Secularism, Decolonisation, and the Cold War in South and Southeast Asia PDF Download

Author: Clemens Six
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351684795
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
The intensifying conflicts between religious communities in contemporary South and Southeast Asia signify the importance of gaining a clearer understanding of how societies have historically organised and mastered their religious diversity. Based on extensive archival research in Asia, Europe, and the United States, this book suggests a new approach to interpreting and explaining secularism not as a Western concept but as a distinct form of practice in 20th-century global history. In six case studies on the contemporary history of India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, it analyses secularism as a project to create a high degree of distance between the state and religion during the era of decolonisation and the emerging Cold War between 1945 and 1970. To demonstrate the interplay between local and transnational dynamics, the case studies look at patterns of urban planning, the struggle against religious nationalism, conflicts around religious education, and (anti-)communism as a dispute over secularism and social reform. The book emphasises in particular the role of non-state actors as key supporters of secular statehood – a role that has thus far not received sufficient attention. A novel approach to studying secularism in Asia, the book discusses the different ways that global transformations such as decolonisation and the Cold War interacted with local relations to reshape and relocate religion in society. It will be of interest to scholars of Religious Studies, International Relations and Politics, Studies of Empire, Cold War Studies, Subaltern Studies, Modern Asian History, and South and Southeast Asian Studies.

Author: Spencer C. Tucker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 4179

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Book Description
This sweeping reference work covers every aspect of the Cold War, from its ignition in the ashes of World War II, through the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Cold War superpower face-off between the Soviet Union and the United States dominated international affairs in the second half of the 20th century and still reverberates around the world today. This comprehensive and insightful multivolume set provides authoritative entries on all aspects of this world-changing event, including wars, new military technologies, diplomatic initiatives, espionage activities, important individuals and organizations, economic developments, societal and cultural events, and more. This expansive coverage provides readers with the necessary context to understand the many facets of this complex conflict. The work begins with a preface and introduction and then offers illuminating introductory essays on the origins and course of the Cold War, which are followed by some 1,500 entries on key individuals, wars, battles, weapons systems, diplomacy, politics, economics, and art and culture. Each entry has cross-references and a list of books for further reading. The text includes more than 100 key primary source documents, a detailed chronology, a glossary, and a selective bibliography. Numerous illustrations and maps are inset throughout to provide additional context to the material.

Author: Clemens Six
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004447962
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
To what extent was the evolution of secularism in twentieth-century South and Southeast Asia a result of transnational exchange? Six argues that networks of non-state actors played a bigger role than previously understood.

Author: Geoff Wade
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429952139
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Spanning over a millennium of history, this book seeks to describe and define the evolution of the China–Southeast Asia nexus and the interactions which have shaped their shared pasts. Examining the relationships which have proven integral to connecting Northeast and Southeast Asia with other parts of the world, the contributors of the volume provide a wide-ranging historical context to changing relations in the region today – perhaps one of the most intense re-orderings occurring anywhere in the world. From maritime trading relations and political interactions to overland Chinese expansion and commerce in Southeast Asia, this book reveals rarely explored connections across the China–Southeast Asia interface. In so doing, it transcends existing area studies boundaries to present an invaluable new perspective to the field. A major contribution to the study of Asian economic and cultural interactions, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese history, as well as those engaged with Southeast Asia.

Author: Elizabeth A. Foster
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512824976
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In the decades following the era of decolonization, global Christianity experienced a seismic shift. While Catholicism and Protestantism have declined in their historic European strongholds, they have sustained explosive growth in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. This demographic change has established Christians from the Global South as an increasingly dominant presence in modern Christian thought, culture, and politics. Decolonization and the Remaking of Christianity unearths the roots of this development, charting the metamorphosis of Christian practice and institutions across five continents throughout the pivotal years of decolonization. The essays in this collection illustrate the diverse new ideas, rituals, and organizations created in the wake of Western imperialism's formal collapse and investigate how religious leaders, politicians, theologians, and lay people debated and shaped a new Christianity for a postcolonial world. Contributors argue that the collapse of colonialism and broader cultural challenges to Western power fostered new organizations, theologies, and political engagements across the world, ultimately setting Christianity on its current trajectory away from its colonial heritage. These essays interrogate decolonization's varied and conflicting impacts on global Christianity, while also providing a novel framework for rethinking decolonization's modern legacies. Taken together, this book charts the relationship between decolonization and Christianity on a truly global scale. Contributors: Joel Cabrita, Darcie Fontaine, Elizabeth A. Foster, Udi Greenberg, David Kirkpatrick, Eric Morier-Genoud, Phi-Vân Nguyen, Justin Reynolds, Sarah Shortall, Lydia Walker, Charlotte Walker-Said, Albert Wu, Gene Zubovich.

