Bangladesh, the eastern half of earth's largest delta, Bengal, is today an independent country of 163 million people. Among the 98% ethnic Bengali population, above 90 percent practice Islam.Surprisingly, Buddhism was the predominant religion of the region until the beginning of the 2nd millennium. In the midst of a long and fierce Brahman-Buddhist conflict, political Islam arrived in Bengal in the very early 13th century.Against the background of the above history, this book tells the story of successive religious and political transformations, touching upon the sensitive subject of Bengali Muslim identity. Encompassing a period of more than a millennium, it narrates a political history beginning with the independent Muslim Sultanate and closing with the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh. The book concludes by discussing the present day, here termed "Authoritarian Secularism".

Scrutinises the political strategies and ideological evolution of Islamist actors and forces following the Arab uprisingsWhat role does political Islam play in the genealogy of protests as an instrument to resist neo-liberalism and authoritarian rule? How can we account for the internal conflicts among Islamist players after the 2011/2012 Arab uprisings? How can we assess the performance of Islamist parties in power? What geopolitical reconfigurations have the uprisings created, and what opportunities have arisen for Islamists to claim a stronger political role in domestic and regional politics? These questions are addressed in this book, which looks at the dynamics in place during the aftermath of the Arab uprisings in a wide range of countries across the Middle East and North Africa.Key features22 case studies explain the diverse trajectories of political Islam since 2011 in Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Qatar, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey and YemenProvides a comprehensive analysis of political Islam covering intra-Islamist pluralisation and conflict, governance and accountability issues, 'secular-Islamist' contention, responses to neo-liberal development and the resurgence of sectarianism and militancyOffers a set of innovative approaches to the study of political Islam in the post-Arab spring era that open new possibilities for theory development in the fieldContributorsIbrahim Al-Marashi, California State University San MarcosNazli Cagin Bilgili, Istanbul Kultur UniversitySouhail Belhadj, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in GenevaFrancesco Cavatorta, Laval University, QuebecCherine Chams El-Dine, Cairo UniversityKaterina Dalacoura, London School of Economics and Political Science Jerome Drevon, University of Oxford Vincent Durac, University College Dublin and Bethlehem UniversityLaura Ruiz de Elvira Carrascal, French Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement (IRD), ParisMelissa Finn, University of WaterlooCourtney Freer, London School of Economics and Political Science Angela Joya, University of OregonWanda Krause, Royal Roads UniversityMohammed Masbah, Chatham House and Brandeis UniversityAlam Saleh, Lancaster UniversityJillian Schwedler, City University of New York's Hunter College Mariz Tadros, University of Sussex Truls Tonnessen, Georgetown UniversityMarc Valeri, University of Exeter Anne Wolf, University of CambridgeLuciano Zaccara, Qatar UniversityBarbara Zollner, Birkbeck College

When the Cradock Four's Fort Calata was murdered by agents of the apartheid state in 1985, his son Lukhanyo was only three years old. Thirty-one years later Lukhanyo, now a journalist, becomes one of the SABC Eight when he defies Hlaudi Motsoeneng's reign of censorship at the public broadcaster by writing an open letter that declares: "my father didn't die for this".

Now, with his wife Abigail, Lukhanyo brings to life the father he never knew and investigates the mystery that surrounds his death despite two high-profile inquests.

Join them in a poignant and inspiring journey into the history of a remarkable family that traces the struggle against apartheid beginning with Fort's grandfather, Rivonia trialist and ANC Secretary-General Rev James Calata.

