Editor
Paul R. Brass is Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. His most recent books are Forms of Collective Violence: Riots, Pogroms, and Genocide in Modern India (2006), The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (2003), and Theft of an Idol (1997). His current research is on a multi-volume history of north Indian politics from 1937 to 2007.
Editorial board
Harry Blair, Yale University, US
Stephen P. Cohen, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, US
David Gellner, Oxford University, UK
John Harriss, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Gary Jacobsohn, University of Texas, Austin, US
Tariq Rahman, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan
Gurharpal Singh, University of Birmingham, UK
Ian Talbot, University of Southampton, UK
Jayadev Uyangoda, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka
Contributors
E. Annamalai was Visiting Professor at Yale University and Director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India. His research areas include language policy and planning and language diversity and contact. He is currently working on the modernization of languages in India and the impact of English on them. His recent publications include Managing Multilingualism in India: Political and Linguistic Manifestations (2001).
Sumanta Banerjee is an independent researcher based in Dehradun, India, specializing in the areas of contemporary Indian Left politics and the popular culture and social history of nineteenth-century Bengal. His publications include Crime and Urbanization: Calcutta in the Nineteenth Century (2006), The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta (1989) and In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement (1980).
Harry Blair is Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science at Bucknell University and presently serves as Associate Chair, Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer in Political Science at Yale University. He currently works on democratization, focusing in particular on civil society and local governance in South and Southeast Asia, and the Balkans.
Jan Breman is Professor (Emeritus) of Comparative Sociology at the University of Amsterdam and Fellow at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research. He has conducted fieldwork-based research since 1961, mainly in India and Indonesia. Some of his recent books are The Jan Breman Omnibus (2007), The Poverty Regime in Village India: Half-a-Century of Work and Life at the Bottom of the Rural Economy in Gujarat (2007), and The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class: Sliding Down the Labour Hierarchy in Ahmedabad, India (2003).
Shahid Javed Burki is former Vice-President of the World Bank and former Finance Minister of Pakistan. He is currently Chairman of the Lahore-based Institute of Public Policy. His most recent book is Changing Perceptions, Altered Reality: Pakistan’s Economy under Musharraf, 1999–2006 (2007).
Stephen P. Cohen is Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Washington, DC. His most recent books include Four Crises and a Peace Process (2007), The Idea of Pakistan (2004), and India: Emerging Power (2002). He has taught at the University of Illinois and also at universities in India, Japan, and Singapore. He was a member of the US Department of State Policy Planning Staff from 1985 to 1987. He is currently writing a book on Indian military modernization.
Stuart Corbridge is Professor of Development Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His most recent books are Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India (2005, with Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava, and René Veron) and Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy (2000, with John Harriss).
Neil DeVotta is Associate Professor of Political Science at Wake Forest University. He is the author of Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka (2004), co-author of Politics of Conflict and Peace in Sri Lanka (2006), and co-editor of Understanding Contemporary India (2003).
David N. Gellner is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. His publications include The Theravada Movement in Twentieth-Century Nepal (2005, with Sarah LeVine), The Anthropology of Buddhism and Hinduism: Weberian Themes (2001), and the edited books Local Democracy in South Asia:The Micropolitics of Democratization in Nepal and its Neighbours (2008, with Krishna Hachhethu), and Resistance and the State: Nepalese Experiences (2003).
Krishna Hachhethu is associated with the Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS), Tribhuvan University. His publications include Nepal in Transition: A Study on the State of Democracy (2008), Party Building in Nepal: Organization, Leadership and People (2002), and the edited book Local Democracy in South Asia: The Micropolitics of Democratization in Nepal and its Neighbours (2008, with David Gellner).
John Harriss is Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University, Canada, having previously researched and taught at the universities of Cambridge and East Anglia and the London School of Economics. His publications include Depoliticizing Development: The World Bank and Social Capital (2001) and Reinventing India: Economic Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy (2000, with Stuart Corbridge). His current research concerns India’s social policy in the context of liberalization.
Vernon Hewitt is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Bristol, UK. His most recent books include Political Mobilisation and Democracy in India: States of Emergency (2008), and Development and Colonialism: The Past in the Present (forthcoming, co-edited with Mark Duffield).
