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This text aims to fill a gap in the field of Middle Eastern political studies by combining international relations theory with concrete case studies. It begins with an overview of the rules and features of the Middle East regional system—the arena in which the local states, including Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Israel and the Arab states of Syria, Jordan and Iraq, operate. The book goes on to analyse foreign-policy-making in key states, illustrating how systemic determinants constrain this policy-making, and how these constraints are dealt with in distinctive ways depending on the particular domestic features of the individual states. Finally, it goes on to look at the outcomes of state policies by examining several major conflicts including the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Gulf War, and the system of regional alignment. The study assesses the impact of international penetration in the region, including the historic reasons behind the formation of the regional state system. It also analyses the continued role of external great powers, such as the United States and the former Soviet Union, and explains the process by which the region has become incorporated into the global capitalist market.
Ireland, the advent of the Stuart monarchy coincided with the end of a major conflict, the Nine Years War (1594–1603). Following the Treaty of Mellifont of March 1603 that formally ended hostilities, the new King, James VI & I, immediately authorised a dramatic reduction of the crown forces in the country. Relying on his fellow Scotsman Sir James Fullerton to oversee the decommissioning process, in barely three years the English army ‘on the establishment’ in Ireland fell from its end-of-war level of circa 17,500 men to barely 2,000 men by the beginning of 1606 – a
second of a blast, was within reach. The imagery of the so-called ‘small wars’ of peak colonial expansion stands out. These ‘small wars’ offered the last few opportunities to narrate and stage acts of individual heroism; such opportunities appear to have faded away on the great battlefields. Most of the time, colonial operations were on a smaller scale than the major conflicts that occurred from the 1900s to 1914. They usually involved only a few hundred or a few thousand soldiers. Unlike wars made
This chapter focuses on the problem of dowry to explore its present-day ramifications. It highlights a problem that is in sharp contrast to the ‘image’ of Orissan society being relatively free from violence and major conflicts, with communal riots (as exemplified in the case of Kandhamal) being explained as aberrations, that have been precipitated by fascist, right-wing politics. Tracing the problem of gender devaluation that had pre-colonial roots, it questions positions that see it as a problem related to increased agricultural productivity or prosperity. As delineated, the problems related to under-development and scarcity need to be borne in mind while discussing the phenomenon of dowry. As this chapter argues, while economic explanations can explain some aspects of the problem, they can be hopelessly inadequate in explaining the problem of dowry.
In the highly politicised world of nineteenth-century Russian religious culture, translation of the Bible became a source of major conflict. Who had the right to translate the Bible? What base texts were authoritative? What was to be the language of the modern Russian Bible? This chapter focuses on the controversy dividing Russian prelates in the 1850s over the renewal of Russian biblical translation efforts following the thirty-year hiatus imposed by Emperor Nicholas I. The chapter explores four touchstone moments when the politics of empire and nation came to be sharply represented in conflicts over biblical translation: (1) the conflict in the early nineteenth century over the imperially sanctioned Russian Bible Society; (2) the internal debate of the 1850s in the Holy Synod over the reopening of modern Russian biblical translation; (3) the conflicts linking the Jewish question with biblical translation in the last half of the nineteenth century; and, briefly, (4) the contemporary issue of biblical translation in the context of the current international conflict over Ukraine. The chapter argues that these fault lines reflected deep divisions over how best to accommodate ethnic diversity and incipient secularisation within Russian religious culture from the nineteenth century to the present day.
No struggle for social justice that lacks a grounded understanding of how wealth is accumulated within society, and by whom, is ever likely to make more than a marginal dent in the status quo. Much work has been done over the years by academics and activists to illuminate the broad processes of wealth extraction. But a constantly watchful eye is essential if new forms of financial extraction are to be blocked, short-circuited, deflected or unsettled. So when the World Bank and other well-known enablers of wealth extraction start to organise to promote greater private-sector involvement in ‘infrastructure’, for example through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), alarm bells should start to ring. How are roads, bridges, hospitals, ports and railways being eyed up by finance? What bevels and polishes the lens through which they are viewed? How is infrastructure being transformed into an ‘asset class’ that will yield the returns now demanded by investors? Why now? What does the reconfiguration of infrastructure tell us about the vulnerabilities of capital? The challenge is not only to understand the mechanisms through which infrastructure is being reconfigured to extract wealth: equally important is to think through how activists might best respond. What oppositional strategies genuinely unsettle elite power instead of making it stronger?
Anthropology after Gluckman places the intimate circle around Max Gluckman, his Manchester School, in the vanguard of modern social anthropology. The book discloses the School’s intense, argument-rich collaborations, developing beyond an original focus in south and central Africa. Where outsiders have seen dominating leadership by Gluckman, a common stock of problems, and much about conflict, Richard Werbner highlights how insiders were drawn to explore many new frontiers in fieldwork and in-depth, reflexive ethnography, because they themselves, in class and gender, ethnicity and national origins, were remarkably inclusive. Characteristically different anthropologists, their careers met the challenges of being a public intellectual, an international celebrity, an institutional good citizen, a social and political activist, an advocate of legal justice. Their living legacies are shown, for the first time, through interlinked social biography and intellectual history to reach broadly across politics, law, ritual, semiotics, development studies, comparative urbanism, social network analysis and mathematical sociology. Innovation – in research methods and techniques, in documenting people’s changing praxis and social relations, in comparative analysis and a destabilizing strategy of re-analysis within ethnography – became the School’s hallmark. Much of this exploration confronted troubling times in Africa, colonial and postcolonial, which put the anthropologists and their anthropological knowledge at risk. The resurgence of debate about decolonization makes the accounts of fierce, End of Empire argument and recent postcolonial anthropology all the more topical. The lessons, even in activism, for social scientists, teachers as well as graduate and undergraduate students are compelling for our own troubled times.
This book explores the evolving African security paradigm in light of the multitude of diverse threats facing the continent and the international community today and in the decades ahead. It challenges current thinking and traditional security constructs as woefully inadequate to meet the real security concerns and needs of African governments in a globalized world. The continent has becoming increasingly integrated into an international security architecture, whereby Africans are just as vulnerable to threats emanating from outside the continent as they are from home-grown ones. Thus, Africa and what happens there, matters more than ever. Through an in-depth examination and analysis of the continent’s most pressing traditional and non-traditional security challenges—from failing states and identity and resource conflict to terrorism, health, and the environment—it provides a solid intellectual foundation, as well as practical examples of the complexities of the modern African security environment. Not only does it assess current progress at the local, regional, and international level in meeting these challenges, it also explores new strategies and tools for more effectively engaging Africans and the global community through the human security approach.
In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps.
to adjust and recover, to regain well-being and build resilience to face future stressors, can be significantly impaired. Economic and business potential is eroded, and the quality of life overall is reduced. Individuals and families face the choice of staying or leaving, subject to the resources and alternatives open to them. As noted earlier, when the human consequences of protracted and major