Associations and the Chinese State: Contested Spaces: Contested Spaces

<em>The Oxford Handbook of Social Welfare in the Global South</em> offers a critical examination of social protection systems across the Global South, interrogating their role in addressing inequality, mitigating crises, and fostering transformative development. Structured around three core themes--equity, resilience, and systemic change--the volume explores how social protection policies are designed, contested, and reconfigured in diverse political and economic contexts. Moving beyond technocratic assessments, it situates social protection within broader struggles over rights, governance, and social justice, revealing both the promises and limitations of these systems in an era of compounding global challenges. <p/>This handbook bring together leading scholars and practitioners to dissect the interplay between social protection and development across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Contributions interrogate how cash transfers, healthcare reforms, and labor policies function as instruments of both stability and exclusion, while probing the political tensions that shape their expansion or retrenchment. Case studies-from South Africa's contested welfare reforms to Thailand's rapid scaling of universal child grants-demonstrate how institutional legacies, advocacy coalitions, and crises reshape policy trajectories. At the same time, the volume highlights persistent gaps in coverage, particularly for informal workers, women, and displaced populations, arguing for rights-based approaches that transcend temporary fixes. <p/>Pushing the debate on social protection in bold new directions, this volume challenges conventional assumptions about targeting, conditionality, and fiscal sustainability while foregrounding questions of power, participation, and historical contingency. Taken together, the volume not only maps the current landscape of social protection but also redefines its future-as a dynamic field of governance, a site of political struggle, and a potential catalyst for more inclusive futures.

Berman, Greg

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. <p/>How do non-governmental organizations (NGOs) create the spaces in which they act, despite all the odds that are stacked against them? How do NGOs meet the requirements of the moment, often being in the right place at the right time? Why is the sum of NGO activity frequently greater than the parts? <p/>To answer these questions, <em>A Relational Approach to NGOs in Global Politics</em> analyses the ways in which NGOs relate to each other as well as with states, intergovernmental organizations, businesses, and other actors. It considers NGOs as living organizations - flexible, adaptive, creative - to examine the various NGO relationships and how they are built to surmount challenges, manage complexity, and make progress. In doing so, it sheds light on their power and agency in global politics. <p/>Maryam Zarnegar Deloffre and Sigrid Quack develop core conceptual building blocks, such as NGOing and typologies of social interactions and relational power, which are explored in empirical studies of NGOs on a range of topics. These include legal environmental conflicts, humanitarian assistance, and counterterrorism, as well as analyses of relational forms such as super-networks, meta-associations, and mergers and acquisitions. <p/>With a broad conceptualization of NGO-NGO relationships and in-depth analysis of the forms and processes of NGO interactions, this volume expands the understanding of NGOing, promotes synthetic knowledge about the power and effects of NGO interactions, and reveals new perspectives on processes of global governing.

This volume comprises original, empirically grounded chapters that collectively offer the most comprehensive study available to date on food security in the Middle East. The book starts with a theoretical framing of the phenomena of food security and food sovereignty and presents empirical case studies of Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Yemen, the Persian Gulf states and Iran. Some of the major themes examined include the ascent and decline of various food regimes, urban agriculture, overseas agricultural land purchases, national food self-sufficiency strategies, distribution networks and food consumption patterns, and nutrition transitions and healthcare. Collectively, the chapters represent highly original contributions to the disciplines of political science, economics, agricultural studies, and healthcare policy.

Davies, Thomas

Rubenstein, Jennifer C