This book provides a comprehensive overview of the influence that the papyrus plant has had on African wetlands (with a particular focus on the Nile) in the past, and how this may change with the oncoming threats of climate change.

The papyrus plant is one of the fastest growing in the world and it forms the dominant vegetation in almost all sub-Saharan wetlands, and particularly the Nile Basin wetlands. Unlike other books on rivers and wetlands, this book focuses on this dominant and defining plant which plays such an important role in determining the structure and functioning of the Nile and other African wetland systems. It examines papyrus in the past, in the present and in the future, asking where and when did it evolve, what features have made it so widespread, productive and useful to humans, and how it has influenced the ecology of African wetlands. With over 250 million people relying on the water of the Nile to survive, the book examines the intimate relationship between, papyrus, people and the river. It concludes by discussing the current challenges to the sustainability of that relationship and whether this relationship can withstand the threat of changing climate and human demands as populations increase.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of wetland management, ecosystem services, water resource management, biogeography, sustainable development and African studies.

The struggle for independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde was shaped by a multiplicity of interactions and connections. Because of the intimate association between the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC - Partido Africano da Independencia da Guine e Cabo Verde) and Amilcar Cabral's leadership, the existing scholarship has been discussing the fight led by the liberation movement and its Secretary-General's role within a single analytical framework.

While much has been written, most studies fail to break the many historiographical silences still existing around the subject. Amilcar Cabral and the PAIGC's Binational Struggle for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde intends to evince a multiplicity of analytical itineraries through which Cabral's figure can contribute to understand the rise to statehood of both territories and the construction of memory of the anti-colonial struggle.

This book explores class formation and political consciousness in contemporary Africa. It challenges prevailing narratives by examining the nuanced emergence of middle-class identities across Africa since the early 2000s.

Initially viewed through a narrow economic lens focused on income thresholds, the concept of an "African middle class" has evolved into a rich field of inquiry. This collection moves past superficial analyses to explore the lived experiences, political orientations, and social consciousness of these diverse groups. Through meticulously researched case studies spanning multiple countries, contributors from sociology, anthropology, and political science reveal the fragile and contradictory nature of middle-class formation in Africa. The volume interrogates how factors beyond economic criteria-including education, consumption patterns, cultural capital, and political engagement-shape class identity and social movements.

This essential text demystifies uncritical notions of "African middle classness" while providing empirical depth to our understanding of how these emerging social segments navigate complex sociopolitical landscapes. Scholars and students of development studies, African Studies, and class analysis will find this collection indispensable for understanding the intersection of class formation and political consciousness in contemporary Africa.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Contemporary African Studies.

City and Identity in Modern Iraq examines the role of Baghdad in the process of shaping collective identity and analyzes how different visions of citizenship have changed the face of the city. Since the establishment of the modern state in 1921, the capital city was central to questions of belonging and the country's social stability. Each phase of the city's history offers insights into processes of identity and nation-building that can be found nowhere else.

The book traces Baghdad's evolution from being a "melting pot" for all Iraqis to becoming an epicenter of division after 2003. The focus is on the era following the American occupation and how the city regained its role in constructing inclusive visions of nationality in recent years. Due to the lack of suitable methodologies, the new concept of "cultural capacity" is developed and implemented here. It serves as a tool to analyze the city's cultural heterogeneity, the accessibility of its spaces for social interaction and the visibility it offers to different forms of belonging on the micro, mezzo and macro levels. The spaces with the highest relevance for these processes are thoroughly documented to provide insights from the everyday perspective of life. Findings are used to anticipate Baghdad's role, especially after the end of the last wave of ethnoconfessional violence and the Tahrir uprising in October 2019.

The book will be useful for readers and institutions with an interest in Iraq, "the Middle East" or the Arabic-Islamic World. Furthermore, it aims to appeal to researchers and professionals from the disciplines of geography, architecture, urban studies, sociology, political sciences, history, heritage and cultural studies.

