Danda Yatra : Odisha’s Ritual of Fire and Pain—A Testament to India’s Enduring Devotional Traditions

This rather wide-ranging paper considers the cultural and comparative elements in the training of military officers since the European Enlightenment of the 18(superscript th) Century. The entire conception of military training is too often confined to studies of military training institutions, changing legislation, the links between training and military strategies, and perhaps the economics of warfare. These are large issues but they tend to neglect the historical forces impacting upon the training of military officers' that stem from profound socio-cultural and technological changes in the total environment of military institutions and capacities. In this study we argue that officer education has always been dominated, and in all places, by only two essential elements-those of character and those of expertise or special knowledge. Changes in the wider contexts of military institutions have clearly affected the commanding conceptions of character and expertise. What should an officer look like? How should he act? What should he know? Or, what should she know? Our argumentative strategy here is to claim that officer training has historically taken place within 'total institutions' on the basis of social selection and a more-or-less common set of hegemonic values, although these latter may have at times been quite explicitly imposed from above by elite authorities. We further argue that the underlying social, cultural and technological changes of the 20th Century effectively destroyed such conditions and, thereby, threw into question the whole character and purpose of officer education in all nations. As such changes, first stemming from advanced western societies, globalized over that century, so too the military of all nations were ultimately concerned, pulled into the vortex of a new cultural dissolution. All military systems resisted the impact of such cultural or technological revolutions, and in many societies, especially authoritarian communist, nationalist or Islamic societies, there were strong efforts to isolate military academies from their historical contexts. The final part of this article considers the place of Taiwan within this new socio-cultural vortex.

Two important methodological debates in political theory concern (i) the place of historical research and interpretation in normative inquiry; and (ii) the importance of comparing different cultural traditions of political thought. The first question animates a long-standing controversy over the relative importance of ‘history of political thought’ versus ‘philosophy’ in political theory, while the second has been central to the recent growth of ‘comparative political theory’. Despite both debates being concerned, in fundamental ways, with history and comparison, they have remained surprisingly disconnected from broader debates in the humanities and social sciences about the use of comparative history and, in particular, of the prominent methodological approach in political science known as ‘comparative historical analysis’. This may reflect the fact that the debates over history of political thought and comparative political theory have fundamentally revolved around thought—history as the history of thought and comparison as the comparison of thought—whereas comparative historical analysis is more centrally focused on the study of political behaviour. In this paper I suggest that this neglect of comparative historical analysis in political theory represents a missed opportunity. Like other forms of social scientific inquiry, comparative historical analysis can yield important empirical knowledge for political theorists. But I wish to more ambitiously suggest that comparative historical analysis can also be adapted for conducting normative political theory itself. I summarise the key features of comparative historical analysis for political theorists, and explain how its use of historical cases can supplement both the use of imaginary thought experiments and the study of contemporary politics. I then delineate three specific ways in which comparative historical analysis might be used to support normative inquiry: deductive testing, inductive construction, and casuistic elaboration. All three, I argue, can help meet recent calls to bring the study of real political behaviour more centrally into political theory research.

This concept paper introduces the Contextual Critical Historical Inquiry and Analysis (CCHIA) framework—a critical synthesis tool designed to advance historical contextual inquiry in urban studies. The study aims to develop a structured methodological framework that integrates historical and critical approaches to enhance the analysis of urban phenomena. To develop this framework, we employed a two-fold strategy, conducting a literature search of the social sciences and urban studies using databases including Google Scholar, Web of Science, JSTOR, and Scopus. First, we screened Google Scholar to identify relevant scholars and works published between 1883 and 2024. Second, a content analysis of 58 peer-reviewed articles (2000–2024) was then performed. The concept paper follows a five-stage, 26-step framework integrating four history-focused concepts—interpretive history, historical perspective, historical context, and historical contextualization—alongside three critical approaches: critical discourse analysis, comparative historical analysis, and critical urban theory. By synthesizing these elements, the suggested framework equips researchers to systematically decode the historical and societal forces shaping urban phenomena. CCHIA challenges traditional urban scholarship by leveraging interdisciplinary insights from the social sciences, addressing context as a theoretical perspective for understanding urban formation, and as a critical influence on academic writing. The contribution of CCHIA lies in linking historical analysis to contemporary urban challenges—enabling researchers to focus on previous literature analysis findings to address the current situation’s challenges. The CCHIA framework offers an adaptable toolkit for producing socially engaged and context-sensitive urban textbooks.

