The Kurds, who number some 28 million people in the Middle East, have no country they can call their own. Long ignored by the West, Kurds are now highly visible actors on the world's political stage. ...More than half live in Turkey, where the Kurdish struggle has gained new strength and attention since the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq.
Essential to understanding modern-day Kurds-and their continuing demands for an independent state-is understanding the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party. A guerilla force that was founded in 1978 by a small group of ex-Turkish university students, the PKK radicalized the Kurdish national movement in Turkey, becoming a tightly organized, well-armed fighting force of some 15,000, with a 50,000-member civilian militia in Turkey and tens of thousands of active backers in Europe. Under the leadership of Abdullah Ocalan, the war the PKK waged in Turkey through 1999 left nearly 40,000 people dead and drew in the neighboring states of Iran, Iraq, and Syria, all of whom sought to use the PKK for their own purposes. Since 2004, emboldened by the Iraqi Kurds, who now have established an autonomous Kurdish state in the northernmost reaches of Iraq, the PKK has again turned to violence to meet its objectives.
Blood and Beliefcombines reportage and scholarship to give the first in-depth account of the PKK. Aliza Marcus, one of the first Western reporters to meet with PKK rebels, wrote about their war for many years for a variety of prominent publications before being put on trial in Turkey for her reporting. Based on her interviews with PKK rebels and their supporters and opponents throughout the world-including the Palestinians who trained them, the intelligence services that tracked them, and the dissidents who tried to break them up-Marcus provides an in-depth account of this influential radical group.
There is no one-size-fits-all decentralized fix to deeply divided and conflict-ridden states. One of the hotly debated policy prescriptions for states facing self-determination demands is some form ...of decentralized governance - including regional autonomy arrangements and federalism - which grants minority groups a degree of self-rule. Yet the track record of existing decentralized states suggests that these have widely divergent capacity to contain conflicts within their borders. Through in-depth case studies of Chechnya, Punjab and Québec, as well as a statistical cross-country analysis, this book argues that while policy, fiscal approach, and political decentralization can, indeed, be peace-preserving at times, the effects of these institutions are conditioned by traits of the societies they (are meant to) govern. Decentralization may help preserve peace in one country or in one region, but it may have just the opposite effect in a country or region with different ethnic and economic characteristics.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army swiftly occupied Manila and then plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign with striking parallels to today’s war in Iraq. Armed with ...cutting-edge technology from America’s first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence units anywhere under the American flag. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy shows how this imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony and won global power in 1945, it would intervene in the Philippines periodically for the next half-century—using the country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present day.     But security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial rule were not contained, McCoy shows, at this remote periphery of American power. Migrating homeward through both personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American system of public-private surveillance persisted in various forms for the next fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of labor activists and ethnic communities during World War I, to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, all the way to the secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War. “With a breathtaking sweep of archival research, McCoy shows how repressive techniques developed in the colonial Philippines migrated back to the United States for use against people of color, aliens, and really any heterodox challenge to American power. This book proves Mark Twain’s adage that you cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.”—Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago  “This book lays the Philippine body politic on the examination table to reveal the disease that lies within—crime, clandestine policing, and political scandal. But McCoy also draws the line from Manila to Baghdad, arguing that the seeds of controversial counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq were sown in the anti-guerrilla operations in the Philippines. His arguments are forceful.”—Sheila S. Coronel, Columbia University   Winner, George McT. Kahin Prize of the Southeast Asian Council of the Association for Asian Studies
Invisible Agentsshows how personal and deeply felt spiritual beliefs can inspire social movements and influence historical change. Conventional historiography concentrates on the secular, ...materialist, or moral sources of political agency. Instead, David M. Gordon argues, when people perceive spirits as exerting power in the visible world, these beliefs form the basis for individual and collective actions. Focusing on the history of the south-central African country of Zambia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his analysis invites reflection on political and religious realms of action in other parts of the world, and complicates the post-Enlightenment divide of sacred and profane.The book combines theoretical insights with attention to local detail and remarkable historical sweep, from oral narratives communicated across slave-trading routes during the nineteenth century, through the violent conflicts inspired by Christian and nationalist prophets during colonial times, and ending with the spirits of Pentecostal rebirth during the neoliberal order of the late twentieth century. To gain access to the details of historical change and personal spiritual beliefs across this long historical period, Gordon employs all the tools of the African historian. His own interviews and extensive fieldwork experience in Zambia provide texture and understanding to the narrative. He also critically interprets a diverse range of other sources, including oral traditions, fieldnotes of anthropologists, missionary writings and correspondence, unpublished state records, vernacular publications, and Zambian newspapers.Invisible Agentswill challenge scholars and students alike to think in new ways about the political imagination and the invisible sources of human action and historical change.
By analyzing Ethiopia's rule over Eritrea and Indonesia's rule over East Timor, Third World Colonialism and Strategies of Liberation compares the colonialism of powerful third world countries on ...their small, less powerful neighbors. Through a comparative study of Eritrean and East Timorese grand strategies of liberation, this book documents the inner workings of the nationalist movements and traces the sources of government types in these countries. In doing so, Awet Tewelde Weldemichael challenges existing notions of grand strategy as a unique prerogative of the West and opposes established understanding of colonialism as an exclusively Western project on the non-Western world. In addition to showing how Eritrea and East Timor developed sophisticated military and non-military strategies, Weldemichael emphasizes that the insurgents avoided terrorist methods when their colonizers indiscriminately bombed their countries, tortured and executed civilians, held them hostage, starved them deliberately, and continuously threatened them with harsher measures.
