Sri Lanka has been regarded as a model democracy among former British colonies. It was lauded for its impressive achievement in terms of human development indicators. However, Sri Lanka's modern history can also be read as a tragic story of inter-ethnic inequalities and tensions, resulting in years of violent conflicts. Two long spells of anti-state youth uprisings were followed by nearly three decades of civil war, and most recently a renewed upsurge of events are examples of the on-going uneasy project of state-building. This book discusses that state-building in Sri Lanka is centred on the struggle for hegemony amidst a kind of politics that rejects individual and group equality, opposes the social integration of marginalised groups and appeals to narrow, fearful and xenophobic tendencies among the majority population and minorities alike. It answers the pressing questions of - How do the dynamics of intra-Sinhalese class relations and Sinhalese politics influence the trajectories of post-colonial state-building? What tensions emerge over time, between Sinhalese hegemony-building and wider state-building? How did these tensions manifest in majority and minority relationships?

It departs from the scholarship produced on Sri Lanka, and re-introduces the neo-Marxist approaches through the works of Antonio Gramsci.

When commercial media practices are insinuated into local cultures, existing cultural and media practices are often displaced and social inequalities are exacerbated—sometimes with the consent of consumers, but frequently confronting organized proponents. The Globalization of Corporate Media Hegemony provides case studies from five continents—from government-promoted telecommunications programs and technologies in Canada and Britain, MTV Asia's call-in request lines, and the pan-Latin ideology of a Mexican television variety show, to Islamic pop radio in Turkey, commercial radio in Africa, a "Millionaire" game show in India, and Hollywood's muted influence on Korean cinema, among others. Each case offers new insight into the particulars of an expanding corporate hegemony and together they invite the conversation on media globalization to consider the dynamics of class conflict and negotiation as an analytical perspective having prescriptive potential.

This book describes the relations between international relations theory and the realities of U.S.-Latin American relations. It attempts a reappraisal of U.S. power in Latin America, a risky venture in times of indeterminate change and divergent thinking.

This study brings an original approach to the important concept of hegemony. It presents a theoretical history of the use of hegemony in a range of work starting with a discussion of Gramsci and Russian Marxism.

The study of racial and ethnic relations has become one of the most written about aspects in sociology and sociological research. In both North America and Europe, many "traditional" cultures are feeling threatened by immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Asia. This handbook is a true international collaboration looking at racial and ethnic relations from an academic perspective. It starts from the principle that sociology is at the hub of the human sciences concerned with racial and ethnic relations.

There has been clear recognition of tendencies towards uncritically celebrating resistance and the need for critical appraisal within the literature on globalization and contestation. This book provides a conceptual history of global civil society and a critical examination of the politics of resistance in the global political economy. It uses a dialectical method of analysis to illustrate the conceptual stasis of mainstream approaches to questions of globalization and contestation, while demonstrating the potential of a Gramscian approach to reconstitute hegemony as a key analytical and explanatory tool. Buckley offers insight to the movements of transversal hegemony and existent and anticipated modes of social relation through the case studies of the World Social Forum and the World People's Conference on Climate Change. Offering a more comprehensive understanding of change in the global political economy, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of international political economy, globalization, global civil society, sociology, and the politics resistance.

This book presents an innovative approach to gender, nationalism, and the relations between them, and analyses the broader social base of Hindu nationalist organisation to understand the growth of 'Hindutva', or Hindu nationalism, in India. Arguing that Hindu nationalist thought and predilections emerge out of, and, in turn, feed, pre-existing gendered tendencies, the author presents the new concept of 'masculine hegemony', specifically Brahmanical masculine hegemony. The book offers a historical overview of the processes that converge in the making of the identity ‘Hindu’, in the making of the religion ‘Hinduism’, and in the shaping of the movement known as ‘Hindutva’. The impact of colonialism, social reform, and caste movements is explored, as is the role of key figures such as Mohandas Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, and Narendra Modi. The book sheds light on the close, yet uneasy, relations that Hindu nationalist thought and practice have with conceptions of 'modernity', 'development' and women's movements, and politics, and the future of Hindu nationalism in India. A new approach to the study of Hindu nationalism, this book offers a theoretically innovative understanding of Indian history and socio-politics. It will be of interest to academics working in the field of Gender studies and Asian Studies, in particular South Asian history and politics.

Douglas Kellner's Persian Gulf TV War attacks the myths, disinformation, and propaganda disseminated during the Gulf war. At once a work of social theory, media criticism, and political history, this book demonstrates how television served as a conduit for George Bush's war policies while silencing anti-war voices and foregoing spirited discussion of the complex issues involved. In so doing, the medium failed to assume its democratic responsibilities of adequately informing the American public and debating issues of common concern. Kellner analyzes the dominant frames through which television presented the war and focuses on the propaganda that sold the war to the public–one of the great media spectacles and public relations campaigns of the post-World War II era. In the spirit of Orwell and Marcuse, Kellner studies the language surrounding the Gulf war and the cynical politics of distortion and disinformation that shaped the mainstream media version of the war, how the Bush administration and Pentagon manipulated the media, and why a majority of the American public accepted the war as just and moral.