Northern Ireland: A Comparative Analysis (F. Wright, 1987, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan) remains the most significant work of comparative historical analysis written on Ireland, yet its reputed difficulty has blunted its impact. This article reconstructs Frank Wright's research design and comparative method and situates the book in the research tradition of configurative macroanalysis pioneered by Barrington Moore. Wright's detailed, processual, analytic narratives comparing the breakdown of communal deterrence systems in Northern Ireland, the US South and Algeria have been relatively neglected in later literature. Those grounded comparisons focused on getting the concrete details of cases right while striving to build middle-range generalizations about ethnic stratification and political authority. His comparisons were morally serious searches for paths out of conflict, which analyzed the unfolding of temporal processes in ways that anticipated recent interest in path dependence; but Wright downplayed political institutions and overstated his categorical distinction between settlement colony and ethnic frontiers. Future comparative research on Northern Ireland should focus even more on variation across conflicts, including institutional change, but would benefit from re-engaging with A Comparative Analysis as a gateway to comparative historical analysis.

Globalization and Socio-Cultural Change in Qatar

Like Regime, Like Newspaper: Comparative Analysis on Newspaper Industries across Taiwan Strait (1949-1958) Abstract Ever since 1949, across Taiwan strait, the Republic of China on Taiwan ruled by Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuo Min Tang, KMT) and the People’s Republic of China on Chinese Mainland ruled by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were antagonist to each other for a long time. Far-reaching changes were mandated both in Taiwan and Mainland China by the two regimes while communications between people on both sides of Taiwan strait were banned, and later vanished. Thus, to all professions across Taiwan strait, two groups of numerous experiments were performed at the same time. The experiences and consequences of these experiments influenced the working conditions, lives and cultures on both territories and evidenced distinction between the two national systems. As the most important media at the time, newspaper industry was highly regarded by both KMT and CCP. Although in the beginning of the political separation, newspaper industries across Taiwan strait were quite similar, the many newspaper policies raised by the two governments molded different environments for the industry. Experiments of newspaper industry under different regimes were taken place from then on. Within ten years, the newspaper industries evolved seperately across the strait, and around 1958, divergent newspaper systems appeared. Newspaper industry in Mainland China became a typical example of the industry under totalitarian regime, while newspaper industry in Taiwan showed itself a model of the industry under authoritarian regime. Base on the above historical background, what was the mechanism that caused and shaped different newspaper industries across Taiwan strait? How did newspaper industry respond to totalitarian or authoritarian ruling? What factors that differentiated authoritarianism from totalitarianism can be reached through the examples in newspaper industry? These questions reckon the necessity of comparative study on the same industry in two isolated and widely different regions during the same time period. This dissertation tries to be contributive to the answers. Newspaper industry is considered and studied here with its entire functionality. Not only are news reporting, editing and editorial writing examined, but newspaper’s producing, sales and management are also studied. Comparative historical analysis is applied as the main methodology with the assistance of knowledges from journalism, political science, sociology, business administration and accounting. Acknowledging newapapers as the “tongue and throat to the party” and tool for propaganda, CCP spared no effort to control newspaper industry. However, it’s means and artifices were nimble and flexible. From 1949, CCP elaborated a government-owned hierarchy newspaper system. Party leaders directed newspapers owned and operated by central to local governments, while tolerated temporary existence of some privately-owned newspapers. Following the establishment of the regime, CCP seized newspaper industry’s resources such as manpower, materials, financial supply, news announcing, circulation channels and market throughout Mainland China. The number of remaining privately-owned newspapers and circulation and advertising agent houses declined sharply and eventually died out in a few years. When CCP had monopolized the newspaper industry, consequently, it had monopolized the social capitals contained in the industry. Newspapers in the totalitarian country became part of the regime itself. On the other side of the strait, the retreating and exhausted KMT faced difficulties inside and outside Taiwan. For surviving, the adoption of a two-handed policy, with both suppressions and compromises was inevitable, which made the ROC of Taiwan an authoritarian country. Government’s publication moratorium and journalistic taboos set walls around newspaper industry, but also kept potential competitors away. Among the coexisting, fixed-numbered newspapers, those owned by government or KMT were in leading positions in 1949. However, due to the realism of authoritarianism, some “reservations,” such as social and crime news, popular supply and circulation markets, and advertisements had been made by the government for other newspapers to maneuver their future with free competition in these areas. Privately-owned newspapers utilized the opportunities created by these “reservations” to compete capitalistically. In ten years, resources contained in Taiwanese societies were gradually excavated and transferred to privately-owned newspapers when social capitals were being accumulated by them; meanwhile government- and KMT-owned newspapers began to ebb. Preparation for privately-owned newspapers to meet the further economic development and foundation for them to exceed government- and KMT-owned newspapers were established in this period of time. Ten years were short in history, yet long enough to create two completely different newspaper industries in two areas that were politically separated and isolated to each other. It was the decade right after the split in 1949 that the two regimes across Taiwan strait, CCP’s totalitarian and KMT’s authoritarian, formed newspaper industries based on each one’s political ideology. So ten years are long enough to have a specific newspaper industry appear under a regime’s specific ruling. Sensitive to its environment as any other news media is, newspaper industry is a product of the regime that brings about the media industry’s environment. Like regime, like newspaper.

