In order to understand the Pakistani state and government's treatment of non-dominant ethnic groups after the failure of the military operation in East Pakistan and the independence of Bangladesh, ...this book looks at the ethnic movements that were subject to a military operation after 1971: the Baloch in the 1970s, the Sindhis in the 1980s and Mohajirs in the 1990s.
The book critically evaluates the literature on ethnicity and nationalism by taking nationalist ideology and the political divisions which it generates within ethnic groups as essential in estimating ethnic movements. It goes on to challenge the modernist argument that nationalism is only relevant to modern-industrialised socio-economic settings. The available evidence from Pakistan makes clear that ethnic movements emanate from three distinct socio-economic realms: tribal (Baloch), rural (Sindh) and urban (Mohajir), and the book looks at the implications that this has, as well as how further arguments could be advanced about the relevance of ethnic movements and politics in the Third World.
It provides academics and researchers with background knowledge of how the Baloch, Sindhi and Mohajir ethnic conflict in Pakistan took shape in a historical context as well as probable future scenarios of the relationship between the Pakistani state and government, and ethnic groups and movements.
Moving Memory is an
ethnography of remembrance in the field of tension between
post-dictatorship Chile and occupied Palestine that offers new
insights into memory politics as a globally resurgent and
...increasingly transnational phenomenon. It tells a largely
untold story of a Palestinian diaspora: how a predominantly
Christian, conservative, and wealthy elite has come to form the
backbone of a diasporic community to which the Palestinian struggle
remains a central mobilizing force. Schwabe explores how
Palestinian diaspora politics play into larger attempts to obscure
the recent Chilean past and its consequences, all the while working
to counter Zionist efforts to negate and erase Palestinian
existence. Despite considerable efforts to contain them, memories
move. They travel across porous and ever-changing geographical and
socio-political boundaries, reconfiguring realities in the process.
In exploring the paradoxes of remembering and forgetting between
Palestine and Chile as intertwining nodes in the complex field of
global memory politics, the book demarcates the limits and
possibilities of forging solidarity at the fault lines of
memory.
"This book is an ethnographic account of political relations in an autonomous highland region in Myanmar, governed by the country's largest insurgent group, the United Wa State Army"--.
Water in confined geometries has obvious relevance in biology, geology, and other areas where the material properties are strongly dependent on the amount and behavior of water in these types of ...materials. Another reason to restrict the size of water domains by different types of geometrical confinements has been the possibility to study the structural and dynamical behavior of water in the deeply supercooled regime (e.g., 150–230 K at ambient pressure), where bulk water immediately crystallizes to ice. In this paper we give a short review of studies with this particular goal. However, from these studies it is also clear that the interpretations of the experimental data are far from evident. Therefore, we present three main interpretations to explain the experimental data, and we discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Unfortunately, none of the proposed scenarios is able to predict all the observations for supercooled and glassy bulk water, indicating that either the structural and dynamical alterations of confined water are too severe to make predictions for bulk water or the differences in how the studied water has been prepared (applied cooling rate, resulting density of the water, etc.) are too large for direct and quantitative comparisons.
This book provides an unparalleled insider's look at the factors leading up to the 1997-98 crisis in South Korea and how the crisis unfolded over the next two years. Written by former finance ...minister Kyu-Sung Lee, this book traces the evolving situation across the key sectors and the series of policy and institutional measures the government deployed throughout the crisis. This book is a must-read for policymakers, scholars, students, and any reader interested in understanding the facts and circumstances surrounding the 1997-98 crisis, the policies undertaken at the time, and what the experience implies for preventing future crises.
Mexico since 1980 Haber, Stephen; Klein, Herbert S.; Maurer, Noel ...
07/2008
eBook
This book addresses two questions that are crucial to understanding Mexico's current economic and political challenges. Why did the opening up of the economy to foreign trade and investment not ...result in sustained economic growth? Why has electoral democracy not produced rule of law? The answer to those questions lies in the ways in which Mexico's long history with authoritarian government shaped its judicial, taxation, and property rights institutions. These institutions, the authors argue, cannot be reformed with the stroke of a pen. Moreover, they represent powerful constraints on the ability of the Mexican government to fund welfare-enhancing reforms, on the ability of firms and households to write contracts, and on the ability of citizens to enforce their basic rights.
