No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Als eine der ersten ihrer Art außerhalb Europas war die Kommunistische Partei Indiens (CPI) bei der Ausbreitung des Marxismus jenseits des europäischen Rahmens vorne mit dabei. Zu ihren prägenden Einflüssen zählten die sowjetische Praxis der Revolutionsjahre und zeitgenössische radikale Spielarten des Nationalismus in Britisch-Indien. Von Beginn an musste sie sich unter Bedingungen behaupten, denen in der Theorie wenig Beachtung zugekommen war – zuvorderst der ungebrochenen Bedeutung von Religion und Gemeinschaft für das politische und soziale Leben des Subkontinents. Die Arbeit untersucht zunächst anhand der Werke von Marx, Engels und Lenin sowie der Komintern den theoretischen und organisatorischen ‚Überbau‘ der CPI auf den Stellenwert von Religion in einem parteikommunistischen Emanzipationsgefüge. In der Folge widmet sie sich den oft biografisch eingefärbten Ansätzen und Strategien der Partei und ihrer Mitglieder, unter dem Primat der ‚Politik für die Masse‘ mit den Verhältnissen auf dem Subkontinent umzugehen. Sie beleuchtet kommunistische Perspektiven auf Revolution anhand konkreter Fälle wie dem passiven Widerstand Gandhis, dem Moplah-Aufstand, der Arbeiterschaft, religiösem Kommunalismus und dem erstarkenden Gemeinschaftsgefühl religiöser Gruppen. Es zeigt sich, dass die Partei beständig zwischen qualifizierter Ablehnung und bedingter Unterstützung religiöser Kultur schwankte, die schematisch zwei divergierende und seit der russischen Revolution erkennbare revolutionäre Paradigmen bilden: ein westliches und ein östliches. Der in Letzterem kondensierte Strang politischer Tradition ermöglichte es schließlich, dass der Partei die Unterstützung für die Pakistanforderung der Muslim League in den 1940er Jahren plausibel erschien. / Among the eldest of its kind in Asia, the Communist Party of India (CPI) pioneered the spread of Marxist politics beyond the European arena. Influenced by both Soviet revolutionary practice and radical nationalism in British India, it operated under conditions not provided for in Marxist theory—foremost the prominence of religion and community in social and political life. The thesis analyzes, first, the theoretical and organizational ‘overhead’ of the CPI in terms of the position of religion in a party communist hierarchy of emancipation. It will therefore question the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin on the one hand, and Comintern doctrines on the other. Secondly, it scrutinizes the approaches and strategies of the CPI and individual members, often biographically biased, to come to grips with the subcontinental environment under the primacy of mass politics. Thirdly, I discuss communist vistas on revolution on concrete instances including (but not limited to) the Gandhian non-cooperation movement, the Moplah rebellion, the subcontinental proletariat, the problem of communalism, and assertion of minority identities. I argue that the CPI established a pattern of vacillation between qualified rejection and conditional appropriation of religion that loosely constituted two diverging revolutionary paradigms characterizing communist practice from the Soviet outset: Western and Eastern. The specific tradition condensed in the latter eventually would render it plausible to the party to support the Muslim League’s Pakistan demand in the 1940s.

Through an ethnographic examination of two New York City South Asian organizations, Worker's Awaaz and the Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO), this study attends to the classed subjects produced at the different points of convergence of neoliberal policy in India and the United States. The project is concerned with the workings of South Asian organizations as the demographic profile of this population changes due to new migration patterns marked by gender, class, nationality and status, and new subjectivities borne of organizing and activism that have emerged around these. With attention to the nexus of capital, labor and rights, I argue that each organization represents two sides of neoliberal tendencies, and that this materializes in the subjects of worker and diasporic entrepreneur that are mobilized in Worker's Awaaz and GOPIO, respectively. Structural adjustment programs (SAPs) in South Asia compelled the migration of the low-wage female membership Worker's Awaaz. Once in the United States, where carework has become increasingly privatized, many of these women find employment as domestic workers whose labor is necessary to the households of upper-middle class and wealthy South Asians. SAPs also opened up South Asian markets to direct foreign investment. Needing outside capital for schemes of privatization and deregulation, the government of India turned to the diaspora, and deployed financial investment by overseas Indians as diasporic duty. This is a role that GOPIO has been at the forefront of organizing. I specifically explore how economic beings constructed through neoliberal discourse of human capital inhabit, rework, and contest these very discourses and practices. In Worker's Awaaz debates regarding who constituted a worker were contestations over the meanings of class and labor rooted in global migration flows. Within GOPIO the class inflected subjectivity of entrepreneur found nationalist luster as the articulation of entrepreneurialism was cast as a trait of Indian diasporic culture. The subject positions borne from these activities produced different struggles over the terms of national belonging and rights. The dissertation understands these positions as generated from the disjunctive tendencies of neoliberalism, and as sites that give insight into the workings of current capital regimes. / text

