The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Islamic Publications Ltd.

The Huthi rebels in Yemen are a resistance movement going back decades. Their coup against Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi in 2015 - and the subsequent Yemeni civil war and the intervention of the Arab coalition in support of Hadi - has brought absolute devastation to the country. But who are the Huthis and how can we understand the group away from armed conflict and war? What has motivated their social movement to fundamentally re-shape Yemen, and what are the group's local and regional ambitions?

This book provides the first comprehensive critical analysis dedicated to the Huthis. Across four parts and 17 chapters, the book examines how the movement is challenging traditional religious authority, re-shaping tribal values and roles in Yemen, constructing new collective memories and identities, and infusing Yemen's mediascape with their ideological creed. In examining the movement's specific ways of thinking and beliefs, the book also highlights its foreign policy within a regional policy of resistance to the United States, and it points towards what its impact on both Yemen and the security of the Arab Gulf region will be. The book brings together the leading experts on Yemen from diverse disciplines to provide readers with a nuanced and multi-layered approach to understanding the Huthi movement.

The Politics of the Near offers a novel approach to social unrest in post-apartheid South Africa. Keeping the noise of demonstrations, barricades, and clashes with the police at a distance, this ethnography of a poor people's movement traces individual commitments and the mainsprings of mobilization in the ordinary social and intimate life of activists, their relatives, and other township residents.
Tournadre's approach picks up on aspects of activists lives that are often neglected in the study of social movements that help us better understand the dynamics of protest and the attachment of activists to their organization and its cause. What Tournadre calls a "politics of the near" takes shape, through sometimes innocuous actions and beyond the separation between public and domestic spheres.
By mapping the daily life of Black and low-income neighborhoods and the intimate domain where expectations and disappointments surface, The Politics of the Near offers a different perspective on the "rainbow nation"-a perspective more sensitive to the fact that, three decades after the end of apartheid, poverty and race are still as tightly interwoven as ever.

I.B. Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies

The Shi'i Ismaili Muslims of Central Asia have a complex political history. This open access book is the first English-language study of the Ismaili Muslims in this region, based on analysis of the Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet scholarship about them. It sheds new light on their history and heritage, and also shows how the Ismailis of Central Asia have been understood and presented in the academic literature.
Divided into three parts, the first covers the spread of the Ismaili da'wa (mission) throughout Central Asia - known as Khurasan - from the 3rd/9th century until modern times. This part examines the prominent poet da'i Nasir-i Khusraw, who played an instrumental role in the expansion and development of Ismailism in Badakhshan in the eleventh century and reveals the impact of his religio-philosophical legacy in the life of the contemporary community. The second part examines the initial interest in Ismaili Studies engendered by Russian imperial rule. It also shows how approaches to the study of Ismailism were affected by 70 years of Communist atheist rule and the demise of the Communist political and ideological system. The third part presents an annotated bibliography of books, articles, and published and unpublished materials, including documents and oral materials on the history, thought and practices of the Ismailis of Central Asia, most of which has not been hitherto easily accessible to Western scholarship.
The comprehensive survey and rich bibliography aims to illuminate the history and historiography of the Ismailis in Central Asia and facilitate further study on the subject by experts around the world.

Graciela chronicles the life a Quechua-speaking Indigenous woman in the remote Andean highlands during the civil war in Peru that killed seventy thousand and displaced hundreds of thousands more in the 1980s and 1990s. The book traces her early years as a young child living in an epicenter of violence to her contemporary life as a postwar survivor. Graciela Orihuela Rocha's history embodies the horrors, injustices, promises, and challenges faced by countless individuals who endured and survived the war. Her story provides intimate insights into deep-seated divisions within Peruvian society that center around skin color, gender, language, and ties to the land. These fault lines have endured to the present day, fostering discontent and violence in Peru.

Through Graciela's story we not only learn of trauma and dehumanization but also resilience, strength, and perseverance. Graciela's history provides insight into the systemic challenges of determining truth, implementing justice, and envisioning reconciliation in a country where calls for equality and justice remain unrealized for the most marginalized.

This book aims to fill a gap in research on women's political representation by developing a multidimensional assessment of female participation in subnational legislatures in a federal political system like Mexico. The Mexican experience in terms of women's political representation at the federal and subnational levels has been very successful, as the reforms created a more robust "gender electoral regime" that promoted an increase in the number of elected female legislators (1987-2021). Still, little is known about the impact of the rise in women's presence in Congresses on other dimensions of political representation, such as symbolic or substantive.

