A Rwandan proverb says “Defeat is the only bad news.” For Rwandans living under colonial rule, winning called not only for armed confrontation, but also for a battle of wits—and not ...only with foreigners, but also with each other. In Defeat Is the Only Bad News Alison Des Forges recounts the ambitions, strategies, and intrigues of an African royal court under Yuhi Musinga, the Rwandan ruler from 1896 to 1931. These were turbulent years for Rwanda, when first Germany and then Belgium pursued an aggressive plan of colonization there. At the time of the Europeans’ arrival, Rwanda was also engaged in a succession dispute after the death of one of its most famous kings. Against this backdrop, the Rwandan court became the stage for a drama of Shakespearean proportions, filled with deceit, shrewd calculation, ruthless betrayal, and sometimes murder.             Historians who study European expansion typically focus on interactions between colonizers and colonized; they rarely attend to relations among the different factions inhabiting occupied lands. Des Forges, drawing on oral histories and extensive archival research, reveals how divisions among different groups in Rwanda shaped their responses to colonial governments, missionaries, and traders. Rwandans, she shows, used European resources to extend their power, even as they sought to preserve the autonomy of the royal court. Europeans, for their part, seized on internal divisions to advance their own goals. Des Forges’s vividly narrated history, meticulously edited and introduced by David Newbury, provides a deep context for understanding the Rwandan civil war a century later.  
The phrase "Cold War" was coined by George Orwell in 1945 to describe the impact of the atomic bomb on world politics: "We may be heading not for a general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly ...stable as the slave empires of antiquity." The Soviet Union, he wrote, was "at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbors." But as a leading historian of Soviet foreign policy, Jonathan Haslam, makes clear in this groundbreaking book, the epoch was anything but stable, with constant wars, near-wars, and political upheavals on both sides.
Whereas the Western perspective on the Cold War has been well documented by journalists and historians, the Soviet side has remained for the most part shrouded in secrecy-until now. Drawing on a vast range of recently released archives in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and Eastern Europe,Russia
's Cold Waroffers a thorough and fascinating analysis of East-West relations from 1917 to 1989.
Far more than merely a straightforward history of the Cold War, this book presents the first account of politics and decision making at the highest levels of Soviet power: how Soviet leaders saw political and military events, what they were trying to accomplish, their miscalculations, and the ways they took advantage of Western ignorance.Russia's Cold Warfills a significant gap in our understanding of the most important geopolitical rivalry of the twentieth century.
The paper road Mueggler, Erik
2011., 20111003, 2011, 2011-11-02
eBook
This exhilarating book interweaves the stories of two early twentieth-century botanists to explore the collaborative relationships each formed with Yunnan villagers in gathering botanical specimens ...from the borderlands between China, Tibet, and Burma. Erik Mueggler introduces Scottish botanist George Forrest, who employed Naxi adventurers in his fieldwork from 1906 until his death in 1932. We also meet American Joseph Francis Charles Rock, who, in 1924, undertook a dangerous expedition to Gansu and Tibet with the sons and nephews of Forrest's workers. Mueggler describes how the Naxi workers and their Western employers rendered the earth into specimens, notes, maps, diaries, letters, books, photographs, and ritual manuscripts. Drawing on an ancient metaphor of the earth as a book, Mueggler provides a sustained meditation on what can be copied, translated, and revised and what can be folded back into the earth.
The emergence of globalization was neither accidental nor inevitable. To make the "free flow" of commodities, capital, and money possible, governments first had to introduce a new political ...infrastructure. InRemaking U.S. Trade Policy, Nitsan Chorev focuses on trade liberalization in the United States from the 1930s to the present as she explores the political origins of today's global economy.
The ability of the U.S. government to impose its preferences on other governments is an important part of the story of globalization, but what is central to Chorev's analysis is understanding why the nation's leaders supported trade liberalization in the first place. For Chorev, the explanation lies in domestic political struggles. Advocates of free trade prevailed in the struggle with protectionists by working to change the institutions governing trade policy, replacing institutional arrangements that favored protectionism with new ones that favored a free-market approach.
The new institutional arrangements shifted authority from a protectionist Congress to liberal agencies at the executive branch and to the World Trade Organization. These transformations entailed a move from a politicized location, in which direct negotiations and debates dominate the process of decision-making, to bureaucratic and judicial arenas where a legal logic dominates and the citizens have little voice.