In this urgent and compelling book, Julie M. Norman and Maia Carter Hallward tell the story of Gaza from its early foundations, across decades of occupation, to the devastation of the ongoing war. Rather than focusing on elites or abstract politics, at the book's heart are ordinary Gazans - students, aid workers, journalists, and teachers - whose first-hand testimonies vividly illuminate the realities behind the headlines.

Refusing to sensationalize or oversimplify, the book reckons with the legal, moral, and humanitarian deabtes surrounding Gaza, from war crimes investigations to the contested meaning of resistance and the politicization of aid. Combining a nuanced narrative with hard-hitting reflections from everyday Gazans, the book serves as a timely and necessary disruption of media cliches and political binaries, and from the perspectives of its own people.

Also available as an audiobook.

A major new history of revolutionary Iran, from the 1940s to the present

Iran's revolution in 1979 shook the world. The Pahlavi dynasty came crashing down, and the Islamic Republic rose in its place. But what led to this seismic event? How did the revolutionary movement gain such strength? And what has its legacy been for modern Iran?

In this comprehensive history, Homa Katouzian explores Iran from the 1940s to the present, showing how the revolution came into being. From the chaos of oil nationalisation to the overthrow of Mosaddeq in 1953, through the revolutionary moment itself, to the resistance movements of contemporary Iran, the revolution has had long and lasting effects. We see the profound influence of US presidents and the ramifications of Saddam Hussein's invasion in 1980. Crucially, Katouzian shows how the revolution constituted an uprising of the whole of Iranian society and was not a purely Islamic movement.

This is an engaging account of an epochal event-one which continues to shape Iran to this day.

Modernity and Malevolence in the Psychiatric Clinic is a richly detailed ethnographic study of clinical care at NIMHANS, India's leading mental health institution, offering rich observations of patient-physician interactions alongside interviews with psychiatrists and neurologists. It explores how patterns of psychosocial causation, shaped by modernity's pressures, frame key questions in psychiatric practice.

With hundreds of patients visiting NIMHANS' outpatient department daily, time constraints affect both doctors and patients. The stigma surrounding mental illness leads families to seek quick pharmaceutical solutions, avoiding psychotherapy for fear of exposing their condition to wider social circles-an issue that limits treatment options.

Urban modernity has introduced new sociocultural changes, creating tensions that shape vulnerable identities. Evolving religious disciplines have hardened social boundaries, frustrating aspirations and manifesting as somatic illness or spiritual affliction. This phenomenon drives the resurfaced diagnosis of "hysteria," a term with both descriptive and analytical weight, in opposition to neuro-genetic determinism.

The book further explores the growing rigidity in thinking about good versus evil and self versus other. It argues that contemporary political and religious narratives sharpen social divisions, reinforcing rigid identity attachments and exacerbating clinical symptoms. Ultimately, it suggests that the "madness" observed in these cases stems from the impossible demands for singular, fixed identities in modern life, suppressing more fluid subjectivities and the histories that shape them.

Mythistory and Memory in Kaziranga explores the cultural and ecological heritage of Kaziranga National Park through the oral traditions of the Karbi people, centering on the mythical figure of Kajir Ronghangpi. Combining indigenous studies, environmental anthropology, and oral history, the book examines how Karbi myths, folktales, and sacred landscapes shape local identity and territorial belonging. It challenges dominant narratives of Kaziranga as an uninhabited wilderness, revealing it instead as a vibrant cultural landscape. Through critical analysis of oral narratives and community memory, the book documents how traditions inform ecological practices and resist modern state-driven conservation discourses. Offering an alternative history of one of India's most iconic national parks, this volume is essential for scholars of folklore, indigenous knowledge systems, cultural geography, and biodiversity conservation.

The subject matter of this book includes:

• Explores the oral history and ecological relationship between the Karbis and Kaziranga National Park.
• Challenges state-centric narratives by foregrounding community-based knowledge, traditions, and myths.
• Examines biodiversity, sacred groves, and climate change through the lens of oral traditions.
• Introduces a legendary female figure as central to the cultural construction of place and heritage.

