Exploring a new approach to interfaith/interreligious communication, the contributors to this collection seek to interact from the perspective of their own tradition or academic discipline with Ernest Becker's theory on the relationship between religion, culture, and the human awareness of death and mortality. While much interfaith/interreligious dialogue focuses on beliefs and practices, thus delineating areas of disagreement as a starting point, these chapters foster interactive communic...

Presenting a framework that incorporates macro-level forces into micro-level strategic calculations, this book explains key political choices by leaders and challengers in Pakistan through the political survival mechanism. It offers an explanation for continuing polity weakness in the country, and describes how political survival shapes the choices made by the leaders and challengers.Using a unique analysis that synthesizes theories of weak states, quasi-states and political surviv...

The work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom represents a distinctive contribution to the study of political economy, public policy and administration, collective action, and governance theory. Efforts to present a comprehensive overview of the Bloomington School that grew around the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis (now renamed the Ostrom Workshop), which they founded more than 40 years ago, received new impetus with the award of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science to El...

Development analysts often focus on the role of “the state” in making the right rules by which to govern society, assuming that governance is exclusively or mainly the work of the central government authority. The reality in many developing countries, particularly those with weak central government authorities, is that governance happens through diverse rules and in many centers of decision-making, in ways that are formal and informal, official and unofficial. This real-world polycentricit...