front cover of The Art of Staying Neutral
The Art of Staying Neutral
The Netherlands in the First World War, 1914-1918
Maartje Abbenhuis
Amsterdam University Press, 2006
An insightful account of the challenges of neutrality in an era of total war, The Art of Staying Neutral shows how the Netherlands remained peaceful throughout World War I. This sustained neutrality, Maartje Abbenhuis demonstrates, was the result of many factors, including masterly diplomacy, careful adherence to international laws and a decisive measure of good fortune. Neutrality, however, did not come without considerable costs to the nation’s economy and security. 

This book is a major contribution both to the study of neutrality and the domestic history of the Netherlands.

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Why Are Artists Poor?
The Exceptional Economy of the Arts
Hans Abbing
Amsterdam University Press, 2002
Most artists earn very little. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of aspiring young artists. Do they give to the arts willingly or unknowingly? Governments and other institutions also give to the arts, to raise the low incomes. But their support is ineffective: subsidies only increase the artists' poverty.

The economy of the arts is exceptional. Although the arts operate successfully in the marketplace, their natural affinity is with gift-giving, rather than with commercial exchange. People believe that artists are selflessly dedicated to art, that price does not reflect quality, and that the arts are free. But is it true?

This unconventional multidisciplinary analysis explains the exceptional economy of the arts. Insightful illustrations from the practice of a visual artist support the analysis.
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Islam in a Secular State
Muslim Activism in Singapore
Walid Jumblatt Abdullah
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
The overtly secular state of Singapore has unapologetically maintained an authoritarian approach to governance in the realm of religion. Islam is particularly managed by the state. Muslim activists thus have to meticulously navigate these realities - in addition to being a minority community - in order to maximize their influence in the political system. Significantly, Muslim activists are not a monolith: there exists a multitude of political and theological differences amongst them. This study analyses the following categories of Muslim activists: Islamic religious scholars (ulama), liberal Muslims, and the more conservative-minded individuals. Due to constricting political realities, many activists attempt to align themselves with the state, and call upon the state to be an arbiter in their disagreements with other factions. Though there are activists who challenge the state, these are by far in the minority, and are typically unable to assert their influence in a sustained manner.
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Austronesian Soundscapes
Performing Arts in Oceania and Southeast Asia
Birgit Abels
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

In Austronesia—the region that stretches from Madagascar in the west to Easter Island in the east—music plays a vital role in both the construction and expression of social and cultural identities. Yet research into the music of Austronesia has hitherto been sparse. Drawing together contemporary cultural studies and musical analysis, Austronesian Soundscapes will fill this research gap, offering a comprehensive analysis of traditional and contemporary Austronesian music and, at the same time, investigating how music reflects the challenges that Austronesian cultures face in this age of globalization.

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Music Worlding in Palau
Chanting, Atmospheres, and Meaningfulness
Birgit Abels
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Music Worlding in Palau: Chanting, Atmospheres, and Meaningfulness is a detailed study of the performing arts in Palau, Micronesia as holistic techniques enabling the experiential corporeality of music’s meaningfulness—that distinctly musical way of making sense of the world with which the felt body immediately resonates but which, to a significant extent, escapes interpretive techniques. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research alongside Pacific Islander and neo-phenomenological conceptual frameworks, Music Worlding distinguishes between meaning(s) and meaningfulness in Palauan music-making. These are not binary phenomena, but deeply intertwined. However, unlike meaning, meaningfulness to a significant extent suspends language and is thus often prematurely considered ineffable. The book proposes a broader understanding of how the performing arts give rise to a sense of meaningfulness whose felt-bodily affectivity is pivotal to music-making and lived realities. Music Worlding thus seeks to draw the reader closer to the holistic complexity of music-making both in Palau and more generally.
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front cover of Anticipating Sin in Medieval Society
Anticipating Sin in Medieval Society
Childhood, Sexuality, and Violence in the Early Penitentials
Erin Vanessia Abraham
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Composed between the sixth and ninth centuries, penitentials were little books of penance that address a wide range of human fallibility. But they are far more than mere registers of sin and penance: rather, by revealing the multiple contexts in which their authors anticipated various sins, they reveal much about the ways those authors and, presumably, their audiences understood a variety of social phenomena. Offering new, more accurate translations of the penitentials than what has previously been available, this book delves into the potentialities addressed in these manuals for clues about less tangible aspects of early medieval history, including the innocence and vulnerability of young children and the relationship between speech and culpability; the links between puberty, autonomy, and moral accountability; early medieval efforts to regulate sexual relationships; and much more.
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front cover of Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media
Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media
Lila Abu-Lughod
Amsterdam University Press

