This book spotlights the emergent patterns of community leadership. It focuses on the theoretical concepts of political sociology and its applications in dayto-day life based on ethnographic evidence. From an insider's perspective, it holistically integrates social, cultural, economic and political factors that determine the understanding of community leadership. It aims to bring a positive change in the behaviour, attitude and perception of common people about the new vocabularies of political mobilisation at different levels.

This volume discusses various emerging issues that affect a large number of community members directly or indirectly. Its main strength lies in its evidence-based approach to the issues affecting community life. This entails participation in cultural events and the use of metaphors in everyday engagement with the State to assert new identities, thereby transforming the modalities of claim-making with the State. With an incisive examination of conceptual models, examples and case studies, this book is written in lucid language for better understanding of the subject.

This book will be useful to the students, researchers, activists and teachers of subaltern studies, political science, urban sociology and political sociology. It will also be an indispensable companion to academics, policy makers and readers who are invested in subaltern political mobilisation.

Traces the role that western India's influential Brahman communities played in shaping India's modern caste system.

Western India's Brahman communities have played a key role in the shaping of India's modern caste system. In Lineages of Brahman Power, Rosalind O'Hanlon focuses on their rise to power between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, exploring the ways in which some Brahman intellectuals sought to defend the hierarchies of caste against the social changes of the early modern era while others looked for compromise. Drawing on Marathi vernacular sources, O'Hanlon also examines the household, family, and lineage as key sites for Brahman accumulation of skills and cultural capital. This approach also reveals Brahman identity itself as contested, as Brahman subcastes competed with each other not only for service positions and state patronage but also to define who could actually be considered a Brahman, and of what kind. This focus on Brahman social history is novel, in that most historians focus on Brahman power as emerging out of their religious prestige and dominance of intellectual and literary cultures. The emphasis on Brahman identity itself as complex and internally contested also helps to avoid essentializing Brahman power as always and everywhere the same.

By integrating governance theory with real-world service delivery practices in South Asia, this book explores the vital intersection of governance and public service delivery, particularly within the complex socio-political landscape of South Asia.

The book bridges theory and practice to reveal how good governance principles such as decentralisation, accountability, citizen participation, and digital innovation can drive more equitable and efficient service provision. Chapters focus on the evolving shift from traditional government to participatory governance, examining the roles of public-private partnerships, e-governance, and inclusive policy design in transforming service delivery. Providing a regionally grounded perspective by drawing from comparative regional analysis, rather than country-specific diagnostics, the book ensures broader relevance while remaining rooted in the realities of rapidly developing South Asian nations.

A timely contribution in the era of digital transformation and growing demands for transparent, accountable institutions, this book will be of interest to academics working in the fields of South Asian politics, international relations, governance, decentralisation, and participatory public administration.

This book serves as a scholarly work examining Karbi philosophy, oral traditions, and cultural practices through comprehensive analysis. It explores themes in indigenous philosophy, folklore, eco-philosophy, historical memory, and collective identity formation including:

• Critical examination of colonial constructions and decolonizing methodologies in ethnographic studies
• In-depth study of Karbi eco-philosophy and environmental worldview
• Historical memory analysis and trauma interpretation in indigenous contexts
• Examination of collective identity formation through memory and metaphor
• Scholarly investigation of evolving belief systems and religious transformations

The book includes detailed studies of belief systems, decolonizing methodologies, and ethnographic approaches. Ideal for researchers, anthropologists, and students interested in cultural studies and indigenous research.

This title has been co-published with Manohar Publishers & Distributors. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print edition in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Bhutan.

This book reveals that caste, usually assumed to be a feature of Hindu society, was in fact a trans-religious phenomenon in colonial India, as it is today. Even in an Islamic religious milieu that was supposedly more egalitarian than hierarchical Hinduism, colonial Indian subjects thought and acted in terms of caste. Through a focus on one agrarian Muslim caste known as Arains, Ashish Koul shows how some Indian Muslims transmuted caste and emplaced it within their understanding of Islam. During this time, Arain Muslims were derogatively called mali- gardener-instead of what they wished to be seen as-respectable landholders. Seeking to refute such negative portrayals, a group of elite Arains came together to develop a new Islamic vocabulary for caste.

