The research presented in this book explores the formation of the middle class in contemporary urban China.

Including case studies on middle-class professionals living in Beijing, this book analyses how social and economic changes to Chinese society create a middle-class lifestyle and new forms of distinction with a particular focus on the social construction of identity. Looking through the lens of individuals' perception of life trajectories and ideological taxonomies generated within the framework of post-Maoist China, the book uncovers the role that the Chinese middle-class play in a state-sponsored discourse and where the distinctions identifying the middle-class lifestyle produce inequality, transfer privilege, and disadvantage in contemporary urban China. It goes on to question hegemonic discourses on class, arguing that a middle-class identity is progressively constructed in urban China not only though consumption practices, but through the experience of non-individualistic activities in both the public and private spheres.

Analyzing how social distinctions are performed contributes to the understanding of the Chinese middle-class pre-pandemic, as well as the continual challenges this social group shall face in the years to come. As such, this is a must read for those interested in the Chinese middle-class, Chinese politics, and gender studies.

Over the course of four decades of the Cold War, Chakraborti and Chakraborty analyse India's path from nonalignment towards realism and self-assertion, and finally to confidence-building and interdependence with respect to their neighbours in Southeast Asia.

What were the reasons for India's shift from non-alignment to a more pragmatic approach to foreign relations in its relationships with both the non-Communist states of ASEAN and the Communist States of Indochina? How was this shift perceived by those countries? To what degree were Pakistan's foreign and defence policies responsible for India's changes in alignment throughout the Cold War? What lessons can we draw from these events, as the Indo-Pacific is again becoming a major arena of great power rivalry? In order to address these questions, Chakraborti and Chakraborty study the development of India's foreign and security policies throughout the period, tracking the changes of stances between and within administrations. They evaluate how these decisions were driven by a combination of ideology, pragmatism and changes in priorities as the regional architecture developed over time.

A valuable read for scholars and students of India's foreign relations and of Indo-Pacific geopolitics more broadly.

Winner of the Norbert Elias Book Prize 2023

This book charts the process of civilisation in Japan. Using the theory of civilising processes developed by Norbert Elias, the author examines the complex underlying structural and psychological processes from the seventh century to the twentieth century. Furthermore, by drawing on rich historical data, the author illustrates how these complex processes led the Japanese to see themselves as 'more civilised' than their forebears and neighbouring countries. Although the theory serves as an important reference point, the author draws on other works to address different complex questions surrounding Japanese development. Therefore, this book presents three key themes: first, it gives an alternative understanding of the complex developments of Japanese society; second, it intercedes into an ongoing debate about the applicability of Elias's theory in a non-Western context; and third, it expands Elias's theory.

This book identifies differing approaches to the issues of conceptualising hegemony, hegemony-building processes and the relationship between a hegemonic state and a rising power. It focuses on transformations of the Chinese state, society and political-economy, China's rapidly ascending status in the world order and changing relations with the outside world, in particular with the US.

Bringing together mainstream and critical approaches from Anglo-America and China, which occupy different positions in the core-periphery structure of social sciences knowledge production and provide diverging standpoints to understanding the phenomenon of a rising China, the book questions the existing division of labour in IR and in general social sciences knowledge production. Through the lenses of multiple Anglo-American and Chinese scholars, it offers a nuanced and multifaceted view on the issue and focuses on a direct comparison of different localized perspectives. The author scrutinizes the heterogeneity of knowledge, the relationship between power and knowledge production and the region-centricity, in particular the Western-centricity, of knowledge production by analysing the discourse on the "(re-) rising" status of China in the world. The book problematizes the close link between power and knowledge production and presents a more critical view on the conclusions drawn by each approach.

Offering an understanding of the nexus between knowledge production and power structures, the heterogeneity and multiplicity of knowledge and the influence of locality on the knowledge produced in social sciences, the book will be of interest to academics working in the fields of International Relations theories, critical approaches, non-Western theories, Euro- or Western-centrism, and social sciences in China, Area Studies, in particularly China and East Asia.

This book provides an in-depth account of military operations against drug gangs and organizations in two of the biggest countries in Latin America: Brazil and Mexico. Recent studies on drug wars have detailed case studies on the war on drugs but do not focus on the role of the army in such policies. Publications that do drive attention to the military in such situations are usually from human rights organizations or the press and are therefore not scholarly works. There are therefore no recent academic books dealing with the role of the military in the fight against drugs in Latin America. This book aims to fill this gap. It also offers an empirical and theoretical examination of the issue of the role of the military (rather than the police) on national soil-the army being generally devoted to interventions abroad, and the police, to law enforcement on the national ground. The book is also the first work to look at high-level negotiations between military and civilian elites that define the conditions for the use of force during military operations. It provides a theoretically informed understanding of contemporary security politics in Brazil and Mexico.

