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Analyzes the causes, organization, and impact of wartime migration during and since Mozambique's recent civil war (1977–1992), in order to challenge theories that establish categorizations of migration based on the degree of its ‘forcedness’. It demonstrates how predominant demographic theories of forced migration rest on a highly reductionist model of decision‐making that fails adequately to examine actor agency and the social and cultural factors that inform agency in acute crisis contexts. It also challenges theoretical models of so‐called ‘forced migration’ that privilege the analysis of macro‐political factors in explaining the causes and organization of wartime movement. Arguing that displacement must be examined in historical perspective, this study shows how migration had long been a strategy deployed by actors in central Mozambique in a variety of local‐level social struggles over the rights and obligations that defined social relationships. These culturally defined, and ‘micro‐level’ social struggles also shaped wartime migration in ways that ultimately resulted in a highly gendered wartime population distribution. This study focuses, in particular, on how struggles over the gendered configuration of power relations within marriage affected wartime and post‐conflict migration through the development of new forms of ‘transnationalized’ polygyny. Finally, this study proposes steps towards developing alternative theoretical approaches to the study of crisis migration.

This chapter explains the objectives, theoretical framework, literature review, scope of research, methods of research, and chapterisation of this study. This study adopts a combination of Anthony Giddens’s structure-agency theory as well as Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and field as a framework for examining the strategies and tactics that Chinese Indonesians adopt to safeguard their business and personal interests as well as their ethnic and cultural identities in the post-Suharto era. Medan and Surabaya were selected as field sites for this study because both cities are economically and politically significant. Moreover, there are certain interesting contrasts in regard to their Chinese populations. The methods used in this research are library research, individual interviews, and participant observation.

This chapter is concerned with the intersection of ethnicity, class, and gender, and the impact of labour market initiatives in Coventry. It is noted that Coventry went through a period of rapid structural change. The discussion studies two major themes from a structure-agency perspective: access to the labour market and the transformative potential of community-based initiatives (CBIs). CBIs are defined as outreach schemes that are based on voluntary participation aimed at improving the supply-side employability of disadvantaged people. The chapter first examines the broader structural context in Coventry, and then studies the selected initiatives and how they were perceived by the recipients.

After examining paradigmatic views on the relationship between trade shows and their underlying economic geographies, based on the structure–agency debate in the social sciences, this chapter proposes a two-way model of reciprocal influences between trade show specialization and territorial specialization. On the one hand, trade show specialization depends upon the characteristics of firms located in the local catchment basin, the hosting areas' image and cultural heritage, and the national institutional set-up. On the other hand, trade shows impact hosting areas by generating local economic impacts and regional development, facilitating the establishment of vertical pipelines with non-local business, and by contributing to the reproduction of national specialization patterns. The chapter also discusses how the link between trade shows and territories is stronger in some phases of the trade show lifecycle than in others, and for certain types of trade shows in contrast to others, thus emphasizing the need for a contextual analysis.

What are the effects of nonviolent (civil) resistance on political transitions? This chapter examines what we know about the relationship between nonviolent resistance and political order and uses that established knowledge to argue for a novel theory of civil resistance transitions. Civil resistance gives countries a democratic advantage relative to other ways of initiating a political transition. But that advantage must be carried through the uncertainty of the transitional period. Two key challenges can undermine this advantage: a failure to maintain high levels of social and political mobilization and a failure to direct mobilization away from revolutionary maximalist goals and tactics into new institutional avenues. The chapter details the mechanisms of civil resistance transitions that these challenges undermine and the unique regime types that variation in these challenges leads to.

Looks at two other key functions of politicians: legislator and minister. It finds that politicians confront a paradox when seeking to enact change: they are both powerful and powerless. It concludes by arguing that recognition of this dilemma forces us to rethink our expectations of what can be achieved, with specific reference to the emerging literature on ‘developmental’ leadership.

Chapter 1 outlines the key principles that guide interview-based research and highlights the unique contributions this can yield. Conducting depth interviews places each participant’s voice at the heart of the study, giving participants an opportunity to tell their stories in their own words and to think more deeply about their experiences than is usually possible with other methods. Through careful questioning, concentrated listening, and focused follow-up probing, interviewers invite further exploration that encourages people to share their life experiences, describe the social contexts surrounding these experiences, and consider their personal reactions to them, including the meaning they attribute to life events and the accounts, motivations, and actions these events engender. Then, through systematic analysis of how each piece of information stands in relationship to the other information offered by that participant and all the others, it becomes possible to chart the dynamic processes that shape life trajectories and link individual actions to larger social structures. This enables interviewers to address their original question(s) and any new ones that emerge to discover empirical patterns and develop theoretical insights.

Chapter 2 reviews how International Relations (IR) scholarship has been treating individual agency, especially within the dominant theoretical frameworks, Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism. Various analytical perspectives, such as the “levels-of-analysis,” foreign policy analysis, and the transnational relations approach, have reserved room for the analysis of individuals in world politics. But concerns about academic discipline formation and real-world relevance have led to a widespread neglect of individual actors. While James Rosenau’s research and the integration of social theory into IR offer fruitful ways of thinking about individual agency, they often overemphasize the structural situatedness of actors fulfilling social roles. Revisiting the structure–agency debate, the chapter takes inspiration from Margaret Archer’s sociological insights in order to propose that agency should be analyzed as a variable with an intrasubjective and an intersubjective dimension, which always requires contextual specification. Power, it is argued, should be seen as a disposition, and its exercise vis-à-vis other actors as an intentional project.