This book reiterates pluralism as the basic feature of the Indian social sphere. It highlights challenges to the continuity of the plural fabric of India's society and culture. Acknowledging that socio-political concerns on women's issues do not always find adequate representation in social science texts, the book explores issues and policies related to gender. It locates the roots of feminist fundamentalism, studies the reactions to it, and brings forth the demands relating to new agendas and strategies for feminism. The authors also present empirical studies on issues faced by minority communities in India.

An important contribution, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of sociology, political sociology, gender studies, exclusion studies, South Asian studies, Affirmative action, and political science.

In autumn 1951, a diverse array of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish students from clubs like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Worker's Vanguard launched a guerrilla struggle against British occupation of the Suez Canal Zone. Revolutionary Emotions in Cold War Egypt recovers this overshadowed revolution of 1951, and the part played by the "Canal struggle" in the overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy.

In a study spanning a half-dozen international archives, the book delves into the divisive court cases and rousing club newspapers, intimate memoirs and personal poetry of Egyptian activists. These documents reveal that in the early years of the Cold War, morality tales and moral emotions were at the heart of the methods and the successes of Egyptian activists.

What stories did activists tell, and how did the emotional appeals and "moral talk" of Islamist and communist clubs compare? How did Arabic-speaking populations negotiate moral norms, and what role did emotions like love, anger, and disgust play in political campaigns? Taking a journey through Islamic parables about perilous beaches, communist adaptations of Greek myths, and popular stories about Juha's Nail and Paul Revere's Ride through the Suez Canal, this book uncovers a rich history of activist storytelling. These practices uncover the mechanics of morality tales, and reveal how activists used narratives to convert emotion to motion and drive social change. Still vitally important for readers today, such findings shed light on how paramilitary groups and protest movements use moral appeals to attract support-and why activist campaigns become the controversial epicentre of polarizing emotional battles.

This book presents a comprehensive analysis of a remarkable and unexpected outcome of the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence.

Despite defeat in the Scottish referendum, the two leading parties in the Yes campaign - the Scottish National Party and Scottish Green Party - experienced an extraordinary surge in membership. The book explains these events, examining the relationship between political parties and social movements, and it assesses the long-term consequences of the surge. Based on surveys of members and interviews with party and movement actors since the referendum, the book analyses the members' involvement in the 2014 referendum, their motives for joining a party, their backgrounds and political attitudes, and their behaviour as party members. A key component of the book is how the surge changed the parties - socio-demographically, ideologically and organisationally.

This book will appeal to scholars, students and observers of electoral politics, political participation, social and political movements, and political parties and their members, and more broadly to those interested in the debate on Scottish independence, British politics and comparative politics.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Over the last thirty years, humanity has discovered thousands of planets outside of our solar system. The discovery of extraterrestrial life could be imminent. This book explains how such a discovery might impact Islamic theology. It is the foundational reference on the subject, comprising a variety of different insights from both Sunni and Shi'i positions, from different Muslim contexts, and with chapters that compare and contrast Islamic perspectives with Christianity. Together, they address some of our biggest questions through an Islamic lens: What makes humans unique in the cosmos? What are the ethics of dealing with other sentient beings? And how universal is salvation?
Given the accelerating advances in exoplanet research and astrobiology, the book is at the frontier of science and Islamic thought. Contributors include a range of leading experts from Muslim theologians, scholars of comparative religion and philosophers, to historians, social scientists and natural scientists.

The book offers a vivid analysis of the new geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific in terms of big power rivalry between the US-China and country-wise perspectives situating largely within the late 2000s and culminates with the developments of the COVID-19 period. The great power shift, marked by the rise of China and the relative decline of the US, poses a serious challenge to the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region and the world order in general. Ironically, the play of realism in the region is stymied by broad partnerships of key countries that utilise the liberal approaches of cooperation with both rivals - the US and China. The book captures the mosaic of stakeholders - rivals the US and China along with Russia; other QUAD members Australia, India, and Japan; key ASEAN members, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam; vulnerable states in East Asia, viz. Taiwan and South Korea; and groupings including the ASEAN and QUAD - that constitute the new world politics of the Indo-Pacific.

The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of Indo-Pacific studies, global politics, and international relations.

The South China Sea (SCS) has been in the spotlight since the Permanent Court of Arbitration's ruling in 2016, favouring the Philippines on its maritime entitlements. China rejected the verdict and militarized the islands while asserting its 'historic rights' over more than 80% of the SCS. This book examines China's behaviour in the SCS from multiple perspectives like history, environment, law, trade, security, and its relations with Southeast Asian countries that have their own EEZ claims in the SCS, revealing that their actions align with their grand strategy of becoming a global and maritime superpower by 2050 with the Nine Dash Line at its centre.

Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

The liberal use of the sedition law in recent years, mainly by state governments intolerant of dissenting opinion, has provoked justified controversy. After some prominent individuals fell afoul of the law, activists, journalists, lawyers, and jurists took up cudgels on behalf of the victims, and demanded that the law be scrapped, as it belongs to the colonial era. The Supreme Court of India, in May 2022, admitted a host of petitions challenging the law as upheld in Kedar Nath Singh vs Union of India, 1961.

The author believes that the fundamental right to free speech is a non-negotiable right in a democratic country, but the law is relevant for countering threats to national security and sovereignty. Examining the trajectory of the sedition law from its introduction by the British colonial power and its subsequent rejection by the Constituent Assembly of India, the author observes that the statute had to be hastily restored by the Provisional Parliament to cope with the challenges posed by communal rioting in many parts of the country, several years after independence. As such, it is pertinent in times of crisis. The current law undeniably needs safeguards against political misuse, but deserves a place on the statute.

Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

This volume examines the progress made by the Chinese military (the People's Liberation Army, PLA) as it strives to meet its commander-in-chief's directive to transform itself into a more capable fighting force.

The book tracks the reforms undertaken by the PLA in meeting its commander-in-chief's grand objectives set at the 2015 Central Military Commission Reform Work Meeting: for China's armed forces to transform themselves into a more professional and modern military. Focusing on those changes since late 2016 at corps level and below, the first and second sections of the volume document the subsequent force structure and operational changes to the PLA's four conventional services, and two newly established PLA branches: the Strategic Support Force and Joint Logistic Support Force. To that end, the contributors examine the reforms promulgated by the Chinese high command and measure them against observable developments in the PLA's power-projection capabilities. In view of how the instrumentalization of military power is writ large in Beijing's strategic calculus and in regional hotspot issues, the final part of the book also provides pathbreaking insights into two critical but not so well-understood phenomena: the now regular PLA aerial activities in the Taiwan Strait and the PLA Navy's submarine operations in the South China Sea.

This book will be of much interest to students of East Asian security, Chinese politics, and military and strategic studies in general.

This book analyses under what conditions, and with what developmental effects, armed organizations shift their 'coercive profile' during civil wars, with a focus on the recent conflicts in Syria and Iraq.

The work begins with an operationalisation of the term 'political settlement', focusing on how power is organized in fragile and conflict-affected countries, and then uses this operationalization to analyse the political settlements of contemporary Syria and Iraq, including their breakdown and transformation during recent civil wars (of 2011-today in Syria and 2014-17 in Iraq). It subsequently examines why and how elite factions have used armed organizations in times of conflict. This approach links an understanding of the broad evolution of power relations at the national level with the specific effects of the use of armed organizations on such relations. It argues for a shift from assigning fixed labels to armed organizations during civil wars to studying their coercive profile in a dynamic fashion, i.e. how armed organizations behave in terms of their use of threats and coercive force. The book introduces five profiles of coercive behaviour that demonstrate how the same organization can behave very differently at various points in time. One of these, the 'hybrid coercive profile', fills a gap in the existing civil war typology of organized armed violence by opening up the possibility of elite factions deliberately combining collaborative and competitive modes of behaviour. As an evidence base, the book provides in-depth analysis of the origins, evolution and operations of four armed organizations that have acted under a hybrid coercive profile during the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars: the Syrian Kurdish People's Defence Forces, the Eagles of the Whirlwind of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga and the Badr Organization. By connecting the concepts of political settlement and civil war, and applying them to specific armed organizations operating in Syria and Iraq, the book offers new insights into this nexus.

This book will be of much interest to students of civil wars, conflict studies, Middle Eastern Studies and International Relations.

Ongoing arguments over how histories are honoured - as evidenced by the conflict between South Korea and Japan over the opening of Tokyo's Heritage Information Centre in June 2020 - reveal the extent to which heritage processes enable states to assert legitimacy and power on a global stage.

Here, Contesting Memorial Spaces of Japan's Empire shines a timely spotlight on the complicated histories and disputed legacies of various sites associated with Japan's empire in Asia and the Pacific.

Bringing together a team of international scholars, this transnational study sees contested memorial spaces as windows for us to explore how borders are created, moved and altered in everyday life. From the Asan Bay Overlook Memorial Wall in Guam and the Puppet Emperor Palace in China to Japan's Ainu Museum and the Cowra War Cemetery in Australia, the diverse range of case studies examined here foreground the complex relationship Japan and its neighbours have with their imperial past and reveal how these relations stand at the intersection of individual actions, societal choices and memory collectives. In doing so, this innovative collection of essays bridges history, geography and heritage studies to provide an invaluable new approach to the study of imperial conflict and memory politics in modern Japan.

