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Gives a comprehensive overview of national elections and referendums in South East Asia, East Asia, and the South Pacific. For all relevant states, the legal provisions on suffrage as well as parliamentary and presidential electoral systems are analysed in both a historical and a comparative manner. Investigates the effects of elections and electoral systems on the development of the political regimes. The concluding section summarizes the context‐specific availability and reliability of official electoral statistics. The appendix presents the basic features of the parliamentary electoral systems currently applied in the 30 states of the three regions.

We live in an increasingly prosperous world, yet the estimated number of undernourished people has risen, and will continue to rise with the doubling of food prices. A large majority of those affected are living in India. Why have strategies to combat hunger, especially in India, failed so badly? How did a nation that prides itself on booming economic growth come to have half of its preschool population undernourished? Using the case study of a World Bank nutrition project in India, this book takes on these questions and probes the issues surrounding development assistance, strategies to eliminate undernutrition, and how hunger should be fundamentally understood and addressed. Throughout the book, the underlying tension between choice and circumstance is explored. How much are individuals able to determine their life choices? How much should policy-makers take underlying social forces into account when designing policy? This book examines the possibilities and obstacles to eliminating child hunger. This book is not just about nutrition, it is an attempt to uncover the workings of power through a close look at the structures, discourses, and agencies through which nutrition policy operates. In this process, the source of nutrition policy in the World Bank is traced to those affected by the policies in India.

Gives a comprehensive overview of national elections and referendums in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus, and South Asia. For all relevant states, the legal provisions on suffrage as well as parliamentary and presidential electoral systems are analysed in both a historical and a comparative manner. Investigates the effects of elections and electoral systems on the development of the political regimes. The concluding section summarizes the context‐specific availability and reliability of official electoral statistics. The appendix presents the basic features of the parliamentary electoral systems currently applied in the 22 states of the three regions.

The book analyses the changes that have occurred in developing countries since the end of the Cold War. The first section highlights major areas of change in economics, politics, and security and institutions, while the second section develops these themes and reveals the diversity of experience through regional case studies (Latin America, Asia Pacific, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East).

Although many refer to the American South as the “Bible Belt”, the region was not always characterized by a powerful religious culture. In the 17th century and early 18th century, religion was virtually absent from southern culture. The late 18th century and early 19th century, however, witnessed the astonishingly rapid rise of evangelical religion in the Upper South. Within just a few years, evangelicals had spread their beliefs and their fervor, gaining converts and building churches throughout Virginia and North Carolina and into the western regions. This book argues that early evangelicals successfully negotiated the various challenges of the 18th-century landscape by creating churches that functioned as civil as well as religious bodies. As the era experienced substantial rifts in the relationship between church and state, the disestablishment of colonial churches paved the way for new formulations of church-state relations. The evangelical churches were well-positioned to provide guidance in uncertain times, and their multiple functions allowed them to reshape many of the central elements of authority in southern society. They assisted in reformulating the lines between the “religious” and “secular” realms, with significant consequences for both religion and the emerging nation-state.

This book reflects the author's experience across more than forty years in assessing and helping to shape policy about nuclear weapons, mostly at senior levels close to the centre both of British governmental decision-making and of NATO's development of plans and deployments, with much interaction also with comparable levels of United States activity in the Pentagon and the State Department. From this exceptional background of practical experience Part I of this book seeks to distill basic conceptual ways of understanding the nuclear revolution—the transformation brought about by the existence of nuclear weapons, and their significance in preventing major war. It also surveys NATO's progressive development of thinking about nuclear deterrence, and then discusses the deep moral dilemmas posed—for all possible standpoints—by the existence of such weapons. Part II considers the risks and costs of nuclear-weapon possession, including proliferation dangers, and looks at both successful and unsuccessful ideas for risk-management. Part III illustrates specific issues by reviewing the history and current policies of one long-established possessor, the United Kingdom, and two more recent ones in South Asia. Part IV turns to the future, examines the goal of the eventual abolition of all nuclear armouries, and then discusses the practical agenda, short of such a goal, which governments can usefully tackle in reducing the risks of proliferation and other dangers while not surrendering prematurely the war-prevention benefits which nuclear weapons have brought since 1945.

