India and Pakistan will be among the most important countries in the twenty-first century. In Avoiding Armageddon, Bruce Riedel clearly explains the challenge and the importance of successfully managing America's affairs with these two emerging powers and their toxic relationship.Born from the British Raj, the two nations share a common heritage, but they are different in many important ways. India is already the world's largest democracy and will soon become the planet's most populous nation. Pakistan, soon to be the fifth most populous country, has a troubled history of military coups, dictators, and harboring terrorists such as Osama bin Laden.The longtime rivals are nuclear powers, with tested weapons. They have fought four wars with each other and have gone to the brink of war several times. Meanwhile, U.S. presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have been increasingly involved in the region's affairs. In the past two decades alone, the White House has intervened several times to prevent nuclear confrontation on the subcontinent. South Asia clearly is critical to American national security, and the volatile relationship between India and Pakistan is the crucial factor determining whether the region can ever be safe and stable.Based on extensive research and Riedel's role in advising four U.S. presidents on the region, Avoiding Armageddon reviews the history of American diplomacy in South Asia, the crises that have flared in recent years, and the prospects for future crisis. Riedel provides an in-depth look at the Mumbai terrorist attack in 2008, the worst terrorist outrage since 9/11, and he concludes with authoritative analysis on what the future is likely to hold for America and the South Asia puzzle as well as recommendations on how Washington should proceed.
President Obama may have delivered on his campaign promise to kill Osama bin Laden, but as an Al-Qaeda strategist bin Laden has been dead for years. This book introduces and examines the new generation of Al-Qaeda leaders who have been behind the most recent attacks. Investigative journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad dedicated his life to revealing the strategies and inner workings of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He had access to top-level commanders in both movements, as well as within the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service. Shahzad's work was praised by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for 'bringing to light the troubles extremism poses to Pakistan's stability. Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban explains the wider aims of both organizations and provides an essential analysis of major terrorist incidents, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks. In May 2011, Shahzad was abducted and killed in Pakistan, days after writing an article suggesting that insiders in the Pakistani navy had colluded with Al-Qaeda in an attack on a naval air station. This book is a testament to his fearless reporting and analytical rigour. It will provide readers worldwide with an invaluable introduction to a new phase of the ongoing struggle against terrorism which threatens lives in so many countries.
Available at the JSCC Jackson Campus
Nuclear-armed adversaries India and Pakistan have fought three wars since their creation as sovereign states in 1947. They went to the brink of a fourth in 2001 following an attack on the Indian parliament, which the Indian government blamed on the Pakistan-backed Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist organizations. Despite some attempts at rapprochement in the intervening years, a new standoff between the two countries was precipitated when India accused Lashkar-e-Taiba of being behind the Mumbai attacks late last year. The relentlessness of the confrontations between these two nations makes Inside Nuclear South Asia a must read for anyone wishing to gain a thorough understanding of the spread of nuclear weapons in South Asia and the potential consequences of nuclear proliferation on the subcontinent. The book begins with an analysis of the factors that led to India's decision to cross the nuclear threshold in 1998, with Pakistan close behind: factors such as the broad political support for a nuclear weapons program within India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the intense rivalry between the two countries, the normative and prestige factors that influenced their behaviors, and ultimately the perceived threat to their respective national security. The second half of the book analyzes the consequences of nuclear proliferation on the subcontinent.
Applying fresh tools from economics to explain puzzling behaviors of religious radicals: Muslim, Christian, and Jewish; violent and benign.How do radical religious sects run such deadly terrorist organizations? Hezbollah, Hamas, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Taliban all began as religious groups dedicated to piety and charity. Yet once they turned to violence, they became horribly potent, executing campaigns of terrorism deadlier than those of their secular rivals. In Radical, Religious, and Violent, Eli Berman approaches the question using the economics of organizations.
