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Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history
The attacks and blockade on Yemen by the Saudi-led multinational
coalition have killed thousands and triggered humanitarian
disaster. The longstanding conflict in the country between the
Huthi rebels and (until December 2017) Salih militias on the one
side and those loyal to the internationally recognized government
and many other groups fighting for their interests on the other are
said to have evolved into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and
Iran. In 2011, however, thousands of Yemenis had taken to the
streets to protest for a better future for their country. When
President Ali Abdullah Salih signed over power in the aftermath of
these protests, there were hopes that this would signal the
beginning of a new period of transition. Yemen and the Search for
Stability focuses on the aspirations that inspired revolutionary
action, and analyzes what went wrong in the years that followed. It
examines the different groups involved in the protests - Salih
supporters, Muslim Brothers, Salafis, Huthis, secessionists, women,
youth, artists and intellectuals- in terms of their competing
visions for the country's future as well as their internal
struggles. This book traces the impact of the 2011 upheavals on
these groups' ideas for a `new Yemen' and on their strategies for
self-empowerment. In so doing, Yemen and the Search for Stability
examines the mistakes committed in the country's post-2011
transition process but also points towards prospects for stability
and positive change.
The `refugee crisis' and the recent rise of anti-immigration
parties across Europe has prompted widespread debates about
migration, integration and security on the continent. But the
perspectives and experiences of immigrants in northern and western
Europe have equal political significance for contemporary European
societies. While Turkish migration to Europe has been a vital area
of research, little scholarly attention has been paid to Turkish
migration to specifically Sweden, which has a mix of religious and
ethnic groups from Turkey and where now well over 100,000 Swedes
have Turkish origins. This book examines immigration from Turkey to
Sweden from its beginnings in the mid-1960s, when the recruitment
of workers was needed to satisfy the expanding industrial economy.
It traces the impact of Sweden's economic downturn, and the effects
of the 1971 Turkish military intervention and the 1980 military
coup, after which asylum seekers - mostly Assyrian Christians and
Kurds - sought refuge in Sweden. Contributors explore how the
patterns of labour migration and interactions with Swedish society
impacted the social and political attitudes of these different
communities, their sense of belonging, and diasporic activism. The
book also investigates issues of integration, return migration,
transnational ties, external voting and citizenship rights. Through
the detailed analysis of migration to Sweden and emigration from
Turkey, this book sheds new light on the situation of migrants in
Europe.
Adopting a transnational approach, this edited volume reveals that
Germany and China have had many intense and varied encounters
between 1890 and 1950. It focuses on their cross-cultural
encounters, entanglements, and bi-directional cultural flows.
Although their initial relationship was marked by the logic of
colonialism, interwar Sino-German relations established a
cooperative relationship untainted by imperialist politics several
decades before the era of decolonization. A range of topics are
addressed, including pacifists in Germany on the Boxer Rebellion,
German investment in Qingdao, teachers at German-Chinese schools,
social and pedagogical theories and practice, female literary and
missionary connections, Sino-German musical entanglements,
humanitarian connections during the Nanjing Massacre,
Manchukuo-German diplomacy, and psychoanalysis during the Shanghai
exile.
In the early twenty-first century, trauma is seemingly everywhere,
whether as experience, diagnosis, concept, or buzzword. Yet even as
many scholars consider trauma to be constitutive of psychological
modernity or the post-Enlightenment human condition, historical
research on the topic has overwhelmingly focused on cases, such as
World War I or the Holocaust, in which Western experiences and
actors are foregrounded. There remains an urgent need to
incorporate the methods and insights of recent historical trauma
research into a truly global perspective. The chapters in Traumatic
Pasts in Asia make just such an intervention, extending
Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of
world-historical suffering and, in the process, exploring how these
new domains of research inform and enrich earlier scholarship.
This book examines the role of imperial narratives of
multinationalism as alternative ideologies to nationalism in
Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East from
the revolutions of 1848 up to the defeat and subsequent downfall of
the Habsburg and Ottoman empires in 1918. During this period, both
empires struggled against a rising tide of nationalism to
legitimise their own diversity of ethnicities, languages and
religions. Contributors scrutinise the various narratives of
identity that they developed, supported, encouraged or unwittingly
created and left behind for posterity as they tried to keep up with
the changing political realities of modernity. Beyond simplified
notions of enforced harmony or dynamic dissonance, this book aims
at a more polyphonic analysis of the various voices of Habsburg and
Ottoman multinationalism: from the imperial centres and in the
closest proximity to sovereigns, to provinces and minorities, among
intellectuals and state servants, through novels and newspapers.
Combining insights from history, literary studies and political
sciences, it further explores the lasting legacy of the empires in
post-imperial narratives of loss, nostalgia, hope and redemption.