The creation of Afghanistan in 1880, following the Second Anglo-Afghan War, gave an empowering voice to the Pashtun people, the largest ethnic group in a diverse country. In order to distil the narrative of the state's formation and early years, a Pashtun-centric version of history dominated Afghan history and the political process from 1880 to the 1970s. Alternative discourses made no appearance in the fledgling state which lacked the scholarly institutions and any sense of recognition for history, thus providing no alternatives to the narratives produced by the British, whose quasi-colonial influence in the region was supreme. Since 1970, the ongoing crises in Afghanistan have opened the space for non-Pashtuns, including Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks, to form new definitions of identity, challenge the official discourse and call for the re-writing of the long-established narrative. At the same time, the Pashtun camp, through their privileged position in the political settlements of 2001, have attempted to confront the desire for change in historical perceptions by re-emphasising the Pashtun domination of Afghan history. This crisis of hegemony has led to a deep antagonism between the Pashtun and non-Pashtun perspectives of Afghan history and threatens the stability of political process in the country.

From the 1870s to the 1930s, American cartoonists devoted much of their ink to outlandish caricatures of immigrants and minority groups, making explicit the derogatory stereotypes that circulated at the time. Members of ethnic groups were depicted as fools, connivers, thieves, and individuals hardly fit for American citizenship, but Jews were especially singled out with visual and verbal abuse. In The Implacable Urge to Defame, Baigell examines more than sixty published cartoons from humor magazines such as Judge, Puck and Life and considers the climate of opinion that allowed such cartoons to be published. In doing so, he traces their impact on the emergence of anti-Semitism in the American Scene movement in the 1920s and 1930s.

The voices of dozens of innocent victims, silenced during Stalin's Terror and since forgotten, can yet be heard in secret police archives Swept up in the maelstrom of Stalin's Great Terror of 1937-1938, nearly a million people died. Most were ordinary citizens who left no records and as a result have been completely forgotten. This book is the first to attempt to retrieve their stories and reconstruct their lives, drawing upon recently declassified archives of the former Soviet Secret Police in Kiev. Hiroaki Kuromiya uncovers in the archives the hushed voices of the condemned, and he chronicles the lives of dozens of individuals who shared the same dehumanizing fate: all were falsely arrested, executed, and dumped in mass graves. Kuromiya investigates the truth behind the fabricated records, filling in at least some of the details of the lives and deaths of ballerinas, priests, beggars, teachers, peasants, workers, soldiers, pensioners, homemakers, fugitives, peddlers, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Koreans, Jews, and others. In recounting the extraordinary stories gleaned from the secret files, Kuromiya not only commemorates the dead and forgotten but also proposes a new interpretation of Soviet society that provides useful insights into the enigma of Stalinist terror.

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm," wrote RalphWaldo Emerson in 1841. While this statement may read like an innocuoustruism today, the claim would have been controversial in the antebellumUnited States when enthusiasm was a hotly contested term associated withreligious fanaticism and poetic inspiration, revolutionary politics and imaginativeexcess. In analysing the language of enthusiasm in philosophy, religion,politics, and literature, John Mac Kilgore uncovers a tradition of enthusiasmlinked to a politics of emancipation. The dissenting voices chronicledhere fought against what they viewed as tyranny while using their writings toforge international or antinationalistic political affiliations. Pushing his analysis across national boundaries, Kilgore contends thatAmerican enthusiastic literature, unlike the era's concurrent sentimentalcounterpart, stressed democratic resistance over domestic reform as it navigatedthe global political sphere. By analysing a range of canonical Americanauthors-including William Apess, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Beecher Stowe,and Walt Whitman-Kilgore places their works in context with the causes,wars, and revolutions that directly or indirectly engendered them. In doingso, he makes a unique and compelling case for enthusiasm's centrality in theshaping of American literary history.

When Nada Prouty came to the United States as a young woman, she fell in love with the democracy and freedom of her new home.Following a childhood in war-torn Lebanon with an abusive father, and facing the prospect of an arranged marriage, she jumped at the chance to forge her own path in America - a path that led to exciting undercover work in the FBI, then the CIA. But all this changed in the wake of 9/11, at the height of anti-Arab fervor, when federal investigators charged Prouty with passing intelligence to Hezbollah. Though the CIA and federal judge eventually exonerated Prouty of all charges, she was dismissed from the agency and stripped of her citizenship. In Uncompromised, Prouty tells her whole story in a bid to restore her name and reputation in the country that she loves. Beyond a thrilling story of espionage and betrayal, this is a sobering commentary on cultural alienation, the power of fear, and what it means to truly love America.

