tendencies in relation to the changing dynamics of Indian...

Using the case study of Laos, a small landlocked country in Southeast Asia that has seen some of the world's most brutal forms of poverty and violence, this book examines the power of traditional and indigenous conflict resolution systems as a tool for...

In Politics in Contemporary Indonesia, Ken M.P. Setiawan and Dirk Tomsa analyse the most prominent political ideas, institutions, interests and issues that shape Indonesian politics today. Guided by the overarching question whether Indonesia still...

This volume brings together the work of a group of Islamic studies scholars from across the globe. They discuss how past and present Muslim women have participated in the struggle for gender justice in Muslim communities and around the world. The essays...

When most of Eastern Europe was struggling with dictatorships of one kind or another, the Democratic Republic of Georgia (1918-1921) established a constitution, a parliamentary system with national elections, an active opposition, and a free press. Like...

Emanuel Levinas and the Limits to Ethics highlights how radically different Jewish ethics is from Christian ethics, and the profound affinities that subsist between Jewish ethics and philosophical and political liberalism.The philosophy of Emmanuel...

China's rapid urbanization has restructured the great socialist cities Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou into mega cities that embrace global capitalism. This book focuses on the urban transformations of these three cities: Beijing is the nation's...

Through a close-reading of a corpus of novels featuring young protagonists in their path toward adulthood, the book shows how Bildungsroman impacted the formation of the Egyptian narrative. On a larger scale, the book helps the reader to understand the...

This book uncovers the Jesuits' mystic theological interpretation in the translation of the Book of Changes (the Yijing) in their mission in China.The book analyzes how Jesuit Figurists incorporated their intralingual translation of the Yijing, the...

This book presents a wide range of new research on the Chinese treaty ports - the key strategic places on China's coast where in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries various foreign powers controlled, through "unequal treaties", whole cities or...

Examining two state-sponsored history writing projects in Indonesia and the Philippines in the 1970s, this book illuminates the contents and contexts of the two projects and, more importantly, provides a nuanced characterization of the relationship...

Arabic Literature for the Classroom argues for a more visible presence of Arabic within the humanities and social sciences, stressing the need to make Arabic literature available as a world literature, without damaging its own distinctive characteristics...

This book is about the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan, living in and around Tokyo; it is, therefore, about what has been pushed to the margins of history. Customarily, anthropologists and public officials have represented Ainu issues and political...

In recent years a number of countries have introduced affirmative action programmes in order to put right historical injustices and economic inequalities involving ethnic communities. This book examines affirmative action programmes in a range of...

This book, first published in 1979, was the first political and social history of Qatar. Its main thrust is to provide the reader with a description and identification of the processes and forces that have contributed to change and continuity in Qatari...

This book examines the process of secularization in the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th century through an analysis of the transformation and abolition of Islamic Caliphate. Focusing on debates in both the center of the Caliphate and its...

Tracing the evolution of French sociology from the early twentieth century to the present day, this insightful book brings to the fore the renowned origins but relatively slow development of the discipline in France. Divided into four chronological...

This book examines the development of Welsh devolution in the context of great economic and political uncertainty. Drawing on research carried out over more than a decade, it explores whether Welsh devolution has developed the capacity to resist internal...

The book explores how the collapse of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations in 2005 was rooted in a ""crisis of authority"" with respect to the leadership of the United States in the Americas. This ""crisis of authority"" was prompted...

This volume constitutes a multidisciplinary intervention into the emerging field of postcolonial studies in Italy, bringing together cultural and social history, critical and political theory, literary and cinematic analyses, ethnomusicology and cultural...

First Published in 1996. This collection of works is in response to American film scholar and long-term resident of Japan, Donald Richie, words:' The Japanese failure to come to terms with Hiroshima is one which is shared by everybody in the world...

In 1585, at the height of Jesuit missionary activity in Japan, which was begun by Francis Xavier in 1549, Luis Frois, a long-time missionary in Japan, drafted the earliest systematic comparison of Western and Japanese cultures. This book constitutes the...

This book is a major and wide-ranging re-assessment of Anglo-American relations in the Middle Eastern context. It analyses the process of ending of empire in the Middle East from 1945 to the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Based on original research into both...

Originally published in 1892 by the Fine Art Society in London and simultaneously in Yokohama, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, this book shows the context and growing interest in the arts and crafts of this newly discovered burgeoning country with such artistry...

Economic reform in post-Soviet Russia created not only a devastating decline in living standards, but also widespread insecurity and uncertainty. This book is the first to analyse the situation from a gendered perspective, shedding new light on the way...

This book observes and analyzes transnational interactions of East Asian pop culture and current cultural practices, comparing them to the production and consumption of Western popular culture and providing a theoretical discussion regarding the specific...

This book provides a systematic analysis of the fragile dominance of the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition in Malaysia.

The Dazzle of the Digital is written in the context of digital technology's inextricable link with progress and modernity in India, with the COVID pandemic in the backdrop. Digital technology such as smartphones and the internet exemplify the popular...

This book offers both a conceptual and an empirical analysis of how violence is normalized. In its conceptual analysis, Irm Haleem offers a framework of explanation that she argues is universal in its narratives, which she submits is premised on...