Violent Non-State Actors in World Politics
Klejda Mulaj
Hurst (2010)
Rs8,493
The 2008 attacks on Mumbai were carried out by a Pakistani militant group known as Lashkar i-Taiba, termed a ‘non-state actor’ by Pakistan’s president, Asif Zardari. In most cases, violent non-state actors (VNSAs) rise as a state fails, resorting to organised attacks as a brutally effective method for advancing their political aims and other goals. Currently operating in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, and Sudan, VNSAs can take the form of national liberation movements confronting an occupying force; insurgents engaged in protracted political and military struggles that eat at the power and legitimacy of a ruling government; terrorists who use threats or violent acts to effect political change; irregular yet recognisable armed forces working within an ungoverned area or failing state; and mercenary militias, such as those used by Shell, or army-loaded units, such as those used in the Niger Delta. The essays in this volume map the relationship between VNSAs and the state, following the political, economic, and social processes that contribute to the emergence of these groups and how VNSAs in turn use these processes to trigger a crisis of the state. Contributors locate the point in which violence becomes desirable to the non-state actor and whether this alters the purpose of the relationship between VNSAs and the state, and they track the influence that the former can have in reshaping the governments they tear down. One of the first resources to describe these groups in full, this volume explains the internal structure of VNSAs, their recruitment strategies and leading ideologies, the characteristics and partnerships that allow them to adapt and prosper, and the fundamental similarities and differences between groups.
Klejda Mulaj is lecturer in International Relations and Leverhulme Fellow in Ethno-national Politics in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Exeter. She is the author of The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing: Nation-State Building and Provision of In/Security in the Twentieth-Century Balkans.
White Mutiny. British Military Culture in India, 1825-1875
Peter Stanley
C Hurst & Co (1998)
Rs2,879
This study traces the composition and culture of the British East India Company’s Europeans in the 30 years preceding the Indian uprising of 1857, and the Europeans’ protest against their subsequent incorporation into the British Army.
In the White Mutiny of 1859-61—the largest revolt the British army ever faced—European troops operating on behalf of the East India Company rebelled against their transfer to the service of the Queen of England. Through an analysis of the White Mutiny, Peter Stanley provides a portrait of emerging working-class consciousness among the troops and reveals how the British army, the preeminent icon of English imperialism, first maintained, then lost, control over a vast and generally hostile sub-continent.
In cantonment offices in Meerut and Calcutta, we find unimpaired the class distinctions and aspirations of contemporary Britain. Penetrating the hidden worlds of the barrack room and the officers’ mess, White Mutiny demonstrates the intimate relationship between the military and the social history of British culture in India, and how awareness of each can enrich the other.
A military historian working at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, Peter Stanley is editor of What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? and author of Bomber Command, Air Battle Europe, 1939- 1945.
Muslims and the State in the Post-9/11 West
Edited by Erik Bleich
Routledge (2010)
Rs12,740
From the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London transportation bombings, dramatic events of recent years have generated security concerns about Muslim communities in the West. These have added an additional layer to the tensions surrounding Muslim immigrant integration and have generated heated discussions about how governments should address such challenges. This collection assembles leading scholars to address four central themes related to the interactions between Muslims and states in contemporary Europe and North America. Its authors investigate the timing of Muslims’ emergence as a perceived security risk; they review the variety of actions undertaken in response to the new concerns; they assess the effectiveness of different kinds of policies in managing the security and social challenges that governmental actors observe; and they identify relevant Muslim sub-groups and their highly divergent views on recent developments. This book thus serves as a foundation for understanding an issue of critical importance and as a touchstone for advancing public, policy, and scholarly debate about Muslim-state interactions.
This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
Erik Bleich is Associate Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College in Vermont. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles on European policymaking in the areas of race, ethnicity, and religion. His book Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policymaking since the 1960s was published in 2003, and he is currently at work on a book entitled The Freedom to be Racist?