front cover of Repertoires of Slavery
Repertoires of Slavery
Dutch Theater Between Abolitionism and Colonial Subjection, 1770-1810
Sarah Adams
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
Through the lens of a hitherto unstudied repertoire of Dutch abolitionist theatre productions, Repertoires of Slavery prises open the conflicting ideological functions of antislavery discourse within and outside the walls of the theatre and examines the ways in which abolitionist protesters wielded the strife-ridden question of slavery to negotiate the meanings of human rights, subjecthood, and subjection. The book explores how dramatic visions of antislavery provided a site for (re)mediating a white metropolitan—and at times a specifically Dutch—identity. It offers insight into the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century theatrical modes, tropes, and scenarios of racialised subjection and considers them as materials of the “Dutch cultural archive,” or the Dutch “reservoir” of sentiments, knowledge, fantasies, and beliefs about race and slavery that have shaped the dominant sense of the Dutch self up to the present day.
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Kyiv, Ukraine - Revised Edition
The City of Domes and Demons from the Collapse of Socialism to the Mass Uprising of 2013-2014
Roman Adrian Cybriwsky
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
The unrest and violence in Ukraine in recent years shocked the world, and the region's long-term future remains troublingly uncertain. Focusing on the difficulty of Kiev's transition from socialism to market democracy, this book demonstrates how Ukraine reached this turbulent point. Roman Adrian Cybriwsky delves deeply into the changing social geography of the city, recent urban development, and critical problems such as official corruption, inequality, sex tourism, and the heedless destruction of the city's historical architecture - all difficulties that have contributed incrementally to Ukrainian citizens' anger against their government. This thoroughly revised edition brings Cybriwsky's account of events and their ramifications fully up to date, offering the clearest picture we've had yet of what has happened - and what is likely still to come - in Ukraine.
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front cover of Social Concertation in Times of Austerity
Social Concertation in Times of Austerity
European Integration and the Politics of Labour Market Reforms in Austria and Switzerland
Alexandre Afonso
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
A term specifically found in European politics, social concertation refers to cooperation between trade unions, governments and employers in public policy-making. Social Concertation in Times of Austerity investigates the political underpinnings of social concertation in the context of European integration. Alexandre Afonso focuses on the regulation of labor mobility and unemployment protection in Austria and Switzerland, two of Europe’s most prosperous countries, and he looks at nonpartisan policymaking as a strategy for compromise. With this smart, new study, Afonso powerfully enters the debate on the need for a shared social agenda in post-crisis Western Europe.
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A Journal of Three Months’ Walk in Persia in 1884 by Captain John Compton Pyne
Marjan Afsharian
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
In 1884 an obscure British soldier, having finished his tour of duty in India, decided to make a detour on his trip home in order to spend three months crossing Persia unaccompanied except for the local muleteers. Among his accoutrements he packed a small leather-bound sketchbook in which he not only wrote a journal but in which he also added accomplished and charming water-colour illustrations. The authors’ introduction contextualises this trip made in 1884 against the background of Persianate influence in British culture, and the general cultural background of late Victorian Britain is presented as the subliminal driver behind a young man’s desire to explore, and illustrate, an already discovered country – Persia.
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Women and Temporality in Literature and Cinema
Negotiating with Timelessness
Ila Ahlawat
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
Women and Temporality in Literature and Cinema delves into the subject of literary and cinematic women characters entrapped in temporal spaces and their peculiar communication with visibility, enclosure, space and time in the setup of a sexual and temporal discord. It explores subjects such as youth, ageing, remembering, forgetting, and repeating within the larger realm of gendered temporalities that are essentially a nuanced and affective experience. In its entirety, this book has sought to locate and spell out both the damaging as well as the healing effects of temporality upon women's consciousness.
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Racial Difference and the Colonial Wars of 19th Century Southeast Asia
Farish Ahmad-Noor
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
The colonisation of Southeast Asia was a long and often violent process where numerous military campaigns were waged by the colonial powers across the region. The notion of racial difference was crucial in many of these wars, as native Southeast Asian societies were often framed in negative terms as 'savage' and 'backward' communities that needed to be subdued and 'civilised'. This collection of critical essays focuses on the colonial construction of race and looks at how the colonial wars in 19th-century Southeast Asia were rationalised via recourse to theories of racial difference, making race a significant factor in the wars of Empire. Looking at the colonial wars in Java, Borneo, Siam, the Philippines, the Malay Peninsula and other parts of Southeast Asia, the essays examine the manner in which the idea of racial difference was weaponised by the colonising powers and how forms of local resistance often worked through such colonial structures of identity politics.
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Sharing
Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age
Philippe Aigrain
Amsterdam University Press, 2012

An in-depth exploration of digital culture and its dissemination, Sharing offers a counterpoint to the dominant view that file sharing is piracy. Instead, Philippe Aigrain looks at the benefits of file sharing, which allows unknown writers and artists to be appreciated more easily. Concentrating not only on the cultural enrichment caused by widely shared digital media, Sharing also discusses new financing models that would allow works to be shared freely by individuals without aim at profit. Aigrain carefully balances the needs to support and reward creative activity with a suitable respect for the cultural common good and proposes a new interpretation of the digital landscape.

