Recasting The Region

Presents an analysis of Muslim political mobilization in the late 20th century, arguing that it emerged out of a sustained engagement with Bengali intellectual and literary traditions rather than from north Indian calls for a separatist Muslim state.

Analysing an extensive range of texts and publications across multiple genres, formats and literary lineages, Reclaiming Karbala studies the emergence and formation of a viable Muslim identity in Bengal over the late-19th century through the 1940s. Beginning with an explanation of the tenets of the battle of Karbala, this multi-layered study explores what it means to be Muslim, as well as the nuanced relationship between religion, linguistic identity and literary modernity that marks both Bengaliness and Muslimness in the region.This book is an intervention into the literature on regional Islam in Bengal, offering a complex perspective on the polemic on religion and language in the formation of a jatiya Bengali Muslim identity in a multilingual context. This book, by placing this polemic in the context of intra-Islamic reformist conflict, shows how all these rival reformist groups unanimously negated the Karbala-centric commemorative ritual of Muharram and Shī‘ī intercessory piety to secure a pro-Caliphate sensibility as the core value of the Bengali Muslim public sphere.

An innovative analysis of the experience of Bengali Muslims on the Indian side of the India-Bangladesh border.

The dramatic events since the late 1980s, which witnessed the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a united Germany, have set in motion a recasting of the European security order.

This volume reviews and critiques efforts to recast governance of marine fisheries on the basis of sustainability principles (e.g., precautionary and ecosystem approaches), with a focus on Canada’s transboundary fisheries management arrangements, and surveys international laws and policy developments governing transboundary fisheries.

The end of the unipolar moment completes the passing of a Western era that was prolonged for half a century when the United States took over for a defeated and exhausted group of European states after World War II. Distinguished scholar Simon Serfaty vigorously argues that while it is possible, and even desirable, to acknowledge the passing of the Western era, it is exaggerated to present it as an irreversible decline of the West relative to an irresistible rise of the Rest. Rather, he shows that the unfolding post-Western moment will be messy. In addition to the United States and the states of Europe as a Union, the new cast of significant powers will involve a dozen or more countries: emerging powers like China and India, postimperial powers such as Japan and Russia, new influentials like Brazil and Turkey, pivot states like Egypt and Pakistan, nuisance states like Iran, failed or failing states like North Korea and Sudan, and others. Echoes of a Sarajevo moment played out this time in the greater Middle East, the new global Balkans for the twenty-first century. But Serfaty convincingly contends that even during a zero-polar moment of geopolitical transition, American power remains superior, and thus indispensable though no longer decisive; Western power stands on top and thus is inescapable though no longer exclusive; and even as the Rest gains broadly in stature and reach it is unlikely to achieve preponderance any time soon. This powerful and provocative book should be read by all who share a deep concern for the future of America—and a recast world.

Critically deploying the idea of uneven and combined development this book provides a novel non-Eurocentric account of Iran’s experience of modernity and revolution. Recasting Iranian Modernity presents the argument that Eurocentrism can be decisively overcome through a social theory that has international relations at its ontological core. This will enable a conception of history in which there is an intrinsic international dimension to social change that prevents historical repetition. This hitherto under-theorized international dimension is, the book argues, manifest in combined patterns of development, which incorporate both foreign and native forms. It is the tension-prone and unstable nature of these hybrid developmental patterns that mark Iranian modernity, and fuelled the socio-political dynamics of the 1979 revolution and the rise of political Islam. Challenging solely comparative approaches to the Iranian Revolution that explain it away as either a deviation from, or a reaction to, modernity on the grounds of its religious form, this book will be valuable to those interested in an alternative theoretical approach to the Iranian Revolution, modern Iran and political Islam, working in the fields of International Relations, Middle East and Islamic Studies, History, Political Science, Political Sociology, Postcolonialism, and Comparative Politics.