This book provides a comprehensive picture for understanding the experiences and dynamics of precarious workers' in-work poverty in western China.

The research presented in this book identifies the causes and the consequences of precarious employment and in- work poverty and analyses the stakeholders' responses to the changes in the context of employment in China's socialist market economy. The book explains why precarious workers tend to remain outsiders to rapid socio-economic transformation and informs readers as to how people make choices, how those with different abilities adapt to the process of de-traditionalisation, and how marketisation changes people's lifestyles, value systems, and policy designs.

Detailing empirical investigations of the experience and dynamics of workers' precarious life, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese society, social policy, and poverty.

Libraries are included in the widely accepted definition of Cultural and Creative Industries, together with heritage, performing arts, museums, visual arts, and archives, and they play an important role in the creative value chain. The Economics of Libraries highlights the economic importance of the library sector.

Providing an accessible and concise expert overview of the most important economic features and diversified functions of libraries, the authors also summarise the challenges and opportunities deriving from digital technologies, the management of cultural infrastructures, and audience development. This unique short-form book fills a longstanding gap in our understanding of the demand and supply of library services.

This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the fields of economics and the creative and cultural industries. It also provides useful insights for students and lecturers, as well as topics of discussion for professionals.

This interdisciplinary book investigates the problematization of global challenges in world politics by analyzing what they are and how they come to be.

Offering a conceptual framework, including four modes of construction-universalizing, bundling, upscaling, and creating urgency-this book provides a heuristic method for understanding how the process of rendering an issue a "global challenge" unfolds. It examines the role of the global challenges discourse, which may either reinforce or challenge the dominant orders of world politics, such as the capitalist market-based system and the liberal international order. As a consequence, the global challenges discourse facilitates the emergence of new actors and policy fields.

The book will be of interest to students, academics, and practitioners of global governance, international organizations, and, more broadly, international political economy and international relations.

This book is an introductory account for policy makers, academia, and interested readers on the digital technologies on Indian Military. It covers three technologies - AI, Blockchain, and Quantum communications - and provides a detailed account on the military use cases. It evaluates the readiness of Indian Military in these technologies. A foundational text, it not only provides key policy analysis but also identifies the gray areas for the future research in the security studies.

The volume will be essential reading for scholars and researchers of military and strategic studies, especially future warfare, AI and Blockchain, and South Asian studies. It will be of interest to general readers as well.

The geopolitical landscape of Central Europe has undergone considerable transformation in the last two decades. While the pre-Global Financial Crisis period saw a focus on strengthening ties with Western Europe and the USA, the post-crisis period has seen reorientation towards Asia, in particular China.
This book charts these changes in geopolitical dominance in the region, covering the economic influence of China, the increasingly assertive diplomatic involvement of Russia and increased US interest in the region under the Biden administration. The book also seeks to explain why the countries of Central Europe are realigning their geopolitical alliances towards the great powers as confidence in the European project and its economic benefits has waned, and what opportunities this realignment could hold.

This book examines the international efforts to regulate violence in Kosovo since 1999 through the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and covers 15 years of international presence.

The book analyses the process of implementing international policies from a sociological perspective, and looks at the adaptations and arrangements of public policies achieved through the transactions of international actors with local actors, who are at the heart of policy implementation. In particular, it analyses the disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration of combatants (DDR) programme and shows the extent to which it was co-produced with Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) leaders co-opted by international administrators. These analyses take the opposite view to the work that considers ex-combatants as spoilers. In Kosovo, the combatant leaders acted as peace brokers, facilitating demobilisation and exercising disciplinary control over rank-and-file combatants. Their position as brokers helped them to take control of the new state being built under international administration. This book shows the importance of the relationship between ex-combatants and the state and illustrates the multiplicity of their possible trajectories, including political ones. To elucidate the dynamics of co-production in shaping DDR policies and hybridising international policies as well as in state formation, the book relies on around a hundred interviews with ex-combatants of the KLA and with international personnel, as well as on the archives of international organisations and observations in the field.

This book will be of much interest to students of international statebuilding, peace and conflict studies, Balkan politics and international relations.

This expanded second edition of Scientific Method shows how science works, fails to work or pretends to work by looking at examples from physics, biomedicine, psychology, sociology and economics.

Scientific Method aims to help curious readers understand the idea of science, not by learning a list of techniques but through examples both historical and contemporary. Staddon affirms that if the reader can understand successful studies as well as studies that appear to be scientific but are not, they will become a better judge of the "science" in circulation today. To this end, this new edition includes a new chapter, What is Science?, which points out that science, like any human activity, has its own set of values, with truth being the core. Other new chapters focus on the emergence of AI and machine learning, science and diversity, and behavioral economics. The book also includes textual features such as bullet-points and text boxes on topical issues.