This book provides a constructive criticism of the emerging practice of conscious capitalism from the perspective of world religions and spiritualities. Conscious capitalism, to many of its adherents, represents an evolutionary step forward beyond the dominant neo-liberal paradigm, where it often appears that just about everything is for sale. Is conscious capitalism consistent with the values inherent in religious and spiritual world-views and does it provide a better fit for bringing out the best that business has to offer? This book answers these questions and many more. An appealing read for researchers in business ethics as well as any reader critical of the excrescences of capitalism.

This book discusses the nature of China's current international reassertion of itself and the thinking and attitudes which lie behind it. It argues that the Chinese leadership has a strongly held view of its own high moral authority, which emphasizes inclusion, equality and mutual benefits, and that this sense of morality underpins the driving forces for China's foreign policies, rationalization of China's overseas activities, the overall Chinese worldview, and China's vision of a Chinese world order. It highlights how the country's outward expansion has been characterized mainly by spreading influence through non-use of force and strategies of "co-operation" and "managed conflict" under the umbrella of "winning without fighting". A set of Chinese geo-strategic reasoning that addresses how the possession of capabilities in land power and sea power will interact to produce favorable balance of power corresponds to the country's pattern of overseas activities. The book approaches the subject empirically based on original research into both writings for policy-making purposes, which indicate realistic assessments of world politics and of China's international capacity, and also narratives for public consumption, which have less emphasis on selfinterest and realpolitik. The book concludes that Beijing's self-privileging high morality might have the unfortunate consequence of reinforcing its own behavior which defies international order and which others disapprove of, thereby increasing the likelihood of non-armed and armed conflicts.

Despite China's rise to the status of global power, many Chinese youths are anxious about their personal future, in large measure because the rapid changes have left them feeling adrift. This book, available in open access, provides a manifesto of intellectual activism that counsels China's young people to think by themselves and for themselves. Consisting of three conversations between Xiang Biao, a social anthropologist, and Wu Qi, a rising journalist, the book probes how China has reached its current stage and how young people can make changes. The conversations touch on issues of mobility, education, family, relations between the self and the authority, centers and margins, China, and the world. The Chinese version was named the "most impactful book of 2021" by Douban, China's premier website for rating books, films, and music. The English version is translated by David Ownby, who also penned an introduction.

Practicing Oral History with Military and War Veterans focuses predominantly on conducting oral history with men and women of recent wars and military conflicts.

The book provides a structured methodology for building interest and trust among veterans to conduct interviews, design oral history projects, and archive and use these oral history interviews. It includes background on the evolution of veterans oral history, the nuts and bolts of interviewing, ethical guidelines, procedures, and the overall value of veterans oral history. The methodology emphasizes how memory evolves over the years - when a veteran becomes more distant from the events of war, the experiences become individualized and personalized for each veteran based on location, time, place, and purpose of their service. The book also aims to improve understanding of the personal, ethical, and psychological issues involved in listening compassionately to veterans' stories that may contain issues of trauma, gender, socio-economics, race, dis/ability, and ethnicity.

Practicing Oral History with Military and War Veterans is an invitation to community scholars, students, oral historians, and families of veterans to actively participate in the oral history process and to embrace methodology that may help with designing and conducting oral history projects and interviewing war veterans.

Reflecting on the "clash of civilizations" as its point of departure, this book is based on a series of sixteen of the author's interconnected, thematically focused lectures and calls for new perspectives to resist imperialistic homogeneity.

Situated within a neo-humanist context, the book applies interactive cognition from an Asian perspective within which China can be perceived as an essential "other," making it highly relevant in the quest for global solutions to the many grave issues facing humankind today. The author critiques American, European, and Chinese points of view, highlighting the significance of difference and the necessity of dialogue, before, ultimately, rethinking the nature of world literature and putting forward interactive cognition as a means of "reconciliation" between cultures. Chinese culture, as a frame of reference endowed with traditions of "harmony without homogeneity", may help to alleviate global cultural confrontation and even reconstruct the understanding of human civilization.

The book will be essential reading for scholars and students of Comparative Literature, Chinese Studies, and all those who are interested in cross-cultural communication and Chinese culture in general.

This book examines the independent media movements by Inmediahk and Coolloud - long-established, autonomous media organizations that have agitated for the development of media freedom and human rights in Hong Kong and Taiwan since 2004 and 1997, respectively.

Based on direct interviews with the founders and core members of Inmediahk and Coolloud, the author investigates the origins, growth, and achievements of Inmediahk and Coolloud's media social movements as well as the current challenges the two independent media outlets encounter with regard to funding, increasing socio-political pressure, and the complicated media environments in Hong Kong and Taiwan using the method of qualitative content interpretation. Moreover, the practicality of social media and independent media in contemporary social movements, including the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong, is reviewed according to text analysis.