Although previous studies on women's political representation in Mexico have yielded exciting conclusions based on empirical evidence and strengthened a theory focused on the analysis of presence, it is still insufficient to explain the other dimensions of representation and the relationship between them. Therefore, this book contributes to the comparative scholarship from the perspective of feminist neo-institutionalism, expanding the understanding of the relationship between women's formal and descriptive representation, the content of legislative work in terms of preferences and interests (substantive representation), and its symbolic effects on women and politics in general (symbolic representation).

Women in Mexican Subnational Legislatures: From Descriptive to Substantive Representation will be of interest to political scientists, sociologists, and jurists interested in gender and politics. The book fills a theoretical and empirical gap on the effects of gender parity in the programmatic and symbolic scope of power building. The findings on good practices and challenges are discussed within a broader body of comparative research, providing knowledge to academia, policymakers, and international cooperation agencies about the remaining obstacles to strengthening Latin American democracies and the need to continue exploring the links between subnational politics and democratization of federal political systems.

Abu Bakr al-Suli was an Abbasid polymath and table companion, as well as a legendary chess player. He was perhaps best known for his work on poetry and chancery, which would have a long-lasting influence on Arabic literature. His decades of service at the court of at least three caliphs give him a unique perspective as an historian of his own time, although he is often valued as an observer rather than an interpreter of events for posterity.
Letizia Osti here provides the first full-length English-language study devoted to al-Suli, illustrating how investigating the life, times and works of such a complex individual can serve as a fil rouge for tackling broader, contested concepts, such as biography, autobiography, court culture, and written culture. The result is an exploration of the ways in which the Abbasid court made sense of the past and, in general, of what 'historiography' means in a medieval Arabic context.

This book explores the application of the work of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben to the post-Arab Uprisings in the Middle East, considering the evolution of regime-society relations that ultimately erupted in violence in the early months of 2011.
Agamben's ideas of the state of exception and bare life provide important intellectual tools to understand the nature of sovereignty and the regulation of life, which has largely been missing in the study of the region. Filling a theoretical and empirical gap by exploring the concept of the 'state of exception' via a multidisciplinary approach, Simon Mabon, Sanaa Alsarghali and contributors in the fields of political science, law and philosophy offer a unique set of perspectives analysing how politics and law combine to facilitate the misuse of executive powers.

Explaining state-building failures in Lebanon during the 20th century, this book looks at the relationship between legitimacy and stability in the country since the creation of the state in 1920. The presence of legitimacy is considered necessary to any successful state-building endeavour. This book argues that the Lebanese state failed to achieve any meaningful form of legitimacy from its inception in 1920 to its near-collapse during the civil war. However, by analysing different eras of Lebanese history, throughout the different presidential terms, the author challenges the general understanding of stability and governance to show that the absence of legitimacy and society support actually contributed to the persistence of the Lebanese state. More than this, the evidence shows that Lebanese state was at its most stable when it was regarded as illegitimate. The wider, implicit question thus asked in the book revolves around a case where illegitimacy within the state is what ensures its stability and survival.

Based on primary sources including national archives and collections, institutional documents, personal memoirs, newspapers and journals, this book provides a rich survey on the development and functioning of Lebanese political institutions.

A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia, 600-1700 proposes a new language for studying and conceptualizing the spaces, societies, and institutions that existed on the territory of today's Northern Eurasia. This is not the story of a certain present-day state or people evolving through consecutive historical stages. Rather, the book is a modern analytical approach to the problem of human diversity as a fundamental social condition. Through cooperation and confrontation, various attempts to manage diversity fostered processes of societal self-organization, as new ideas, practices, and institutions were developed virtually from scratch or radically altered. Essentially, this is the story of individuals and societies creatively responding to their natural and social environments in unique historical circumstances.

This volume explores how the mutual interactions of several local socio-political arrangements, and attempts to integrate with one of the universal cultures of the time, caused a string of unintended consequences. As a result, the enormous landmass from the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east, from the Polar Circle in the north to the steppe belt in the south was divided among several regional powers. Ultimately unable to overtake each other by military force, they were locked in a zero-sum game until the uneven development of modern state institutions tilted the balance in favor of one of them - Russia.

Memoirs of diasporic Iranian-American authors are a unique and culturally powerful way in which Iran, its politics, and people are understood in the USA and the rest of the world. This book offers an analysis of the processes of production, promotion, and reception of the representations of post-revolutionary Iran.

The book provides new perspectives on some of the most famous examples of the genre such as Betty Mahmoody's Not Without My Daughter, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, and Fatemeh Keshavarz's Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran. Hossein Nazari places these texts in their social, historical, and political contexts, tracing their origins within the trope of the American captivity narrative, teasing out and critiquing neo-Orientalist tendencies within, and finally focusing on modes of discursive resistance to neo-Orientalist narratives. The book analyzes the structural means by which stereotypes about Islam and women in the Islamic Republic in these narratives are privileged by news media and the creative industries, while also charting a growing number of 'counterhegemonic' memoirs which challenge these narratives by representing more nuanced accounts of life in Iran after 1979.