Lashkar-e-Taiba is among the most powerful militants groups in South Asia and increasingly viewed as a global terrorist threat on par with al-Qaeda. Considered Pakistan's most powerful proxy against India, the group gained public prominence after its deadly ten-person suicide assault on Mumbai in November 2008. By the time the last Lashkar terrorist was dead after nearly 60 hours, it appeared the world was facing a new menace. Boasting transnational networks stretching across several continents, there has been serious debate since 9/11 of whether Lashkar is an al-Qaeda affiliate. The deliberate targeting of Westerners and Jews during the Mumbai attacks raised questions about whether Lashkar was moving deeper into al-Qaeda's orbit and perhaps on a trajectory to displace Osama bin Laden's network as the next major global jihadi threat. Lashkar's expansion has serious security implications for India, Pakistan, Europe and the United States and its activities threaten to damage US-Pakistan relations. Despite growing calls for action, Pakistan is yet to take any serious steps toward dismantling Lashkar for fear of drawing it further into the insurgency raging there and because of its continued utility against India. More than a militant outfit, Lashkar also controls a vast infrastructure that delivers necessary social services to the Pakistani populace, making it all the more difficult to dismantle. Storming the World Stage traces the evolution of Lashkar-e-Taiba over more than two decades to illustrate how the group grew so powerful and to assess the threat it poses to India, the West and to Pakistan itself. The first English-language book ever written about Lashkar, it draws on in-depth field research, including interviews with senior Lashkar leaders, rank-and-file members, and officials of the Pakistani security services--some of who have helped nurture the group over the years.
Faced with these existential challenges, the Muslim community is involved in simultaneous churning within where the words of Islamic scholar and teacher Farhat Hashmi are bringing about a silent change at the grassroots level. Amidst all the challenges, the idea of India, often challenged, continues to show the way to a nation looking for direction.
He shows how Gandhi's non-violent protests were the subject of widespread discussion and debate in the USA and UK for several decades. Though at first misrepresented by Western newspapers, they were patiently described and clarified by a devoted group of cosmopolitan advocates. Small groups of Westerners experimented with Gandhian techniques in virtual anonymity and then, on the cusp of the 1960s, brought these methods to a wider audience. The swelling protests of later years increasingly abandoned the spirit of non-violence, and the central significance of Gandhi and his supporters has therefore been forgotten. This book recovers this tradition, charts its transformation, and ponders its abiding significance.
DS481.G3 G824 2014 Available at JSCC Jackson Campus
A first volume of a series detailing the life and work of the influential political advocate draws on private papers and other untapped sources to cover his birth in 1869 through his upbringing in Gujarat, discussing his London education and decades as a lawyer in South Africa.
In his Autobiography, Gandhi wrote, “What I want to achieve—what I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty years—is self-realization, to see God face to face. . . . All that I do by way of speaking and writing, and all my ventures in the political field, are directed to this same end.” While hundreds of biographies and histories have been written about Gandhi (1869–1948), nearly all of them have focused on the national, political, social, economic, educational, ecological, or familial dimensions of his life. Very few, in recounting how Gandhi led his country to political freedom, have viewed his struggle primarily as a search for spiritual liberation. Shifting the focus to the understudied subject of Gandhi’s spiritual life, Arvind Sharma retells the story of Gandhi’s life through this lens.
Using the frames of diaspora theory, post-colonial discourse theory and the recent Atlantic turn in studies of resistance, this book brings into relief Gandhi′s experience as a traveler moving from a classic colony, India, to the plantation and mining society of South Africa. The author forwards the argument that this move between different modes of production brought Gandhi into contact with indentured laborers, with whom he shared exilic and diasporic consciousness, and whose difficult yet resilient lives inspired his philosophy. It reads Gandhi′s nationalistic (that is, anti-colonial) sentiments as born in diasporic exile, where he formed his perspective as a provincial subject in a multiracial plantation.
This is a rare view of Gandhi as a hard-hitting political thinker willing to countenance the greatest violence in pursuit of a global vision that went beyond a nationalist agenda. Guided by his idea of ethical duty as the source of the self's sovereignty, he understood how life's quotidian reality could be revolutionized to extraordinary effect.
Mohandas Gandhi, icon of Indian liberation, remains an inspiration for anti-capitalists and peace activists globally. His campaigns for national liberation based on non-violence and mass civil disobedience were critical to defeating the power of the British Empire. This biography examines his campaigns from South Africa to India to evaluate the successes and failures of non-violent resistance. Seventy years after his death, his legacy remains contested: was he a saint, revolutionary, class conciliator, or self-obsessed spiritual zealot?
The law. M. K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law is the first biography of the Mahatma's early years as a lawyer. It follows Gandhi as he embarks on a personal journey of self-discovery: from his education in Britain, through the failure of his first law practice in India, to his eventual migration to South Africa. Though he found initial success representing wealthy Indian merchants, events on the ground would come to change him. Relentless attacks by the white colonial establishment on Indian civil rights prompted Gandhi to give up his lucrative business in favor of representing the oppressed in court. Gandhi had originally hoped that the South African legal system could be relied upon for justice.
