Seminar papers.

This volume attempts to show the emerging contours of ‘transformative action’ in social movements across South Asia. It argues that these contours have been shaped by contestations over questions of equity, justice and well-being on the one hand, and the nature and scope of new and classical social movements on the other. This is manifest in diverse modes through people’s struggles, protest and dissent. The authors examine a variety of themes that have determined the course of the politics of transformative struggles. They critique neoliberalism, ‘primitive’ accumulation, money, class inequalities, as well as aspects of capital–labour conflict. They highlight the contributions of movements by women, dalit and marginalized communities; peace movements; and environmental and agrarian struggles. The volume also appraises the role of internet in grassroots mobilizations and that of civil society networks in the making of participatory democracy. It further argues that the predicaments of cultural, ethnic, national, regional, and linguistic identities are not divorced from capital–labour conflicts. The book will serve as essential reading for students and scholars of sociology, social movements, politics, gender and feminist studies, labour studies, and the informed general reader.

Analyzing Indian women's groups as one sector of a complex of new grass-roots, non-party political movements, Dr. Caiman considers why and how a women's movement evolved in India when it did. She describes the nature, origins, and meanings of the movement for Indian women and discusses the movement's significance for Indian politics in general as w

The World Bank is the single biggest source of finance for international development, and its policies have a critical impact on the future of more than 110 borrowing countries. In this dramatic and lively new critique, Bruce Rich, internationally known expert on the environment and the World Bank, analyzes how the Bank has become a seemingly unstoppable and often destructive environmental and political force. The author chronicles the life-and-death impact of Bank-funded projects around the world: huge dams that have forced the resettlement of millions of the poorest people on earth, road building and jungle colonization schemes in Brazil, Indonesia, and Africa that have left vast deforestation and social conflict in their wake, and much more. Rich also recounts the bold grassroots campaigns of nongovernmental groups seeking alternatives to Bank-style development. Confidential internal Bank documents expose chronic misrepresentations by Bank management to its donor nations and to the public. Rich reveals how senior officials continue to push money into projects with disastrous ecological and human rights consequences, despite early and persistent protests of Bank staff. He shows how repeatedly and without political accountability the Bank has increased its support for regimes that torture and murder their subjects, from Ceaucescu's Romania to Suharto's Indonesia. Mortgaging the Earth explains the so-called pressure to lend that emerges as a leitmotif in the Bank's fifty-year history and shows how this institutional dynamic has taken on a damaging life of its own. Rich traces the history of the Bank, from its inception at Bretton Woods, where it was conceived as a way to funnelreconstruction loans for war-torn Europe, through the surreally top-down tenure of Robert McNamara to the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit. At Rio, governments poured billions of dollars more into the Bank to save our global environment - while the Bank financed new ecological disasters. The World Bank, Rich demonstrates in a provocative history of development from Descartes to Max Weber to Chico Mendes, is a crucible of the goals of the modern age, goals that in the very moment of their worldwide triumph have become problematic. He shows how the Bank's dilemmas mirror our global civilization's crisis of values and gives expert prescription for reform. Mortgaging the Earth makes disturbingly clear why every American should be concerned about the World Bank, as a critical arena where the global politics of technology, development, and the environment are played out on a small planet, one where the stakes are increasingly for keeps.

Behind the public's hope of effective action by governments on environmental issues lies a complex terrain of conceptual confusion, conflicts of interest and philosophical dispute. This is why some of the world's leading environmental thinkers have come together in this volume to probe critically the new language being developed by environmental professionals. They examine the contradictions inherent in the fashionable notion of sustainable development. They explore the emerging conflicts over the distribution of environmental risks between North and South. And they warn that 'global ecology' seen in a managerial perspective, may degenerate into an effor to redesign and manage Nature in order to keep economic growth going in the face of a rising tide of resource plunder and pollution. This book seeks to launch a critical debate in order to clarify the issues involves and what might constitute appropriate action.

This study describes and analyses the new social movements that have arisen in India over the past two decades, in particular the anti-caste movement (of both the untouchables and the lower-middle castes), the women's liberation movement, the farmers' movement (centred on struggles arising out of their integration into a state-controlled capitalist market), and the environmental movements (opposition to destructive development, including resistance to big dam projects and the search for alternatives). Rooted in participant observation, it focuses on the ideologies and self-understanding of the movements themselves. The central themes of this book are the origin of movements in the socio-economic contradictions of post-independence India; their effect on political developments, in particular the disintegration of Congress hegemony; their relation to "traditional Marxist" theory and Communist practice; and their groping toward a synthesis of theory and practice that constitutes a new social vision distinct from traditional Marxism.

The increasing investment in scientific knowledge, in its production, distribution and reproduction, is acquiring greater social significance. Everything that is regarded as knowledge in society has become a legitimate subject matter for academic investigations from various disciplines and for practitioners.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title The 1984 lethal gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, may be the most extensively studied industrial disaster in history. In a departure from earlier studies that have focused primarily on the causes of the catastrophe, Sheila Jasanoff and the contributors to this volume critically examine the consequences of the accident.

øThis Handbook uniquely collates the results of several decades of academic research in these two important fields. The expert contributions successively address the different forms of political citizenship and current approaches and recent development