China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is intended to radically increase investment and integration along a series of land and maritime routes. As the initiative involves more than 100 countries or international organizations and huge amounts of infrastructure construction, cooperation between many different markets is essential to its success. Cheung and Hong have edited a collection of essa…
Current demographic trends raise new questions, challenges and controversies. Comparing demographic trends in Europe and the NAME-region (North Africa and the Middle East), this book demonstrates how population change interacts with changing economic landscapes, social distinctions and political realities. A variety of drivers contribute to demographic change in the various regions and countrie…
Parliaments are often seen as Western European and North American institutions and their establishment in other parts of the world as a derivative and mostly defective process. This book challenges such Eurocentric visions by retracing the evolution of modern institutions of collective decision-making in Eurasia. Breaching the divide between different area studies, the book provides nine case s…
How do videos, movies and documentaries dedicated to indigenous communities transform the media landscape of South Asia? Based on extensive original research, this book examines how in South Asia popular music videos, activist political clips, movies and documentaries about, by and for indigenous communities take on radically new significances. Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South Asia shows …
Based on extensive original research, including interviews with key participants, this book investigates the sudden and unforeseen collapse of communist power in Poland in 1989. It sets out the sequence of events, and examines the strategies of the various political groupings prior to the partially free election of June 1989. This volume argues that the specific negotiating strategies adopted b…
Adding a new perspective to the current literature on decentralization in Japan, Cities, Autonomy and Decentralization in Japan, approaches the subject from an urban studies and planning approach. The essays in the collection present a cogent compilation of case studies focusing on the past, present and future of decentralization in Japan. These include small scale development in the fields suc…
Although over eighty percent of the country is Muslim, Indonesia is marked by an extraordinary diversity in language, ancestry, culture, religion and ways of life. This book focuses on the Christian Dani of West Papua, providing a social and ethnographic history of the most important indigenous population in the troubled province. It presents a fascinating overview of the Dani’s conversion to…
China's recent economic reforms have led to impressive growth, and an unprecedented enthusiasm for establishing foreign enterprises in China. Since 1993, China has been the second largest recipient of foreign direct investment in the world and is now considered to be the world's third biggest economy. Its greater economic integration with the rest of the world, especially since its accession to…
The vast majority of books on Buddhism describe the Buddha using the word enlightened, rather than awakened. This bias has resulted in Buddhism becoming generally perceived as the eponymous religion of enlightenment. Beyond Enlightenment is a sophisticated study of some of the underlying assumptions involved in the study of Buddhism (especially, but not exclusively, in the West). It investigate…
The Complete Poetry of Du Fu presents a complete scholarly translation of Chinese literature alongside the original text in a critical edition. The English translation is more scholarly than vernacular Chinese translations, and it is compelled to address problems that even the best traditional commentaries overlook.The main body of the text is a facing page translation and critical edition of t…