The purpose of this chapter is to evaluate the effect and potentials of social media as a tool for social, political, and economic change in Africa. This chapter argues that social media has become so entrenched in various facets of society that it has become a mechanism impacting social, political, and economic life in Africa. This chapter looks at the 2011 Nigerian elections and the worldwide Kony Movement against Kony the Ugandan warlord, as tools/examples of analysis. These are some of the developments that have driven the debate about the ability of social media in bringing about social, economic, and political change and participation in the African continent. The research method adopted in this chapter involves an analysis of a growing scholarship addressing the various arguments proffered on this topic. The chapter concludes by establishing the impact of social media on social, economic, and political life in Africa as well as identifying challenges posed by this development and making recommendations for the regulatory framework required to effectively harness these potentials in Africa.

The modern level of historical and legal science development objectively causes rethinking of its traditional methodological approaches and ways of scientific knowledge of the historical past. Comparative historical and legal method that requires its adaptation to the new realities of the functioning of the science of the history of state and law is one of such methods.The systematic application of the comparative historical and legal method when studying state legal phenomena of various levels provides for the sufficient elaboration of its logical and methodological foundations. Herewith, the most important issues are: the problem of selecting objects of historical and legal comparison, researching sources of comparative work, typologizing historical and legal phenomena, and the problem of choosing the forms in which the comparative analysis will be carried out.Historical and legal objects being both at the same stage of their historical development and at the different stages in chronological significance can be the subject of historical and legal comparison. In the first case, it will be about the synchronic comparison, which allows to reveal the general and the especial between the objects being compared that exist during a certain period of time, in the other – about the diachronic one, which allows to consider historical and legal objects at different historical stages of their existence. As it can be seen, the category of time is the main criterion for distinguishing between these forms of comparison, since the principle of simultaneity is the basis of synchronic comparison, and the principle of time sequence is the basis of diachronic one.Both synchronic and diachronic comparisons as forms of comparative historical and legal analysis have a rather complex structure. At the same time, the synchronic approach, being based on the simultaneity of historical and legal phenomena, provides for the statical character of the objects being compared, the determination of their geographical location, and the abstraction from their previous historical development. The diachronic approach, on the contrary, obliges a comparativist to take into account the dynamics of the genesis of historical and legal objects, allowing during the comparison both to establish different stages of their development and to reveal the specificity of the evolution of complex state legal systems. In general, the synchronic and diachronic approaches possess sufficiently broad cognitive capabilities, which make it possible to refer them to the main types of comparative procedures in comparative historical and legal research.

