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This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

This chapter explores the writings of Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi, especially on the post-colonial state, ethnicity, peasantry and kinship relations. In contradistinction to most (partial) uptakes of Alavi, I evaluate his work as a whole in order to shed light on its continuities and discontinuities. I demonstrate both the strengths and pitfalls of Alavi's theorisation of the post-colonial state, mode of production and ethnicity by placing him in context of wider Marxist debates at the time. I then suggest that Alavi's other work (e.g. on the peasantry and kinship relations) may serve to complement the weaknesses of the former. Thus, by reading Alavi contra Alavi, I advocate for an ‘integral’ perspective on the relations between civil and political society, arguing for a conjunctural awareness of mediations between the same, and their imbrications with differentiated relations of class, ethnicity and kinship.

This essay examines how two Marxist anti-colonial intellectuals from Portuguese India and French India – Aquino de Bragança and V Subbiah – differentially theorized movements for independence from colonial rule. Through the analysis of primary source documents in French, Portuguese, Italian and English, I compare V Subbiah's Dalit, anti-fascist anti-colonial Marxism to Aquino de Bragança's internationalist anti-colonial Marxism. Both theorists' approaches have similarities in (1) theorizing the relationship between fascism and colonialism given that the Portuguese Empire was administered by Salazar's Estado Novo and the French Empire was under Vichy rule, (2) rethinking Marxism to better fit the Global South context and (3) intellectual and political connections to Algeria were critically important for theory and praxis. Despite the distinct geographic and social spaces in which they lived and worked, both produced remarkably similar theories of anti-imperialism.

This chapter critically examines the dialectical relationship between colonial capitalism, racism, state terrorism, and racial/ethnonational domination from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. It demonstrates the deficiencies of theories of global studies. In reformulating and improving critical international studies, this study advances the idea that excluding indigenous wisdom and knowledge from this area has allowed the hegemonic Euro-American-centric scholarship and ideology to limit our understanding of the racist sickness and its continuous evolution in the modern world system. Since this sickness has been hidden under the rhetoric of democracy, human rights, and social justice, even progressive intellectuals have failed to thoroughly comprehend the devastating consequences of racism and terrorism in global studies.

First, the chapter critically establishes the dialectical relationship between colonial capitalism, racial terrorism, and the continuous destruction of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia. It explains how the dominant racial/ethnonational groups have continued to maintain their privileges at the cost of marginalized societies. Second, using indigenous wisdom and knowledge, the piece exposes the intellectual deficiencies of Euro-American scholarship and ideology from the right and left in global studies. Third, the chapter demonstrates that the claims of democracy, human rights, and social justice do not adequately apply to the conditions of the indigenous peoples in the world. Fourth, it proposes ways of developing a comprehensive critical global studies by critically including the wisdom and knowledge of indigenous peoples.

This paper explores two museums in Taiwan, both former sites of incarceration, and asks how they reflect Taiwan’s evolving relationship with the past. Taiwan has successfully emerged from its authoritarian past into a democratic present; yet, it still bears the scars of its traumatic and violent history in the places where trauma and pain was exacted over Taiwanese people by different regimes. Two of these places are former prisons, now museums with common histories of incarceration, but very different approaches to presentation of traumatic pasts. This paper aims to understand the selective presentation of narratives of punishment in prison museums in Taiwan and what they reflect about Taiwan’s national identity.

This research used a qualitative ethnographic methodology, approaching prison museums as research sites with multidimensional textual, spatial and visual data. This study used a narrative ethnology approach to analyse the content, structure and social context surrounding the stories told about punishment at the sites.

While the Jingmei White Terror Memorial Park documents past abuses under the authoritarian Kuomindang Government (1945–1987), the narratives presented at the Chiayi Prison Museum, constructed under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945), ignore past colonial violence. This study argues that the invisibility of past colonial violence in Chiayi prison museum acts to strengthen Taiwan’s multicultural national identity, while Jingmei WTMP acts to valorise political prisoners as heroic fighters for Taiwan’s democracy and human rights.

This research makes a contribution to the museum studies literature through extending understanding of the relationship between former carceral spaces and national identity projects.

Conflicts between herders and farmers in Nigeria in the last five years have been destructive to the corporate existence of Nigerian society and the Nigerian State, especially in Northcentral, Northwestern and Southern Nigeria. This paper aims to investigate the relationships between state responses and peace-building in rural grazing communities in Nigeria using a National Survey on Peace-building in Nigeria conducted by this team using a cross-sectional survey of 1,711 farmers and herders.

The study adopted the political economy of the herder–farmers conflict in Africa to contextualise the problem. Data generated from the study were analysed using chi-square test and binary logistic regression model.

The results showed that protection of victims of herder–farmers conflict (P = 0.024), blockage of sources of illicit weapons (P = 0.000), arrest of leaders (P = 0.043), provision of shelter (P = 0.030), provision of food (P = 0.037), protection of women from sexual exploitation and abuse (P = 0.019) and use of the media were positively related to peace-building in the rural grazing areas. The study further found that when the Federal Government (ß= 0.452, P = 0.018), State Government (ß= 0.522, P = 0.018), private individuals (ß = 0.855, P = 0.000) and cooperative societies (ß = 0.744, P = 0.021) established ranches, peace was likely to be guaranteed as opposed to where herders (ß= –0.355, P= 0.029) were allowed to establish ranches in the rural grazing communities in Nigeria implying that the Federal and State Government must be cautious in the implementation of the Livestock Transformation Plans not to create an impression that it is designed to favour the herders.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is original and the paper has not been submitted to any journal.