In 2004, I went around the research institution where I work in search of a discussant for a paper on the historical shaping of public consent for family planning in 20th century Kerala. This was interdisciplinary work which reexamined some of the received wisdom of demography pertaining to Kerala from a critical historical perspective.
Conflict Society and Peacebuilding: Comparative Perspectives is an edited volume of eleven essays, which explores the linkages between civil society, conflict and peace, drawing on empirical studies from regions in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe.
The Eagle and the Elephant is the best book on Indo-US relations written by an insider in the US administration. Vickery holds a bipartisan American view largely sympathetic to Indian concerns. It surpasses Denis Kux’s magisterial book—Estranged Democracies.
Mappila Muslims constitute more than ninety percent of the Muslim population in Kerala. The majority of these Muslims live in the northern part of Kerala, called Malabar region. Historians and sociologists like Roland E. Miller, Stephen F. Dale, K.N. Panikkar, Hussain Randathani and many others have written about the socio-political and cultural world of Malabar Muslims from various perspectives.
Islam is the predominant religion of contemporary Africa and Asia and has a large following in Australasia, Europe and North America. According to reliable demo-graphic sources in as many as fifty-one nation-states scattered over the continents of Asia, Africa and Europe followers of Islam are in a majority—in as many as forty of them the Muslim population being above 80%.
The existing vast scholarship on collective identities in India, whether it deals with caste, creed or nationalism, is dominated by a concern with their modern ‘construction’, a process generally seen as having occurred during the colonial period.
Sociality is a fact of human existence,however, not an unproblematic one.Even after centuries of contemplation, it is still as enigmatic as ever. With the advent of modernity, tension surfaced between the individual and the community to which the individual belonged.
With the passing of the 73rd amendment of the Constitution which empowered a three-tiered local (self) government system or panchayat raj, attention has been focused on the success of decentralization in India. Millions of local politicians have been elected with constitutional authority into the panchayat raj system since 1993.
Given the centrality that elections have come to occupy in the political fabric of this country, it is not surprising that election studies are one of the prominent and oldest research traditions in political science in India.
The metamorphosis of Sino-Indian interaction into a developing adversary relationship from 1959 onwards and the climax of this process which was reached in 1962, when Peking resorted to a military option and out-manoeuvred New Delhi in a border war, has been a subject of study from several points of view, both by Indian and foreign scholars.
Peter Ronald de Souza in his foreword sees the book’s central contribution in providing a ‘frame within which to understand the troublesome question as to how a democracy should respond when a group acquires a voice, when that voice be-comes louder, and when it perhaps grows to be a cacophony?’
The question of the nation—its presence or absence, expansion or stagnation,exclusivity or everydayness, or its accuracy and ambiguity, has quite often rendered the concept difficult and unyielding.