Considering the prospect of media activism from a non-western perspective, this book will appeal not only to scholars and researchers with interests in media, social movement, and cultural studies, but also to media workers and activists across the globe.

The book explores the pressing problem of rural violence in contemporary Nigeria by assessing the changing patterns of conflict and response across the country.

Rural violence in Nigeria is becoming an increasingly pressing concern, with cattle rustling, banditry, kidnapping and farmer-herder conflicts putting immense pressure on the state's institutional preparedness and the response capacity of the government, military and other security agencies. Drawing from the expertise of a wide range of African development, governance and security researchers and practitioners, this book assesses the severity of the current problem of rural violence, and provides a critical analysis of the various national and state responses to rural violence in Nigeria. Ultimately, the book aims to provide suggestions for restoring peace, security and development in Nigeria.

This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and administrators across Political Science, Security Studies, Rural Studies, and Regional Studies in Africa.

Sustainability Communication across Asia distils the core components of environmental communication in the diverse milieu of Asian nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and China.

The chapters in this book engage readers in a clear-sighted view of issues, challenges, and strategies related to sustainability communication in Asia, examining fundamental principles, digital strategies, and the role of language, as well as community engagement. The first part of the book features underpinning ideologies of sustainability communication. The authors go on to explore the prevalent trends and approaches in sustainable communication in the digital realm, examining the internet in general, social media, and gaming platforms. Finally, the book discusses the green efforts adopted among selected Asian communities, the role of communication, and the resulting societal impacts. Readers will be introduced to many related examples of Asian sustainability cases and issues that may differ from Western experiences. Interesting topics such as environmental gamification, edutainment and sustainability communication, and social media and sustainability are among those presented and elaborated at length by 21 writers with industrial and academic backgrounds.

Practical and inspiring, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainability and environmental communication, and Asian studies in general.

Drawing on new archival documents and interviews, this book demonstrates the evolving role of international politics in Olympic security planning. Olympic security concerns changed forever following the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. The International Olympic Committee's (IOC) choice to ignore security after the attack in Munich left individual Olympic Games Organizing Committees to organize, fund, and provide security for the major international event. Future Olympic hosts planned security amidst increasing numbers of international terrorist attacks, and with the Cold War in full swing. For some Olympic hosts, Olympic security now represented their nation's largest ever military operations. By the time the IOC made security more of a priority in the early 1980s, the trends in Olympic security were set for the future.

Relying on micro-evidence on the repercussions of civil conflicts, this edited book explores theories and policies of post-conflict peacebuilding. Reconsidering existing knowledge on the civil conflict and peacebuilding processes in particular, it empirically presents the relationships between conflict dynamics and citizens' norms, values, and preferences in the post-conflict context.

Once it occurs, civil conflict brings enormous suffering on the local society. As a consequence of wartime coercion and violence that tear it apart, citizens come to harbor fear, distrust, and hatred of others, especially of those who are in different sociopolitical groups. This can significantly alter the pre-conflict norms and values of the citizenry and make reconciliation difficult across groups in the aftermath of the conflict.

To tackle these problems, post-conflict peacebuilding should be well designed so that it can widely cover and sufficiently deal with conflict-affected citizens. This approach urges us to pay serious attention to the individual-level impact of the conflict process and dynamics. The importance of micro-level analysis does not disregard that of normative and/or macro-level approaches to the development of peacebuilding policies. However, the micro-level approach is better able to capture wartime civil-military relations that largely vary between individuals.

The book is aimed at linking academic knowledge with policy development in peacebuilding. To reflect existing policy frameworks in peacebuilding, the implications of micro-evidence-based studies for conflict-affected societies are discussed here. A bottom-up approach pursued throughout this book allows us to elaborate desirable policy schemes for peacebuilding that conform to local contexts.

This handbook aims to bridge the gap between the fields of positive psychology and the psychology of religion and spirituality. It is the authoritative guide to the intersections among religion, spirituality, and positive psychology and includes the following sections: (1) historical and theoretical considerations, (2) methodological considerations, (3) cultural considerations, (4) developmental considerations, (5) empirical research on happiness and well-being in relation to religion and spirituality, (6) empirical research on character strengths and virtues in relation to religion and spirituality, (7) clinical and applied considerations, and (8) field unification and advancement. Leading positive psychologists and psychologists of religion/spirituality have coauthored the chapters, drawing on expertise from their respective fields. The handbook is useful for social and clinical scientists, practitioners in helping professions, practitioners in religious and spiritual fields, andstudents of psychology and religion/spirituality.

This is an open access book.

