Edited by Eva Harrison and Meredith L. Weiss

The Routledge Handbook of Civil and Uncivil Society in Southeast Asia explores the nature and implications of civil society across the region, engaging systematically with both theoretical approaches and empirical nuance for a systematic, comparative, and informative approach. The handbook actively analyses the varying definitions of civil society, critiquing the inconsistent scrutiny of this sphere over time. It brings forth the need to reconsider civil society development in today’s Southeast Asia, including activist organisations' and platforms' composition, claims, resources, and potential to effect sociopolitical change. Structured in five parts, the volume includes chapters written by an international set of experts analysing topics relating to civil society: Spaces and platforms Place within politics Resources and tactics Identity formation and claims Advocacy The handbook highlights the importance of civil society as a domain for political engagement outside the state and parties, across Southeast Asia, as well as the prevalence and weight of 'uncivil' dimensions. It offers a well-informed and comprehensive analysis of the topic and is an indispensable reference work for students and researchers in the fields of Asian Studies, Asian Politics, Southeast Asian Politics and Comparative Politics.

London; New York: Routledge, 2023. 422p.

By Karl Mannheim

Translated from the German by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. From the Preface: The original German edition of Ideology and Utopia ap. peared in an atmosphereof acute intellectual tension marked by widespread discussion which subsided only with the exile or enforced silence of those thinkers who sought an honest and tenable solution to the problems raised. Since then the conflicts which in Germany led to the destruction of the liberal Weimar Republic have been felt in various countries all over the world, especially in Western Europe and the United States. The intellectual problems which at one time were considered the peculiar preoccupation of German writers have enveloped virtually the whole world. What was once regarded as the esoteric concern of a few intellectuals in a single country has become t h ecommon plight of the modern man.In response to this situation there has arisen an extensive literature which speaks of the "end," the "decline," the " crisis," the " decay," or the " death " of Western civilization. But despite the alarm….

NY. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1936. 381p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Samuel P. Huntington

From the Preface: “In the summer of 1993 the journal Foreign Affairs published an article of mine titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”. That article, according to the Foreign Affairs editors, stirred up more discussion in three years than any other article they had published since the 1940s. It certainly stirred up more debate in three years than anything else I have written. The responses and comments on it have come from every continent and scores of countries. People were variously impressed, intrigued, outraged, frightened, and perplexed by my argument that the central and most dangerous dimension of the emerging global politics would be conflict between groups from differing civilizations. Whatever else it did, the article struck a nerve in people of every civilization.

Given the interest in, misrepresentation of, and controversy over the article, it seemed desirable for me to explore further the issues it raised. One construc­tive way of posing a question is to state an hypothesis. The article, which had a generally ignored question mark in its title, was an effort to do that. This book is intended to provide a fuller, deeper, and more thoroughly documented answer to the articles question…”

NY. Touchstone. 1996. 350p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By V. S. Naipaul

Returning to India--the subject of his acclaimed "An Area of Darkness"--in 1975, Naipaul produced this concise masterpiece of journalism and cultural analysis, a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by repeated foreign invasions and immured in a mythic vision of its past. In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi's "Emergency," V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years earlier. Out of that journey he produced a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of India. Drawing on novels, news reports, political memoirs, and his own encounters with ordinary Indians--from a supercilious prince to an engineer constructing housing for Bombay's homeless--Naipaul captures a vast, mysterious, and agonized continent inaccessible to foreigners and barely visible to its own people. He sees both the burgeoning space program and the 5,000 volunteers chanting mantras to purify a defiled temple; the feudal village autocrat and the Naxalite revolutionaries who combined Maoist rhetoric with ritual murder. Relentless in its vision, thrilling in the keenness of its prose, India: A Wounded Civilization is a work of astonishing insight and candor.

NY. Vintage. 1976. 161p.

By Michel Foucault. Translation by Richard Howard

From Chapter 1: “At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable. For centuries, these reaches would belong to the non-human. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, they would wait, soliciting with strange incanta- tions a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of ter- ror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion.”

Vintage Random House. 1965. 317p.

By Arnold J. Toynbee.

“Civilization ... is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour." That idea runs throughout the book. In a very interesting essay, Toynbee asked: "Does History Repeat Itself?" One answer is this: "There is nothing to prevent our Western civilization from following historical precedent, if it chooses, by committing social suicide." What will it take to avoid our demise? Toynbee believed that "world government," the mixed economy, and a revival of religion were the keys to the salvation of Western civilization. Religion is prominent in Toynbee's perspective of history. He recommended that "If our first precept should be to study our own history, ... our second precept should be to relegate economic and political history to a subordinate place and give religious history the primacy. For religion, after all, is the serious business of the human race." Toynbee was prescient about the importance of Islam. "Thus the contemporary encounter between Islam and the West," he observed, "is not only more active and intimate than any phase of their contact in the past; it is also distinctive in being an incident in an attempt by Western man to `Westernize' the world---an enterprise which will possibly rank as the most momentous, and as certainly the most interesting, feature in the history even of a generation that has lived through two world wars."

NY. Oxford University Press (1948) 255p.