When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the forces of resistance were disparate and divided mujahideen groups, as interested in fighting each other and competing for Western arms as opposing the Russians. The exception was Ahmed Shah Massoud, the military strategist and political operator who solidified the resistance and undermined the Russian occupation by leading its members to a series of defensive victories. Sandy Gall was embedded with Massoud during Soviet offences and reported on the war in Afghanistan for a number of years. He has now written an illuminating biography of this charismatic guerrilla commander, which contains excerpts from the surviving volumes of Massoud's diaries. Massoud's prolific diary-keeping was little known during his lifetime, and his entries detail crucial moments in his life and throw fascinating light on his struggles, both in the resistance and in his personal life. Born into an ostensibly liberalising Afghanistan in the 1960s, Massoud ardently opposed communism and Mohammed Daoud, Afghanistan's puppet leader. He quickly rose to prominence and distinguished himself by coordinating the defence of the Panjshir Valley against repeated Soviet offensives. As the occupation wore on, Massoud became the resistance's unifying force. Massoud's assassination in 2001 presaged the attack on the Twin Towers just two days later and it is widely believed to have been ordered by Osama bin Laden. Forever the underdog in a life dominated by conflict, Massoud's attempts to build political consensus in Afghanistan were ultimately frustrated. Despite that, he is recognised today as a national hero.

This book examines the social, political and ideological dimensions of the encounter between the indigenous inhabitants of the Andaman islands, British colonizers and Indian settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The British-Indian penal settlements in the Andaman Islands - beginning tentatively in 1789 and renewed on a larger scale in 1858 - represent an extensive, complex experiment in the management of populations through colonial discourses of race, criminality, civilization, and savagery. Focussing on the ubiquitous characterization of the Andaman islanders as 'savages', this study explores the particular relationship between savagery and the practice of colonialism. Satadru Sen examines savagery and the savage as dynamic components of colonialism in South Asia: not intellectual abstractions with clear and fixed meanings, but politically 'alive' and fiercely contested products of the colony. Illuminating and historicizing the processes by which the discourse of savagery goes through multiple and fundamental shifts between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries, he shows the links and breaks between these shifts and changing ideas of race, adulthood and masculinity in the Andamans, British India, Britain and in the wider empire. He also highlights the implications of these changes for the 'savages' themselves. At the broadest level, this book re-examines the relationship between the modern and the primitive in a colonial world.

From ancient Mesopotamia into the 20th century, "the Circle of Justice" as a concept has pervaded Middle Eastern political thought and underpinned the exercise of power in the Middle East. The Circle of Justice depicts graphically how a government's justice toward the population generates political power, military strength, prosperity, and good administration. This book traces this set of relationships from its earliest appearance in the political writings of the Sumerians through four millennia of Middle Eastern culture. It explores how people conceptualized and acted upon this powerful insight, how they portrayed it in symbol, painting, and story, and how they transmitted it from one regime to the next. Moving towards the modern day, the author shows how, although the Circle of Justice was largely dropped from political discourse, it did not disappear from people's political culture and expectations of government. The book demonstrates the Circle's relevance to the Iranian Revolution and the rise of Islamist movements all over the Middle East, and suggests how the concept remains relevant in an age of capitalism. A "must read" for students, policymakers, and ordinary citizens, this book will be an important contribution to the areas of political history, political theory, Middle East studies and Orientalism.

Lebanon gives a concise and lucid account of contemporary Lebanese society. It provides both a developed understanding of the pre-civil war system and an analysis of how circumstances resulting from the civil war combined with essential pre-war elements to define the contemporary political processes in Lebanon.

This book is about the issues and challenges facing the implementation of the Responsibility To Protect (R2P) principle in the case of Sri Lanka. It addresses the political, legal and practical challenges that such possible implementation could confront. There have been numerous events in recent years that have led to the acceptance of R2P, including Sierra Leone, Darfur and Kosovo. The extent (or lack) of international intervention in each of these cases differs, but each raised the question of the responsibility of the international community and the role of international law. However, the R2P is not universally endorsed and has strong international opponents, including many countries noted to be signatories to the convention. Critical among those opponents to R2P is Sri Lanka. This book provides a study of the war by Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to create a separate state in Sri Lanka, and the ways in and extent to which this war might have invoked R2P principles and in which the continuing humanitarian and political crisis may still do so. By considering the example of Sri Lanka, this book makes a unique contribution by focusing on what conditions could satisfy, or in principle demand, the application of R2P. Further, it offers an insight into the nature and consequences of the Sri Lanka war, presenting a case as to why this conflict was and may still be the normative responsibility of the international community. This book will be of much interest to students of SE Asian politics, ethics, human rights, international law, ethnic conflict, security studies and IR in general.

This book examines Pakistan's strategies in the war against Islamist armed groups that began late 2001, following the 9/11 attacks.

The significance of the war inside Pakistan can hardly be understated. Starting in the tribal territories adjacent to Afghanistan, Pakistan 's war has come to engulf the majority of the country through a brutal campaign of suicide bombings. Thousands of Pakistani lives have been lost and the geostrategic balance of the region has been thrown into deep uncertainty.