Scientific Method is essential reading for students and professionals trying to make sense of the role of science in society, and of the meaning, value and limitations of scientific methodology.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of research and publication ethics and guides young researchers on how to conduct ethical research and publish their work responsibly. It presents an understanding of ethical practices in research and how they apply to research and publication by examining the different ethical theories and their application. The book also discusses the different factors influencing ethical decision-making and probes into the ethical issues that can arise in the research process. It explores the different forms of scientific misconduct, such as data fabrication and falsification, plagiarism, and conflicts of interest, and provides strategies for ethical research. The book also details the impact of scientific misconduct on research and publication and the strategies for preventing and detecting misconduct.

Aligning to the belief that promoting ethical research practices is essential for advancing science and society, this book will be helpful for young researchers, scholars, aspiring researchers, and academicians interested in ethical research practices in multiple disciplines.

This book reveals how decisions regarding where to migrate are made, what factors are considered, how these change over time and why some destinations are more attractive to certain categories of people.

Based on rich existent, and new data, the book explains the destination choices of Polish migrants to the four most frequently chosen destinations countries: the UK, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands. Examined through a sophisticated theoretical framework allowing for the incorporation of factors resulting from several fields - economics, public policies, demography - and migration theories, it paints a nuanced and balanced picture of European migration.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of migration studies, Central and Eastern European politics, and more broadly to sociology, political science, social geography and international relations.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Beyond Liberalism and Communism: Socialist Theory and the Chinese Case presents a new conceptual framework of socialism and applies it to the study of socialist development in China, shedding new light on modern China and signposting novel directions in socialist thought.

Based on a Marxian-Polanyian approach, the book develops a new conceptual framework of socialism by taking the liberal and the communist challenges seriously. In doing so, Brie develops a liberal and a communist formula of socialism based upon two owners of socialist property (the individuals and the society), different forms of possession (public, common, associative, and individual) meditating the interests of the two opposite owners, and democracy as an expression of the will of the many and of all together in common. This formula is then applied to socialist development in China, analysing its booming centrally directed economy and the political ways to safeguard democracy as the rule of, for, and by the people under the Chinese Communist Party.

With an analysis of the means by which China has pursued a unique form of socialist development, Beyond Liberalism and Communism: Socialist Theory and the Chinese Case will appeal to scholars of modern China, political theory, political sociology, and socialist thought.

By bringing together fundamental rights, economic law, and recent legislation in the areas of digital platforms, data, and AI, this open access book gives a comprehensive picture of the state of play in technology regulation in the EU.

Risks of regulatory fragmentation are on the rise with ever more legislative instruments becoming applicable to the technology sector. This book explores the prospects and challenges of ensuring legal consistency in a period of transition in which new legislation is being implemented and the interpretation of existing laws is being challenged by the use of data, AI, and platform technologies.

The book analyses the legal consistency of technology regulation from three perspectives: (1) the relationship between the EU and the Council of Europe; (2) the relationship among EU regulatory frameworks; and (3) the relationship between EU and Member State law. By covering issues of fundamental rights protection, the free flow of data, consumer protection, competition, and innovation, the book gives a unique and extensive outlook into the state of the art in academic and policy discussions.

Unravelling the relationship between legal fields, the book is an essential resource for academics, practitioners and students wishing to understand the increasingly complex landscape of technology regulation in Europe.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

This book explores the long-term origins of populist Euroscepticism.

Taking a historical perspective to move beyond explaining present-day expressions of opposition to the European Union in isolation, this book reveals the historical sedimentation of the several ways and forms taken over decades by opposition towards European integration. As such, this approach - with contributions from across disciplines - explains not just the past of Euroscepticism, but also its current nature and future prospects.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of European History, European Politics and Studies and more broadly to Political Science, International Relations, the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Qualitative Inquiry in Transition-Pasts, Presents, & Futures: A Critical Reader gathers more than 30 internationally renowned scholars in qualitative inquiry to present provocative interventions into the politics of research, philosophy of inquiry, justice matters, and writing practices.

Drawn from a decade of cutting-edge plenary volumes emanating from the annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, these contributors and their chapters represent the leading edge of scholarship that has pushed the field forward over the last decade. Topics discussed include the research marketplace, data entanglements, the neoliberal university, Indigenous methodologies, slow research, performative ethics, intersectionality, civically engaged research, post-qualitative inquiry and the new materialisms, collaborative research, poetic inquiry, academic writing, and the future of the field. These and other topics comprise a moving-rather than static-center to the field, one that moves across contexts and ontologies, moves between agreement and disagreement, forges new collaborations, and informs new inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches to research.

Qualitative Inquiry in Transition-Pasts, Presents, & Futures: A Critical Reader will be required reading for those seeking to understand where the field of qualitative inquiry has been and will look to go in the years to come.