The question of why some countries have democratic regimes and others do not is a significant issue in comparative politics. This book looks at India and Pakistan, two countries with clearly ...contrasting political regime histories, and presents an argument on why India is a democracy and Pakistan is not. Focusing on the specificities and the nuances of each state system, the author examines in detail the balance of authority and power between popular or elected politicians and the state apparatus through substantial historical analysis.
India and Pakistan are both large, multi-religious and multi-lingual countries sharing a geographic and historical space that in 1947, when they became independent from British rule, gave them a virtually indistinguishable level of both extreme poverty and inequality. All of those factors militate against democracy, according to most theories, and in Pakistan democracy did indeed fail very quickly after Independence. It has only been restored as a façade for military-bureaucratic rule for brief periods since then. In comparison, after almost thirty years of democracy, India had a brush with authoritarian rule, in the 1975-76 Emergency, and some analysts were perversely reassured that the India exception had been erased. But instead, after a momentous election in 1977, democracy has become stronger over the last thirty years.
Providing a comparative analysis of the political systems of India and Pakistan as well as a historical overview of the two countries, this textbook constitutes essential reading for students of South Asian History and Politics. It is a useful and balanced introduction to the politics of India and Pakistan.
1. Introduction: Why India is a Democracy and Pakistan is not (yet?) a Democracy Part 1 : The First Thirty Years of Independence 2. Inheritances of Colonial rule 3. Constitutional & Political Choices, in the initial years 4. Institutionalizing Democracy 5. Who (Really) Governs? Part 2: From 1977 to the present 6. 1977 as a Turning Point? 7. Religion as an Explanation 8. External Influences 9. Clearly Diverging Paths 10. Prospects for Path Convergence in the Next Decades 11. Conclusion
Philip Oldenburg is a Research Scholar at the South Asia Institute of Columbia University, where he has taught political science since 1977. He has done field research in India on local self-government, and on national elections and has been editor or co-editor of ten books in the India Briefing series.
'This book deals with a most interesting and rather unexplored problem: why has India become a robust democracy and Pakistan ended up by being a military-ruled country while both of them share similar cultural features and emerged from the same history (including the colonial experience)?
Philip Oldenburg has not only chosen an excellent topic, he is also very well informed and gets his facts right. To present such an ambitious comparison in this format is a tour de force.' -- Christophe Jaffrelot, Senior Research Fellow CNRS, France
'This fine book, full of insight and wisdom, reflects Philip Oldenburg’s long scholarly engagement with the study of South Asian politics, and offers a magisterial synthesis of a wide literature in developing what will surely stand as the definitive comparative analysis of the political systems of India and Pakistan.' -- John Harriss, School for International Studies, Simon Fraser University, Canada
'This is the first major attempt to solve the puzzle of democratic divergence by looking at two countries with near-identical cultural, political, and social origins. Dr. Oldenburg's book is uniquely informed by deep familiarity with both India and Pakistan, and by a solid grasp of the relevant scholarly literature. It is a landmark in both regional studies and comparative political analysis, and will inform all future work on the democratization process.' -- Stephen P. Cohen, Brookings Institution, USA
"It's impossible for this review to do full justice to this richly-detailed, cool-headed, well-grounded must read for anyone interested in South Asia--or in the study of democracy." -- Patricia Lee Sharpe, Whirled View
"The book is carefully researched, well documented, and clearly argued...Policy analysts, journalists, and students interested in the contemporary politics of India and Pakistan will benefit considerably from a careful perusal of this book." -- Sumit Ganguly, H-Asia
"This book offers a nuanced assessment which shows that while India and Pakistan have not converged on an authoritarian model, they have much in common... Thoughtful questions are asked, difficult issues considered and a large amount of material is synthesised. Scholars, students and teachers alike will find this book very useful." - Andrew Wyatt, University of Bristol, UK; Pacific Affairs: Volume 85, No. 2 - June 2012
The first modern jew Schwartz, Daniel B
2012., 20120226, 2012, 2012-02-26, 20120101
eBook
Pioneering biblical critic, theorist of democracy, and legendary conflater of God and nature, Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in ...1656 for his "horrible heresies" and "monstrous deeds." Yet, over the past three centuries, Spinoza's rupture with traditional Jewish beliefs and practices has elevated him to a prominent place in genealogies of Jewish modernity.The First Modern Jewprovides a riveting look at how Spinoza went from being one of Judaism's most notorious outcasts to one of its most celebrated, if still highly controversial, cultural icons, and a powerful and protean symbol of the first modern secular Jew.
Ranging from Amsterdam to Palestine and back again to Europe, the book chronicles Spinoza's posthumous odyssey from marginalized heretic to hero, the exemplar of a whole host of Jewish identities, including cosmopolitan, nationalist, reformist, and rejectionist. Daniel Schwartz shows that in fashioning Spinoza into "the first modern Jew," generations of Jewish intellectuals--German liberals, East European maskilim, secular Zionists, and Yiddishists--have projected their own dilemmas of identity onto him, reshaping the Amsterdam thinker in their own image. The many afterlives of Spinoza are a kind of looking glass into the struggles of Jewish writers over where to draw the boundaries of Jewishness and whether a secular Jewish identity is indeed possible. Cumulatively, these afterlives offer a kaleidoscopic view of modern Jewish cultureand a vivid history of an obsession with Spinoza that continues to this day.