Досліджено способи та форми систематизації результатів порівняльного історико-правового аналізу. Окреслено основні висновки, що можуть бути отримані у ході зіставлення історико-правових об’єктів. Охарактеризовано багатомірність організації та подання інформації в ході проведення компаративного дослідження. Проаналізовано значення типологізації на стадії упорядкування результатів порівняльної роботи та її співвідношення з класифікацією. Зроблено висновки про нові способи узагальнення даних, отриманих у процесі здійснення порівняльного історико-правового дослідження.

Introduction. The study of everyday cultural practices of the Ural Mari living in rural areas can not only provide extra information, but also change our views on distinctive features of their culture, the prospects for its development, and resistance to ethnocultural transformations. Materials and Methods. The work used interdisciplinary research methods, the principles of comparative, system and structural analysis, as well as sociological methods: observation, in-depth survey, comparative analysis, interviewing. Results and Discussion. Distinctive features of the ethnic culture of the Ural Mari were influenced by the regional factor, and were recorded not only in the Mari dialect, national dresses, but also in everyday practices, namely household chores, the relationship between a man and a woman, and between generations. Their formation was influenced by folk religiosity, which is closely related to mythological thinking. Belief in the spirits that accompanies the everyday life of a person, has been transformed according to new everyday practices, and is still preserved in the everyday life of the ethnos. The author provides data from in-depth surveys and interviews of Mari living in the Sverdlovsk region and the Perm Territory, and also analyzes examples from literary sources. Conclusion. The transformation of the culture of the Ural Mari in rural areas is a response to scientific and technological progress, global changes, and is exteroceptive in nature with a persisting axiological basis. Further research of the everyday cultural practices of the Ural Mari living in rural areas will make it possible to predict the development of their ethnic culture and point out the critical aspects of transformation.

This chapter examines the relationship between comparative area studies (CAS) and comparative historical analysis (CHA). I trace both to a common lineage in the Annales school of historical research and its emphasis on contextualized comparison, determining the appropriate scope conditions, and mid-range theorizing as necessary conditions for causal explanation. However, while CHA has emphasized the challenges associated with understanding the temporal aspects of historical research, it has largely neglected the spatial. CAS helps to restore this critical element to historical analysis and bring back a sensibility toward historical geography that has been muted in recent discussions of social science history. Together, CAS and CHA offer powerful tools for comparative analysis and an opportunity to bring together features of historical analysis that have been divided between different research communities. Moreover, they serve as intellectual anchors for approaches that embrace a pragmatic hermeneutics and understand social scientific inquiry as the terrain of conceptual clarification and bounded explanation across different contexts.

The fall of socialism and the collapse of socialist regimes in 1989 mark a pivotal moment in global history. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the reformation of the Soviet Union led to significant changes to the global power dynamics and geopolitical landscape, including major economic and political changes, particularly for the former Eastern Bloc states. For many, this was the beginning of a long and uncertain period of “transition” defined by demands for political freedom, economic changes, democracy and integration with Western Europe. Although post-socialist economic and political changes have been extensively studies, the focus on the “cultural transition” has been comparatively neglected. More specifically, academic research on heritage politics “in transition” and how the socialist past affects post-socialist heritage management remains limited. The aim of this study is to address the gap and shed more light on the politics of heritage management and tourism dynamics drawing on the case study of the Ancient City of Nessebar, a widely known summer tourism destination and a UNESCO World Heritage Site located on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. The paper focuses on the changing discourse of heritage tourism development and management. Adopting a qualitative approach grounded in semi-structured interviews and archival research, the study provides a comprehensive understanding of the post-1989 authorized heritage discourse. The findings reveal that the governance of heritage and politics of heritage tourism development are still in “transition”. The pre-1989 state-centralized and state-subsidized model has not fully been changed and continue to cast its shadows. However, the political changes have brought notable concerns such as lack of government funding, absence of updated protection mechanisms, and uncertain state politics of tourism development and heritage conservation. Overall, the paper concludes that the current model of governance is inefficient, and a new strategy is needed to establish a sustainable balance between tourism and heritage preservation.