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Global Modernity from Coloniality to Pandemic
A Cross-disciplinary Perspective
Hatem Akil
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Global Modernity from Coloniality to Pandemic explores issues related to the global crises of our time: reason, science, and the environment by revisiting the notions of modernity, modernism, and modernization, which can no longer be considered purely Western or strictly secular. The book poses questions about viewing modernity today from the vantage point of traditionally disparate disciplines – engaging scholars from sociology to science, philosophy to robotics, medicine to visual culture, mathematics to cultural theory, biology to environmental studies. Leading sociologist Alain Touraine contributes a new text in which he reflects on the role of women, refugees and migrants, and the future of democracy. In their conclusion, the editors posit a fundamental ethical distinction between modernization and modernity and call for a new understanding of modernity that is globally distributed, informed by the voices of many, and concerned with crises that threaten all of us at the level of the species – a modernity-to-come.
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East Asian Cartographic Print Culture
The Late Ming Publishing Boom and its Trans-Regional Connections
Alexander Akin
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
Alexander Akin examines how the expansion of publishing in the late Ming dynasty prompted changes in the nature and circulation of cartographic materials in East Asia. Focusing on mass-produced printed maps, this book investigates a series of path-breaking late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century works in genres including geographical education, military affairs, and history, analysing how maps achieved unprecedented penetration among published materials, even in the absence of major theoretical or technological changes like those that transformed contemporary European cartography. By examining contemporaneous developments in neighboring Choson Korea and Japan, the study demonstrates the crucial importance of considering the broader East Asian sphere in this period as a network of communication and publication, rather than as discrete units with separate cartographic histories. It also reexamines the place of the Jesuits in this context, arguing that in printing maps on Ming soil they should be seen as participants in the local cartographic publishing boom and its trans-regional repercussions.
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The Japanese and German Economies in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Business Relations in Historical Perspective
Kudo Akira
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Supported by a number of high-profile case studies, this volume offers a comprehensive exploration of Japanese-German economic relations through the whole of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. It also offers clarification on the structure and processes of the world economy in the same period. Drawing on both unpublished discussion papers as well as previously published essays, the reader will find much of interest in the wide-ranging scholarship contained in this work, structured as follows: Part I, Japanese-German Business Relations; Part II, Trajectory of Japanese-German Business Relations; Part III, The Japanese and European Business and Economies. A Foreword by YUZAWA Takeshi, Professor Emeritus, Gakushuin University, Tokyo, evaluates the relevance and significance of Professor Kudo’s lifetime research and scholarship in the context of German-Japanese relations.
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Hizbullah's Documents
From the 1985 Open Letter to the 2009 Manifesto
Joseph Alagha
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

Despite the controversial reputation of Hizbullah in the West, and the significant role this powerful Islamist organization plays in Lebanese politics, there are few reliable, published English translations of the party’s primary documents. With this extensive work, Joseph Alagha seeks to remedy this problem and rectify the distortions and misrepresentations that have resulted from inaccurate translations.

Through privileged access to the party, Alagha was able to compile and meticulously translate a host of original primary documents, from the party’s 1985 Open Letter; through its eight clandestine conclaves from 1989 to 2009; to all of its election programs from 1992 to 2010, as well as all of the agreements, understandings, and pacts the party has ratified over the years; ending with the 2009 Political Manifesto. This firsthand portrait of Hizbullah’s metamorphosis, especially in the past decade, is complete with thorough footnotes, commentary, background information, chronology, and a detailed introductory chapter that maps the party’s transformation by analytically comparing the Open Letter with the 2009 Manifesto. This volume will be an invaluable companion for both scholars and policy makers.