A vast network of prison camps was an essential part of the Stalinist system. Conditions in the camps were brutal, life expectancy short. At their peak, they housed millions, and hardly an individual in the Soviet Union remained untouched by their tentacles. Michael Jakobson's is the first study to examine the most crucial period in the history of the camps: from the October Revolution of 1917, when the tsarist prison system was destroyed to October 1934, when all places of confinement were consolidated under one agency -- the infamous GULAG. The prison camps served the Soviet government in many ways: to isolate opponents and frighten the population into submission, to increase labor productivity through the arrest of "inefficient" workers, and to provide labor for factories, mines, lumbering, and construction projects. Jakobson focuses on the structure and interrelations of prison agencies, the Bolshevik views of crime and punishment and inmate reeducation, and prison self-sufficiency. He also describes how political conditions and competition among prison agencies contributed to an unprecedented expansion of the system. Finally, he disputes the official claim of 1931 that the system was profitable -- a claim long accepted by former inmates and Western researchers and used to explain the proliferation of the camps and their population. Did Marxism or the Bolshevik Revolution or Leninism inexorably lead to the GULAG system? Were its origins truly evil or merely banal? Jakobson's important book probes the official record to cast new light on a system that for a time supported but ultimately helped destroy the now fallen Soviet colossus.

From Orlando Figes, international bestselling author of A People's Tragedy, Just Send Me Word is the moving true story of two young Russians whose love survived Stalin's Gulag. Lev and Svetlana, kept apart for fourteen years by the Second World War and the Gulag, stayed true to each other and exchanged thousands of secret letters as Lev battled to survive in Stalin's camps. Using this remarkable cache of smuggled correspondence, Orlando Figes tells the tale of two incredible people who, swept along in the very worst of times, kept their devotion alive. Orlando Figes was granted exclusive access to the thousands of letters between Lev and Sveta that form the foundation of Just Send Me Word, and he was able to interview the couple in person, then in their nineties. These real-time and largely uncensored letters form the largest cache of Gulag letters ever found. Reviews: 'One is overcome with admiration for the kindness, bravery and generosity of people in terrible peril ... It is impossible to read without shedding tears' Simon Sebag Montefiore, Financial Times 'This powerful narrative by a distinguished historian will take its place not just in history but in literature' Robert Massie 'Electrifying, passionate, devoted, despairing, exhilarating ... a tale of hope, resilience, grit and love' The Times 'Moving ... a remarkable discovery' Max Hastings, Sunday Times 'The gulag story lacks individuals for us to sympathise with: a Primo Levi, an Anne Frank or even an Oskar Schindler. Just Send Me Word may well be the book to change that' Oliver Bullough, Independent 'Immensely touching ... [a] heartening gem of a book' Anna Reid, Literary Review 'The remarkable true story of a love affair between two Soviet citizens ... as much a literary challenge as a historical one: the book can be read as a non-fiction novel' Telegraph 'Remarkable ... Figes, selecting and then interpreting this mass of letters, makes them tell two kinds of story. The first is a uniquely detailed narrative of the gulag, of the callous, slatternly universe which consumed millions of lives ... The second is about two people determined not to lose each other' Neal Ascherson, Guardian 'A quiet, moving and memorable account of life in a totalitarian state ... The book often reads like a novel ... captivating' Evening Standard 'Orlando Figes has wrought something beautiful from dark times' Ian Thomson, Observer 'A heart-rending record of extraordinary human endurance' Kirkus Reviews '[A] remarkable tale of love and devotion during the worst years of the USSR ... [Figes's] fine narrative pacing enhances this moving, memorable story' Publishers Weekly About the author: Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Peasant Russia, Civil War, A People's Tragedy, Natasha's Dance, The Whisperers and Crimea. He lives in Cambridge and London. His books have been translated into over twenty languages.

