By Guy Standing

In this, the shift away from the possibilities of ‘education commons’ has been towards facilitating education to serve the needs of industry and a larger economy in which the learner becomes primarily a worker, an employee, and a subject of the larger capitalist system. Human capital, now accepted uncritically in most international circuits and policies (including India), focuses on enabling ‘money-making, employability, competitiveness and the fetish of the age, economic growth’ (p. 62). In this shift, Standing highlights the loss of the key foundations of what liberal, classical Western education once stood for: Paideia (search for truth); Arete (moral virtue); Schole (learning with public participation in the life of polis); Praxis (practice as an end in itself); Parrhesia (speaking truth to power); Matthesis (moral or ethical thinking skills);


Reviewed by: AR Vasavi
By Jean-Pierre Filiu

A History, one of the authoritative works on this contested strip of land, is Professor of Middle East Studies at a leading French University, and a well-known columnist. He has visited Gaza multiple times through the decades and knows the land, its history and its inhabitants intimately. However, Filiu undertook this clandestine and imperilled visit after the most recent and savage war to see for himself the site of his study; to check if anything at all remained of the civilization.


Reviewed by: Rohini Mokashi-Punekar
By Patrick Bixby

There were more than 1.5 million émigrés, stateless persons who had become refugees, deprived of citizenship, denaturalized and denationalized. (The 2025 figure is nearly 120 million; 43 million refugees and 68 million internally displaced.) The next year, in 1921, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, a zoologist and oceanographer, Nobel Peace Prize winner, proposed a supranational passport. The eponymous Nansen passport offered a lifeline to those thus cut loose. Marc Chagall, Igor Stravinsky and Vladimir Nabokov were among countless other celebrities who were beneficiaries. The passports could not be cancelled; the holder was protected from deportation; but it did not automatically confer the right to work and notice for travel had to be given in advance. Refugee law emerged. Alongside came intolerance,


Reviewed by: TCA Rangachari
By Indira Jaising with Ritu Menon

Running through the later chapters is a profound anxiety about the fate of constitutional democracy in contemporary India. Jaising writes about citizenship, secularism, civil liberties, judicial accountability and the treatment of dissenters with the urgency of someone who believes that foundational constitutional commitments are under strain. Her discussions of the Citizenship Amendment Act, the National Register of Citizens,


Reviewed by: Sahil Hussain Choudhury
Edited by Yatindra Singh Sisodiya, Uday Singh Rajput, Pushpendra Kumar Mishra

Vijay Shankar Choudhry has evaluated the journey of the idea and practice of federalism in postcolonial India. The idea of federalism faced different stages and challenges, and after diverse experiences now scholars and policy makers have accepted the idea of cooperative federalism. Sweety Sinha differentiates between competitive and cooperative federalism and argues that in recent times one can find the existence of competitive-cooperative federalism in India, where the Centre and different States are competing for foreign investment and also cooperating on different aspects of governance and welfare. However, another contributor,


Reviewed by: Kamal Nayan Choubey
By Zoramthanga

He sheds light on its planning and the major sites of conflict, besides making a realistic assessment of its successes and failures. He also dwells on the counter-insurgency operation of the Indian army. It was to suppress this very uprising that the Indian Air Force launched an attack within its own territory, the only such instance to date. The author mentions many of the places where the air force struck. The army’s strategy of grouping villages into guarded enclaves is also critically discussed. While its purported objective was to shield villagers from the conflict, according to him the real reason was to cut off supplies and information to the rebels.


Reviewed by: Abhinav Pankaj Borbora