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The Shifts in Hizbullah's Ideology
Religious Ideology, Political Ideology, and Political Program
Joseph Alagha
Amsterdam University Press, 2002

As the recent war in Lebanon demonstrated, an understanding of the Lebanese Shi‘ite militant group Hizbullah remains an important component of any attempt to solve the problems of the Middle East. The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology provides an in-depth analysis of the group’s motivations, tracking the changes it has undergone since Hizbullah’s founding by Lebanese Shi‘ite clergy in 1978. Joseph Alagha demonstrates that Hizbullah, driven at its founding chiefly by religious concerns, in the latter half of the 1980s became a full-fledged social movement, with a structure and ideology aimed at social change. Further changes in the 1990s led to Hizbullah’s becoming a mainstream political party—but without surrendering its militarism or willingness to use violence to advance its ends.
            In tracking these changes, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology covers such disparate topics as Hizbullah’s views of jihad, suicide and martyrdom, integration, pan-Islamism, anti-Zionism, and the relationship with Israel and the United States. It will be necessary reading for both scholars and policymakers.
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front cover of Hizbullah's Identity Construction
Hizbullah's Identity Construction
Joseph Alagha
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

As the dominant political force in Lebanon and one of the most powerful post-Islamist organizations in the world, Hizbullah is a source of great controversy and uncertainty in the West. Despite the significant attention paid to this group by the media, the details of Hizbullah’s evolution have frequently confounded politicians—and even scholars. In this important study, Joseph Alagha, a scholar with unprecedented access to the organization, exhaustively and objectively analyzes Hizbullah’s historical evolution and offers a revolutionary new perspective on the political phenomenon of the organization.

Hizbullah’s Identity Construction is a timely examination of one of the world’s most turbulent regions; a major contribution to the study of contemporary Islamic political movements in the Middle East; and a refreshing departure from the bland hagiographies and ad hominem attacks that are all too common in studies of Hizbullah’s murky history. Superbly documented and argued, and rooted in broad knowledge of contemporary Islamist political thought, this study brings much-needed clarity to a hot-button subject.
 
“Joseph Alagha remains one of the most thorough and careful analysts of Hizbullah’s political ideology and practice. Scholars, analysts, and policy makers will find in this work a veritable treasure trove of research and insights into this complex organization.”—Michaelle Browers, Wake Forest University
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Cinema Beyond Film
Media Epistemology in the Modern Era
François Albera
Amsterdam University Press, 2010

Cinema Beyond Film elaborates on the theoretical uses of two key terms—dispositif and episteme—in order to examine their relationship as well as their larger connections to film, technology, and modernity. Although both terms originate in the work of Foucault, dispositif (“device”) intrinsically links itself to the mechanics of movement and speed behind cinematics, while more generally referring to the mechanisms and structures that hold power in place. Episteme(“to know”), on the other hand, refers to the conditions and possibilities of knowledge and reception, more than to technological innovation. Each term is explored here in relation to the other, allowing this edited collection to assess the wide array of potential materialities that arise from the mechanics behind cinema and the changing face of its technology.