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

This book introduces its readers to the concept of governance and various aspects of the Panchayat Raj Institutions, including Panchayats in the Fifth Scheduled Areas and the institutional arrangements in the Sixth and other scheduled areas. It also focuses on the role of voluntary and community-based organisations, along with the participation of vulnerable groups and their involvement in the implementation of various programmes and schemes, strategies, and policy instruments in rural development.

Encompassing wider aspects of rural governance and development, this book illuminates how people, communities, institutions, and PRIs plan and implement development in rural India. Drawing extensively on author's field experiences of working in villages and with grassroots level institutions, each chapter is aided by 'Main Points to Remember' and review questions for classroom discussions. This reader-friendly volume also includes PPTs and instructions as support material.

The balanced blend of both theory and field insights makes this book relevant not only to students of public administration, political science, and development administration but also practitioners, civil society actors, and researchers.

Becoming an Agent-based Modeller takes you on a journey, from curiosity about social phenomena to generating them with a computer simulation. The book introduces agent-based modelling as a method to understand societies as complex systems, systems of interconnected, interdependent, and interacting agents.

The book is structured like a course rather than a textbook or reference book. The core of the book is an extended tutorial introducing the NetLogo programming language. Using the example of an epidemic, it explores how an agent-based model of social influence, situational awareness, and contextual decisions by individual agents about protective behaviour can help us understand plausible epidemic trajectories. The tutorial demonstrates how to build an agent-based model from scratch and use it in research, including the conceptualisation stage, the operationalisation and implementation, experimentation, and interpretation. This practical part of the book is embedded in chapters on theory, epistemology, and ethics of agent-based modelling.

With pedagogical tools including key discussion points, illustrations, and highlighted concepts, this is an ideal resource for courses on ABM, and for postgraduate students and researchers in the social sciences and beyond, who wish to develop their understanding of agent-based modelling.

This volume examines some of the most critical issues facing contemporary India. From the changing manifestations of national and state politics to questions of citizenship; from fraught land acquisitions for development to new welfare policies; from gender rights to labour rights, this book brings to the fore the tensions and the innovations that have come to be an integral part of everyday India. The essays in the volume critically address the transformations of the Indian state in the twenty-first century and trace their roots in contemporary history.

A timely intervention engaging with urgent concerns, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, especially political economy, South Asian studies, and public policy.

Outsiders have construed Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands as isolated natural laboratories since the 19th century. The islands' inhabitants, descended from the 18th-century mutineers of the British naval vessel Bounty and their partners from Tahiti, Tubuai, Huahine, and Raiatea, have long been idealized by investigators as incomparable research subjects, uniquely suited for the study of racial, cultural, and linguistic "hybridity." But how did these two Pacific islands come to be seen as natural experiments in the first place? How was that idea shaped and contested in encounters between knowledge makers and the people they studied? And how can we dismantle the myth of the Pacific Island as human laboratory today?

The Myth of the Natural Laboratory answers these questions by tracing two centuries of interest in both of these communities. Across chapters on sailors, colonial administrators, anthropologists, historians, and linguists, it critically historicizes the trope of the island as laboratory and argues for more critical examination of colonial science's reliance on Indigenous subjects. Over time, Pitcairn and Norfolk Islanders became, on a per capita basis, among the most studied people on earth, often subject to dozens of investigations across their lifetimes-to the point that they were sometimes accused by their investigators of being more expert in "fieldwork" than the fieldworkers who came to study them. They inflected the ways investigations proceeded on both islands and leveraged the interest in their communities to stake their own claims and produce their own counternarratives.

Almost without exception, researchers failed to acquire or produce the knowledge they sought. This book suggests that far from becoming ideal natural experiments producing easily accessible knowledge, both islands ultimately became sites of "epistemic derangement," places where attempts to produce knowledge were halted, redirected, or reconfigured. Bringing recent conversations on imperial anxiety to bear on questions of science and empire, The Myth of the Natural Laboratory studies these fractures and failures to produce knowledge, showing the ways colonial paranoias and colonial histories unsettled studiers' practices, categories, and assumptions.

