Bücher der Reihe South Asia in the Social Sciences

Makes an intervention in debates around the nature of the political economy of Pakistan. It is the first comprehensive academic analysis of Pakistan's political economy after thirty-five years, addressing issues of state, class and society, examining gender, the middle classes, the media, the bazaar economy, urban spaces and the new elite.

This book explores how industrial firms in South Asia manage the challenges of production after the withdrawal of the government from directing industry in the 1980s. Naseemullah argues that in Pakistan and India, manufacturers manage capital and labor differently based on their backgrounds, complicating industrial transformation by the state.

This book challenges the ongoing debates on poor people's negotiations with democracy. It analyses the varied ways in which the poor participate in a democracy. Based on fieldwork, Roy argues that poor people neither assimilate into the universal values associated with democracy nor maintain their difference vis-a-vis democracy.

Drawing on long-term fieldwork in the former Maoist heartland of Nepal, this book explores how the Maoist conflict transformed Nepali society between 1996-2006. It demonstrates how the everyday became a primary site of revolution in Nepal during the war and how people adopted previously transgressive practices and recreated their lives.

How does democracy empower marginalized voters under conditions of inequality? The author probes into this question grounding her research in the context of Pakistan, an emerging democracy whose voters have actively been involved in defining its political history but about whom we know very little. They turn up in sizeable numbers to vote during elections, even under military rule, prompting all kinds of contradictory stereotypes about how Pakistani rural voters behave as electoral cannon fodder. But no one has looked very closely at why they vote as they do, or why they vote at all when their political agency is severely limited by high socio-economic inequality. By using original data collected across different villages and households in rural Pakistan, this book finds that electoral politics enables even the most marginalized voters to strategically further their interests vis-a-vis elite groups, but that persistent inequality limits their ability to organize or compete.