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Syntax of Hungarian
Nouns and Noun Phrases, Volume 1
Gábor Alberti
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
These books aim to present a synthesis of the currently available syntactic knowledge of the Hungarian language, rooted in theory but providing highly detailed descriptions, and intended to be of use to researchers, as well as advanced students of language and linguistics. As research in language leads to extensive changes in our understanding and representations of grammar, the Comprehensive Grammar Resources series intends to present the most current understanding of grammar and syntax as completely as possible in a way that will both speak to modern linguists and serve as a resource for the non-specialist.
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Syntax of Hungarian
Nouns and Noun Phrases, Volume 2
Gábor Alberti
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
These books aim to present a synthesis of the currently available syntactic knowledge of the Hungarian language, rooted in theory but providing highly detailed descriptions, and intended to be of use to researchers, as well as advanced students of language and linguistics. As research in language leads to extensive changes in our understanding and representations of grammar, the Comprehensive Grammar Resources series intends to present the most current understanding of grammar and syntax as completely as possible in a way that will both speak to modern linguists and serve as a resource for the non-specialist.
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Re
Thinking Europe: Thoughts on Europe: Past, Present and Future
Yoeri Albrecht
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
What is Europe? This question is ever more pressing, as present day Europe wallows in crisis - its deepest since the process of European integration took off in the 1950s. The current state of affairs sets the stage for this book. It brings together leading international thinkers and scholars of different generations in a feverish quest to better understand Europe's present state.In their essays these authors engage in the paradoxes and puzzles of European identity and culture. They present new answers to the eternal question regarding 'the essence of Europe'.An anthology of influential texts from the making of present-day Europe completes the book as a very European exercise in thinking and re-thinking Europa, its culture, history and present.
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The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium
Paula Albuquerque
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
All the world’s a stage - literally so, given the ubiquitous presence of webcams recording daily life in cities. This footage, allegedlydocumentary, recreates cities as cinematic environments as people interact with the multitudes of cameras and screens aroundthem. Paula Albuquerque’s original research and experimental films, presented in this groundbreaking book, expose fictionalising elements in archival webcams and explore video surveillance as an urban condition that influences both perceptions of the past and visions of the future.
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Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida
Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson
Richard Allen
Amsterdam University Press, 2003
Annette Michelson’s contributions to art and film criticism over the last three decades have been unparalleled. This volume honors her unique legacy with original essays by some of the many scholars who have been influenced by her work. Some continue her efforts to develop theoretical frameworks for understanding modernist art, while others practice her form of interdisciplinary criticism in relation to avant-garde and modernist art works and artists. Still others investigate and evaluate Michelson’s work itself. All in some way pay homage to her extraordinary contribution.
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Piracy in World History
Stefan Amirell
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
In a modern global historical context, scholars have often regarded piracy as an essentially European concept which was inappropriately applied by the expanding European powers to the rest of the world, mainly for the purpose of furthering colonial forms of domination in the economic, political, military, legal and cultural spheres. By contrast, this edited volume highlights the relevance of both European and non-European understandings of piracy to the development of global maritime security and freedom of navigation. It explores the significance of ‘legal posturing’ on the part of those accused of piracy, as well as the existence of non-European laws and regulations regarding piracy and related forms of maritime violence in the early modern era. The authors in this volume highlight cases from various parts of the early-modern world, thereby explaining piracy as a global phenomenon.
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The Medieval Life of Language
Grammar and Pragmatics from Bacon to Kempe
Mark Amsler
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
The Medieval Life of Language: Grammar and Pragmatics from Bacon to Kempe explores the complex history of medieval pragmatic theory and ideas and metapragmatic awareness across social discourses. Pragmatic thinking about language and communication are revealed in grammar, semiotics, philosophy, and literature. Part historical reconstruction, part social history, part language theory, Amsler supplements the usual materials for the history of medieval linguistics and discusses the pragmatic implications of grammatical treatises on the interjection, Bacon's sign theory, logic texts, Chaucer's poetry, inquisitors' accounts of heretic speech, and life writing by William Thorpe and Margery Kempe. Medieval and contemporary pragmatic theory are contrasted in terms of their philosophical and linguistic orientations. Aspects of medieval pragmatic theory and practice, especially polysemy, equivocation, affective speech, and recontextualization, show how pragmatic discourse informed social controversies and attitudes toward sincere, vague, and heretical speech. Relying on Bakhtinian dialogism, critical discourse analysis, and conversation analysis, Amsler situates a key period in the history of linguistics within broader social and discursive fields of practice.
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Constructing Iron Europe
Transnationalism and Railways in the Interbellum
Irene Anastasiadou
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
Although the years between the world wars were ones of diplomatic tension in Europe, they also saw the construction of countless miles of international railroads on the continent. In Constructing Iron Europe, Irene Anastasiadou examines this era of railroad building and argues that, contrary to most conventional histories—which view railroad building as an aspect of nation- or empire-building—the construction in this era was deliberately transnational, and ultimately aimed at tightening links between nations and constructing a closer-knit European community.
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front cover of Street Politics in the Age of Austerity
Street Politics in the Age of Austerity
From the Indignados to Occupy
Marcos Ancelovici
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
The past few years have seen an unexpected resurgence of street-level protest movements around the world, from the uprisings of the Arab Spring to the rise of the anti-austerity Indignados in Spain and Greece to the global spread of the Occupy movement. This collection is designed to offer a comparative analysis of these movements, setting them in international, socio-economic, and cross-cultural perspective in order to help us understand why movements emerge, what they do, how they spread, and how they fit into both local and worldwide historical contexts. As the most significant wave of mass protests in decades continues apace, this book offers an authoritative analysis that could not be more timely.
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The Apollonian Clockwork
On Stravinsky
Louis Andriessen
Amsterdam University Press, 2006
‘I think my music deserves to be considered as a whole’, Igor Stravinsky remarked at the end of a long and restless career, and that is exactly what the authors of The Apollonian Clockwork do. In 1982, convinced that there is no essential difference between ‘early’ and ‘late’ Stravinsky, Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger were the first to write a monograph on the composer which radically breaks with the habit of dividing his works into ‘Russian’, ‘neoclassical’ and ‘serial’. In an essay which continually shifts in its approach, style and perspective, the authors elaborate on their insight that a single, immutable compositional attitude underlies the whole of Stravinsky’s oeuvre. By this token the book not only offers an analysis of the composer’s protean work and artistry but takes example by it as well.
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Contesting Chineseness
Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants
Sylvia Ang
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Nearly eleven million Chinese migrants live outside of China. While many of these faces of China’s globalization headed for the popular Western destinations of the United States, Australia and Canada, others have been lured by the booming Asian economies. Compared with pre-1949 Chinese migrants, most are wealthier, motivated by a variety of concerns beyond economic survival and loyal to the communist regime. The reception of new Chinese migrants, however, has been less than warm in some places. In Singapore, tensions between Singaporean-Chinese and new Chinese arrivals present a puzzle: why are there tensions between ethnic Chinese settlers and new Chinese arrivals despite similarities in phenotype, ancestry and customs? Drawing on rich empirical data from ethnography and digital ethnography, Contesting Chineseness investigates this puzzle and details how ethnic Chinese subjects negotiate their identities in an age of contemporary Chinese migration and China’s ascent.
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Language Contact and Bilingualism
Rene Appel
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
In the late 1990s NATO dropped bombs and supported armed insurgencies in Yugoslavia while insisting that its motives were purely humanitarian and that its only goal was peace. However, George Szamuely argues that NATO interventions actually prolonged conflicts, heightened enmity, increased casualties, and fueled demands for more interventions.