Vanished history Sniegon, Tomas
2014., 20140515, 2014, 2014-04-08, Volume:
18
eBook, Book
Bohemia and Moravia, today part of the Czech Republic, was the first territory with a majority of non-German speakers occupied by Hitler's Third Reich on the eve of the World War II. Tens of ...thousands of Jewish inhabitants in the so called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia soon felt the tragic consequences of Nazi racial politics. Not all Czechs, however,remained passive bystanders during the genocide. After the destruction of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39, Slovakia became a formally independent but fully subordinate satellite of Germany. Despite the fact it was not occupied until 1944, Slovakia paid Germany to deport its own Jewish citizens to extermination camps.
About 270,000 out of the 360,000 Czech and Slovak casualties of World War II were victims of the Holocaust. Despite these statistics, the Holocaust vanished almost entirely from post-war Czechoslovak, and later Czech and Slovak, historical cultures. The communist dictatorship carried the main responsibility for this disappearance, yet the situation has not changed much since the fall of the communist regime. The main questions of this study are how and why the Holocaust was excluded from the Czech and Slovak history.
In Faith in Freedom, Andrew R. Polk argues that the American civil religion so many have identified as indigenous to the founding ideology was, in fact, the result of a strategic campaign of ...religious propaganda. Far from being the natural result of the nation's religious underpinning or the later spiritual machinations of conservative Protestants, American civil religion and the resultant "Christian nationalism" of today were crafted by secular elites in the middle of the twentieth century. Polk's genealogy of the national motto, "In God We Trust, " revises the very meaning of the contemporary American nation. Polk shows how Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, working with politicians, advertising executives, and military public relations experts, exploited denominational religious affiliations and beliefs in order to unite Americans during the Second World War and, then, the early Cold War. Armed opposition to the Soviet Union was coupled with militant support for free economic markets, local control of education and housing, and liberties of speech and worship. These preferences were cultivated by state actors so as to support a set of right-wing positions including anti- communism, the Jim Crow status quo, and limited taxation and regulation. Faith in Freedom is a pioneering work of American religious history. By assessing the ideas, policies, and actions of three US Presidents and their White House staff, Polk sheds light on the origins of the ideological, religious, and partisan divides that describe the American polity today.
Bush's Wars H. Anderson, Terry
2011, 2011-05-14
eBook
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush told advisor Karl Rove, "I am here for a reason, and this is how we're going to be judged." Anderson provides this ...judgment in this sweeping, authoritative account of Bush's War on Terror and his twin interventions. Carefully researched and briskly narrated, Bush's Wars provides the single-volume balanced history that we have waited for. This new paperback edition takes the story through the first Obama term, covering our exit from Iraq and the ongoing drawdown in Afghanistan.
Looking beyond Putin to understand how today's Russia actually works
Media and public discussion tends to understand Russian politics as a direct reflection of Vladimir Putin's seeming omnipotence or ...Russia's unique history and culture. Yet Russia is remarkably similar to other autocracies—and recognizing this illuminates the inherent limits to Putin's power. Weak Strongman challenges the conventional wisdom about Putin's Russia, highlighting the difficult trade-offs that confront the Kremlin on issues ranging from election fraud and repression to propaganda and foreign policy.
Drawing on three decades of his own on-the-ground experience and research as well as insights from a new generation of social scientists that have received little attention outside academia, Timothy Frye reveals how much we overlook about today's Russia when we focus solely on Putin or Russian exceptionalism. Frye brings a new understanding to a host of crucial questions: How popular is Putin? Is Russian propaganda effective? Why are relations with the West so fraught? Can Russian cyber warriors really swing foreign elections? In answering these and other questions, Frye offers a highly accessible reassessment of Russian politics that highlights the challenges of governing Russia and the nature of modern autocracy.
Rich in personal anecdotes and cutting-edge social science, Weak Strongman offers the best evidence available about how Russia actually works.
How do writers of contemporary fiction incorporate Shakespeare - the man, his work and his cultural legacy? This collection brings together some of the leading voices in the scholarship of ...Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation to examine the ways in which writers have used literary culture's most prominent historical figure to their own ends since the year 2000. The essays consider the representation of the man himself, the rethinking of his stories - often in pointed defiance of the original - and explorations of the plays radically repositioned in time and space. In the process the collection reveals which versions of Shakespeare are most current in contemporary culture and education, even as they remake them in the terms of the present, often exploiting the new notions of genre, of publishing technologies, and of political identity which have evolved so drastically since the turn of the last century.
Ali Mirsepassi's book presents a powerful challenge to the dominant media and scholarly construction of radical Islamist politics, and their anti-Western ideology, as a purely Islamic phenomenon ...derived from insular, traditional and monolithic religious 'foundations'. It argues that the discourse of political Islam has strong connections to important and disturbing currents in Western philosophy and modern Western intellectual trends. The work demonstrates this by establishing links between important contemporary Iranian intellectuals and the central influence of Martin Heidegger's philosophy. We are also introduced to new democratic narratives of modernity linked to diverse intellectual trends in the West and in non-Western societies, notably in India, where the ideas of John Dewey have influenced important democratic social movements. As the first book to make such connections, it promises to be an important contribution to the field and will do much to overturn some pervasive assumptions about the dichotomy between East and West.
Timur (or Tamerlane) is famous as the fourteenth-century conqueror of much of Central Eurasia and the founder of the Timurid dynasty. His reputation lived on in his native lands and reappeared some ...three centuries after his death in the form of fictional biographies, authored anonymously in Persian and Turkic. These biographies have become part of popular culture. Despite a direct continuity in their production from the eighteenth century to the present, they remain virtually unknown to people outside the region. This remarkable and rigorous scholarly appraisal of the legendary biographies of Tamerlane is the first of its kind in any language. The book sheds light not only on the character of Tamerlane and how he was remembered and championed by many generations after his demise, but also on the era in which the biographies were written and how they were conceived and received by the local populace during an age of crisis in their own history.