Using primary sources in English and Urdu, Koul analyzes the intricacies of caste, religion, and politics among Muslims in colonial India. By asserting that being Arain was a way of being a true Muslim, elite Arains were able to intervene in significant debates about Muslim identity, colonial law, and political representation. Reinventing Caste shows that in order to understand why caste persists among South Asians, we must examine how caste consciousness has been entrenched within multiple religious traditions.

This book is a groundbreaking and original contribution to understanding the intersectionality of caste, race, and class in South Asia. Grounded in rich ethnographic fieldwork, it situates its analyses in Pakistan to reveal how caste-often denied or obscured by nationalist, religious, and liberal-progressive discourses-continues to shape everyday hierarchies, moral imaginaries, and political structures. It unravels how both privileged and oppressed caste groups invoke the past to construct identities and contest histories in the present, showing how systemic discrimination has pushed Scheduled Castes and Pasmanda communities to the lowest rungs of the social, economic, and political hierarchy. Moving beyond the familiar frames of Indian caste practices, the book demonstrates that caste in Pakistan is not a relic of the past or a "Hindu problem," but a transreligious and deeply entrenched social structure sustained across Hindu, Muslim, and Christian communities alike. Foregrounding caste as an analytic category and a fundamental marker of identity, the book interrogates the role of hegemonic actors-religious, nationalist, and secular-in strategically denying or reasserting caste to preserve structures of privilege. Combining theoretical sophistication with moral and ethnographic engagement, Architecture of Caste in Pakistan compels a rethinking of caste, religion, and equality in Muslim societies.

This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of caste and discrimination studies, critical Dalit and Pasmanda studies, sociology, social anthropology, and South Asian studies.

Formed in the late 1960s, the Young Patriots Organization was a Chicago-based radical group made up of young white migrants from Appalachia and the South who helped found Black Panther activist Fred Hampton's Rainbow Coalition. The YPO grew from a local street gang into a powerful political and social force in the city's Uptown neighborhood, where it fought against police brutality, racism, economic exploitation, and displacement through community organizing, the establishment of survival programs, and working-class cultural organizations.

In this first stand-alone history of the YPO, Jesse Montgomery presents the group as one of the New Left's most enigmatic anti-racist organizations-one inspired by the moral and political power of the civil rights movement and the street corner socialism of the Black Panthers but also one that embraced regressive Southern identifiers, such as Confederate flags, that belied its liberatory message. Though the YPO's existence was short-lived, its story helps us to reimagine radical unity in the face of dislocation, political oppression, and the brutal incentives of racial capitalism. As Montgomery argues, its work to cross racial and class lines and build coalitions for the greater good is a symbol of the America that could still be.

Indian Federalism: Structure, Process and Agency offers a comprehensive and critical account of Indian Federalism, its origin, development, structural, innovations and functioning, and resilience in the face of new challenges.

Federalism in India is a relative success story as a model of governance of a complex multi-ethnic country. This book provides a detailed examination of the structures of Indian federalism with particular focus on the core structures such as tiers of government, constitutional distribution of powers, parliamentary second chamber, Supreme Court, Finance Commission (fiscal federalism and federal asymmetry) and Inter-State Council. Each discussion is preceded by the constitutional designs and functions. The issues covered in this book are territorial accommodation of ethnic identity; power-sharing; centripetalism and state autonomy; changing political economy from a command economy to a market driven one; special significance of the major transformation in the party systems for federalism; and the new meaning of centre-state relations in the shifting patty systems and the political economy.

This book will be of interest to advanced undergraduates and postgraduates as a core text on Indian federalism, and a necessary reference for the students and researchers of comparative federalism, and Indian politics, globally speaking.

