Governance, Conflict And Development In South Asia: Perspectives from India, Nepal and Sri Lanka:

This volume examines how various forms of governance have emerged in South Asia after colonialism, and the developmental and conflict-related challenges the region faces. Drawing from the contexts of India, Sri Lanka and Nepal, it highlights the degree of institutionalization of democracy.

The book further points to the manner in which shortcomings in governmental arrangements intersect with the prevalence of conflict at the national as well as sub-national levels. It showcases that democratic and more authoritarian cultures have influenced developmental successes and failures, and reveals how (external) interventions and policy reforms in the name of  development have led to diverse outcomes in different South Asian countries.

Siri Hettige is Senior Professor of Sociology at the University of Colombo. He is former Head of Sociology, former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the same University and former President of the Sri Lanka Sociological Association. His other current positions include Chairman, Social Science National Committee of the NSF, Sri Lanka, Adjunct Professor at RMIT University, Australia, and Adjunct Research Associate at Monash University, Australia. He has many publications to his credit on such diverse topics as social inequality, social protection, youth unrest, education and health policy, ethnic conflict and migration. These include a number of books, edited volumes and more than a hundred papers published in edited volumes and refereed journals. He has also served on a number of government commissions and committees as a member as well as an advisor over a period of 20 years. He has been a consultant to a number of international organizations such as the ILO, the World Bank and IOM.

Eva Gerharz is a Junior Professor of Sociology of Development and Internationalization at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Formerly, she was a senior researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology at Bielefeld University, Germany. Her main research interests are empirically grounded perspectives on development sociology, activism and identity politics, diaspora and development, and transnational and translocal dynamics. She has conducted empirical fieldwork in South Asia since 1999, especially in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Her book The Politics of Reconstruction and Development in Sri Lanka will be published with Routledge. She has edited The Making of World Society: Perspectives from Transnational Research together with Remus Anghel Gabriel, Gilberto Rescher and Monika Salzbrunn (2008).