Eschewing the one-sided approach adopted by previous works on the Yugoslavian crisis, Szamuely offers a broad overview of the conflict, its role in the rise of NATO’s authority, and its influence on Western policy on the Balkans. His timely, judicious, and accessible study sheds new light on the roots of the contemporary doctrine of humanitarian intervention.
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Language Contact and Bilingualism
Rene Appel
Amsterdam University Press, 2006
What happens – sociologically, linguistically, educationally, politically – when more than one language is in regular use in a community? How do speakers handle these languages simultaneously, and what influence does this language contact have on the languages involved?

Although most people in the world use more than one language in everyday life, the approach to the study of language has usually been that monolingualism is the norm. The recent interest in bilingualism and language contact has led to a number of new approaches, based on research in communities in many different parts of the world. This book draws together this diverse research, looking at examples from many different situations, to present the topic in any easily accessible form.

Language contact is looked at from four distinct perspectives. The authors consider bilingual societies; bilingual speakers; language use in the bilingual community; finally language itself (do languages change when in contact with each other? Can they borrow rules of grammar, or just words? How can new languages emerge from language contact?). The result is a clear, concise synthesis offering a much-needed overview of this lively area of language study.
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New Perspectives on Games and Interaction
Krzysztof Apt
Amsterdam University Press, 2008

In 2007 at the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences in Amsterdam, a colloquium on new perspectives on games and interaction brought together researchers on games in logic, computer science, linguistics, and economics in order to clarify their uses of game theory and identify promising new directions for the field. This volume is a collection of papers presented at the colloquium, and it testifies to the growing importance of game theory as a tool that can capture concepts of strategy, interaction, argumentation, communication, and cooperation amid the disciplines.

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Communication Research into the Digital Society
Fundamental Insights from the Amsterdam School of Communication Research
Theo Araujo
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Media and communication have become ubiquitous in today’s societies and affect all aspects of life. On an individual level, they impact how we learn about the world, how we entertain ourselves, and how we interact with others. On an organisational level, the interactions between media and organisations, such as political parties, NGOs, businesses and brands, shape organisations’ reputation, legitimacy, trust and (financial) performance, as well as individuals’ consumer, political, social and health behaviours. At the societal level, media and communication are crucial for shaping public opinion on current issues such as climate change, sustainability, diversity, and well-being. Media challenges are widespread and include mis- and disinformation, the negative impact of algorithms on our information diets, challenges to our privacy, cyberbullying, media addiction, and unwanted persuasion, among many others. All this makes the study of media and communication crucial.