It shows why the two dynasties keep haunting the twenty-first
century with fears and promises of conflict, coexistence, and
reborn greatness.
This book investigates handwritten entertainment fiction
(shouchaoben wenxue) which circulated clandestinely during the
Chinese Cultural Revolution. Lena Henningsen's analyses of
exemplary stories and their variation across different manuscript
copies brings to light the creativity of these
readers-turned-copyists. Through copying, readers modified the
stories and became secondary authors who reflected on the realities
of the Cultural Revolution. Through an enquiry into actual reading
practices as mapped in autobiographical accounts and into
intertextual references within the stories, the book also positions
manuscript fiction within the larger reading cosmos of the long
1970s. Henningsen analyzes the production, circulation and
consumption of these texts, considering continuities across the
alleged divide of the end of the Mao-era and the beginning of the
reform period. The book further reveals how these texts achieved
fruitful afterlives as re-published bestsellers or as adaptations
into comic books or movies, continuing to shape the minds of their
audience and the imaginations of the past. Chapter 5 is available
open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License via link.springer.com.
What does it mean to be a conservative in Republican China?
Challenging the widely held view that Chinese conservatism set out
to preserve traditional culture and was mainly a cultural movement,
this book proposes a new framework with which to analyze modern
Chinese conservatism. It identifies late Qing culturalist
nationalism, which incorporates traditional culture into concrete
political reforms inspired by modern Western politics, as the
origin of conservatism in the Republican era. During the May Fourth
period, New Culture activists belittled any attempts to reintegrate
traditional culture with modern politics as conservative. What
conservatives in Republican China stood for was essentially this
late Qing culturalist nationalism that rejected squarely the
museumification of traditional culture. Adopting a typological
approach in order to distinguish different types of conservatism by
differentiating various political implications of traditional
culture, this book divides the Chinese conservatism of the
Republican era into four typologies: liberal conservatism,
antimodern conservatism, philosophical conservatism, and
authoritarian conservatism. As such, this book captures - for the
first time - how Chinese conservatism was in constant evolution,
while also showing how its emblematic figures reacted differently
to historical circumstances.
Does the industrial development of a country entail the
democratization of its political system? Malaysia in the World
Economy examines this theme with regards to Malaysia in the period
between 1824 and 2011. Capitalism was first introduced into
Malaysia through colonialism specifically to supply Britain with
much-needed raw materials for its industrial development. Aside
from economic exploitation, colonial rule had also produced a
highly unequal and socially distant multicultural society, whose
multifaceted divisions kept the colonial rulers in supreme
authority. After independence, Britain ensured that Malaysia became
a staunch western ally by structuring in a capitalist system
specifically helmed by western-educated elites through what
appeared to be "formal" democratic institutions. In such a system,
the Malaysian ruling elites have been able to "manage" the
country's democratic processes to its advantage as well as preempt
or suppress serious internal challenges to its power, often in the
name of national stability. As a result, an increasingly unpopular
National Front political coalition has remained in power in the
country since 1957. Meanwhile, Malaysia's marginal position in the
world economy, which has maintained its economic subordination to
the developed countries of the west and Japan, has reproduced the
internal social inequities inherited from colonial rule and
channeled the largest returns of economic growths into the hands of
the country's foreign investors as well as local elites associated
with the ruling machinery. Over the years however, the state has
lost some of its political legitimacy in the face of widening
social disparities, increased ethnic polarization, and prevalent
corruption. This has been made possible by extensive exposures of
these issues via new social media and communications technology.
Hence, informational globalization may have begun to empower
Malaysians in a new struggle for political reform, thereby
reconfiguring the balance of power between the state and civil
society. Unlike other past research, Malaysia in the World Economy
combines both macro- and micro-theoretical approaches in critically
analyzing the relationship between capitalist development and
democratization in Malaysia within a comparative-historical and
world-systemic context.
Possibly there is nothing more conducive to thoughts of the
Eternal, than having one's face slammed into red, wet muck, with
explosions so close your body arcs and bounces off the ground, hot
shards burn in your flesh, and concussions are bright flashes of
dirty fire beating a tattoo on the light receptors in the backs of
your eyes. Your head aches; throbbing from visual shock waves.
Time has come to an end; there is no right, no wrong, only
whatever follows a life that is now over. The dark reaper is here.
What's it going to be like on the other side? Is there an "other
side"?
The old timers use the maxim, "There are no atheists in a
fox-hole." Possibly so; I can only give my own experience, and I
never had the opportunity to be in one. Combat aviators crash and
sometimes burn instead. But close calls almost always give rise to
interminable questions; especially when the survived experience is
seared into the human psyche.
For some, satisfactory answers never seem to come. For myself,
may I pro-offer both scorching experience, and incredible
life-lessons learned? Then, should you ever fall into similar
adventure; you man go into it better prepared than I was.
JWV
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