Presenting a unique East meets West subaltern history of the twentieth century, this book juxtaposes the political lives and ideas of B. R. Ambedkar and Malcolm X, homing in on their respective struggles against caste and racial discrimination. Despite the differences in their backgrounds, the two thinkeractivists had significantly overlapping worldviews, shaped by their experiences of identity-based oppression, marginalization, and institutional violence. This book explores those overlaps, with a view to analysing how Ambedkar and Malcolm X's legacies live on in civil rights movements and discourse the world over.

The volume will be of interest to researchers and scholars of race, caste and discrimination studies, history, African-American studies and South Asian studies.

After the fall of the Marcos regime in 1986, the Philippines became the first country in Asia to codify Indigenous rights. This hard-fought reform aimed to protect the ancestral lands of the archipelago's remaining Indigenous communities. Since then, these communities have become increasingly embroiled in resource politics and many have found that claiming their rights does as much to facilitate their dispossession as it does to prevent it. In A Forest of Dreams, Noah Theriault examines the entanglement of capitalism, conservation, and indigeneity in southern Palawan, a place widely coveted as the Philippines's "last frontier." Drawing on a decade of research, Theriault reveals how bureaucrats, investors, and conservationists impose their own designs on Indigenous rights as they vie for land, labor, and legitimacy. But he also asks how those designs collide with the dreams-both figurative and literal-of Indigenous persons themselves. What results is a story of unexpected agency and contingency, in which humans, wildlife, and powerful forest beings complicate prevailing theories of social and environmental change.

A Forest of Dreams traces how Palawan families understand and influence the powerful forces that have enclosed them within an ancestral domain, a protected landscape, and an expanding plantation zone. Each chapter opens with a memorable historical or ethnographic episode: Magellan's fateful battle with Lapu-Lapu; the primitivist visions of Charles Lindbergh; a screeching civet and truckloads of tree-planting college students; oneiric owl sorcery; and a bitter dispute over almaciga resin. Informed by Palawan analyses of their own history, Theriault argues that efforts to "save the last frontier" have reinforced, rather than disrupted, long-term processes of colonization and capitalist expansion. Yet, he also shows how studies of the environment, development, and human rights in Southeast Asia can better account for the critical agency of those whose lands are at stake.

Since 2008, there has been tremendous public interest in the social and ecological ramifications of the global land rush, a rapid increase of capital investment into land, especially for the establishment of agricultural and tree plantations. In Laos, the government has granted five percent of the national territory to investors as long-term land concessions since the early 2000s. Land investments, globally and in Laos, have violently and unjustly dispossessed peasants and Indigenous peoples of their life-giving land, leading to their immiseration. Yet, targeted communities have rarely accepted the theft of their land outright, often struggling to protect their land rights with varying degrees of success. How can these divergent outcomes of land control be understood?

In Socializing Land, Miles Kenney-Lazar addresses these questions by investigating the development of Chinese and Vietnamese pulpwood and rubber plantations on the lands of ethnic minority Brou people in eastern Savannakhet of southern Laos. He argues that land should not be viewed as a "thing" but as a set of social relationships among different groups of people. The characteristics of these ties to land play a critical role in determining if and how its use, access, and ownership change-whether land becomes the property of plantation capitalists or remains in the possession of peasant farmers. Furthermore, the book explores the contradictory role of the state, simultaneously pursuing investment-driven economic growth built upon the coercive expropriation of land while pledging to protect a limited set of peasant land rights. Highlighting the sociality of land demonstrates that land transactions are full of friction and contestation.

The book is based upon in-depth ethnographic research and generates unique insights into the political relationships between government officials, plantation managers, and village authorities and households in Laos. Each chapter examines a different element of land relations that impacted shifting control over land: state-investor relationships, customary versus statutory property, lowland versus upland land uses, the kinship, ethnic, and personal relationships between villagers and government officials, and village solidarity and democratic accountability. Ultimately, the book demonstrates how the land rush, despite its many disastrous effects, can strengthen peasant social ties to land through resistance, progressively limiting attempts at land alienation.