The series, Mao's Road to Power, consisting of translations of Mao Zedong's writings from 1912 to 1949, provides abundant documentation in his own words on his life and thought as well as developments in China during the pre-1949 period. This final volume in the series, Volume 10, covers the period from the Chinese Communist Party's Strategic Offense during the Civil War to the Establishment of the People's Republic of China, July 1947 to October 1949.

This textbook introduces the reader to the field of military sociology through narrative reviews of selected key studies in the discipline.

The book provides a guided introduction. In each chapter, the authors set the stage and then immerse the reader in Spotlights - that is, descriptions of essential studies that inform the discipline of military sociology. The goal is to afford readers a ready pathway into how sociologists and social scientists have thought about topics in the study of the military and war.

Topics covered in the book include:

• What is military sociology? What does it have to offer in understanding armed forces, wars, and societies?
• What basic tools are needed to ply sociological, or more broadly, social science perspectives for studying war and the military?
• What are the bio-social bases of war? What does the spectrum of such societally organized violence look like?
• How do societies raise and maintain formal militaries? What are variations in their social composition and in the profiles of civil-military relations?
• How and why is military organization and war changing so dramatically in the 21st-century? What does the future hold?

This book will be of great interest to students of military sociology, the armed forces and society, peace studies, and International Relations.

This book tackles the question of border control in and around imperial Japan in the first half of the twentieth century, with a specific focus on its documentation regime.

It explores the institutional development, media and literary discourses, and on[1]the-ground practices of documentary identification in the Japanese empire and the places visited by its subjects. The contributing authors, covering such regions as Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, Siberia, Australia, and the United States, place the question of individual identity in the eyes of the respective governments in dialogue with the global developments of the identification and mobility control practices. The chapters suggest the importance of focusing more than previously on the narrative of individual identification, not as a tool for creating nation states but as a tool for generating, strengthening, and maintaining asymmetrical relationships between people of different socioeconomic backgrounds who moved in and out of empires.

This book explores the contradictions in Britain's humanitarian and military intervention in Libya and Syria, beginning with the Arab spring in 2010.

The book assesses the contradictions between the expressed humanitarian intentions of British military interveners and the impact of their actions on the putative beneficiary states. It demonstrates that, as a result of foreign intervention, both Libya and Syria were rendered non-functional as unitary nations and suffered extensive harm to their people and infrastructure. To evaluate the effectiveness and credibility of humanitarian warfare, the author conducts a thematic analysis of debates on Libya and Syria in the House of Commons. The book provides a detailed study of intentions and motives expressed by Members of Parliament, of consequent British state actions and their outcomes, and of MPs' reactions to outcomes. It provides ample evidence of duplicity, insincerity, indifference to harm, and ulterior motives for violence that undermine moral claims and support the argument that, although humanitarian warfare may be possible, the leading Western activist states (Britain, France, and the USA) are poorly qualified to carry it out.

Illustrating a systemic failure of strategy and accountability in British foreign policy, this book will be of interest to scholars and graduates of Humanitarian Studies, International Relations and Military Studies.

Threats in Context: Identify, Analyze, Anticipate begins with the premise that a risk assessment is relevant primarily-and hinges upon-the correct evaluation of the threat. According to the author, all the other stages of the risk evaluation are, in fact, dependent on getting the understanding and measurement of the threat right.

Despite this truism, many risk assessment methods (i.e., the process of determining the threat) tend to rush through a vague typology, offer minimal classifications, utilize an often-outdated list of potential malevolent actions-all of which are based on precedent occurrences. There should be a way to improve on this: a way to provide security practitioners and analysts better tools to deal with the task of analyzing threats and risk and to prepare for such contingencies appropriately.

The book begins with a retrospective on the threats from the 1960s through to the present. The list is long and includes hijackings and airport attacks, piracy, drug smuggling, attacks on trains, pipelines, city-wide multi-site attacks, road attacks, workplace shootings, lone wolf attacks, drone attacks, bombings, IEDs, sniper attacks, random stabbings, and more.

Terrorism, workplace violence, and active shooter scenarios all present asymmetric problems and unique challenges that require new ways of thinking, operationally, of risk to properly prevent, mitigate, and respond to such threats. The author demonstrates how to develop an appropriate methodology to define both current and emerging threats, providing a five-step process to self-evaluate-to determine an organization's, a location's, or a facility's threats and to plan risk mitigation strategies to accurately identify, minimize, and neutralize such threats.

Coverage progressively builds from correctly identifying the root threats-both global and local-to a subsequent understanding of the corollary relationship between threat, vulnerability, and risk, with the threat serving as the fundamental cornerstone of the risk evaluation. As such, Threats in Context will serve as a pivotal resource to security professionals from all backgrounds serving in a variety of fields and industries.