The foundations of the major federal policies that govern todays workplace were put in place during the 1930s, when most families had a stay-at-home caregiver who could tend to the needs of children, ...the aged, and the sick. Seven decades later, many of the nations workplace policies are in need of major updates to reflect the realities of the modern workforce. American workers, for example, typically have little or no control over their work hours and schedules; few have a right to job-protected access to paid leave to care for a family member. Heather Boushey examines three types of work-family policies that affect work-family conflict and that are in serious need of repair— those that govern hours worked and workplace equity, those that affect the ability of workers to take time off from work because their families need care, and those that govern the outsourcing of family care when necessary. In each case Boushey surveys new programs currently on the policy agenda, assesses their effectiveness, and considers the extent to which they can be used as models for a broader federal program. Boushey looks, for example, at a variety of pilot and experimental programs that have been implemented both by private employers and by federal, state, and local governments to provide workers with flexible working hours. Careful evaluations of these programs show that several can increase scheduling flexibility without adversely affecting employers. Although few Americans have access to paid family and medical leave to attend to family needs, most believe that businesses should be required to provide paid leave to all workers. Boushey notes that several states are moving in that direction. Again, careful evaluations show that these experimental programs are successful for both employers and employees. National programs to address child and elder care do not yet exist. The most comprehensive solution on the horizon is the universal prekindergarten programs offered by a few states, most often free of charge, for children aged three and four.
For millennia, humans have lived in locations that are highly vulnerable to large earthquakes, often out of strategic or cultural necessity and/or the proximity of these locations to resources ...necessary for survival. Despite the often catastrophic effects when large earthquakes occur, recent history reveals that human nature is to rebuild rather than relocate, implying that seismic activity is not a sufficient deterrent of population growth in tectonically vulnerable areas. In order to investigate whether this was the case for ancient civilisations, and thus perhaps a fundamental tenet of human behaviour, a palaeo-earthquake history was developed for the active Cheskin and Ipak Faults in northwestern Iran, and compared with the well-resolved archaeological history of the nearby ‘Sagzabad cluster’ settlements of Zagheh (7170–6300 BP), Ghabristan (6215–4950 BP) and Sagzabad (4050–2350 BP). Combining new geologic, geomorphic, and chronologic datasets revealed the presence of a fault-propagated anticline formed by large (
Mw ∼ 6.5–7.0) earthquakes on a blind thrust fault that projects to seismogenic depth directly beneath the Sagzabad cluster settlement sites. Large earthquakes with a return period of <1000 y occurred on the Cheskin and Ipak Faults during human occupation of the Sagzabad cluster. Gaussian cumulative distribution modelling indicates a >90% probability under most faulting scenarios that the energy release from these earthquakes would have been of sufficient magnitude to generate peak horizontal acceleration (PHA) values at the Sagzabad cluster in excess of likely threshold values for complete settlement destruction. Poisson modelling assuming a time–displacement repeating model for earthquake recurrence indicates a 66 (
42) % probability of one (
two) earthquakes that would generate PHA ≥ 0.25 g occurring during occupation of Zagheh, a 79 (
55) % probability for Ghabristan, and an 88 (
65) % probability for Sagzabad. Despite the near certainty that the residents of these Holocene settlements experienced large destructive earthquakes, the near-continuous history of occupation at this area suggests that early humans were not apt to relocate in response to earthquake activity. Environmental (e.g., alluviation, stream channel avulsion, climate change), cultural and/or political factors may have been more important drivers of settlement shifts and abandonment at the Sagzabad cluster of Iran.
Thin places Armbrecht, Ann
2009., 20081128, 2008, 2008-12-29
eBook
Thin Placesis an eloquent meditation on what it means to move between cultures and how one might finally come home, a particular paradox in a culture that lacks deep ties to the natural world. During ...the 1990s, Ann Armbrecht, an American anthropologist, made several trips to northeastern Nepal to research how the Yamphu Rai acquired, farmed, and held onto their land; how they perceived their area's recent designation as a national park and conservation area; and whether-as she believed-they held a wisdom about living on the earth that the industrialized West had forgotten.
What Armbrecht found instead were men and women who shared her restlessness, people also driven by the feeling that there must be more to life than they could find in their village. "We each blamed our dissatisfaction on something in the world," she writes, "not something in ourselves or in the stories we told ourselves about that world. If only we lived elsewhere, then we would be at home."
Charting Armbrecht's travels in the mountains of Nepal and in the United States and her disintegrating marriage back home,Thin Placesis ultimately an exploration not of the sacred far-off but of the sacredness of places that are between-between the internal and external landscape, the self and others, and the self and the land. She finds that home is not a place where we arrive but a way of being in place, wherever that place may be. Along the way, Armbrecht explores the disconnections in our most intimate relationships, how they stem from the same disconnections that create our destruction of the land, and how one cannot be healed without attending to the other.
Cyborgs in Latin America explores the ways cultural expression in Latin America has grappled with the changing relationships between technology and human identity. The book takes a literary and ...cultural studies approach in examining narrative, film and advertising campaigns from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay by such artists as Ricardo Piglia, Edmundo Paz Soldán, Carmen Boullosa and Alberto Fuguet among others. Using and criticizing theoretical models developed by Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, the book will appeal to specialists and students of Latin American Studies; Posthuman Theory; and Literature, Science and Technology Studies.
PDF