The purpose of the book is to provide researchers with a framework to conduct research in a culturally sensitive manner with individuals, families, and communities in diverse cultural settings in the United States, as well as in a global context within the context of three aims: (1) To understand and describe the nature and extent to which a particular problem occurs; (2) To understand the etiology or potential factors associated with the occurrence of a particular problem; (3) To evaluate programs or interventions designed to ameliorate or eliminate a problem. For each of these three aims, applications of different research methods with various population groups are discussed with considerable detail. The work presented falls into different sides of the emic–etic continuum, with some studies taking a more emic perspective (i.e., Chapter 2, a mixed methods study with American Indian populations), others presenting more of an etic approach (i.e., Chapter 3, a multicountry study of drug use in Central America), and yet others presenting an emic–etic distinction that is less salient (i.e., Chapters 4–6, a longitudinal studies of ecological factors and drug use in Santiago, Chile; a longitudinal study of ecological factors and PTSD in the City of Detroit; and a randomized clinical trial and community-based participatory research project both also conducted in Detroit). Two central themes that guided this work are that culture is not static, rather it is fluid and changing, and that cross-cultural researchers should avoid making sweeping generalizations that risk taking on essentialist characteristics. The book concludes with a call for anyone conducting cross-cultural research to include an intersectionality lens, one that encompasses a broader range of multiple identities, into their work.

This book presents a cross-linguistic study of the phenomenon of infixation, typically associated in English with words like nullim-bloody-possiblenull, and found in all the world's major linguistic families. Infixation is a central puzzle in prosodic morphology: the book explores its prosodic, phonological, and morphological characteristics; considers its diverse functions, and formulates a general theory to explain the rules and constraints by which it is governed. The book examines 154 infixation patterns from over a hundred languages, including examples from Asia, Europe, Africa, New Guinea, and South America. It compares the formal properties of different kinds of infix, explores the range of diachronic pathways that lead to them, and considers the processes by which they are acquired in first language learning. A central argument of the book concerns the idea that the typological tendencies of language may be traced back to its origins and to the mechanisms of language transmission. The book thus combines the history of infixation with an exploration of the role diachronic and functional factors play in synchronic argumentation: it is an exemplary instance of the holistic approach to linguistic explanation.

This book analyses the prospects for services integration in South Asia, focusing on member countries of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) — India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. SAARC turned to trade promotion in order to achieve greater regional integration, starting with the signing of the SAARC Preferential Trade Agreement (SAPTA) in April 1993. The book discusses the role and performance of services within the region and identifies those services and areas which offer good and varied prospects for intra-regional integration. It also assesses the status of liberalization and reforms as well as current levels of intra-regional engagement in services in order to highlight the policy environment and existing opportunities and interests in the regional market. Furthermore, the book looks at multilateral and extra-regional/bilateral commitments made by the member countries of the South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) in services and their positions on key issues in order to evaluate their preparedness to commit under SAFTA. Finally, the book considers negotiating priorities in different services and on cross-cutting issues to point out possible modalities for negotiation.

Islam is spreading rapidly in sub‐Saharan Africa, home of more than 150 million Muslims. African Islam is local Islam, responsive to local histories in cultures as diverse as the countries considered in this study – Nigeria, Sudan, Senegal, Kenya, and South Africa. Islam provides a source of communal identity to those experiencing rapid change, populations affected by secularization, unemployment, corrupt and ineffectual governments, and the intrusions of global media. The spread of Islam ascends as respect for the state declines. Ironically, the same Muslim believers who rail against Western materialism are keen on adopting the most modern technologies to communicate with members, and to find access to employment and economic opportunities in the West. As for Islamic fundamentalists (Islamists) the danger is that given Africa's porous borders and weak state structures, such groups can move about easily, feeding on popular discontent. Often more political than theological in aspirations, there is no certainty that the Islamist position will advance in Africa. Opposition includes central governments, many of them with Muslims in key positions, and numerous traditional Islamic rulers and brotherhoods, more moderate in outlook. The extent to which imposition of Sharia, traditional Islamic law, is introduced in a country can be a barometer of the extent of Islamic influence. This timely study is based on extensive field research, including oral interviews, the study of contemporary local sources, and historical research by two scholars with long familiarity with the subject.

