Madrasas in West Bengal

By Nilanjana Gupta

Based on extensive fieldwork and archival records, this book traces the emergence and flourishing of madrasas and the myriad ways in which they impact upon local Muslim communities, especially in West Bengal. It also addresses issues of identity, ‘secular’ education and gender in this context, while exploring the myths that surround these institutions. Amongst other things, it interrogates why Muslim communities prefer sending their sons to government schools to receive a secular education, while the daughters are sent to madrasas.

ISBN: 9780415544597

Published June 30 2009 by Routledge India.

A Survey

By Stephen C. Berkwitz

South Asian Buddhism presents a comprehensive historical survey of the full range of Buddhist traditions throughout South Asia from the beginnings of the religion up to the present. Starting with narratives on the Buddha’s life and foundational teachings from ancient India, the book proceeds to discuss the rise of Buddhist monastic organizations and texts among the early Mainstream Buddhist schools. It considers the origins and development of Mahayana Buddhism in South Asia, surveys the development of Buddhist Tantra in South Asia and outlines developments in Buddhism as found in Sri Lanka and Nepal following the decline of the religion in India. Berkwitz also importantly considers the effects of colonialism and modernity on the revivals of Buddhism across South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

South Asian Buddhism offers a broad, yet detailed perspective on the history, culture, and thought of the various Buddhist traditions that developed in South Asia. Incorporating findings from the latest research on Buddhist texts and culture, this work provides a critical, historically based survey of South Asian Buddhism that will be useful for students, scholars, and general readers.

Stephen C. Berkwitz is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Missouri State University, USA.

ISBN: 9780415452496

Published June 29 2009 by Routledge.

By Laura Dales

In contemporary Japan there is much ambivalence about women’s roles, and the term "feminism" is not widely recognised or considered relevant. Nonetheless, as this book shows, there is a flourishing feminist movement in contemporary Japan. The book investigates the features and effects of feminism in contemporary Japan, in non-government (NGO) women’s groups, government-run women’s centres and the individual activities of feminists Haruka Yoko and Kitahara Minori. Based on two years of fieldwork conducted in Japan and drawing on extensive interviews and ethnographic data, it argues that the work of individual activists and women’s organisations in Japan promotes real and potential change to gender roles and expectations among Japanese women. It explores the ways that feminism is created, promoted and limited among Japanese women, and advocates a broader construction of what the feminist movement is understood to be and a rethinking of the boundaries of feminist identification. It also addresses the impact of legislation, government bureaucracy, literature and the internet as avenues of feminist development, and details the ways which these promote agency – the ability to act – among Japanese women.

ISBN: 9780415459419

Published June 29 2009 by Routledge.

Transforming Conflicts and Building Peace

Edited by Dale Bagshaw, Elisabeth Porter

This book examines mediation in connection with peacebuilding in the Asia-Pacific region, providing practical examples which either highlight the weaknesses within certain mediation approaches or demonstrate best-practice.

The authors explore the extent to which current ideas and practices of mediation in the Asia-Pacific region are dominated by Western understandings and critically challenge the appropriateness of such thinking. Featuring a range of case studies on Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, Vietnam, China, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, this book has three main aims:

• To challenge dominant Western practices and ways of thinking on mediation that currently are being imposed in the Asia-Pacific region;
• To develop culturally-fluent and socially just mediation alternatives that build upon local, traditional or religious approaches;
• To situate mediation within ideas and practices on peacebuilding.

Making a unique contribution to peace and conflict studies literature by explicitly linking mediation and peacebuilding practices, this book is a vital text for students and scholars in these fields.

ISBN: 9780415489676

Published June 29 2009 by Routledge.

The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday’s "Mao: The Unknown Story"

Edited by Gregor Benton, Lin Chun

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday was published in 2005 to a great fanfare. The book portrays Mao as a monster – equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin – and a fool who won power by native cunning and ruled by terror. It received a rapturous welcome from reviewers in the popular press and rocketed to the top of the worldwide bestseller list. Few works on China by writers in the West have achieved its impact.

Reviews by serious China scholars, however, tended to take a different view. Most were sharply critical, questioning its authority and the authors’ methods , arguing that Chang and Halliday’s book is not a work of balanced scholarship, as it purports to be, but a highly selective and even polemical study that sets out to demonise Mao.

This book brings together sixteen reviews of Mao: The Unknown Story – all by internationally well-regarded specialists in modern Chinese history, and published in relatively specialised scholarly journals. Taken together they demonstrate that Chang and Halliday’s portrayal of Mao is in many places woefully inaccurate. While agreeing that Mao had many faults and was responsible for some disastrous policies, they conclude that a more balanced picture is needed.

ISBN: 9780415493291

Published June 29 2009 by Routledge.

By Naheem Jabbar

A critical examination of post-colonial Indian history-writing.