This book delivers a fresh approach to understanding cultural heritage amid an under-explored yet dynamic global force: the uncertainty of political transition.

Since the turn of the 21st century, transition has defined geopolitics across the globe - from a sharp rise in hybrid authoritarian-democratic regimes and an unsettling shift toward post-truth politics to the accelerating threat of technological warfare. As the past is constantly renegotiated to suit the ever-changing needs of the present, cultural heritage emerges as both beacon and battleground. Employing the versatile concept of contemporary liminality from political anthropology, this book provides critical heritage studies with a novel approach to understanding the interplay between heritage and transition. It illuminates how different political groups use cultural heritage as a tool for navigating the uncertainty of transitional crisis in their quests to legitimise power or to resist it. Drawing on a synthesis of two centuries of political transitions in Myanmar and interviews with military officials, pro-democracy leaders, cultural experts, and everyday people, an innovative critique which ventures into the backstage spaces of cultural production emerges.

The book makes a unique contribution by theorising a modality of 'liminal heritage', cultural expression that takes on qualities of its transitional-liminal context, such as absurdity, ambiguity, imitation, violence, and inversion, particularly potent in authoritarian contexts. It will appeal to scholars and researchers with interests in sociology, political anthropology, heritage studies, museum studies, and Asian studies.

The construction of the nation-state, the development of capitalism, and the modernization of society have historically been defined as masculine endeavors, with women on the sidelines. This biography of Juana Catarina Romero (1837-1915) shatters many of the stereotypes of nineteenth-century women and provides a new perspective of women's national agency during a time in which women could neither vote nor hold political office. Romero's breathtaking climb from illiterate cigarette peddler and Liberal spy to wealthy entrepreneur, philanthropist, and, finally, cacica (political boss) of the city of Tehuantepec, despite the opposition of male elites, reveals the growing fluidity of class, race, and ethnicity.

Francie Chassen-Lopez's fascinating biography of Romero offers rich insight into the complexities of modernization as it developed on the periphery of Mexico. Romero sought a Tehuantepec-style modernity, a modus vivendi between modernization, Catholicism, and isthmian Zapotec culture. Like her friend President Porfirio Diaz, Romero formed part of a group of ambitious Mexicans of modest origins, forged in civil war, who would build the Mexican nation-state.

Describes and analyzes the main divisions within Israel's heterogenous society.

In November 2022, Israeli citizens went to the polls to elect their representatives to the legislature, the Knesset, for the fifth time in less than four years. This was the culmination of a political crisis that began in November 2018 when Avigdor Lieberman resigned from his position as minister of defense after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to approve a significant military move in the Gaza Strip. Since then, Israel has been caught in a political whirlwind. In Search of Identity seeks to find out the nature of the crisis in Israel by analyzing the main rifts in Israeli society. It describes and analyzes the main splits within Israel's heterogenous society, arguing these divisions have social, ideological, and political consequences, the most important being a lack of common national interests and vision. The goal herein is to present a society and country that has long been searching for identity, not only geographically but also in terms of moral values, ethics, and integrity.

Needs That Bind reconsiders the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and the construction of new regimes in the decade after World War I, to understand the consequential connections that remained among the new republican regime in Turkey and neighboring French and British Mandates in Syria-Lebanon and Iraq. Orcun Can Okan examines how these new states and their people managed problems of state succession through diplomatic, administrative, and legal interactions with and between bureaucracies. He foregrounds pressing questions of nationality as they were experienced by a diverse group of social actors, men and women, rich and poor.

Okan tracks previously untapped Ottoman records, now spread across multiple regimes, to investigate claims to retirement pensions, alimony cases between former spouses who became nationals of different states, and disputes over land, property, and assets held in pious endowments. It is through these types of interactions and connections, he argues, that newly emerged post-Ottoman regimes materialized basic norms and understandings about nationality-an understanding more similar to subjecthood to state authority than rights-based citizenship. With an engaging, grounded historical narrative, this book contributes to thinking historically and critically about the tangible stakes and practical significance of nationality in times of profound political change and institutional instability.