Writing more than one hundred years ago, African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois speculated that the great dilemma of the twentieth century would be the problem of “the color line.” Nowhere was the dilemma of racial discrimination more entrenched—and more complex—than South Africa. This book looks at South Africa’s freedom struggle in the years surrounding African decolonization, and it uses the global apartheid debate to explore the way new nation-states changed the international community during the mid-twentieth century. At the highpoint of decolonization, South Africa’s problems shaped a transnational conversation about nationhood. Arguments about racial justice, which crested as Europe relinquished imperial control of Africa and the Caribbean, elided a deeper contest over the meaning of sovereignty, territoriality, and development. This contest was influenced—and had an impact on—the United States. Initially hopeful that liberal international institutions would amicably resolve the color line problem, Washington lost confidence as postcolonial diplomats took control of the U.N. agenda. The result was not only America’s abandonment of the universalisms that propelled decolonization, but also the unravelling of the liberal order that remade politics during the twentieth century. Based on research in African, American, and European archives, this book advances a bold new interpretation about African decolonization’s relationship to American power. The book promises to shed light on U.S. foreign relations with the Third World and recast our understanding of liberal internationalism’s fate after World War II.

The book explores how new democracies face an authoritarian past and past human rights violations, and the way in which policies of truth and justice shape the process of democratization. Eighteen countries in Central and South America, Central, Eastern and South Europe and South Africa are analysed in detail. The main variables affecting the implementation of truth and justice policies (purges, truth commissions and trials, among other policies) are: the balance between old and new regime forces; the availability of institutional, human and financial resources, the nature of the ideological preferences and commitments of the elites in question; the mobilization of social groups pressing in favour of these policies; and the importance of human rights in the international arena. The duration and degree of institutionalization of dictatorship is also important. A prolonged dictatorship makes it harder for a new democracy to implement truth and justice policies, particularly when repression occurred in the distant past and if repression gained social complicity. The magnitude and methods of repression used against opposition forces in the dictatorship also shape transitional truth and justice: torture, assassination, and disappearances and clandestine repression in general (as in Central and South America, South Africa) require a different response to official institutionalized ‘softer’ repression (as in Portugal, Spain and Eastern Europe). The findings indicate that, with hindsight, there appears to be no direct relation between the implementation of policies of backward-looking truth and justice and the quality of new democracies. Democracy is just as strong and deep in Spain, Hungary and Uruguay, where there was no punishment or truth telling, as it is in Portugal, the Czech Republic or Argentina, which experienced purges and trials. However, such policies are justified not merely on instrumental grounds, but also for ethical reasons, and they symbolize a break with a violent, undemocratic past.

The four Pacific Basin countries of Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, have each defied the vicious circle of poverty in the post-war years, emerging as dynamic and rapidly growing economies. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the economic factors that led to the “miracle”. It aims to reveal the sources of economic growth by analyzing the underlying mechanisms and interrelationships of this export success. The authors combine a wide-ranging empirical body of data spanning a full twenty-five years, from the early “take-off” period of the mid-1960s, to the early 1990s with a broad theoretical approach to its analysis. The concept of revealed comparative advantage is utilized. Using Japan's trade performance as a benchmark, this book examines whether the four NICs have gained on or fallen further behind Japan. Not only are detailed product groups examined but such economic factors as specific product characteristics and embodied factor contents are explored. The important issues of intra-industry trade and NIC import-export relationships are also examined, and imports and exports of specific products are forecast. The conclusions reached in this chapter can serve as a guide to likely future developments. The book makes an original contribution by describing international trade data that relates to the evaluation of the extraordinary success of these four countries.

At the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. This book examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as blacks and whites alike learned to navigate the shoals between two different economic worlds. In the aftermath of the Civil War, uncertainty was a pervasive feature of life in the South, affecting the economic behavior and social status of former slaves, Freedmen's Bureau agents, planters, merchants, and politicians, among others. Emancipation brought fundamental questions: How should emancipated slaves be reimbursed in wage contracts? What occupations and class positions would be open to blacks and whites? What forms of agricultural tenure could persist? And what paths to economic growth would be viable? To understand the escalating uncertainty of the postbellum era, the book draws on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including several thousand interviews with former slaves, letters, labor contracts, memoirs, survey responses, census records, and credit reports. The book identifies profound changes between the economic institutions of the Old and New South and sheds new light on how the legacy of emancipation continues to affect political discourse and race and class relations today.