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Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history
The boat journey is central to the narrative of Mediterranean
migration of the undocumented. The boat itself is flimsy, fragile,
unstable, and easily breakable. It is trifling and insubstantial.
But it has captured the attention of the world - after all, the
boat and its aftermath have produced recurring images of migrants
washing up along southern Europe's picturesque beaches in the
visual archive of undocumented migration. But the boat has also
sharply put into relief the divides of the Mediterranean. After
all, the few miles of the Mediterranean separating Africa's
northern shore and Europe's southern shore is a common observation
in migrant narratives. At the same time, they also reflect on how
the Mediterranean has been imagined as starkly divided into two
incommensurable spaces and civilizational models - North and South
(in actuality, by colonial powers in the modern period). Much
Mediterranean migrant literature indeed captures the
Mediterranean's fossilized binaries, North and South. But, The
Two-Edged Sea also reveals that one inheres within the other. While
the book explores two Mediterraneans, with asymmetrical power
relations that reflect the sea's northern and southern shores, it
also delves into how they are and have been in dialogue with each
other, effectively deconstructing the binary.
In 1968 a cohort of politically engaged young academics established
the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS). Critical of the
field of Asian studies and its complicity with the United States'
policies in Vietnam, the CCAS mounted a sweeping attack on the
field's academic, political, and financial structures. While the
CCAS included scholars of Japan, Korea, and South and Southeast
Asia, the committee focused on Maoist China, as it offered the
possibility of an alternative politics and the transformation of
the meaning of labor and the production of knowledge. In The End of
Concern Fabio Lanza traces the complete history of the CCAS,
outlining how its members worked to merge their politics and
activism with their scholarship. Lanza's story exceeds the
intellectual history and legacy of the CCAS, however; he narrates a
moment of transition in Cold War politics and how Maoist China
influenced activists and intellectuals around the world, becoming a
central element in the political upheaval of the long 1960s.
The primary objective of this book is to unearth the Mosul
Incident, place it in a historical narrative and introduce it to
the literature. Despite creating a historical turning point, the
incident has not attracted the necessary attention in neither the
Ottoman nor Iraqi historiography until now. By interpreting the
preferences, policies and practices associated with this particular
incident, the book is engaged to analyze the Post-Constitutional
power shifts, perceptions of collective violence and the origins of
Arab-Kurdish Dispute. The banishment and murder of Sheikh Said
Barzanji who was the family head of Sadaat al-Barzanjiyya as the
most influential religious organization of region, created a
critical threshold in the history of Mosul. As the urban shootout
on January 5 turned into a provincial bloodshed, Kurdish Sayyids,
tribes and religious orders consolidated and revolted against the
Ottoman authorities. Governors who were polarized as Anti Sâdât
and Pro Sâdât allegedly misconducted their offices and misguided
the authorities of law enforcement and judiciary. By overcoming the
historical rupture between Ottoman Mosul and Modern Iraq, the book
introduces an analytical framework to associate the origins of
collective violence and ethnic fragmentation experienced in
today’s Iraq with the past.
In 2001, Thailand introduced universal health care reforms that
have become some of the most celebrated in the world, providing
almost its entire population with health protection coverage.
However, this remarkable implementation of health policy is not
without its weaknesses. Drawing on two years of fieldwork at a
district hospital in northern Thailand, Bo Kyeong Seo examines how
people in marginal and dependent social positions negotiate the
process of obtaining care. Using the broader concept of
elicitation, Seo analyzes the social encounters and forces that
shape caregivers. These dynamics challenge dichotomies of
subjugation and resistance, consent and coercion, and dependence
and autonomy. The intimate and moving stories at the core of
Eliciting Care from patients and providers draw attention to a
broader, critically important phenomenon at the hospital level.
Seo's poignant ethnography engages with feminist theory on the
ethics of care, and in so doing, makes a significant contribution
to emerging work in the field of health policy and politics.
In 2003, Major William Edwards and Lt. Colonel Robert P. Walters of
the 165th Military Intelligence Battalion were given the
near-impossible task of improving the U.S. Army's security posture
at Abu Ghraib prison under unfathomable conditions. With input from
officers who served with them, their candid firsthand accounts of
life at the notorious prison reveal unpublished details of the
human devastation that took place there, along with unexpected
glimpses of humanity.
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