Exploring a new approach to interfaith/interreligious communication, the contributors to this collection seek to interact from the perspective of their own tradition or academic discipline with Ernest Becker's theory on the relationship between religion, culture, and the human awareness of death and mortality. While much interfaith/interreligious dialogue focuses on beliefs and practices, thus delineating areas of disagreement as a starting point, these chapters foster interactive communic...

Presenting a framework that incorporates macro-level forces into micro-level strategic calculations, this book explains key political choices by leaders and challengers in Pakistan through the political survival mechanism. It offers an explanation for continuing polity weakness in the country, and describes how political survival shapes the choices made by the leaders and challengers.Using a unique analysis that synthesizes theories of weak states, quasi-states and political surviv...

The work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom represents a distinctive contribution to the study of political economy, public policy and administration, collective action, and governance theory. Efforts to present a comprehensive overview of the Bloomington School that grew around the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis (now renamed the Ostrom Workshop), which they founded more than 40 years ago, received new impetus with the award of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science to El...

Development analysts often focus on the role of “the state” in making the right rules by which to govern society, assuming that governance is exclusively or mainly the work of the central government authority. The reality in many developing countries, particularly those with weak central government authorities, is that governance happens through diverse rules and in many centers of decision-making, in ways that are formal and informal, official and unofficial. This real-world polycentricit...

While the outcomes of the tumultuous uprisings that continue to transfix the Arab world remain uncertain, the root causes of rebellion persist. Drawing upon extensive empirical research, Lineages of Revolt tracks the major shifts in the region’s political economy over recent decades. In this illuminating and original work, Adam Hanieh explores the contours of neoliberal policies, dynamics of class and state formation, imperialism and the nature of regional accumulation, the significance of...

The most challenging question today for the citizens of any country in the Gulf region is whether it is heading in the right direction to become a durable, sustainable system, fully supported by its people and capable of being defended from internal and external threats. In The Arab Spring and the Gulf States, Mohamed A. J. Althani, a former minister in the Qatari government, analyses the domestically important areas of demography, security, provision of food and water, and the po...

In November 2011, an agreement brokered by the GCC brought an end to Yemen's tumultuous uprising. The National Dialogue Conference has opened a window of opportunity for change, bringing Yemen's main political forces together with groups that were politically marginalized. Yet, the risk of collapse is serious, and if Yemen is to remain a viable state, it must address numerous political, social and economic challenges. In this invaluable volume, experts with extensive Yemen experience provi...

Egypt's autocratic regime is being weakened by economic crises, growing political opposition, and the pressures of globalization. Observers now wonder which way Egypt will go when the country's aging president, Husni Mubarak, passes from the scene: will it embrace Western-style liberalism and democracy? Or will it become an Islamic theocracy similar to Iran? Egypt after Mubarak demonstrates that both secular and Islamist opponents of the regime are navigating a middle path that may ...

The New Middle East is one of the first comprehensive books to critically examine the Arab popular uprisings of 2011–12. While these uprisings prompted a number of cursory publications, this volume contains meticulous and thoughtful reflections on the causes, drivers and effects of these seminal events on the internal, regional and international politics of the Middle East and North Africa. Although specific conditions in individual countries that have experienced large-scale popular mobil...

Economic liberalization has failed in the Arab world. Instead of ushering in economic dynamism and precipitating democratic reform, it has over the last three decades resulted in greater poverty, rising income inequality and sky-rocketing rates of youth unemployment. In How Capitalism Failed the Arab World, Richard Javad Heydarian shows how years of economic mismanagement, political autocracy and corruption have encouraged people to revolt, and how the initial optimism of the uprisings is ...

Monarchical presidential regimes in the Arab world looked as though they would last indefinitely—until events in Tunisia and Egypt made clear their time was up. This is the first book to lay bare the dynamics of a governmental system that largely defined the Arab Middle East in the twentieth century, and the popular opposition they engendered.

One of our foremost authorities on modern Afghanistan, Barnett R. Rubin has dedicated much of his career to the study of this remote mountain country. He served as a special advisor to the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke during his final mission to the region and still serves the Obama administration under Holbrooke's successor, Ambassador Marc Grossman. Now Rubin distills his unmatched knowledge of Afghanistan in this invaluable book. He shows how the Taliban arose in resistance to warl...