On the operations of the Indian intelligence service in South Asia; a study.

The dramatic surge in regional integration schemes over the past two decades has been one of the most important developments in world politics. This book examines regionalism in South Asia, exploring the linkages between institutional structures, government capabilities, and domestic actors’ preferences to explain the dynamics of regional cooperation.

In recent decades, East Asia has gained prominence and has become synonymous with Asia, while other Asian regions, such as South and Southeast Asia, have been subsumed under it. The resultant overgeneralization has meant that significant aspects of the global ecological crisis as they affect these two regions have been overlooked. Chitra Sankaran refocuses the global lens on these two rapidly developing regions of Asia. Combining South Asian and Southeast Asian philosophical views and folk perspectives with mainstream ecocritical and ecofeminist theories, she generates a localized critical idiom that qualifies and subverts some established theoretical assumptions. This pioneering study, introducing a corpus of more than thirty ecofictions by women writers from twelve countries in South and Southeast Asia, examines how recent global threats to ecosystems, in both nature and culture, impact subdominant groups, including women. This new corpus reveals how women and subalterns engage with various aspects of critical ecologies. Using ecofeminist theory augmented by postcolonial and risk theories as the main theoretical framework, Sankaran argues that these women writers present unique perspectives that review Asian women’s relationships to human and nonhuman worlds.

This book, the first historical sociology of its kind concerning Bangladesh, examines the country's what-went-wrong-syndrome during the first fifty years of its existence, 1971-2021. The work is an exception to the traditional studies on modern and contemporary Bangladesh. The study is also a post-history of united Pakistan. Busting several myths, it sheds light on many known and unknown facts about the history, politics, society, and culture of the country. Besides being a twice-born country – liberated twice, from the British in 1947 and from West Pakistanis in 1971 – it is also an artificial entity suffering from acute crises of culture, development, governance, and identity. Hashmi attributes the culture and identity crises to the demographic byproducts of bad governance. In addition to being overpopulated, Bangladesh is also resource-poor and has one of the most unskilled populations, largely lumpen elements and peasants. According to Marx, these people represent “the unchanging remnants of the past”. The second round of independence empowered these lumpen classes, who suffer from an identity crisis and never learn the art of governance. The proliferation of pseudo-history about liberation has further divided the polity between the two warring tribes who only glorify their respective idols, Mujib and Zia. Pre-political and pre-capitalist peasants’ / lumpen elements’ lack of mutual trust and respect have further plagued Bangladesh, turning it into one of the least governable, corrupt, and inefficient countries. It is essential to replace the pre-capitalist order of the country run by multiple lumpen classes with capitalist and inclusive institutions.

In the scramble for Africa, Britain took a lion’s share of the continent. It occupied and controlled vast territories, including the Uganda Protectorate – which it ruled for 68 years. Early administrators in the region encountered the progressive kingdom of Buganda, which they incorporated into the British Empire. Under the guise of protection, indirect rule and patronage, Britain overran, plundered and disempowered the kingdom’s traditional institutions. On liquidation of the Empire, Buganda was coaxed into a problematic political order largely dictated from London. Today, 56 years after independence, the kingdom struggles to rediscover itself within Uganda’s fragile politics. Based on newly de-classified records, this book reconstructs a history of the machinations underpinning British imperial interests in (B)Uganda and the personalities who embodied colonial rule. It addresses Anglo-Uganda relations, demonstrating how Uganda’s politics reflects its colonial past, and the forces shaping its future. It is a far-reaching examination of British rule in (B)uganda, questioning whether it was designed for protection, for patronage or for plunder.