Britain and Indian Nationalism: The Imprint of Ambiguity 1929-1942
D. A. Low
Cambridge (1997)
Rs7,644
On the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence Anthony Low examines anew the distinctive character of perhaps the most momentous struggle of the twentieth century. He shows how the struggle was conditioned by the ambiguity of the British position, determined to hold fast to their Indian empire yet reluctant to offer unyielding resistance to their nationalist opponents. Britain and Indian Nationalism makes a major contribution to the historiography of modern India, to Britain’s relations with its empire, and to the history of decolonization in the twentieth century.
India’s struggle for independence was arguably the most momentous of the twentieth century, and central to it was the generation of powerful nationalist forces. In a series of detailed studies Anthony Low shows how the ambiguity of the British position conditioned the distinctive character of this struggle: how the British determination to hold fast their Indian empire (unlike the Americans in the Philippines) prior to 1942 was nonetheless complemented by a reluctance to resist their nationalist opponents in the unyielding ways of the French in Vietnam and the Dutch in Indochina. Much that Gandhi did, Professor Low concludes, would have been unnecessary in the Philippines and impossible in Indonesia and Vietnam, but astutely fitted the peculiar conditions of the nationalist struggle against the British in India.
Donald Anthony Low, who passed away in February 2015, could write with ease about African history as he could about South Asia. A distinguished historian, teacher and an excellent administrator, Low was a mentor to some of the finest historians of our times.
Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied
Toby Dodge
Columbia University Press (2003), Rs4,246
If we think there is a fast solution to changing the governance of Iraq, warned U.S. Marine General Anthony Zinni in the months before the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, “then we don’t understand history.” Never has the old line about those who fail to understand the past being condemned to repeat it seemed more urgently relevant than in Iraq today, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the Iraqi people, the Middle East region, and the world. Examining the construction of the modern state of Iraq under the auspices of the British empire—the first attempt by a Western power to remake Mesopotamia in its own image—renowned Iraq expert Toby Dodge uncovers a series of shocking parallels between the policies of a declining British empire and those of the current American administration.
Between 1920 and 1932, Britain endeavored unsuccessfully to create a modern democratic state from three former provinces of the Ottoman Empire, which it had conquered and occupied during the First World War. Caught between the conflicting imperatives of controlling a region of great strategic importance (Iraq straddled the land and air route between British India and the Mediterranean) and reconstituting international order through the liberal ideal of modern state sovereignty under the League of Nations Mandate system, British administrators undertook an extremely difficult task. To compound matters, they did so without the benefit of detailed information about the people and society they sought to remake. Blinded by potent cultural stereotypes and subject to mounting pressures from home, these administrators found themselves increasingly dependent on a mediating class of shaikhs to whom they transferred considerable power and on whom they relied for the maintenance of order. When order broke down, as it routinely did, the British turned to the airplane. (This was Winston Churchill’s lasting contribution to the British enterprise in Iraq: the concerted use of air power—of what would in a later context be called “shock and awe”—to terrorize and subdue dissident factions of the Iraqi people.)
Ultimately, Dodge shows, the state the British created held all the seeds of a violent, corrupt, and relentlessly oppressive future for the Iraqi people, one that has continued to unfold. Like the British empire eight decades before, the United States and Britain have taken upon themselves today the grand task of transforming Iraq and, by extension, the political landscape of the Middle East. Dodge contends that this effort can succeed only with a combination of experienced local knowledge, significant deployment of financial and human resources, and resolute staying power. Already, he suggests, ominous signs point to a repetition of the sequence of events that led to the long nightmare of Saddam Hussein’s murderous tyranny.
Toby Dodge is a senior research fellow at the ESRC Centre for the Study of Globalisation at the University of Warwick, England, and an associate fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London. He has acted as a consultant on Iraq for ABC News and has written for the Guardian. He is coeditor, with Stephen Simon, of Iraq at the Crossroads: State and Society in the Shadow of Regime Change and, with Richard Higgott, of Globalisation and the Middle East: Islam, Economics, Society, and Politics.