1. IntroductionA judge or a judicial system, that is not independent and is influenced by different factors is, unable of establishing justice; he/she is also unable to protect the rights and ...individual freedoms of people which calls into question the existential philosophy of that judicial system. People's lack of trust in the judicial system leads to a decrease in the legitimacy of the political system which causes political and social crises and at higher levels, the collapse of the political system. Based on the principle of separation of powers, which has been one of the most important intellectual achievements of mankind in social administration, the power of the government is separated and divided into the three branches of legislative, judiciary, and executive organs (although they maintain their interaction), in order to prevent the concentration of power in one person or institution. Judicial independence is, therefore, one of the logical results of accepting the principle of separation of powers, the origin of which can be found in the era of Aristotle. Today, this principle is considered one of the most important principles and, in fact, the cornerstone of democratic governments–a form of government that seems better able to provide justice than other forms of government. The Principle of Judicial Independence in International Documents and the Legal System of AfghanistanOne of the results of accepting the principle of separation of powers, as mentioned earlier, is the acceptance of the principle of judicial independence. This principle has been discussed and supported in international and regional documents. In Afghanistan, for the first time during the reign of Amanullah Khan, it was recognized in Article 53 of the Constitution of Afghanistan (1923) by stating that "all courts are free from any interference". In the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (2004), there is no clarity about accepting the principle of separation of powers. But from its general structure and its division of chapters –the fourth chapter (government) the fifth chapter (the National Council) and the seventh chapter (Judiciary) it is inferred that this principle is accepted. Judicial independence is also explicitly accepted in Article 116: "The judiciary is the independent pillar of the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan". Research ProblemIn Afghanistan, in recent years, several criminal cases have resulted in decisions that raised questions about the status and position of judicial independence in the judicial system of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan: Do judges and the judicial system of Afghanistan act independently? History of Research and Its MethodAlthough much research has been done about judicial independence in the world, it has received less attention in Afghanistan which is perhaps the reason why Afghan legal writers have made fewer claims about the strength or weakness of judicial independence in Afghanistan based on evidence. Therefore, evidence-based research about judicial independence, in which the personal judgment of the authors is minimized, is one of the needs of Afghan society. The main question of this essay is regarding the status of judicial independence, as one of the most important pillars of good governance, in the legal system of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.Judicial independence can be studied at both organizational and individual levels. At the organizational level, it is indicated by a look at factors such as the recognition of the independence of the judiciary in the constitution and other laws, the exclusivity of judicial authority in the judiciary, the binding nature of the rulings of the judiciary on other organs, administrative independence, and finally, its financial independence. Also, to evaluate individual judicial independence, one should consider indicators such as the process of selecting and appointing judges, job security of judges, prohibition of engaging in political and other duties for the judges, prescribing objective conditions for their promotion and demotion, documentation of judicial decisions, establishing a judicial panel in court, judicial immunity, the salaries of judges and finally their safety and security. Conclusion The results of this study show that in Afghanistan during the republic period, at the organizational level, while the independence of the judiciary was recognized in the constitution and other laws of the country, the exclusion of jurisdiction in the judiciary was not desirable. The rulings of the judiciary were not so binding on other organs which had damaged its independence. Administrative independence was also weak, but financial independence was in a good condition. At the individual level, the selection and appointment of judges was not suitable, but the job security of judges had been relatively good as the mechanism of hiring judges was in a good situation that ensured their job security to a large extent. The guarantee of the prohibition of their employment in political duties was weak, but in other duties, the ban had been appropriately executed. Also, while the prescription of objective criteria for the promotion and demotion of judges was very bad, the judicial decisions were documented and the judicial boards were established in proceedings. Judicial immunity had been realized incompletely, judges' salaries were assessed as appropriate but their safety and security had been inadequate. In general, judicial independence in Afghanistan was weak which, according to the authors, had caused people's distrust in the judicial system and as a result, a decrease in the legitimacy of the republican system. This can be considered one of the factors for the fall of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
A fundamental task in various disciplines of science, including biology, is to find underlying causal relations and make use of them. Causal relations can be seen if interventions are properly ...applied; however, in many cases they are difficult or even impossible to conduct. It is then necessary to discover causal relations by analyzing statistical properties of purely observational data, which is known as causal discovery or causal structure search. This paper aims to give a introduction to and a brief review of the computational methods for causal discovery that were developed in the past three decades, including constraint-based and score-based methods and those based on functional causal models, supplemented by some illustrations and applications.
Terror in chechnya Gilligan, Emma
2010., 20091109, 2009, 2010-01-01, 20100101, Letnik:
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Terror in Chechnya is the definitive account of Russian war crimes in Chechnya. Emma Gilligan provides a comprehensive history of the second Chechen conflict of 1999 to 2005, revealing one of the ...most appalling human rights catastrophes of the modern era--one that has yet to be fully acknowledged by the international community. Drawing upon eyewitness testimony and interviews with refugees and key political and humanitarian figures, Gilligan tells for the first time the full story of the Russian military's systematic use of torture, disappearances, executions, and other punitive tactics against the Chechen population.
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