Sara Hossain is a barrister practicing at the Supreme Court of Bangladesh. Her recent publications include “Honour”: Crimes, Paradigms and Violence against Women (2005, co-edited with Lynn Welchman). Her main areas of research and activism concern public interest law, access to justice, women’s rights, freedom of expression, and the religious right.
Stanley A. Kochanek is Professor (Emeritus) at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. His most recent book is India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation (2008). He is currently working on a comparative study of business and politics in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
Professor W. D. Lakshman is Professor (Emeritus) at the University of Colombo. A former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Colombo, he currently serves as Senior Economic Advisor to the Ministry of Finance, Sri Lanka. His edited publications, Sri Lanka’s Development since Independence: Socio-Economic Perspectives and Analyses (2000) and Dilemmas of Development: Fifty Years of Economic Change in Sri Lanka (1997), are among widely consulted recent studies in the economic development of Sri Lanka.
Paula R. Newberg is the Executive Director of Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, and is a specialist in governance, development, and democracy in transition and crisis states. She is a former special advisor to the United Nations, a regular contributor to Yale Global, and The Globe and Mail. Her publications include Double Betrayal: Human Rights and Insurgency in Kashmir (1995) and Judging the State: Courts and Constitutional Politics in Pakistan (1995).
Tariq Rahman is Distinguished National Professor of Linguistic History in the National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. His best known book is Language and Politics in Pakistan (1996). Other books include Denizens of Alien Worlds: A Study of Education, Inequality and Polarization in Pakistan (2004) and Language, Ideology and Power: Language-learning among the Muslims of Pakistan and North India (2002).
Lloyd I. Rudolph is Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science, University of Chicago. His recent books, co-authored with Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, include Making U.S. Foreign Policy towards South Asia: Regional Imperatives and the Imperial Presidency (2008) and Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays: Gandhi in the World (2006).
Susanne Hoeber Rudolph is the William Benton Distinguished Service Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science, University of Chicago. She is co-author, with Lloyd I. Rudolph, of Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty Year Perspective (2008) and Reversing the Gaze: The Amar Singh Diary, A Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India (1999).
Shylashri Shankar is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. She is the author of Scaling Justice: India’s Supreme Court, Anti-Terror Laws, and Social Rights (2009). Her current research includes the medical jurisprudence of torture claims by detainees under criminal and anti-terror laws, and a study of district and village-level politics underlying an employment guarantee scheme in India.
Gurharpal Singh is the Nadir Dinshaw Chair in Inter-religious Relations at the University of Birmingham. His recent publications include The Partition of India (forthcoming, 2009, with Ian Talbot), and Sikhs in Britain (2006, with Dashan S. Tatla). He is currently working on a volume on India’s democracy. He is the Deputy Director of the UK Department for International Development-funded Religions and Development research program.
Ian A. Talbot is Professor of British History at the University of Southampton. He is the editor of The Deadly Embrace: Religion, Politics and Violence in India and Pakistan 1947–2002 (2007) and the author of Divided Cities: Partition and Its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar 1947–1957 (2006). His current research is on Partition and violence.
Jayadeva Uyangoda is Professor and Head of the Department of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Colombo, and Founder-Director of the Centre for Policy Research and Analysis. He has written extensively and authoritatively on the civil war in Sri Lanka for many years and on ethnic conflict, minority rights, and conflict resolution. His most recent major publication is Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka: Changing Dynamics (2007).
Virginia Van Dyke is currently teaching in the South Asia Center, University of Washington, Seattle. She was formerly an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has published on the topics of religion and politics, religious violence, and electoral politics. Her current research project is a comparison of coalition politics in four Indian states.
Mohammad Waseem is Professor of Political Science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) Lahore. His most recent book is Democratization in Pakistan: A Study of the 2002 Elections (2006). His current research is on political conflict in Pakistan, covering electoral, civil-military, ethnic, religious, and sectarian conflicts.
Nira Wickramasinghe is Professor of Modern South Asian Studies, Leiden University. Her most recent book is Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History of Contested Identities (2006). She is presently a research fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies where she is writing a history of the reception of the Singer sewing machine in colonial Sri Lanka.
Steven I. Wilkinson is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Patrons, Clients or Policies (2007, co-edited with Herbert Kitschelt) and Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Communal Riots in India (2005). His current research interests include colonial legacies for democracy, governance and conflict, and the causes of the Partition violence.