Author: Dhirendra K Jha
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 8197949247
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
FROM THE AUTHOR OF GANDHI'S ASSASSIN ‘A compelling portrait of M. S. Golwalkar.’—Thomas Blom Hansen ‘…[biography of] one of the most secretive public figures of post-independence India.’—Chistophe Jaffrelot ‘A disturbing book, because of its revelations on the inner working of the RSS.’—Mridula Mukherjee Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, or Guruji as he is reverentially referred to by his followers, is regarded as the demi-god of Hindutva politics and often accorded a status higher than even the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, K. B. Hedgewar. In 1940, when 34-year-old Golwalkar unexpectedly assumed charge of the RSS on Hedgewar’s death, the Hindu militia was still in its nascent stage, with pockets of influence mainly in Maharashtra. Under Golwalkar’s leadership over the next three decades, the RSS and its allied organizations, known as the Sangh Parivar, extended its network across the entire country and penetrated almost every aspect of Indian society. Golwalkar’s ideological influence was enormous—and it did not end with his death. Golwalkar’s prescriptions in his incendiary book We or Our Nationhood Defined, published in 1939, now became central to the ideological training and radicalization of youth dedicated to the idea of a Hindu Rashtra. Here, Golwalkar prescribed a solution to India’s ‘minority problem’ based on the Nazi treatment of Jews in the Third Reich. As Dhirendra K. Jha conclusively establishes in this book, this would eventually provide the core of the Sangh’s credo and, as events in the recent past have borne out, have a lasting influence on Indian politics. Drawing from a wealth of original archival material and interviews, the deeply researched and scholarly Golwalkar: The Myth Behind the Man, the Man Behind the Machine pierces through the many legends built around the man in the biographies written by his loyalists during his own lifetime. Jha traces Golwalkar’s path from a directionless youth to a demagogue who plotted to capture political power by countering the secularist vision of nationalist leaders from Nehru to Gandhi. Ambitious, insecure, tactical and secretive—Jha draws a compelling and sinister portrait of one of the most prominent Hindutva leaders, and of the RSS and its worldview that evolved under him.

Author: Mirjam Künkler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108284906
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
This book traces religion and secularity in eleven countries not shaped by Western Christianity (Japan, China, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and Morocco), and how they parallel or diverge from Charles Taylor's grand narrative of the North Atlantic world, A Secular Age (2007). In all eleven cases, the state - enhanced by post-colonial and post-imperial legacies - highly determines religious experience, by variably regulating religious belief, practice, property, education and/or law. Taylor's core condition of secularity - namely, legal permissibility and social acceptance of open religious unbelief (Secularity III) - is largely absent in these societies. The areas affected by state regulation, however, differ greatly. In India, Israel and most Muslim countries, questions of religious law are central to state regulation. But it is religious education and organization in China, and church property and public practice in Russia that bear the brunt. This book explains these differences using the concept of 'differential burdening'.

Author: István Keul
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000331490
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This book explores religion in various spatial constellations in South Asian cities, including religious centres such as Varanasi, Madurai and Nanded, and cities not readily associated with religion, such as Mumbai and Delhi. Contributors from different disciplines discuss a large variety of urban spaces: physical and imagined, institutional and residential, built and landscaped, virtual and mediatised, historical and contemporary. In doing so, the book addresses a wide range of issues concerning the role of religion in the dynamic interplay of factors which characterise complex urban social spaces. Chapters incorporate varying degrees and forms of the religious/spiritual, ranging from invisible and incorporeal to material and explicit, embedded in and expressed as spatial politics, works of fiction, mission, pilgrimage, festivals and everyday life. Topics examined include conflictual situations involving places of worship in Delhi, inclusive religious practices in Kanpur, American Protestant mission in Madurai, the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday in Lahore, gardens as imaginative spaces, the politics of religion in Varanasi and many others. Illustrating and analysing ways and forms in which religion persists in South Asian urban contexts, this book will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of cultural studies, the study of religions, urban studies and South Asian studies.

Author: Pavin Chachavalpongpun
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351364871
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Thailand is a timely survey and assessment of the state of contemporary Thailand. While Thailand has changed much in the past decades, this handbook proposes that many of its problems have remained intact or even persistent, particularly problems related to domestic politics. It underlines emerging issues at this critical juncture in the kingdom and focuses on the history, politics, economy, society, culture, religion and international relations of the country. A multidisciplinary approach, with chapters written by experts on Thailand, this handbook is divided into the following sections. History Political and economic landscape Social development International relations Designed for academics, students, libraries, policymakers and general readers in the field of Asian studies, political science, economics and sociology, this invaluable reference work provides an up-to-date account of Thailand and initiates new discussion for future research activities.

Author: Rotem Geva
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503632121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Delhi, one of the world's largest cities, has faced momentous challenges—mass migration, competing governing authorities, controversies over citizenship, and communal violence. To understand the contemporary plight of India's capital city, this book revisits one of the most dramatic episodes in its history, telling the story of how the city was remade by the twin events of partition and independence. Treating decolonization as a process that unfolded from the late 1930s into the mid-1950, Rotem Geva traces how India and Pakistan became increasingly territorialized in the imagination and practice of the city's residents, how violence and displacement were central to this process, and how tensions over belonging and citizenship lingered in the city and the nation. She also chronicles the struggle, after 1947, between the urge to democratize political life in the new republic and the authoritarian legacy of colonial rule, augmented by the imperative to maintain law and order in the face of the partition crisis. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Geva reveals the period from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s as a twilight time, combining features of imperial framework and independent republic. Geva places this liminality within the broader global context of the dissolution of multiethnic and multireligious empires into nation-states and argues for an understanding of state formation as a contest between various lines of power, charting the links between different levels of political struggle and mobilization during the churning early years of independence in Delhi.