What is the significance of gender and masculinities in understanding conflict?
Through an ethnographic study conducted between 2013 and 2016, this book explores the politics of competing and sometimes overlapping masculinities represented by the state armed forces and the non-state actors in the Kashmir valley. In addition, the book broadens the understanding of women's agency through its engagement with the construction, performance, and interplay of masculinities in the conflict.
Combining existing elements of both feminist research and critical scholarship on men and masculinities, the book highlights the significance of foregrounding the interplay of men's identities in conflicts to understand agency in a meaningful way. Through the focus on the simultaneous play of multiple masculinities, the book also questions the oversimplified and monolithic usage of masculinity being associated only with violence in conflicts.
The empirical data in the book includes interviews and narratives of multiple stakeholders belonging to diverse vantage points in the Kashmir conflict. Some of these include activists, widows, wives of the disappeared, ex-militants, surrendered militants, participants of the stone-pelting movement, mothers of sons killed in the conflict, women representatives of the village Halqa Panchayats, and army personnel. The book also draws from alternative material in the form of graffiti, folk songs, poetry on graves, and slogans. Through anecdotal reminiscence, the author reflects on the challenges of field research in Kashmir that served as an opportunity for self-contemplation.

The years between 1910 and 1940 were formative for Mexico, with the ouster of Porfirio Diaz, the subsequent revolution, and the creation of the new state. Amid the upheaval, Mexican dance emerged as a key arena of contestation regarding what it meant to be Mexican. Through an analysis of written, photographic, choreographic, and cinematographic renderings of a festive Mexico, Choreographing Mexico examines how bodies in motion both performed and critiqued the nation.

Manuel Cuellar details the integration of Indigenous and regional dance styles into centennial celebrations, civic festivals, and popular films. Much of the time, this was a top-down affair, with cultural elites seeking to legitimate a hegemonic national character by incorporating traces of indigeneity. Yet dancers also used their moving bodies to challenge the official image of a Mexico full of manly vigor and free from racial and ethnic divisions. At home and abroad, dancers made nuanced articulations of female, Indigenous, Black, and even queer renditions of the nation. Cuellar reminds us of the ongoing political significance of movement and embodied experience, as folklorico maintains an important and still-contested place in Mexican and Mexican American identity today.

This book is an enthralling account of the role played by the destroyer ARA Bouchard in the Falklands/Malvinas War. Over forty years after its construction, with obsolete technology, scarce maintenance and many out-of-service machineries, it was still present during the whole campaign with a prominent role that, for several reasons, remained hidden until today.

During the Falklands/Malvinas conflict, it patrolled the north of the archipelago to allow the recapture of the islands. It was noteworthy together with the Cruiser and another destroyer in the attack on the British fleet, without being able to find it. On its return, it was hit by the third torpedo launched by the submarine Conqueror aimed at the cruiser ARA General Belgrano. It suffered damage and, although it could still sail, was forced to dry dock to change a part of its hull. For two consecutive nights, it stopped British commandos from making anincursion into the Rio Grande airport, in order to destroy the Navies Super Etendard attack aircraft and assassinate its pilots. With its main gun battery, it fired with combat ammunition on enemy targets and was the only main battery to have the opportunity to do so. It was irradiated and used for missile target practice; they were unable to sink it during the firing practice. Later, it was decommissioned and scrapped.

"Well-researched... a welcome guide." The Spectator
"Reliable and lucid." History Today

With a fractured geography and complex identity, The Philippines is an eclectic and unique mix of culture, environment, people and politics. Known mostly for natural disasters, migrant labour and dictatorial presidents, in this book Philip Bowing shows how it is much, much more. Deftly navigating the history of this populous island republic, The Making of the Modern Philippines traces its history to define and explain its position in the modern world. Looking past the headlines of volcanoes, earthquakes and violence, it asks why has the Filipino economy lagged behind its neighbours, explores the importance of its location in geopolitics, and investigates how its deep-rooted Catholicism clashes with the Islamic consciousness of the region in which it sits.

Taking the history of the Philippines from its pre-colonial era, through its Spanish and American occupations and up to the modern day, it unravels the complex politics, culture, peoples and economy of this rich and unique nation. Engaging with challenges the Filipino people face today such as federalism, revolution, Mindanao, the diaspora, capitalism and relations with China, it rediscovers the struggles, culture and history of its past to understand the present.