This book provides a broad overview of the ways in which people create, use, and experience their media environment, and the role of media and communication for individuals, organisations, and society. The chapters in the book were written by researchers from the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. ASCoR is today the largest research institute of its kind in Europe and has developed over the past 25 years into one of the best communications research institutes in the world.
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Practicing Decoloniality in Museums
A Guide with Global Examples
Csilla Ariese
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
The cry for decolonization has echoed throughout the museum world. Although perhaps most audibly heard in the case of ethnographic museums, many different types of museums have felt the need to engage in decolonial practices. Amidst those who have argued that an institution as deeply colonial as the museum cannot truly be decolonized, museum staff and museologists have been approaching the issue from different angles to practice decoloniality in any way they can. This book collects a wide range of practices from museums whose audiences, often highly diverse, come together in sometimes contentious conversations about pasts and futures. Although there are no easy or uniform answers as to how best to deal with colonial pasts, this collection of practices functions as an accessible toolkit from which museum staff can choose in order to experiment with and implement methods according to their own needs and situations. The practices are divided thematically and include, among others, methods for decentering, improving transparency, and increasing inclusivity.
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Urban Movements and Climate Change
Loss, Damage and Radical Adaptation
Marco Armiero
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
From the social uprisings in Santiago de Chile to the radical municipalism experiments in Naples, this volume takes the reader on an intellectual journey at the frontlines across global South and global North where climate breakdown meets social innovations. While the effects of the climate crisis are becoming more extreme and tangible across the globe with every passing day, urban social movements and their radical strategies to resist climate injustice often remain concealed from sight. Contributors to this volume ask how would it be to look at the politics of urban loss-and-damage not from the highly securitized zones of climate summits, but from favelas in Rio de Janeiro, flood-prone communities in São Paulo, urban gardens in Naples, or neighborhoods resisting climate gentrification in New York City? This book explores diverse worlds and praxis of urban social movements resisting the rising tides of climate crisis and social injustice.
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Rereading Huizinga
Autumn of the Middle Ages, a Century Later
Peter Arnade
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
*Rereading Huizinga: Autumn of the Middle Ages, a Century Later* explores the legacy and historiographical impact of Johan Huizinga’s 1919 masterwork a century after its publication. Often considered one of the most successful books in medieval European history, its reception has varied over the last hundred years, popular with non-academic readers, and appraised more critically by fellow historians and those more generally in the field of medieval studies. There is broad consensus, however, about the work’s absolute centrality, and the authors of this volume assess the *Autumn of the Middle Ages* reception, afterlife, and continued vitality.
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The Electoral Consequences of Third Way Welfare State Reforms
Social Democracy’s Transformation and Its Political Costs
Christoph Arndt
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
In recent decades, Western nations have increasingly implemented encompassing welfare state reforms that try to establish equality through social programs and governmental intervention rather than direct redistribution of funds. In this book, Christoph Arndt examines the political ramifications of reforming deeply entrenched welfare states through a careful comparative analysis of four European countries that recalibrated their system of social protection under social democratic governments.  Arndt discovers that the "third way" has produced a setback for social democrats and that the nature and scale of this setback is contingent on each country’s electoral system.

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A History of Photography in Indonesia
From the Colonial Era to the Digital Age
Brian C. Arnold
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
As a former colonized nation, Indonesia has a unique place in the history of photography. A History of Photography in Indonesia: From the Colonial Era to the Digital Age looks at the development of photography from the beginning and traces its uses in Indonesia from its invention to the present day. The Dutch colonial government first brought the medium to the East Indies in the 1840s and immediately recognized its potential in serving the colonial apparatus. As the country grew and changed, so too did the medium. Photography was not only an essential tool of colonialism, but it also became part of the movement for independence, a voice for reformasi, an agent for advocating democracy, and is now available to anyone with a phone. This book gathers essays by leading artists, scholars, and curators from around the world who have worked with photography in Indonesia and have traced the evolution of the medium from its inception to the present day, addressing the impact of photography on colonialism, independence, and democratization.
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Lawmaking for Development
Explorations into the Theory and Practice of International Legislative Projects
Julia Arnscheidt
Amsterdam University Press, 2008
Over the last decades there has been increased recognition that law and governance matter for development, be it macro-economic growth or the improvement of micro-level basic needs and freedoms. Legislation is a central part of state legal systems, and often the written legal norms are a starting point when seeking improvement of the legal system as a whole, or one of its specific aspects. This volume discusses how legislation (the product) and lawmaking (the process) function in developing countries, and how legislation contributes to development and how lawmaking and legislation can be improved either by the country itself or by donor assisted projects. It covers topics including legal transplantation, legislative quality, linkages between legislation and implementation, and the politics of lawmaking. The resultant volume combines insights from scholars, based on conceptual analysis and empirical research, with ideas from practitioners involved in lawmaking in legal technical assistance projects. Doing so, this volume aims to be useful for both academia and practice.
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Feminist Futures of Work
Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy
Payal Arora
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
The future of work is at the centre of debates related to the emerging digital society. Concerns range from the inclusion, equity, and dignity of those at the far end of the value chain, who participate on and off platforms, often in the shadows, invisible to policymakers, designers, and consumers. Precarity and informality characterize this largely female workforce, across sectors ranging from artisanal work to salon services to ride hailing and construction. A feminist reimagining of the futures of work—what we term as “FemWork” —is the need of the day and should manifest in multiple and various forms, placing the worker at the core and drawing on her experiences, aspirations, and realities. This volume offers grounded insights from academic, activist, legal, development and design perspectives that can help us think through these inclusive futures and possibly create digital, social, and governance infrastructures of work that are fairer and more meaningful.
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front cover of Women, Art and Observant Franciscan Piety
Women, Art and Observant Franciscan Piety
Caterina Vigri and the Poor Clares in Early Modern Ferrara
Kathleen Giles Arthur
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Caterina Vigri (later Saint Catherine of Bologna) was a mystic, writer, teacher and nun-artist. Her first home, Corpus Domini, Ferrara, was a house of semi-religious women that became a Poor Clare convent and model of Franciscan Observant piety. Vigri's intensely spiritual decoration of her breviary, as well as convent altarpieces that formed a visual program of adoration for the Body of Christ, exemplify the Franciscan Observant visual culture. After Vigri's departure, it was transformed by d'Este women patrons, including Isabella da Aragona, Isabella d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia. While still preserving Observant ideals, it became a more elite noblewomen's retreat.Grounded in archival research and extant paintings, drawings, prints and art objects from Corpus Domini, this volume explores the art, visual culture, and social history of an early modern Franciscan women's community.
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front cover of The Signature Style of Frans Hals
The Signature Style of Frans Hals
Painting, Subjectivity, and the Market in Early Modernity
Christopher D.M. Atkins
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
This richly illustrated study is the first consider the manifold functions and meanings of Hals’s distinctive handling of paint. Atkins explores the uniqueness of Hals’s approach to painting and the relationship of his manner to seventeenth-century aesthetics. He also investigates the economic motivations and advantages of his methods, the operation of the style as a personal and workshop brand, and the apparent modernity of the artist’s style. The book seeks to understand the multiple levels on which Hals’s consciously cultivated manner of painting operated for himself, his pupils and assistants, his clients, and succeeding generations of viewers. As a result, the book offers a wholly new understanding of one of the leading artists of the Dutch Golden Age, and one of the most formative painters in the history of art in the Western tradition. It also provides a much needed interrogation of the interrelationships of subjectivity, style, authorship, methods of artistic and commercial production, economic consumption, and art theory in early modernity.
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front cover of Regional Pathways to Complexity
Regional Pathways to Complexity
Settlement and Land-Use Dynamics in Early Italy from the Bronze Age to the Republican Period
Peter Attema
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

