1st Edition
South Asia from the Margins Transformations in the Political Space
This edited volume brings together a group of scholars examining the effects of social change on the politics in South Asia. It cobbles an inductive analytical framework of South Asian margins to comparatively study the political transformations across the region.
This book envisages politics encompassing interests, imaginations, activities, and actions of numerous actors. Individual contributors analyze the collective choices made by national elites over the past few decades and their implications for development, democracy, and security of their respective country and the region. The resulting analytical framework provides a comparative political matrix of analysis that prioritizes the margins over the center. The matrix compares different countries around the axis of (1) Political Contestations and Engagements, (2) Decoloniality and Populism, and (3) Policy Frames and Visions. It is a contrapuntal analysis that establishes margins as a legitimate place to approach social scientific study of South Asia.
An important and timely contribution to the field, this book will be of interest to researchers studying Asian politics, comparative politics, area studies, in particular South Asia and Pakistan, and international relations.
Chapter 1. Introduction, Asad ur Rehman and Muhammad Shoaib Pervez; Chapter 2. Deliberative Democracy at the local level in Nepal, Vishnu Kumari Tandon; Chapter 3. Politics around women’s landed inheritance in South Asia: The case of Punjab, Pakistan, Iram Rubab; Chapter 4. A Critical Analysis of Christians and Scheduled Castes in Pakistan, Ayra Indrias Patras; Chapter 5. Populism and diaspora politics: Imran Khan and the Pakistani diaspora in the West, Adil Zahoor; Chapter 6. Populism(s) in Pakistan: The Comparative Analysis of PTI and People’s Rights Movement in AJK, Ammar Yasir; Chapter 7. Challenging Decoloniality: Human Rights and Hindutva in contemporary India, Saloni Kapur; Chapter 8. Bring decoloniality at home: a critical perspective on security discourse of Pakistan, Muhammad Shoaib Pervez; Chapter 9. Overviewing the Regime of Practical Citizenship in Rural Pakistan, Asad ur Rehman; Chapter 10. Welfare Policy Initiatives and State-Society Relations: A case of Kerala’s Tribal Assistance Model, José Egas; Chapter 11. Bringing agency back in: Disentangling the complexities of Sri Lanka’s default, Shakthi de Silva; Chapter 12. Ontological and epistemological considerations about the evolution of secularism in Bangladesh, Charza Shahabuddin; Epilogue; Index
Biography
Asad ur Rehman, PhD (Ecole Des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Social, EHESS, Paris France) is Assistant Professor in the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Habib University Karachi, Pakistan. He is the author of Politics of Socio- Spatial Transformation in Pakistan (Routledge 2023).
Muhammad Shoaib Pervez, PhD (Leiden University, Holland), Fulbright Post- doc (Columbia University New York, USA) is Associate Professor and the former Chair (2016– 2023) of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Management and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan. He is the author of the award- winning book, Security Community in South Asia (Routledge 2012) and the editor of Radicalization in Pakistan (Routledge 2020).