RSS, School Texts and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi undertakes the novel experiment of juxtaposing three apparently quite different issues, the nature of the RSS school textbooks, the murder of the Mahatma and the basic ideology of Savarkar and Golwalkar. While deeply delving into all three aspects, it brings out the deep connection between them. The book, which brings out the basic ideological underpinnings of the Hindu Communal Project, is divided into three parts. Part I discusses how this ideology is propagated among young impressionable minds through school textbooks. Part II studies the role of the Sangh combine in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi and Part III analyses the basic elements of the Hindu communal ideology, as propounded by some of its founders like Savarkar and Golwalkar.
Neither an ode of adulation, nor an exercise in iconoclasm, this book on Gandhi gives praise where praise is due; and criticizes where criticism is warranted. The author treads in step with Gandhi as he reveals himself in his Experiments with Truth in an honest attempt to understand the Mahatma in the making. Gandhi's veracity is not in question; but his memory, and selection and omission of episodes, inevitably temper the tenor of truth! His equation of Truth with God can only be understood as justice and fair play analogous to sat...
Dennis Dalton's classic account of Gandhi's political and intellectual development focuses on the leader's two signal triumphs: the civil disobedience movement (or salt satyagraha) of 1930 and the Calcutta fast of 1947. Dalton clearly demonstrates how Gandhi's lifelong career in national politics gave him the opportunity to develop and refine his ideals. He then concludes with a comparison of Gandhi's methods and the strategies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, drawing a fascinating juxtaposition that enriches the biography of all three figures and asserts Gandhi's relevance to the study of race and political leadership in America. Dalton situates Gandhi within the 'clash of civilizations' debate, identifying the implications of his work on continuing nonviolent protests. He also extensively reviews Gandhian studies and adds a detailed chronology of events in Gandhi's life.
This is a story told through the clash of personalities, such as South African statesman Jan Smuts, who saw in the UN a means to protect the old imperial and racial order; Raphael Lemkin and Joseph Schechtman, Jewish intellectuals at odds over how the UN should combat genocide and other atrocities; and Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, who helped transform the UN from an instrument of empire into a forum for ending it. A much-needed historical reappraisal of the early development of this vital world institution, No Enchanted Palace reveals how the UN outgrew its origins and has exhibited an extraordinary flexibility that has enabled it to endure to the present day.
India's foreign policy toward Israel is a subject of deep dispute. Throughout the twentieth century arguments have raged over the Palestinian problem and the future of bilateral relations. Yet no text comprehensively looks at the attitudes and policies of India toward Israel, especially their development in conjunction with history.P. R. Kumaraswamy is the first to account for India's Israel policy, revealing surprising inconsistencies in positions taken by the country's leaders, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and tracing the crackling tensions between its professed values and realpolitik.
While America is focused on religious militancy and terrorism in the Middle East, democracy has been under siege from religious extremism in another critical part of the world. As Nussbaum reveals in this penetrating look at India today, the forces of the Hindu right pose a disturbing threat to its democratic traditions and secular state. Nussbaum's long-standing professional relationship with India makes her an excellent guide to its recent history.
Available at JSCC Jackson Campus
First published in 1936 under title: Jawaharlal Nehru, an autobiography.
Available at the JSCC Jackson Campus
Print book
Available at JSCC Jackson Campus
Kim Chong-il as leader -- Establishing the Kim Chong-il system -- Crisis management: experimenting with reform -- Kim family politics -- Rollback of reforms -- New faces emerge as North Korea takes a different tack at reform -- Passing the torch to a third generation -- Third hereditary succession -- Challenges for the future.
Three days after North Korean premier Kim Il Sung launched a massive military invasion of South Korea on June 24, 1950, President Harry S. Truman responded, dispatching air and naval support to South Korea. Initially, Congress cheered his swift action; but, when China entered the war to aid North Korea, the president and many legislators became concerned that the conflict would escalate into another world war, and the United States agreed to a truce in 1953. The lack of a decisive victory caused the Korean War to quickly recede from public attention. However, its impact on subsequent American foreign policy was profound. In Truman, Congress, and Korea: The Politics of America's First Undeclared War, Larry Blomstedt provides the first in-depth domestic political history of the conflict, from the initial military mobilization, to Congress's failed attempts to broker a cease-fire, to the political fallout in the 1952 election.