Synthesizing almost thirty years of Dutch archaeological research in central and southern Italy, this book discusses and compares settlement and land use patterns from the late protohistoric period to the late Roman Republic. Considering both social and environmental factors, the authors analyze the long-term progression of indigenous Bronze Age tribal pastoralist societies towards the complexity of urbanized Roman society. Drawing on a decade of collaboration between Dutch and Italian researchers, this exhaustive study will be of great interest to students and scholars of Mediterranean archaeology.   

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Reconsidering Postwar Japanese History
A Handbook
Simon Avenell
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
After war defeat in 1945, Japan underwent historic political, economic and social transformations resulting in the country’s rebirth as an economic powerhouse and exemplar of liberal democracy in East Asia. This handbook expands and enriches our understanding of this tumultuous contemporary era in Japan’s modern history. Chapters in the volume ask novel theoretical questions and present fresh empirical perspectives on the era. How, for example, has the postwar era been chronologized to date and how might we rethink or enhance such interpretations? What can we learn by rethinking established moments and phases like the Allied Occupation, the period of high-speed economic growth, the 1970s, the Bubble Economy, and the “lost decades” of Heisei Japan (1989-2019)? What new issues might we introduce to subvert accepted understandings of the postwar era and its various sub-eras? Moreover, how might Japan’s internal postwar be expanded by rethinking the era through novel historical frameworks and regional imaginaries such as East Asian history, Cold War history, environmental history and transnational history? Contributors attempt to transcend temporal, geographical, intellectual and other boundaries inherent in our current understandings of Japan’s postwar experience to provide a compelling compilation of perspectives. Showcasing the work of historians and leading scholars from other disciplines, chapters cover thematic areas including the origins of the postwar era, postwar politics, society and popular culture, transnational and international interactions, and historical memory. The volume’s extensive chronological coverage, combined with the innovative perspectives of the contributors, make it essential reading for both researchers and learners interested in the multifaceted dynamics of Japan’s fascinating contemporary era.
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front cover of The United States and Cultural Heritage Protection in Japan (1945-1952)
The United States and Cultural Heritage Protection in Japan (1945-1952)
Nassrine Azimi
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
One of the untold stories of the American military occupation of Japan, from 1945 to 1952, is that of efforts by the Arts and Monuments Division of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), for the preservation of Japan’s cultural heritage. While the role of Allies after WWII in salvaging the cultural heritage of Europe has recently become better known, not much is written of the extraordinary vision, planning and endeavors by curators and art specialists embedded in the US military and later based in Tokyo, and their peers and political masters back in Washington D.C. - all of whom ensured that defeated Japan’s cultural heritage was protected in the chaos and misery of post-war years.
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