On the evening of April 15, 2014, the Sewol ferry set sail on its overnight journey from Incheon, in northwestern South Korea, to Jeju Island, 240 miles to the south. There were 476 people on board. After receiving a distress call from a passenger onboard, Harbor Affairs at Jeju and at Jindo Island both urged the crew to prepare the passengers for evacuation. Instead, the crew instructed the passengers to stay in their cabins and wait for help. Most of the passengers heeded the instructions and died waiting for rescue.

The feelings of helplessness that many South Koreans and others felt at the sinking of the Sewol were sharpened by the ways the government mishandled the disaster, which has become the most galvanizing event in contemporary South Korean history.

Throughout this roller coaster of national disaster, public outrage, hope for change, and broken promises, an activist movement has taken shape among artists working through the medium of performance to process the disaster, commemorate its victims, and advocate for public change. Beyond the Sewol is the first book to spotlight this creative fluorescence of performative work, which spans the genres of theatre productions, exhibitions, interactive memorial events, site-specific public performances, street protests, and even commercial K-pop music videos. Korean artists, often working in collaboration with Sewol survivors and families, have created a public memory archive countering official versions of the event. These performances have provided an arena through which the project of commemorating the Sewol has been linked by activists to broader demands for changes in politics and society, especially around issues of government accountability, redress for victims, and public empathy for survivors. By identifying and analyzing a multimedia collection of performative works commemorating the Sewol, this book reveals the ways activists and artists mobilizing performative strategies have labored to transform the meaning of Sewol from an unresolved national trauma into a catalyst for creating a safer, fairer, and more caring society.

This book explores how cities worldwide, especially in China, can build resilience against disasters and presents a comprehensive framework for evaluating and strengthening urban safety and sustainability.

Moving beyond theory, the book integrates global best practices and China's unique governance experience to develop a practical, multidimensional evaluation system. It assesses urban resilience across five critical dimensions: the economy, society, infrastructure, ecology, and the increasingly vital domain of information. The study details concrete applications ranging from metropolises to small and medium-sized cities and highlights the use of cutting-edge technologies, such as the digital twin and satellite remote sensing. Crucially, the book translates evaluations into actionable governance strategies and proposes measures for integrated disaster management, emergency resource planning, and technology-driven resilience building. In doing so, it positions China's approach within the context of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This book is essential reading for urban planners, policymakers, disaster management professionals, and scholars of urban studies, sustainability, and public administration. It is also highly relevant for government officials, NGO practitioners, and infrastructure developers who are invested in creating safer, more adaptable cities worldwide.

Using large sample surveys and statistical methods, this book examines Chinese family structure and family caregiving for the elderly.

The author examines a variety of issues, such as the miniaturization and nuclearization of the family, the reasons why multigenerational families still exist in contemporary China, gender differences and family networks in family living arrangements, the influence of empty-nest living on the elderly, the promotion of daughters' support function for the elderly, the basis or conditions on which the family supports the elderly, the impact of reciprocal intergenerational support on the subjective well-being of the elderly, the changing concept of filial piety, and the transformation of intergenerational relations.

The book will appeal to scholars and students of family sociology and China studies.

This new textbook presents an excellent introduction to the most important aspects of contemporary Taiwanese society, politics, economy, and international relations in a comprehensive and reader-friendly way.

Illustrating Taiwan as more than just a military hot spot - also as a vibrant democracy, a beacon of human rights, a technological leader, and an economic hub - each chapter poses a fundamental question, including:

• How did the island develop?
• How did Taiwan become a democracy?
• How does it combine tradition and modernity?
• What human rights problems does Taiwan encounter?
• How did Taiwan become an Asian Tiger?
• How does it live with its neighbours?
• How does diplomacy work when you're not internationally recognized?

Contemporary Taiwan is an excellent resource for students of Taiwan Studies, international relations, political science, and global studies, as well as think tanks, consultants, and journalists seeking critical and balanced background information on contemporary Taiwan.