The Evolution of Repressive Law in Putin’s Russia takes a socio-legal perspective to trace the development of this regime of legalized repression, by looking at both the laws on the books and the law in action. Each chapter is a case study of a single repressive law regime, containing the context and a short legal history followed by analysis of its implementation. The authors cover terrorism, extremism, treason and espionage laws. They also trace restrictions on freedom of assembly, traditional and online media, and speech in multiple contexts, including the COVID era and the 2022 war in Ukraine. Importantly, this book takes a ground-up perspective, centering the voices of those who have engaged with these laws in practice. The contributors have been on the front lines of documenting and resisting the evolution of Russia’s repressive legal system that we document in this book and, as such, have also been caught in its crosshairs.

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Afterlives of Urban Cosmopolitanism charts the history of these communities in Muslim Asia and explores their migratory trajectories. Rather than emphasising the declining significance of non-Muslims to the region, however, this unique book illuminates how even in the context of diaspora many communities have continued to maintain relations with their countries of origin and with Muslims from them living in the diaspora. The book is informed by in-depth fieldwork conducted in Muslim Asia and amongst the region’s diasporas in contexts as diverse as Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, Aleppo, Kabul, and London, New York, and Vienna.

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The volume highlights three cross-cutting methodological challenges: ensuring data quality, establishing causality and enhancing reproducibility/replicability. It discusses how these challenges are best addressed in order to strengthen the robustness and practical relevance of empirical evidence. Additionally, the book enables readers to diversify their methods toolbox to combine approaches in mixed methods research that facilitates innovative and impactful insights. Considering quantitative, qualitative and computational techniques, nine commonly used methods for studying online extremism and terrorism are presented in accessible, practical guides. The latter demonstrate what each design or data collection strategy offers to the field and how they can be implemented, drawing on concrete examples from the literature.

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Drawing on extensive archival research and expert interviews, the book traces two interconnected processes. It reconstructs how human rights were rooted under late socialism through home-grown practices of documentation, translation and dissent. It then examines how these practices were reconfigured after 1989 through uneven professionalisation of national ‘human rights complexes’. The book’s unique contribution lies in its comparative, socio-legal approach. By placing Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, Romania and Russia side by side, it reveals diverse trajectories of human rights professionalisation, resilience and failure. In doing so, it offers a new relational and bottom-up perspective on human rights as a lived social practice shaped by history, professional networks and human experience.

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Since 9/11, the transnational practices of diasporic Muslims have received significant negative attention, as both security threats and impediments to citizenship. *Postcolonial Citizens *unpacks the mutually constitutive relationship between citizenship and transnationalism by focusing on three transnational domains – remittances, religion and investment – in relation to Muslim Bangladeshis in the US and the UK. It is a tale of two cities separated by the Atlantic, and by the respective, albeit interconnected, histories of colonialism and settler colonialism through which different racial practices have emerged and are legitimated in the current conjuncture.

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Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research with Amsterdam’s Parent and Child Teams, Remaking Welfare in the Netherlands examines how this intimate welfare state is imagined and enacted by frontline professionals. The book attends to the fantasies, ethical commitments, and everyday dilemmas that animate these reforms, including the negotiation of race within ostensibly universalist frameworks of care.

The book argues that this emerging formation has a psychic life of its own: animated by aspirations toward a friendly, caring, and accessible state, yet haunted by enduring fears of bureaucratic intrusion and state violence. Bringing ethnographic insight into conversation with debates on welfare and social policy, the book offers a fresh perspective on contemporary transformations of governance in the Netherlands and on the political futures now being forged across Europe.

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Taking stock of the enduring power of negative narratives about pastoralism, the volume considers counter-narratives from multiple corners, tracing their alternative visions of both the past and the future. It explores everyday aspirations and practices to make sense of sweeping socio-economic, political and environmental change. In doing so, Pastoral Prosperities gestures towards new cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral conversations that might inform more grounded approaches to investment, governance and support in the years ahead.

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Drawing on scholarship across sociology, anthropology, political science, and cultural and legal history, the volume examines how narratives of masculine restoration, revolutionary spirit and cultural belonging drive and reinvent political formations across Turkey, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, India and China. Refusing positivist and Eurocentric templates, the contributors co-theorise from within their own contexts, attending to the specific temporalities through which Islamic movements claim the past, inhabit the present and project futures.

The result is a volume whose theoretical force comes from the very geographies it studies: a contribution, not a conclusion, to the decolonial rethinking of political imagination and its entanglement with nationalism, masculine desire and the unfinished business of revolution.

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Bringing into focus the connection between the reconfiguration of labour and changes in the two countries’ welfare systems, Migrant Labour in Global Factories analyses how these contradictions shape the care of their huge migrant labour forces. It explores how they unfold in the historical and political contexts of both countries, bringing a range of relevant theories about welfare and social policymaking to bear on the features of the market socialist economy. The book argues that the evolving welfare systems in China and Vietnam fail to address meaningfully the social consequences of labour commodification in contexts where neoliberal development is instrumentalized to serve the political control and legitimacy of the party states. This is often at the cost of long-term and sustainable social policies for migrant labour in global factories.

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