The aim of this thesis is to explore how livelihoods are recovering in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka through the lens of the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework and the social networks approach—methods of inquiry that have gained considerable impetus in livelihoods research. The study is conducted with reference to two tsunami-affected fisher villages in the Hambantota District, Southern Province. It employs a qualitative ethnographic methodology that examines narratives emerging from households, local officials of government and non-government organizations, office bearers of community-based organizations, local politicians, village leaders, and key informants. Focus is on evaluating how particular roles, activities, and behaviour are given importance by these groups in specific post-tsunami contexts and how these aspects relate to broader conceptualizations of social networks, informal politics, social inequality, and ethnographic research in South Asia. The findings support four major contributions to the literature. First, social networks are significant as an object of study and a method of inquiry in understanding livelihoods post-disaster. Second, paying heed to varied forms of informal politics is critical in post-disaster analyses. Third, the concept of intersectionality can extend and improve upon prevailing approaches to social inequality in disaster recovery. Fourth, ethnographic research is valuable for understanding everyday networks, informal politics, and change in South Asia. Collectively, these findings present a human geography of post-tsunami livelihoods in Sri Lanka, where networks, politics, and inequalities, which form an essential part of everyday livelihoods, have been reproduced in disaster recovery. The thesis constitutes a means of offering expertise in the sphere of development practice, highlighting internal differentiation in access to aid as a key issue that needs to be identified and systematically addressed by policymakers and practitioners.

Les trois monothéismes conçoivent un Dieu créateur et ordonnateur du monde, révélé dans l’histoire, garant de toute justice et de tout équilibre, et déterminant l’autorité et les systèmes d’autorités. La théologie a informé le droit et les lois, l’économie et l’éthique des personnes et des États. L’islam, loin d’être homogénéisé dans ses approches économiques, financières et réglementaires, révèle par le biais d’un exemple concret, par l’industrie des services financiers islamiques, les différentes facettes de ce qu’est l’autorité dans un contexte musulman, international et en pleine évolution. Prenant en compte la dynamique des questions sectaires, géographiques et interprétatives, la thèse analyse cette force déterminante que sont les « autorités » en finance islamique. Ces dernières semblent déterminer la finance islamique dans ses formes les plus tangibles, en structurant des produits financiers islamiques. L’analyse comporte d’abord une approche théorique, ensuite une étude comparée des facteurs qui déterminent les décisions prises lors de la structuration de produits financiers islamiques. Ces structures sont en effet fondées sur des contrats financiers conformes aux principes de la sharia. Leur approbation par des membres de conseils de la sharia est-elle déterminée par une autorité régionale, par des autorités internationales ou par des autorités de régulation ? Ces autorités sont-elles conventionnelles ou religieuses ? Afin de bien évaluer la problématique non seulement de l’autorité en tant que telle mais aussi de l’équilibre complexe entre les différentes autorités, nous développons une analyse comparée du système de structuration des produits financiers islamiques par les autorités concernées, en fonction des zones géographiques, au moyen d’un échantillon de 121 membres de conseils de la sharia couvrant l’approbation de produits financiers islamiques au sein de 243 institutions financières islamiques sur 35 pays. / The three monotheistic religions refer to a God who is the all-powerful creator of all that exists, revealed throughout history, guarantor of justice and fairness, who is the ultimate moral authority. Theology advises some of the laws, economics and ethics of individuals and of states. Islam is not homogeneous in its economic, financial and regulatory approaches. However, through the financial services industry, it reveals in a tangible manner various facets of authority across Muslim contexts. These include contexts that are international and highly dynamic. Taking into account the delicate balance between sectarian, geographic and interpretive facets, the thesis analyses the determining forces that we refer to as authorities in Islamic finance. These contribute to the Islamic finance industry in its most tangible form in the structuring of Islamic financial products. Analysis is carried out initially theoretically. It is followed by a comparative study of factors affecting decisions pertaining to the structuring of Islamic financial products. These structures are based on financial contracts that conform to the principles of the Sharia. Is approval by Sharia board members fashioned by a regional authority, by international authorities, or by regulatory authorities? Are these authorities conventional or religious? We address the question as it pertains to the dynamics between various types of authority. We develop a comparative analysis of the approach taken in structuring Islamic financial products, according to geographical areas related to a sample of 121 Sharia board members covering Islamic financial products for 243 Islamic financial institutions in 35 countries.

