In Thailand's Far South, Kee Howe Yong sheds light on the Malay Muslims in Thailand's far south. The book focuses on the relationship between the construction of minorities - and thus majority - and issues of engaging with the difficulties of their realities: loss, violence, history, memory, livelihood, fear and paranoia, and political formations.

The book explores the ways in which regimes of fear affect the way minorities relate to one another and to those in authority. It reveals how Muslim identities in southern Thailand are produced - under what constraints and structures, and by what technologies and force. Drawing on methodologies of narrative theory, performative aspects of language, and questions of history and memory, Yong demonstrates the ways the conflict was and is differently engaged by Malay Muslim interlocutors. The book addresses the generally ignored topic of the varied positions of the Malay Muslims at the borderland of Thailand's far south and the implications of these positions in understanding the meaning of the current insurgency for the heterogeneous Malay Muslim population. In doing so, Thailand's Far South provides an invaluable contribution to the southern Thai conflict, fieldwork in conflict zones, and the literature on violence, political science, history, security studies, and philosophies of violence.

A worker-centered, woman-centered history of China's economic transformationSocialist China's state forestry and timber industries employed men as state workers and women as family dependents and collective workers who, beginning in the 1950s, turned rural land into urban-industrial space. These features make forestry a unique case with which to investigate how state policies constructed and reinforced intertwined and co-constitutive dualisms between humanity and nature, urban and rural places, production and reproduction, and male and female labor. Centering on oral histories in Fujian, Shuxuan Zhou situates firsthand accounts of labor and resistance in forestry and wood processing within the larger context of postrevolutionary socialist reforms through China's rapid economic development after the 1990s. Zhou shows how, in response to state development projects that exploited female labor, immigrants, rurality, and forests, workers created a space for their personal and political demands. In considering how sawmill and forest farmworkers creatively reconfigured state projects and challenged authority, this book opens a conversation among the fields of gender studies, labor studies, and environmental studies.

White presents a clear and concise analysis of how the modern Republican Party came to be by tracing historical patterns that reach back to the 1930s. He argues that the rise of Republican authoritarianism has been decades in the making, going back to the desperation that took hold among party elites in the wake of twenty years of Democratic dominance between 1932 and 1952. The fear of losing that overtook the party during the Roosevelt period eventually led to an escalation of intrigue that included the rise of the John Birch Society in the 1950s and QAnon today. White traces the development of this culture of conspiracy theories within the GOP and explains how the emphasis on winning at any cost created a cult of personality and a willingness to seize power by any means necessary.

How animal conservation became a defense against cultural erasureChina today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country's arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing desertification. State environmentalism-in the form of grazing bans, enclosure, and resettlement-has transformed the lives of many ethnic minority herders in China's western borderlands.

However, this book shows how such policies have been contested and negotiated on the ground, in the context of the state's intensifying nation-building project. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Alasha, in the far west of China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Thomas White describes how ethnic Mongols have foregrounded the local breed of Bactrian camel, mobilizing ideas of heritage and resource conservation to defend pastoralism.

In exploring how the greening of the Chinese state affects the entangled lives of humans and animals at the margins of the nation-state, this study is both a political biography of the Bactrian camel and an innovative work of political ecology addressing critical questions of rural livelihoods, conservation, and state power.

From ancient gameboards to Honor of Kings, games as cultural agentsGames as global and connected phenomena have been examined in the rising scholarly field of game studies, but relatively little has been published on the history of games and gaming in China. Weiqi (a.k.a. Go), one of the world's oldest board games, originated in China; a variety of Chinese card, dice, board, sport, and performance games have been developed over the millennia; and China is quickly becoming a major player in the contemporary digital game industry. In exploring games and practices of play across social and historical contexts, this volume examines representations of gender, class, materiality, and imaginations of the nation in Chinese and Sinophone contexts, while addressing ways in which games inhabit, represent, disrupt, or transform cultural and social practices. Both analog and computer games are represented in analyses that draw connections between the traditional and the modern and between local or regional and higher-order economic, cultural, and political structures. Among the topics explored are rock carvings of board games, weiqi cultures, scholars' and courtesans' games, gambling, games based on literature, video-game politics, and appropriation of Chinese culture in video games.

The open access publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.

