At the point of independence in 1948, Sri Lanka was projected to be a success story in the developing world. However, in July 1983 a violent ethnic conflict which pitted the Sinhalese against the Tamils began, and did not come to an end until 2009. This conflict led to nearly 50,000 combatant deaths and approximately 40,000 civilian deaths, as well as almost 1 million internally-displaced refugees and to the permanent migration abroad of nearly 130,000 civilians.

With a focus on Sri Lanka, this book explores the political economy of ethnic conflict, and examines how rival political...

The field of Bollywood studies has remained predominantly critical, theoretical and historical in focus. This book brings together qualitative and quantitative approaches to tackle empirical questions focusing on the relationship between soft power, hybridity, cinematic texts, and audiences.

Adopting a critical-transcultural framework that examines the complex power relations that are manifested through globalized production and consumption practices, the book approaches the study of popular Hindi cinema from three broad perspectives: transcultural production contexts, content...

The Muslim shrine is at the crossroad of many processes involving society and culture. It is the place where a saint often a Sufi - is buried, and it works as a main social factor, with the power of integrating or rejecting people and groups, and as a mirror reflecting the intricacies of a society.

The book discusses the role of popular Islam in structuring individual and collective identities in contemporary South Asia. It identifies similarities and differences between the worship of saints and the pattern of religious attendance to tombs and mausoleums in South Asian Sufism and...

Developing a distinctive theoretical framework on civil society, this book examines how Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) contribute towards democratization in India and what conditions facilitate or inhibit their contribution. It assesses three different kinds of politics within civil society liberal pluralist, neo-Marxist, and communitarian which have had different implications in relation to democratization.

By making use of in-depth empirical analysis and comparative case studies of three developmental NGOs that work among the tribal communities in the socio-historical context...

The role of the home, the domestic sphere and the intimate, ethno-cultural identities that are cultivated within it, are critical to understanding the polemical constructions of country and city; tradition and modernity; and regionalism and cosmopolitanism. The home is fundamental to ideas of the homeland that give nationalism its imaginative form and its political trajectory.

This book explores positions that are vital to ideas of national belonging through the history of colonial, bourgeois self-fashioning and post colonial identity construction in Sri Lanka. The country remains...

India's partition in 1947 and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 saw the displacement and resettling of millions of Muslims and Hindus, resulting in profound transformations across the region. A third of the region's population sought shelter across new borders, almost all of them resettling in the Bengal delta itself. A similar number were internally displaced, while others moved to the Middle East, North America and Europe.

Using a creative interdisciplinary approach combining historical, sociological and anthropological approaches to migration and diaspora this book...

Islamic Banking and Finance (IBF) has become a growing force over the past three decades, with Pakistan being one of the IBF pioneers by converting to an 'interest-free' banking system in 1985. However, since independence in 1947, there has been continual tension over Pakistan's essential character, between Islamic Minimalists, who favour a Modernist interpretation of Islam, and those who favour an Islamic Maximalist interpretation that sees Pakistan as a model Islamic state.

This book analyses the push to Islamize Pakistan and its financial system by Islamic revivalists,...

Offering a comparative case study of transitional justice processes in Afghanistan and Nepal, this book critically evaluates the way the "local" is consulted in post-conflict efforts toward peace and reconciliation. It argues that there is a tendency in transitional justice efforts to contain the discussion of the "local" within religious and cultural parameters, thus engaging only with a "static local," as interpreted by certain local stakeholders.

Based on data collected through interviews and participant observation carried out in the civil societies of the respective countries, this...

Exploring the quality of capitalist development in provincial India in the post-Green Revolution period, this book argues that the low quality of capitalist development (India s non-farm economy made of villages and small towns) is the joint outcome of the informal economic organisation that is strongly biased in favour of capital and of the complex stratification of the workforce along class and caste lines.

Focusing on the processes of growth induced by the introduction of the high-yield varieties in agriculture, the book demonstrates that a low-road pattern of capitalist development...

In the past ten years or so, displacement by development projects has gone on almost untamed under the globalization pressures to meet the demand for land from local and increasingly foreign investors. Focusing on India, this book looks at the complex issue of resettling people who are displaced for the sake of development.

The book discusses how the affected farming communities are fiercely opposing the development projects that often leave them worse off than before, and how this conflict is a matter of serious concern for the planners, as it could discourage potential capital inflows...