North Korean Foreign Policy: Security Dilemma and Succession, by Yongho Kim, starts from the point of view that North Korea's provocations have been motivated more by fear than by her in-born provocative nature. Kim argues that North Korea's provocative foreign policy reflects its threat perception stemming from various security dilemma, and a very real concern regarding another father-to-son succession. This volume views North Korea's external and domestic threats as causes and its provocative foreign policy as an effect of the causes. The security dilemma has impelled North Korea to generate and thus portray to the world provocative signals, and the ever-pressing issue of Kim Jong-il's succession has driven him to prioritize his own political survival over that of North Korea's state survival. Unless Kim Jong-il's political survival is guaranteed, North Korea will not be interested in full-scale introduction of capitalist way of economic reform and economic package promised by the United States and South Korea in return for the abandonment of their nuclear program. North Korean Foreign Policy suggests that an effective policy for countries relating to North Korea, whether dovish or hawkish, should deal directly with Kim Jong-il's political survival, and not with Pyongyang's failed economy.
What happens when a dictator wins absolute power and isolates a nation from the outside world? In a nightmare of political theory stretched to madness and come to life, North Korea's Kim Jong Il made himself into a living god, surrounded by lies and flattery and beyond criticism. As over two million of his subjects starved to death, Kim Jong Il roamed between palaces staffed by beautiful girls and stocked with expensive international delicacies. Outside, the steel mills shut down, the trains stopped running, the power went out, and the hospitals ran out of medicine. When the population threatened to revolt, Kim imposed a reign of terror, deceived the United Nations, and plundered the country's dwindling resources to become a nuclear power. Now this tiny bankrupt nation is using her nuclear capability to blackmail the United States.
With nearly twenty-five million citizens, a secretive totalitarian dictatorship, and active nuclear and ballistic missile weapons programs, North Korea presents some of the world's most difficult foreign policy challenges. For decades, the United States and its partners have employed multiple strategies in an effort to prevent Pyongyang from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
Despite recent attempts at 'negotiation', the attitudes of both Kim Jong-un's regime and the West seem unchanged. North Korea is still shrouded in mystery, and there are no clear plans for the future... Can we trust either side to bring about peace? And if so, how? This provocative insider's account blasts apart the myths which paint North Korea as a rogue state run by a mad leader. Informed by extraordinary access to the country's leadership, Glyn Ford investigates the regime from the inside, providing game-changing insights, which Trump and his administration have failed to do.
Featuring contributions by some of the leading experts in Korean studies, this book examines the political content of Kim Jong-Il's regime maintenance, including both the domestic strategy for regime survival and North Korea's foreign relations with South Korea, Russia, China, Japan, and the United States. It considers how and why the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) became a 'hermit kingdom' in the name of Juche (self-reliance) ideology, and the potential for the barriers of isolationism to endure.
Fifty-five years after its founding at the dawn of the cold war, North Korea remains a land of illusions. Isolated and anachronistic, the country and its culture seem to be dominated exclusively by the official ideology of Juche, which emphasizes national self-reliance, independence, and worship of the supreme leader, General Kim Jong Il. Yet this socialist utopian ideal is pursued with the calculations of international power politics. Kim has transformed North Korea into a militarized state, whose nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and continued threat to South Korea have raised alarm worldwide. This paradoxical combination of cultural isolation and military-first policy has left the North Korean people woefully deprived of the opportunity to advance socially and politically.
For more than fifty years, students and teachers have made the two-volume resource Sources of Indian Traditions their top pick for an accessible yet thorough introduction to Indian and South Asian civilizations. Volume 2 contains an essential selection of primary readings on the social, intellectual, and religious history of India from the decline of Mughal rule in the eighteenth century to today. It details the advent of the East India Company, British colonization, the struggle for liberation, the partition of 1947, and the creation of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and contemporary India. This third edition now begins earlier than the first and second, featuring a new chapter on eighteenth-century intellectual and religious trends that set the stage for India's modern development. The editors have added material on Gandhi and his reception both nationally and abroad and include different perspectives on and approaches to Partition and its aftermath. They expand their portrait of post-1947 India and Pakistan and add perspectives on Bangladesh. The collection continues to be divided thematically, with a section devoted to the drafting of the Indian constitution, the rise of nationalism, the influence of Western thought, the conflict in Kashmir, nuclear proliferation, minority religions, secularism, and the role of the Indian political left. A phenomenal text, Sources of Indian Traditions is more indispensable than ever for courses in philosophy, religion, literature, and intellectual and cultural history.