From a gay man secretly mourning his lover's suicide in Morocco to a young woman denied schooling because of religious discrimination in Iran, Arab Spring Dreams spotlights some of the Middle East's most outspoken young dissidents. The essayists cover a wide range of experiences, including premarital sex, the lack of educational opportunities, teenage marriage, and the fight for political freedom. They also highlight how repressive laws and cultural mores snuff out liberty and stifle growth and consider how previous movements - particularly the American civil rights struggle - might be channeled to effect change in their own countries. Beautifully written and profoundly moving, these stories present a decisive call for change at a crucial point in the evolution of the Middle East.

This book examines the human consequences (individual, social, cultural, and economic) of civil war and political repression in Castilleja del Campo, a town in southern Spain with barely more than 600 inhabitants today. The narrow geographical focus allows for a coherent chronological narrative with relevance to current public issues such as the unequal distribution of wealth, political polarisation, the violation of human rights, government surveillance of civilian populations, and extra-legal detentions, torture and executions. The declarations of eyewitnesses are complemented by personal documents, contemporary newspaper accounts, and documents from the town's municipal archive and other archives in the province of Seville. The work presents the events from the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in April 1931 onward from multiple points of view and analyses the interactions among a gallery of characters: Republican and pro-Franco mayors and councilmen; union leaders and affiliates; members of the fascist-inspired Spanish Falange; the schoolteacher; the priest; widows and orphans of the men who were shot; administrators and managers of the estates of the nobles; shaved women paraded through the streets; combatants; day labourers; civil guards; black marketeers; prisoners. Placing these characters and events in their provincial, regional, and national context, the town becomes a microcosm that reflects the experience of Spain during those traumatic years. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies.

Houshang Asadi's Letters to My Torturer is one of the most harrowing accounts of human suffering to emerge from Iran and is now available for the first time in paperback. Kept in solitary confinement for over two years in an infamous Tehran prison, Asadi suffered inhuman degradations and brutal torture: suspended from the ceiling, beaten, and forced to bark like a dog, Asadi became a spy for the Russians, for the British - for anyone. Narrowly escaping execution as the government unleashed a bloody pogrom against political prisoners, Asadi was hauled before a sham court and sentenced to fifteen years. Here he confronts his torturer, speaking for those who will never be heard, and provides a glimpse into the heart of Iran and the practice of state-sponsored justice.

In this magisterial history of Lebanon, from the end of Ottoman rule to the Hezbollah and Hamas wars of today, acclaimed and fiercely independent Middle East journalist and historian David Hirst charts the interplay between a uniquely complex country and the broader struggles of the modern Middle East. Lebanon is the battleground on which the region's greater states pursue their strategic, political, and ideological conflicts--conflicts that sometimes escalate into full-scale proxy wars. Hirst warns that only serious diplomatic action from the Obama administration can prevent the next such action from engulfing the entire region.

Two enduring challenges in South African historiography are addressed by this group of committed scholars from SADET. The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 4 [1980-1990] firstly addresses the muted voices of largely unpublished black scholars, and secondly, ensures that the voices of the majority of our population are at the centre of the historic narrative. Comprising of 32 chapters, Volume 4 in the series focuses on the 1980s and `further fortifies the intellectual traditions set by the earlier volumes'. Included in the volume are chapters by Bernard Magubane on the apartheid state; Sifiso Ndlovu on the ANC and negotiations; Bhekizizwe Peterson on the arts; Zine Magubane on women's struggles; Gregory Houston on the ANC's underground and armed struggle; Thami ka Plaatjie on the PAC; Mbulelo Mzamane and Brown Maaba on the BCM and AZAPO; Eddy Maloka on the SACP; Christopher Saunders on the above-the-ground struggles conducted by white activists; and Jabulani Sithole on the trade union movement.