Problem: Urban growth management policy employs a range of tools to restrain urban sprawl, promote efficient land use, and preserve open space. Yet the efficacy of such policy is widely debated and challenged, necessitating reliable empirical evidence from case studies assessing the historical success (or failure) of such policy. Purpose: We review Israeli national growth management policy over a 36-year period, recording long-term land development trends in order to assess the efficacy of policy. Methods: We integrate a historical analysis of qualitative policy data and quantitative performance indicators of urban spatial development for a selected region of the country. We use a suite of spatial variables indicating amount, distribution, and configuration of built space along with other sprawl-relevant statistical data. Results and conclusions: In the 1970s and 1980s, open space was preserved largely due to agricultural preservation policy, despite demographic and economic growth. During the 1990s, the initiation of growth management policy coincided with a profound proliferation of development and population movement to low-density suburbs. While statistical indicators from the past several years are equivocal, they suggest that policy is encouraging higher-density development and slowing the loss of open space. Takeaway for practice: Urban growth management policy and its impact must be considered within the historical context in which it was implemented. Changes in land use policy in Israel reflect socioeconomic and political changes; when policy did not adapt to changes in society, the results were undesirable. Today, planning tools (e.g., minimum density limits, population size thresholds, urban growth boundaries, and land use fabrics) strike a balance between top-down planning objectives and bottom-up development pressures. The use of these tools within a statutory, national-level plan helps ensure consistency of implementation across regions.

The authors show that the historical and political role of populism in Latin American countries is an extremely relevant, but at the same time complex research and practical topic, which has been causing sharp discussions in the expert community for more than a decade. This is due to the inconsistency and ambiguity of populism as a social phenomenon, its dynamic and variable nature, which constantly puts forward new research tasks to scientists. Latin America is the birthplace of modern populism. Here, as in no other region of the world, populism has long become an integral part of social landscape and a specific feature of political processes. Dozens of prominent populist figures headed governments in most states of the region, were the creators of leading political parties and movements, left an indelible mark on Latin American history. Up to this day, populists of different beliefs largely form a vector of socio-economic development of an entire region. All this determines relevance of the article, and its main goal is to explore the topic of Latin American populism, its ideological pedigree and perspectives on the basis of new knowledge and phenomena. The novelty of the work is the interpretation of ideology and practice of populism, based on the methods of historical research and comparative analysis, which makes it possible to identify features of populist regimes in Latin America. The main conclusion made by the authors is the assertion that it is impossible to use old populist methods to respond to new challenges that await the peoples of Latin America in the future.

Kreuzer offers guidance to scholars looking to comparative historical analysis (CHA) for the tools to analyze macro-historical questions. Like history, CHA uses the past to formulate research questions, describe social transformations, and generate inductive insights. Like social science, CHA compares those patterns to explicate generalizable and testable theories. It operates in two different worlds—one constantly changing and full of cultural particularities and another static and full of orderly uniformities. CHA draws attention to the ontological constructions of these worlds; how scholars background historical and geographic particularities to create a social reality orderly enough for theorizing, while others foreground those particularities to re-complexify it to generate new inductive insights. CHA engages in ontological triage, dialogue between exploration and confirmation, and conversation in how to translate test results into genuine answers. This book is supplemented by online materials including introductory videos, diagnostic quizzes, advanced exercises, and annotated bibliographies.