The author participated in the historic Victory Day at Tahrir Square through a surprise Valentine gift from her Egyptian born husband Amr Abdalla. The world of history, politics, cultures and culinary details are woven with dexterity and creativity that makes her narrative a wholesome read.

As in the cascading of water, violence and nonviolence can cascade down from commanding heights of power (as in waterfalls), up from powerless peripheries, and can undulate to spread horizontally (flowing from one space to another). As with containing water, conflict cannot be contained without asking crucial questions about which variables might cause it to cascade from the top-down, bottom up and from the middle-out. The book shows how violence cascades from state to state. Empirical research has shown that nations with a neighbor at war are more likely to have a civil war themselves (Sambanis 2001). More importantly in the analysis of this book, war cascades from hot spot to hot spot within and between states (Autesserre 2010, 2014). The key to understanding cascades of hot spots is in the interaction between local and macro cleavages and alliances (Kalyvas 2006). The analysis exposes the folly of asking single-level policy questions like do the benefits and costs of a regime change in Iraq justify an invasion? We must also ask what other violence might cascade from an invasion of Iraq? The cascades concept is widespread in the physical and biological sciences with cascades in geology, particle physics and the globalization of contagion. The past two decades has seen prominent and powerful applications of the cascades idea to the social sciences (Sunstein 1997; Gladwell 2000; Sikkink 2011). In his discussion of ethnic violence, James Rosenau (1990) stressed that the image of turbulence developed by mathematicians and physicists could provide an important basis for understanding the idea of bifurcation and related ideas of complexity, chaos, and turbulence in complex systems. He classified the bifurcated systems in contemporary world politics as the multicentric system and the statecentric system. Each of these affects the others in multiple ways, at multiple levels, and in ways that make events enormously hard to predict (Rosenau 1990, 2006). He replaced the idea of events with cascades to describe the event structures that 'gather momentum, stall, reverse course, and resume anew as their repercussions spread among whole systems and subsystems' (1990: 299). Through a detailed analysis of case studies in South Asia, that built on John Braithwaite's twenty-five year project Peacebuilding Compared, and coding of conflicts in different parts of the globe, we expand Rosenau's concept of global turbulence and images of cascades. In the cascades of violence in South Asia, we demonstrate how micro-events such as localized riots, land-grabbing, pervasive militarization and attempts to assassinate political leaders are linked to large scale macro-events of global politics. We argue in order to prevent future conflicts there is a need to understand the relationships between history, structures and agency; interest, values and politics; global and local factors and alliances.

Women are at the heart of civil society organizations (CSOs) that challenge oppressive practices at a local and global level and develop outstanding entrepreneurial activities. Yet CSO research tends to ignore considerations of gender, and the rich history of activist feminist organizations is rarely examined. This collection corrects that oversight, exploring the nexus between the emancipation of women and their roles in CSOs. Featuring contrasting, international studies from a wide range of contributors, it covers emerging issues such as the role of social media in organizing, the significance of religion in many cultural contexts, activism in Eastern Europe, and the impact of environmental degradation on women's lives. Asking whether involvement in CSOs offers a potential source of emancipation for women or maintains the status quo, this book will have an impact on both equal-opportunity policy and practice.

This work of research by Taj Hashmi puts the issue of women's position in society in historical as well as Islamic perspectives to relate it to the objective conditions in Bangladesh. In eight illuminating chapters, he narrates how Quranic edicts about women have through the ages been misinterpreted by the power elites and the mullahs to suppress women. Even NGOs are not immune from exploiting them. Hope, according to the author, lies in the literacy and economic self-reliance of the Bangladeshi women.

Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam chronicles the experiences, identity and achievements of enslaved black people in Morocco from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Chouki El Hamel argues that we cannot rely solely on Islamic ideology as the key to explain social relations and particularly the history of black slavery in the Muslim world, for this viewpoint yields an inaccurate historical record of the people, institutions and social practices of slavery in Northwest Africa. El Hamel focuses on black Moroccans' collective experience beginning with their enslavement to serve as the loyal army of the Sultan Isma'il. By the time the Sultan died in 1727, they had become a political force, making and unmaking rulers well into the nineteenth century. The emphasis on the political history of the black army is augmented by a close examination of the continuity of black Moroccan identity through the musical and cultural practices of the Gnawa.

"DLP, Developmental Leadership Program; Australian Aid; Oxfam."