In November 2004, Mulrunji Doomadgee's tragic death triggered civil unrest within the Indigenous community of Palm Island. This led to the first prosecution of a Queensland police officer in relation to a death in custody. Despite prolonged media attention, much of it negative and full of stereotypes, few Australians know the turbulent history of 'Australia's Alcatraz', a political prison set up to exile Queensland's 'troublesome blacks'. In Palm Island, Joanne Watson gives the first substantial history of the island from pre contact to the present, set against a background of some of the most explosive episodes in Queensland history. Palm Island, often heart wrenching and at times uplifting, is a study in the dynamics of power and privilege, and how it is resisted.

On April 28, 2004, the Abu Ghraib photos of prisoner torture and humiliation appeared on 60 Minutes, setting off an international scandal. Less than seven weeks later, Susan L. Burke, a Philadelphia attorney, field a landmark lawsuit on behalf of the detainees, presenting a case against two private contractors, CACI International and Titan Inc. Burke set out to prove that contractors, soldiers, and officers worked together, or conspired, to torture and kill detainees. McKelvey examines how it is that many of the abusers can never be brought to justice, operating as they do outside the US system of criminal laws. Along the way she has tea with Saddam Hussein's mistress, meets with suspected terrorists, including a ghost detainee, and interviews victims from American detention centers, all the while uncovering vital sources touched upon by no other journalist. Following Burke's lawsuit through the courts, and drawing on interviews with current and former military personnel, translators, and interrogators, as well as listening to the harrowing personal stories of numerous detainee plaintiffs, McKelvey examines the many underreported, under-investigated crimes of Abu Ghraib.

This book explores a century of business development of The South African Life Assurance Company, from a specific local focus to a national conglomerate expanding into global insurance markets. Established as a strategic vehicle to address Afrikaner economic marginalization and abject poverty at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sanlam has displayed both path dependence and a dynamic adaptability to complex changing contexts to become a global player. The strategic convergence of economic empowerment through the mobilization of savings into insurance products, as well as Afrikaner nationalism, assisted this growth. Sanlam has played an a-typical role in the economic empowerment of an ethnic entity through extensive investments into the industrializing South African economy. This strategic diversion created operational limitations that were only resolved early in the twenty-first century. As globalization, financial deregulation, and weakened Afrikaner political and social hegemony manifested, strategic change management relied on the path dependence of empowerment strategies to address new markets with similar needs to those of the early stakeholder market of 1918. The former mutual life office demutualized operations to become a diversified financial services group of companies operating across almost the entire African continent, as well as in India, Malaysia, and the UK. This volume presents a business history of strategic management of an insurance enterprise, and its transformation from a defined cultural context into an international empowerment strategy through innovation on all levels of business operation and organization. This book is an Open Access publication, available online under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Toyo Suyemoto is known informally by literary scholars and the media as ""Japanese America's poet laureate."" But Suyemoto has always described herself in much more humble terms. A first-generation Japanese American, she has identified herself as a storyteller, a teacher, a mother whose only child died from illness, and an internment camp survivor. Before Suyemoto passed away in 2003, she wrote a moving and illuminating memoir of her internment camp experiences with her family and infant son at Tanforan Race Track and, later, at the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, from 1942 to 1945. A uniquely poetic contribution to the small body of internment memoirs, Suyemoto's account includes information about policies and wartime decisions that are not widely known, and recounts in detail the way in which internees adjusted their notions of selfhood and citizenship, lending insight to the complicated and controversial questions of citizenship, accountability, and resistance of first- and second-generation Japanese Americans. Suyemoto's poems, many written during internment, are interwoven throughout the text and serve as counterpoints to the contextualizing narrative. A small collection of poems written in the years following her incarceration further reveal the psychological effects of her experience.