Traces Japan's efforts to modernize Taiwan through gendered educational practicesIn Good Wife, Wise Mother, female education and citizenship serve as a lens through which to examine Taiwan's uniqueness as a colonial crossroads between Chinese and Japanese ideas and practices. A latecomer to the age of imperialism, Japan used modernization efforts in Taiwan to cast itself as a benevolent force among its colonial subjects and imperial competitors. In contrast to most European colonies, where only elites received an education, in Taiwan Japan built elementary schools intended for the entire population, including girls. In 1897 it developed a program known as "Good Wife, Wise Mother" that sought to transform Han Taiwanese girls into modern Japanese female citizens. Drawing on Japanese and Chinese newspapers, textbooks, oral interviews, and fiction, Fang Yu Hu illustrates how this seemingly progressive project advanced a particular Japanese vision of modernity, womanhood, and citizenship, to which the colonized Han Taiwanese people responded with varying degrees of collaboration, resistance, adaptation, and adoption. Hu also assesses the program's impact on Taiwan's class structure, male-female interactions, and political identity both during and after the end of Japanese occupation in 1945. Good Wife, Wise Mother expands the study of Taiwanese history by contributing important gendered and nonelite perspectives. It will be of interest to any historian concerned with questions of modernity, hybridity, and colonial nostalgia.

This book approaches the field of Political Islam from a European security perspective. Featuring various case studies and country surveys written by respected experts in the field, it offers a comparative perspective and comprehensive overview of the ideology and prevalence of Political Islam and its actors in more than 20 European states. The respective contributions identify key actors of Political Islam and reveal the activities, means, and strategies they pursue and employ across the continent. They also discuss if and how Political Islam could undermine the Western liberal democratic order and its associated values. By doing so, the volume offers approaches to analyzing Political Islam and thereby strengthening the resilience of liberal democratic societies, while also protecting Muslims from the radical ideology and agenda of Political Islam.

This volume examines some of the major challenges and opportunities for Europe in the light of the intensifying US-China global strategic rivalry. In doing so, the book investigates European roles and behavior in the contemporary US-China-Europe triangular relationship.

While the book's focus is on Europe, the contributors originate from, or are based in, the US and China, thus presenting a unique outside-in perspective to the analysis of European conduct in the areas of security, geo-politics, geo-economics, global governance, development, and climate change. Each area is investigated by one American and one Chinese scholar, respectively, presenting the different views held on Europe's behavior and positioning in the US and China. In addition to providing critical assessments of Europe's roles and performance as seen through the prism of their respective country, contributors also pose concrete policy recommendations for Europe.

The book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers of political science and international relations, as well as policy-makers interested in a better understanding of Europe's role in the US-China rivalry and its relationship to the two countries.

This book sheds light on the so-called 'Moro Doctrine', an Italian state security policy which has been portrayed in literature as an under-the-counter agreement made between Italy and Palestinian movement during the Cold War. The Moro Doctrine, or 'Lodo Moro' as it is known in Italy, aimed to protect the peninsula from Palestinian attacks by allowing terrorists to use Italian territory as a base for weapons and guerrilla fighters.

Responsibility for the 'Lodo' was instrumentally placed on Aldo Moro, the five- time Prime Minister of Italy, after his death, and since then his name has become indelibly linked with the shame of having negotiated with Palestinian terrorists.

Offering a re-examination of Italian counter-terrorist policy, this book analyses how Italy responded to international terrorism during the Cold War, providing a useful read for those researching Italian and European history, Cold War studies, the history of international relations and diplomacy, and Middle-East history.

Brings a borderlands perspective to the history of ChinaFrom the eighth to thirteenth centuries along China's rugged southern periphery, trade in tribute articles and an interregional horse market thrived. These ties dramatically affected imperial China's relations with the emerging kingdoms in its borderlands. Local chiefs before the tenth century had considered the control of such contacts an important aspect of their political authority. Rulers and high officials at the Chinese court valued commerce in the region, where rare commodities could be obtained and vassal kingdoms showed less belligerence than did northern ones. Trade routes along this Southwest Silk Road traverse the homelands of numerous non-Han peoples.

This book investigates the principalities, chiefdoms, and market nodes that emerged and flourished in the network of routes that passed through what James A. Anderson calls the "Dong world," a collection of Tai-speaking polities in upland valleys. The process of state formation that arose through trade coincided with the differentiation of peoples who were later labeled as distinct ethnicities. Exploration of this formative period at the nexus of the Chinese empire, the Dali kingdom, and the Vietnamese kingdom reveals a nuanced picture of the Chinese province of Yunnan and its southern neighbors preceding Mongol efforts to impose a new administrative order in the region. These communities shared a regional identity and a lively history of interaction well before northern occupiers classified its inhabitants as "national minorities" of China.

Power-sharing serves as a popular conflict resolution device at war's end. Yet, the performance record of such arrangements is highly variable, sometimes leading to peace and stability and at other times to immobilism and institutional collapse. This book explores the adoption, function, and dissolution of power-sharing arrangements across the Global South, including case studies of Colombia, Ethiopia, Malaysia, and Iraq, and others to make sense of this mixed record. Authors identify a range of contextual factors as well as significant variations in the institutional rules and their meaning across the cases that help to explain divergent power-sharing outcomes. Emphasis throughout the chapters is placed on system adaptability for power-sharing success.