I am the Series Editor for a new list of titles which began to be published by Zed Books in London in April 2011 called ‘Asian Arguments’. The new series follows on from Zed’s very successful ‘African Arguments’ series. The basic idea is to work with various authors, mostly non-academic and based in the Asian region, who have substantial ground level experience of the issues covered.
Asian Arguments is a series of short books about Asia today. Aimed at the growing number of students and general readers who want to know more about the region, these books intend to highlight community involvement from the ground up in issues of the day usually discussed by authors in terms of top down government policy. The aim is to better understand how ordinary Asian citizens are confronting problems such as the environment, democracy and their societies development either with or without government support. The books are scholarly but engaged, substantive as well as topical and written by authors with direct experience of their subject matter.
The series has now kicked of with an excellent book on grassroots and village democracy in China from Dr Kerry Brown of Chatham House – Ballot Box China: Grassroots Democracy in the Final Major One-Party State. 
We followed Brown’s book by publishing Michael Barr’s book on Chinese soft power – Who’s Afraid of China? in September 2011:
Recently we published Ruth Peason andKyoko Kusakabe’s Thailand’s Hidden Workforce, a fascinating insight into the lives, conditions and motivations of the nearly two million Burmese women migrant workers who drive southern Thailand’s manufacturing economy.
In November we launched the fourth title in the series, Tom Miller’s China Urban Billion, an excellent study of urbanisation in China
Our fifth book from the team behind the great Chinadialogue web site…
and some others in the works:
- Chinese People’s Responses and Attitudes to the PRC’s Environmental Crisis from Chinadialogue.net
- Resource Nationalism in Tibet
- Life Inside China’s Great Firewall – Activism and the Nert in the PRC
- What do North Koreans Really Think?
- The position of women in China today
- Mongolian Reactions to the Resources Curse
- China’s African Safari
If you have a subject or title you think might fit well into the series and reflect the aims and objectives of Asian Arguments then do let me know – paul@accessasia.co.uk