This book examines walking together as a research method, a social practice, and a paradigmatic social phenomenon. Anchored in long-term fieldwork in post-apartheid South Africa, it explores how walking together exposes the dissonance between lived racialized power asymmetries and methodological ideals that assume universal accessibility of public space. In doing so, the book turns a critical eye toward recent developments in social ontology and phenomenology that underpin walking methodology, interrogating their own theoretical commitments, their claims to universality, as well as their attempts to account for power inequality. The book further shows how the history of walking is deeply intertwined with the history of participant observation, revealing how methodological ideals have been shaped by the embodied, uneven conditions of research on the ground. Combining peripatetic ethnography with theoretical reflections on pace bias, hidden particulars, and agency, the book builds a case for a more accountable walking methodology and offers conceptual tools for working with, rather than smoothing over, difference. By unsettling idealized accounts of walking together, this book offers a fresh approach to movement- based methods that centers lived complexity. It will appeal to scholars and students of anthropology, philosophy, sociology, urban studies, mobility, and methodology - as well as anyone curious about the politics of bodies in public.

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

The Routledge Handbook of State, Nation and Nationalism in South Asia analyses the nature of postcolonial South Asian states, examines enduring debates on nation and nationalism, and investigates the role of interconnected structure and agency in constructing an idea of nation and nationalism in respective South Asian countries.

Following an introduction by the editor, the book is structured in three parts: Part I, Nature of State; Part II, Imagining a Nation and Nation-Making; and Part III, Contesting Nationalism. Written by a mix of established and young scholars on South Asian politics and related disciplines, this handbook explores the following pertinent questions about the region: What is the nature of the State? Who identifies which identity groups are part of the nation and who are the "others"? What is the "dominant" form of nationalism? Why do identity-based differences and conflict exist?

A useful guide and reference work, this handbook will be of interest to students and researchers of South Asian Studies and related disciplines.

Dalit Studies: Key Terms and Concepts undertakes a critical engagement with nearly fifty foundational terms and concepts that have shaped-and continue to shape-the field of Dalit Studies.

The entries in the volume:

* Are lucid, accessible, and interdisciplinary-detailed in information, comprehensive in perspective, and critical in argumentation.

* Integrate quantitative and qualitative research methods by interfacing facts, data, and information with critical, textual, historical, and discourse analysis.

* Discuss the genealogy of each term or concept; provide relevant literary, cultural, and socio-political examples and references; and examine its contemporary significance.

A key text for an evolving field, this book foregrounds the fundamentals-the critical nuances and far-reaching implications of concepts central to Dalit Studies that are frequently invoked but rarely examined in depth. This volume will be essential reading for students and researchers of literary and critical theory, social and cultural theory, discrimination and ethnic studies, and South Asian studies.

Marx and the Politics of Need challenges one of the most pervasive habits in contemporary political theory and practice: treating needs as moral facts that sit outside of our politics, and which can be used to judge it. Against this depoliticising impulse, George Boss offers a provocative re-reading of Marx's writings on need, interpreting them not as didactic statements of an abstract philosophy, but as subversive interventions and provocations inseparable from his radical political activism.

Re-read in this way, those writings take on new, hitherto unexplored dimensions. Building on them, Boss develops a distinctive Marxian framework that recasts needs as constitutively political, exposing the conflicts, stakes, and possibilities that shape how needs are defined, contested, and met. The result is a fresh, deeply political perspective on human need at a time when the politics of need is both increasingly urgent and increasingly unruly. Opening up what had become ossified and closed down in contemporary social thought, the book thus fashions new opportunities for radical political agency and portends new social possibilities.

As such, it will appeal to scholars of politics, sociology, and philosophy exploring Marxist thought, economic justice, and the political dimensions of human need.