The people of Myanmar were struck by three major human rights
disasters during the country's period of democratization from 2003
to 2012: the 2007 Saffron Revolution, the aftermath of Cyclone
Nargis ...in 2008, and the 2012 Rakhine riots, which would evolve into
the ongoing Rohingya crisis. These events saw Myanmar's government
categorically labeled as an offender of human rights, and three
powerful Southeast Asian member states-Indonesia, Thailand, and
Malaysia-responded to the violations in very different ways. In
each case, their responses to the crises were explicitly shaped by
norm conflict, which may be understood as a tension between
international and domestic norms. Their reactions were compelled by
a need to address conflicting domestic and international
expectations for norm compliance regarding human rights protection
and non-interference in internal affairs.
In Norms in Conflict: Southeast Asia's Response to
Human Rights Violations in Myanmar, Anchalee Rüland makes
sense of state action that occurs when a governing body is faced
with a circumstance that is at once in line with and contrary to
its own governing policies. She defines five different types of
response strategies to situations of norm conflict and examines the
enabling factors that lead to each strategy. Domestic norms are
known to evolve as a country's values change over time yet Rüland
argues that the old and new norms may also coexist; knowledge of
the underlying political context is crucial for those seeking a
solid understanding of state behavior. Norms in Conflict
challenges the conventional understanding of the logic of
consequences in determining state behavior, advancing
constructivist theory and establishing a provocative new
conversation in international relations discourse.
Stalemate reveals the history
and contemporary politics of the United Wa State Army (UWSA),
Asia's strongest insurgent army on Myanmar's border with
China. This ethnographic tale recounts how a ...highland
group, often dismissed as rebels or narcotraffickers, maintains a
relational autonomy between two powerful lowland states. The Wa
polity engages rather than evades these surrounding states, yet
struggles to fit into their registers of sovereignty and
statehood.
Andrew Ong examines political culture among Wa elites and
people, UWSA external relations, and capital flows with neighboring
China, showing how Wa autonomy is enacted through careful
navigation of complex borderland geopolitics and the shadow
economy. He analyzes the seeming stalemate between the Myanmar
state and the UWSA as one of tactical dissonance-adopting
simultaneous postures of authority and subordination and creating
disruptions and connections. Stalemate illuminates how
seemingly ambiguous and disorderly practices of political
signaling, economic regulation, and military governance produce
relative stability, challenging our assumptions about state-like
processes at the peripheries.
Clinical trials of the PET amyloid imaging agent F-18-flutemetamol have used visual assessment to classify PET scans as negative or positive for brain amyloid. However, quantification provides ...additional information about regional and global tracer uptake and may have utility for image assessment over time and across different centers. Using postmortem brain neuritic plaque density data as a truth standard to derive a standardized uptake value ratio (SUVR) threshold, we assessed a fully automated quantification method comparing visual and quantitative scan categorizations. We also compared the histopathology-derived SUVR threshold with one derived from healthy controls. Methods: Data from 345 consenting subjects enrolled in 8 prior clinical trials of F-18-flutemetamol injection were used. We grouped subjects into 3 cohorts: an autopsy cohort (n = 68) comprising terminally ill patients with postmortem confirmation of brain amyloid status; a test cohort (n = 172) comprising 33 patients with clinically probable Alzheimer disease, 80 patients with mild cognitive impairment, and 59 healthy volunteers; and a healthy cohort of 105 volunteers, used to define a reference range for SUVR. Visual image categorizations for comparison were from a previous study. A fully automated PET-only quantification method was used to compute regional neocortical SUVRs that were combined into a single composite SUVR. An SUVR threshold for classifying scans as positive or negative was derived by ranking the PET scans from the autopsy cohort based on their composite SUVR and comparing data with the standard of truth based on postmortem brain amyloid status for subjects in the autopsy cohort. The derived threshold was used to categorize the 172 scans in the test cohort as negative or positive, and results were compared with categorization using visual assessment. Different reference and composite region definitions were assessed. Threshold levels were also compared with corresponding thresholds derived from the healthy group. Results: Automated quantification (using pons as the reference region) demonstrated 91% sensitivity and 88% specificity and gave 3 false-positive and 4 false-negative scans. All 3 false-positive cases were either borderline-normal by standard of truth or had moderate to heavy cortical diffuse plaque burden. In the test cohort, the concordance between quantitative and visual read categorization ranged from 97.1% to 99.4% depending on the selection of reference and composite regions. The threshold derived from the healthy group was close to the histopathology-derived threshold. Conclusion: Categorization of F-18-flutemetamol amyloid imaging data using an automated PET-only quantification method showed good agreement with histopathologic classification of neuritic plaque density and a strong concordance with visual read results.
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