Vineeta Sinha

On July 5, 2021 the world lost one of its great sociologists. After battling with cancer for more than two years, Mona Abaza finally succumbed. To the end she was determined to live her life to the full, to the end she followed the ebb and flow of politics and the pandemic; to the end she followed the life of her friends. Suffering from interminable pain, having lost the functioning of several organs, she nevertheless continued teaching her students at the...

The looming figure of the late Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of independent Singapore, appears to have defined the very existence and identity of this island nation-state. The Singapore style of governance associated with, and indeed extending from, the persona of Lee Kuan Yew, has been christened “pragmatic authoritarianism,” “soft-style authoritarianism,” “enlightened despotism” and even “benevolent dictatorship.”...

In 2005, I became involved with the ISA E-Bulletin, initiated by the-then Vice President for the ISA Publications Committee, Susan McDaniel, who invited me to apply for the position of editor. As someone who had some involvement with the editorial board of the Asian Journal of Social Science and as a sociologist based in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore, this innovative concept of an ISA publication appealed to...

Several new editors have been appointed recently for ISA publications. They are Eloísa Martín (Current Sociology), Christine Inglis (International Sociology), Bert Klandermans (Sociopedia) and Sujata Patel (Current Sociology monographs and Sage Studies in International Sociology); we expect great things from all of them in their important tasks. Special thanks go to their retiring predecessors Julia...