About the Editor: John Harriss is Program Director in the Development Studies Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a member of the School's Department of Anthropology. He was formerly Reader and Dean of the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is noted for his research on social change in South Asia and for work on agrarian change and development. He is author of Capitalism and Peasant Farming and editor of Sociology of Developing Societies (with Hamza Alavi) and of Rural Development.