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

This book fleshes out the idea that everything about the city involves a fight for the good life. From how we conceptualize it to its streets and the fiber-optic cables beneath them, nothing is excluded from creating the cities we want to call home.

In turn, this book continues Shane Epting's ideas developed in Urban Enlightenment and Meaning in the Metropolis. It begins with an examination of how scholars define the term "city." He argues that while cities are often described as ecosystems or technologies, these views should be abandoned in most cases. Instead, Epting maintains that cities are groups of people capable of shaping the built environment and its supporting technologies, united by the goal of creating places where people can live their best lives. This is the fight for the city. That fight involves many elements vital to city living, such as streets, land use, historic preservation, and preparation for extreme weather. He argues that fighting for the city is not merely about control. Rather, its purpose is to create environments that foster human flourishing while safeguarding communities against disaster.

Creating Future Cities will be essential reading for scholars and advanced students in philosophy, urban studies, and architecture.

The volume explores how grassroots mobilization and resistance confront democratic backsliding, how institutional design and accountability shape resilience or decay, and how pressing policy challenges-from inequality and migration to social conflict and environmental governance-reshape political dynamics. Special attention is given to public administration, highlighting bureaucratic autonomy, civil service reform, decentralization, corruption, and transparency as crucial dimensions of state capacity and citizen trust. In addition, the Handbook situates regional politics within broader global influences, including international organizations, financial institutions, and social media, and provides detailed case studies of 20 countries.

An essential reference for scholars, students, and practitioners, this Handbook will appeal to those interested in Latin American politics, democratization, public administration, political economy, and global governance.

Key Features:

• 73 entries written by expert scholars
• Coverage of the last two decades of Latin American politics, including post-pandemic developments
• Analysis of six core dimensions: social actors, institutions, democracy, international actors, policy challenges, and public administration
• 20 country case studies

Containing Latin America provides a fresh interpretive history of the making and remaking of Latin America and the United States from the Long Cold War to the Global Cold War (1910-1991), exploring how geopolitics created enduring patterns in inter-American relations.

Berger argues that while each Latin American nation-state followed diverse historical trajectories-contrasting Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina-these differences unfolded within broader Cold War frameworks that shaped the entire hemisphere. Central to this analysis is an examination of how the state was understood during this period as a contested historical institution that provided the major arena for national and international politics, consistently determining which ideological, social, and cultural groups gained political access. The volume discusses pivotal moments including the Guatemalan Revolution, the Alliance for Progress, and the Cuban Revolution, and a compelling epilogue takes readers to the present day, examining the continued tension between visions of a common hemispheric future in a globalized world on the one hand and actual inter-American power relations on the other.

This concise yet informative history provides an invaluable resource for students, scholars, and general readers interested in Latin American history, global history, international relations, and development studies.

Against the backdrop of a shifting global order and strategic realignments, this book examines the past 63 years of Nigeria-Pakistan relations, exploring the factors that have shaped their domestic politics and foreign policy, as well as taking a broader look towards trilateral cooperation between China, Nigeria, and Pakistan.

Using a comparative political lens, this book addresses a significant gap in how Africa, particularly Nigeria, is perceived, studied, and taught in Pakistan. Chapters highlight the importance of people-to-people connections in the shaping of Nigeria-Pakistan relations over time, contributing to existing scholarship on South-South migration. Further, this book compares diverse political systems, civil-military relations, and entrenched corruption, along with the implications of these dynamics for human development and emerging economic growth. Beyond foreign relations, this book addresses the intricate and dynamic domestic politics of both countries through the theoretical framework of elitism, examining how certain actors have consistently shaped and re-shaped the democratic landscape in these nations.

Ultimately, addressing an underexplored area of international relations, this book will be of interest to scholars, postgraduate students, and researchers in the fields of international and comparative politics, regional and area studies, global southern political sociology, and migration studies.