Asia's Unknown Uprisings Volume 2: People Power in the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, and Indonesia, 1947-2009 - Paperback

by George Katsiaficas (Author)

Ten years in the making, this magisterial work--the second of a two-volume study--provides a unique perspective on uprisings in nine Asian nations in the past five decades. While the 2011 Arab Spring is well known, the wave of uprisings that swept Asia in the 1980s remain hardly visible. Through a critique of Samuel Huntington's notion of a "Third Wave" of democratization, the author relates Asian uprisings to predecessors in 1968 and shows their subsequent influence on uprisings in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s. By empirically reconstructing the specific history of each Asian uprising, significant insight into major constituencies of change and the trajectories of these societies becomes visible.

This book provides detailed histories of uprisings in nine places--the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, and Indonesia--as well as introductory and concluding chapters that place them in a global context and analyze them in light of major sociological theories. Profusely illustrated with photographs, tables, graphs, and charts, it is the definitive, and defining, work from the eminent participant-observer scholar of social movements.

Author Biography

George Katsiaficas is a longtime activist for peace and justice who was twice granted Fulbright fellowships. He is the author or editor of 11 books, including The Imagination of the New Left; Latino Social Movements: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives; Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party; The Subversion of Politics; and Vietnam Documents: American and Vietnamese Views. He lives in Boston.