In the Net is the first book about the internet that is an introduction, a handbook, a political treatise and a history. Explicitly written for social and political activists, as well as for educators, it presents a history of the technology, a guide to progressive uses of the internet and an account of how NGOs and others have been using information and communication technology (ICT) for social and political change.

The book opens with a history of computer-mediated communication, its promises and its threats. The author shows how computing and electronic networking have been liberated from governments and corporations. He examines the social and political contexts of the internet internationally and its future potential. He then present a series of case studies – including the use of computer-mediated communication in parts of former Yugoslavia by peace and humanitarian organizations.

This work tells the story of the response of ordinary people around the world to the “irreversible” juggernaut of the global economy – small farmers in Honduras, migrant workers in the Andes, urban poor in Bosnia, Cambodian woodcutters, Mexican textile workers, Korean NGO activists, Vietnamese goverment officials. Readers are shown attempts to create alternatives by those for whom globalization has no need. Their different responses share common features: meeting basic needs, making sustainable, culturally appropriate improvements to people’s lives, and on the basis of active civic participation, solidarity and learning one from another. The book begins with a concise history of how the globalized economy came into being, what it means today, and the emerging challenges to this unprecedented concentration of power.

Constitution-making for democracy has always been a highly political and contested process. It has never been more ambitious, or more difficult, than today as politicians and experts attempt to build democratic institutions that will foster peace and stability in countries torn by violent conflict. The extended investigation out of which this book has grown has ranged across three continents. It has examined such apparently intractable cases as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sri Lanka and Fiji, as well as apparent ‘success stories’ like South Africa, Ghana and Uganda.

This book brings together an inter-disciplinary group of Palestinian, Israeli, American, British and Irish scholars who theorise ‘the question of Palestine’. Critically committed to supporting the Palestinian quest for self determination, they present new theoretical ways of thinking about Palestine. These include the ‘Palestinization’ of ethnic and racial conflicts, the theorization of Palestine as camp, ghetto and prison, the tourist/activist gaze, the role of gendered resistance, the centrality of the memory of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) to the contemporary understanding of the conflict, and the historic roots of the contemporary discourse on Palestine.

1989 marks the unraveling of India’s ‘Nehruvian Consensus’ around the idea of a modern, secular nation with a self-reliant economy.

Caste and religion have come to play major roles in national politics. Global economic integration has led to conflict between the state and dispossessed people, but processes of globalization have also enabled new spaces for political assertion, such as around sexuality. Older challenges to the idea of India continue from movements in Kashmir and the North-East, while Maoist insurgency has deepened its bases. In a world of American Empire, India as a nuclear power has abandoned non-alignment, a shift that is contested by voices within.