Righteous Demagogues explores the causes, dynamics, and consequences of populist politics in South Asia and beyond. It argues that populist mobilizations are rooted in crises of representation, and populism is a symptom not an underlying cause of democratic malaise. Populist leaders, in framing their appeals, evoke the moral contract--that states are obligated to redress certain types of inequality--and promise its restoration, in ways that resonate with voters across lines of partisanship and social divisions, leading party system change. Depending on how broadly populist appeals resonate, different types of populism emerge, with consequences ranging from the rejection of populists to varying forms of democratic backsliding. The book examines the dynamics of populist politics primarily through four cases in South Asia. In the late 1960s, Indira Gandhi in India and Zulfiqar Bhutto in Pakistan effected reordering populist mobilizations on the left, against the de facto oligarchic regime
Observing that the division between theory and empiricism remains inextricably linked to imperial modernity, manifest at the most basic level in the binary between “the West” and “Asia,” the authors o
Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific explores the making and consumption of conflict-related heritage throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Contributing to a growing literature on ‘difficult heritage’, this collection advances our understanding of how places of pain, shame, oppression, and trauma have been appropriated and refashioned as ‘heritage’ in a number of societies in contemporary East and Southeast Asia and Oceania. The authors analyse how the repackaging of difficult pasts as heritage can serve either to reinforce borders, transcend them, or even achieve both simultaneously, depending on the political agendas that inform the heritage-making process. They also examine the ways in which these processes respond to colonialism, decolonization, and nationalism. The volume shows how efforts to preserve various sites of ‘difficult heritage’ can involve the construction of new borders in the mind between what is commemorated and what is often deliberately obscured or forgotten. Take
Part I: Overview Discovering East Asian Middle Classes: Formaton, Differentiation, and Politics PartII: South Korea Studies on the Middle Class in Korea:Some Theoretical and Methodological Cons