Do women national leaders represent a breakthrough for the women's movement, or is women's leadership weaker than the numbers imply? This unique book, written by an experienced politician and academic, is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of how and why women in 53 countries rose to the top in the years since World War II. Packed with fascinating case studies detailing the rise to power of all 73 female presidents and prime ministers from around the world, from 1960 (when the first was elected) to 2010, the motives, achievements and life stories of the female top leaders, including findings from interviews carried out by the author, provide a nuanced picture of women in power. The book will have wide international appeal to students, academics, government officials, women's rights activists and political activists, as well as anyone interested in international affairs, politics, social issues, gender and equality.
Five women have served as leaders of Muslim countries, namely Megawati Sukarnoputri (Vice President of Indonesia, 1991-2001 and President 2002-4), Benazir Bhutto (PM of Pakistan, 1988-90 and 1993-6), Sheikh Hasina (PM of Bangladesh, 1996-2001), Khaleda Zia (PM of Bangladesh, 1991-5 and 2001-6) and Tansu Çiller (PM of Turkey, 1993-6). This is an extraordinary record and somewhat of a challenge to the widespread perception that Muslim women are oppressed. Four of the women belonged to political families by birth or marriage, raising interesting questions about the extent to which this played a role alongside their skills and personal qualities in their rise to power. To what degree did culture rather than Islam aid and abet their roles, or indeed is it sustainable to distinguish Islam from culture. This study of the role of these five powerful Muslim women uses their life and work to explore relevant issues, such as the role of culture, gender in Islam and the nature of the Islamic state.
As the Kashmir dispute brings India and Pakistan ominously close to nuclear war this book provides a compelling account of the history and politics of these two great South Asian rivals. Like the Israel-Palestine struggle, the Indian-Pakistan rivalry is a legacy of history. The two countries went to war within months of becoming independent and, over the following half-century, they have fought three other wars and clashed at the United Nations and every other global forum. It is a complex conflict, over religion and territory with two diametrically opposed views of nationhood and national imagination. J.N. Dixit, former Foreign Secretary of India, and one of the world's leading authorities on the region, has written a balanced and very readable account of the most tempestuous and potentially dangerous flashpoint in international politics.
The partitioning of British India into independent Pakistan and India in August 1947 occurred in the midst of communal holocaust, with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other. More than 750,000 people were butchered, and 12 million fled their homesprimarily in caravans of bullock-cartsto seek refuge across the new border: it was the largest exodus in history. Sixty-seven years later, it is as if that August never ended. Renowned historian and journalist Dilip Hiro provides a riveting account of the relationship between India and Pakistan, tracing the landmark events that led to the division of the sub-continent and the evolution of the contentious relationship between Hindus and Muslims.
What is driving political extremism in Pakistan? In early 2011, the prominent Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer was assassinated by a member of his own security team for insulting Islam by expressing views in support of the rights of women and religious minorities. Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, was killed by gunfire and explosive devices as she left a campaign event in December 2007; strong evidence links members of extremist organizations to her slaying. These murders underscore the fact that religion, politics, and policy are inextricably linked in Pakistan
The killing of Osama bin Laden spotlighted Pakistan's unpredictable political dynamics, which are often driven by conspiracy theory, paranoia, and a sense of betrayal. In Pakistan, the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto famously declared, there is “always the story behind the story.” In The Pakistan Cauldron, James P. Farwell explains what makes Pakistani politics tick. Farwell has advised the Department of Defense on terrorism, sovereignty, and the political issues in the Middle East, Africa, and Pakistan. Here he reveals how key Pakistani political players have inconsistently employed the principles of strategic communication to advance their agendas and undercut their enemies. Pakistan is an enigma to many. Only by understanding the complex forces that shape Pakistani leaders can we uncover their shifting political agendas and how they affect America and the West. Farwell explains how and why former president Pervez Musharraf clamped down on nuclear scientist A. Q. Kahn and isolated him. He assesses Benazir Bhutto's unique legacy and analyzes how Musharraf handled the aftermath of her assassination. He explains Pakistan's current instability and demonstrates how the country's emotional reaction to bin Laden's death is best understood as the outcome of long-standing political dynamics. The Pakistan Cauldron is for anyone who needs to know why Pakistan continues to pose increasingly difficult challenges for the United States and the West.