In the years preceding formal Independence from British colonial rule, Indians found themselves responding to the panorama of sin and suffering that constituted the modern present in a variety of imaginative ways. This book is a critical analysis of the uses made of India’s often millennial past by nationalist ideologues who sought a specific solution to India’s predicament on its way to becoming a post-colonial state. From independence to the present, it considers the competing visions of India’s liberation from her apocalyptical present to be found in the thinking of Gandhi, V. D. Savarkar, Nehru and B. R. Ambedkar as well as V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. It examines some of the archetypal elements in historical consciousness that find their echo in often brutal unhistorical ways in everyday life.

This book is a valuable resource for researchers interested in South Asian History, Historiography or Theory of History, Cultural Studies, English Literature, Post Colonial Writing and Literary Criticism.

ISBN: 9780415488471

Published June 24 2009 by Routledge.

Edited by See Seng Tan

Especially since the end of the Cold War, research on and around the international relations of Asia has grown exponentially and, to make sense of what is now a vast and unwieldly corpus of scholarly literature, this new four-volume collection from Routledge’s Critical Issues in Modern Politics series brings together the best and most influential work in the field.

The first of the four volumes explores ASEAN and international relations theory. Volume II, meanwhile, focuses on the Association’s history and evolution from 1967 to the present day. Volume III examines pan-Asian intergovernmental regionalisms by collecting the most important thinking on the ‘new regionalism’. Vital questions addressed here include the nature of Asian intergovernmental institutions; the overall lack of strategic coherence; whether aims and agendas overlap; conflict or complement; and the implications for the region as a whole. Finally, Volume IV brings together crucial work on non-governmental or unofficial multilateral processes to examine the regionalization processes in Asia and the efficacy of these bottom-up processes in influencing policy and regional security discourse.

With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction newly written by the editor which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, this Routledge collection is an essential work of reference. It is destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers of Asian international relations, politics, history, and current affairs as a vital resource.

ISBN: 9780415475235

Published June 19 2009 by Routledge.

Current features and a vision for the future

Edited by Tamio Nakamura

Plenty has been written about the political and economical aspects of regionalism, but the legal perspective has been neglected. East Asian Regionalism From a Legal Perspective is unique in synthesizing legal, economic and political analyses.

In the first part, the book investigates the current features of regionalism from a comparative perspective, looking at economic and currency cooperation and comparing Asian regionalism with Europe and Latin America. In the second part, the contributors go on to look at the present legal features of regionalism, covering institutional frameworks, trade diversity and regional integration.

The third part of the book is truly unique in proposing an essential groundwork for the institutionalisation of an East Asian Community. It conceives a draft East Asian Charter, an essential document that distils what East Asian nations have achieved, and also includes integral principles and fundamental rules for future cooperation among countries and peoples in the region.

This book will be of interest to graduates and academics interested in regionalism, international relations, international law and Asian studies.

ISBN: 9780415488570

Published June 15 2009 by Routledge.

ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order

By Amitav Acharya

This second edition of Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia takes the excellent framework from Acharya's first edition and brings it up-to-date, looking at ASEAN's comprehensive and critical account of the evolution of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) norms and the viability of the ASEAN way of conflict management.

Key issues in determining the future stability of the Southeast Asian and Asia Pacific region are covered, including:

• intra-regional relations and the effect of membership expansion
• the ASEAN Regional Forum and East Asian regionalism
• ASEAN's response to terrorism and other transnational challenges
• debates over ASEAN's non-interference doctrine
• the 'ASEAN Security Community' and the ASEAN Charter
• the impact of the rise of China and India and ASEAN's relations with the US and Japan.

The new edition will continue to appeal to students and scholars of Asian security, international relations theory and Southeast Asian studies as well as policymakers and the media.

ISBN: 9780415414289

Published June 11 2009 by Routledge.

Edited by Daniel P.S. Goh, Matilda Gabrielpillai, Philip Holden, Gaik Cheng Khoo

This book explores race and multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore from a range of different disciplinary perspectives, showing how race and multiculturalism are represented, how multiculturalism works out in practice, and how attitudes towards race and multiculturalism – and multicultural practices – have developed over time. Going beyond existing studies – which concentrate on the politics and public aspects of multiculturalism – this book burrows deeper into the cultural underpinnings of multicultural politics, relating the subject to the theoretical angles of cultural studies and post-colonial theory; and discussing a range of empirical examples (drawn from extensive original research, covering diverse practices such as films, weblogs, music subcultures, art, policy discourse, textbooks, novels, poetry) which demonstrate overall how the identity politics of race and intercultural interaction are being shaped today. It concentrates on two key Asian countries particularly noted for their relatively successful record in managing ethnic differences, at a time when many fast-developing Asian countries increasingly have to come to terms with cultural pluralism and migrant diversity.

ISBN: 9780415482257

Published June 10 2009 by Routledge.