Anti-corruption movements play a vital role in democratic development. From the American Gilded Age to global demonstrations in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, these movements seek to combat malfeasance in government and improve accountability. While this collective action remains a constant, how government elites perceive and respond to such agitation, varies. My dissertation tackles this puzzle head-on: Why do some democratic governments respond more tolerantly than others to anti-corruption movements? To answer this research question, I examine variation across time in two cases within the world’s largest democracy: India. I compare the Congress Party government's suppressive response to the Jayaprakash Narayan movement in 1975, and the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government’s tolerant response to the India Against Corruption movement in 2012. For developing democracies such as India, comparativist scholarship gives primacy to external, material interests – such as votes and rents – as proximately shaping government behavior. Although these logics explain elite decision-making around elections and the predictability of pork barrel politics, they fall short in explaining government conduct during credibility crises, such as when facing nationwide anti-corruption movements. In such instances of high political uncertainty, I argue, it is the absence or presence of an ideological checks and balance mechanism among decision-making elites in government that shapes suppression or tolerance respectively. This mechanism is produced from the interaction between structure (multi-party coalition) and agency (divergent cognitive frames in positions of authority). In this dissertation, elites analyze the anti-corruption movement and form policy prescriptions based on their frames around social and economic development as well as their concepts of the nation. My research consists of over 110 individual interviews with state elites, including the Prime Minister, cabinet ministers, party leaders, and senior bureaucrats among other officials for the contemporary case; and a broad compilation of private letters, diplomatic cables and reports, and speeches collected from three national archives for the historical study. To my knowledge this is the first data-driven study of Indian politics that precisely demonstrates how ideology acts as a constraint on government behavior in a credibility crisis. On a broader level, my findings contribute to the recently renewed debate in political science as to why democracies sometimes behave illiberally.

This thesis is concerned with transnational literature and writers of the Middle Eastern and South Asian diasporas. It argues that the diasporic position of the authors enables their roles as comprador subjects. The thesis maintains that the figure of the comprador is always acted upon by its ontological predisposition, so that diasporic positionality often involves a single subject which straddles and speaks from two or more different subject positions. Comprador authors can be said to be co-opted by Western metropolitan publishing companies who stand to benefit by marketing the apparent marginality of the homelands about which these authors write. The thesis therefore proceeds from the notion that such a diasporic position is the paradoxical condition of the transnational subject or writer. I submit that there is, to some degree, a questionable element in the common political and cultural suggestions that emerge upon closer evaluation of diasporic literature. Indeed, a charge of complicity has been levelled against authors who write, apparently, to service two distinct entities – the wish to speak on behalf of a minority collective, as well as the imperial ‘centre’ which is the intended interlocutor of the comprador author. However, it is this difference, the implied otherness or marginality of the outsider within, which I argue is sometimes used by diasporic writers as a way of articulating with ‘authenticity’ the cultures and politics of their erstwhile localities. This thesis is concerned, therefore, with the representation of ‘the East’ in four novels by diasporic, specifically comprador writers, namely Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. I suggest that the ‘third-world’ and transnational literature can also be a selling point for the transnational subject, whose representations may at times pander to preconceived ideas about ‘the Orient’ and its people. As an illustration of this double-bind, I offer a close reading of all the novels to suggest that on the one hand, the comprador author writes within the paradigm of the ‘writing back’ movement, as a counter-discourse to the Orientalist representations of the homeland. However, the corollary is that such an attempt to ‘write back’, in a sense, re-inscribes the very discourse it wishes to subvert, especially because the literature is aimed at a ‘Western’ audience. Moreover, the template of the comprador could be used to explain how a transnational post-9/11 text from an Afghan-American, for instance, may be put to the service of the imperial machine, and read, therefore, as a supporting document to the U.S. policy on Afghanistan.