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Kevin Sites is a man on a mission. Venturing alone into the dark heart of war, armed with just a video camera, a digital camera, a laptop, and a satellite modem, the award-winning journalist covered virtually every major global hot spot as the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News. Beginning his journey with the anarchic chaos of Somalia in September 2005 and ending with the Israeli-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, Sites talks with rebels...
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The Golden Triangle region that joins Burma, Thailand, and Laos is one of the global centers of opiate and methamphetamine production. Opportunistic Chinese businessmen and leaders of various armed groups are largely responsible for the manufacture of these drugs. The region is defined by the apparently conflicting parallel strands of criminality and efforts at state building, a tension embodied by a group of individuals who are simultaneously local...
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Warm, graphic, impressionistic, eminently sensible, this humane and appealing facsimile reprint about 1960s India is a modest account of the part two dedicated, but far from solemn, young Australian teachers played in the grassroots problems of a developing country, a story of the difficulty, but not impossibility, of doing anything by individual effort to combat the misery, poverty and ignorance that affect so much of the world.
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Order at the Bazaar delves into the role of bazaars in the political economy and development of Central Asia. Bazaars are the economic bedrock for many throughout the region-they are the entrepreneurial hubs of Central Asia. However, they are often regarded as mafia-governed environments that are largely populated by the dispossessed. By immersing herself in the bazaars of Kyrgyzstan, Regine A. Spector learned that some are rather best characterized...
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Siddhartha Deb grew up in a remote town in the northeastern hills of India and made his way to the United States via a fellowship at Columbia. Six years after leaving home, he returned as an undercover reporter for The Guardian, working at a call center in Delhi in 2004, a time when globalization was fast proceeding and Thomas L. Friedman declared the world flat. Deb's experience interviewing the call-center staff led him to undertake this book and...
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Why do ordinary people engage in corruption? In Corruption as a Last Resort, Kelly M. McMann contends that bureaucrats, poverty, and culture do not force individuals in Central Asia to pay bribes, use connections, or sell political support. Rather, corruption is a last resort when relatives, groups in society, the market, and formal government programs cannot provide essential goods and services. Using evidence from her long-term research in Kazakhstan...
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Drawing on extensive and carefully designed ethnographic fieldwork in the Ferghana Valley region, where the state borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikizstan and Uzbekistan intersect, Madeleine Reeves develops new ways of conceiving the state as a complex of relationships, and of state borders as socially constructed and in a constant state of flux. She explores the processes and relationships through which state borders are made, remade, interpreted and contested...
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Provides vivid accounts of commercial and leisure spaces that captivated the public imagination in the past but have since been destroyed, forgotten, or refurbished.
Monsoon Marketplace uncovers the entangled vernacular cultures of capitalist modernity, mass consumption, and media spectatorship in two understudied postcolonial Asian cities across three crucial historical moments. Juxtaposing Manila and Singapore, it analyzes print and audiovisual...
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Since 1990 public political criticism has evolved into a prominent feature of Vietnam's political landscape. So argues Benedict Kerkvliet in his analysis of Communist Party–ruled Vietnam. Speaking Out in Vietnam assesses the rise and diversity of these public displays of disagreement, showing that it has morphed from family whispers to large-scale use of electronic media. In discussing how such criticism has become widespread over the last three...
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Rebel Politics analyzes the changing dynamics of the civil war in Myanmar, one of the most entrenched armed conflicts in the world. Since 2011, a national peace process has gone hand-in-hand with escalating ethnic conflict. The Karen National Union (KNU), previously known for its uncompromising stance against the central government of Myanmar, became a leader in the peace process after it signed a ceasefire in 2012. Meanwhile, the Kachin Independence...
11) Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia: Submerged Genealogy and the Legacy of Coastal Capture
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Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia shows the vital part maritime Southeast Asians played in struggles against domination of the seventeenth-century spice trade by local and European rivals. Looking beyond the narrative of competing mercantile empires, it draws on European and Southeast Asian sources to illustrate Sama sea people's alliances and intermarriage with the sultanate of Makassar and the Bugis realm of Boné. Contrasting with later...
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The reign of the Tokugawa shoguns was a time of statebuilding and cultural transformation, but it was also a period of ikki: peasant rebellion. James W. White reconstructs the pattern of social conflict in early modern Japan, both among common people and between the populace and the government. Ikki is the first book to cover popular protest in all regions of Japan and to encompass nearly three centuries of history, from the beginnings of the Tokugawa...
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Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples examines the racialization of identities and its impact on mixed couples and families in Soviet Central Asia. In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a single "Soviet people." Yet the official Soviet view of ethnic nationality became increasingly...
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Once the capital of the five-hundred-year Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1897) and the Taehan Empire (1897-1910), the city of Seoul posed unique challenges to urban reform and modernization under Japanese colonial rule in the early twentieth century, constrained by the labyrinthian built environment of the old Korean capital. Colonial authorities attempted to employ a strategy of "erasure"-monumental Japanese architecture was, for instance, superimposed upon...
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B.R. Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important, yet neglected, works of political writing from India. Written in 1936, it is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and its caste system. Ambedkar, a figure like W.E.B. Du Bois, offers a scholarly critique of Hindu scriptures, scriptures that sanction a rigidly hierarchical and iniquitous social system. The world's best-known Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, responded publicly to the provocation....
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En la actualidad, la República de la India pretende encarnar los valores de una democracia política estable, una unidad territorial armoniosa y una imparcialidad inquebrantable en asuntos de religión. Incluso gran parte de aquellos que critican sus sangrantes desigualdades suscriben estas mismas tesis. Pero, ¿hasta qué punto se corresponden dichas afirmaciones con la realidad actual de la India?
En este iluminador ensayo, el célebre estudioso...
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An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business-all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close...
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With air pollution now intimately affecting every resident of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko seeks to understand how, as a physical constant throughout the winter months, the murky and obscuring nature of air pollution has become an active part of Mongolian religious and ritual life. Enlightenment and the Gasping City identifies air pollution as a boundary between the physical and the immaterial, showing how air pollution...
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What does the state do when public expectations exceed its governing capacity? The Performative State shows how the state can shape public perceptions and defuse crises through the theatrical deployment of language, symbols, and gestures of good governance—performative governance.
Iza Ding unpacks the black box of street-level bureaucracy in China through ethnographic participation, in-depth interviews, and public opinion surveys. She demonstrates...
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"Village Life in China - A Study in Sociology" is one of the author's fascinating written accounts of his experiences living and travelling China during the late 19th century, this particular volume focusing on the subject of rural life in the country. He wrote this book while living among the local population in small agricultural villages, noting down his observations and compiling them into this insightful glimpse of 19th-century rural China. Arthur...
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