Pakistan's War on Terrorism is an account of a decade-long war following the 9/11 attacks, that is yet to be chronicled in systematic fashion as a campaign of military manoeuvre and terrorist reprisal. It is also an analytic account of Pakistan 's strategic calculus during this time, both in military and political terms, and how these factors have been filtered by Pakistan 's unique strategic culture.

This text will be of great interest to students of Asian Politics, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Security Studies in general.

Although the Russian Empire has traditionally been viewed as a European borderland, most of its territory was actually situated in Asia. Imperial power was huge but often suffered from a lack of enough information and resources to rule its culturally diverse subjects, and asymmetric relations between state and society combined with flexible strategies of local actors sometimes produced unexpected results.

In Asiatic Russia, an international team of scholars explores the interactions between power and people in Central Asia, Siberia, the Volga-Urals, and the Caucasus from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, drawing on a wealth of Russian archival materials and Turkic, Persian, and Tibetan sources. The variety of topics discussed in the book includes the Russian idea of a "civilizing mission," the system of governor-generalships, imperial geography and demography, roles of Muslim and Buddhist networks in imperial rule and foreign policy, social change in the Russian Protectorate of Bukhara, Muslim reformist and national movements.

The book is essential reading for students and scholars of Russian, Central Eurasian, and comparative imperial history, as well as imperial and colonial studies and nationalism studies. It may also provide some hints for understanding today's world, where "empire" has again become a key word in international and domestic power relations.

This book brings together a group of scholars from diverse disciplines to interrogate everyday life events in various interpersonal and organizational contexts so as to answer an age-old question: what happens when (carriers of) cultures meet, or, when East meets West? The contributors to this volume argue that, rather than assume clashes of civilizations, assimilation, conversion and essentialism to be the expected outcomes of cultural encounters, we should focus our analytical attention on processes rather than outcomes; on emergence, dialectics, contradictions, ironies and paradoxes, and complexity. We should focus on attempting to learn and grow, to synthesize and integrate, to create and innovate, to change and transform, at personal, micro, macro and global levels. Or, in one word: hybridity. Contexts of cultural encounters analyzed in this book range from business organizations, through individual travels, to personal philosophies, and from mechanical models to complex systems as social imaginaries. This book is based on a special issue of World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution.

The 1950s in India were a crucial transition phase where the legacy and institutions of British rule had to be transformed to fit the needs of a post-colonial state. This period is closely associated with India 's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (1947 64). Selecting three key policies closely associated with him, the book traces the political origins of the Panchasheela Agreement with China in 1954, the Hindu Code Bills of 1955 and 1956 and the founding of the Planning Commission in 1950. Each provides a window into the compulsions of Indian domestic politics at the time as well as the parameters of parliamentary debate.

The book goes on to discuss how these policies correspond to the pillars of Nehru 's vision for a modern, independent India that encapsulated socialism, nonalignment and secularism and assesses their long-run impact in Indian politics. With a growing recognition of the resilience of India 's political arrangements, the analysis is particularly relevant to those interested in the politics of transition and modernisation, and contributes to studies on Political Institutions and South Asian Politics.

Historical surveys of postwar Japan are usually established on the grounds that the era is already over, interpreting "postwar" to be the years directly proceeding World War II. However, the contributors to this book take a unique approach to the concept of the postwar epoch and treat it as a network of historical time frames from the modern period, and connect these time capsules to the war to which they are inextricably linked. The books strength is in its very interdisciplinary approach to examining postwar Japan and as such it includes chapters centred on subjects as diverse as politics, poetry, philosophy, economics and art which serve to fill the blanks in the collective cultural memory that historical narratives leave behind. Originally published in French, this new translation offers the English speaking world important access to a major work on Japan which has been greatly enriched by the translator's great accuracy and knowledge of English, French and Japanese language, history and culture. Japan's Postwar will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese Studies and Modern Japanese History as well as historians studying the world after 1945.

This book examines British responses to genocide and atrocity in the Ottoman Empire during the aftermath of World War I. The authors analyze British humanitarianism and humanitarian intervention through the advice and policies of the Foreign Office and British government in London and the actions of Foreign Officers in the field. British understandings of humanitarianism at the time revolved around three key elements: good government, atrocity, and the refugee crises; this ideology of humanitarianism, however, was challenged by disputed policies of post-war politics and goals regarding the Near East. This resulted in limited intervention methods available to those on the ground but did not necessarily result in the forfeiture of the belief in humanitarianism amongst the local British officials charged with upholding it. This study shows that the tension between altruism and political gain weakened British power in the region, influencing the continuation of violence and repression long after the date most perceive as the cessation of WWI. The book is primarily aimed at scholars and researchers within the field; it is a research monograph and will be of greatest interest to scholars of genocide, British history, and refugee studies, as well as for activists and practitioners.

First published in 1901, this study of the social life of the Hebrews considers both the time of the judges and the time of the monarchy. Written in a popularly scientific style, designed to appeal to students of ancient Middle East and biblical history as well as the general reader, this work details the social life and history of allied Semitic races, covering the period of time from the settlement of Canaan to the breakup of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BC.

Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of bestselling author and activist Raja. In this new and searingly personal memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities of their relationship. A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resists under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja fails to recognise his father's courage and, in turn, his father does not appreciate Raja's own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changes Raja irrevocably. This is not only the story of the battle against the various oppressors of the Palestinians, but a moving portrait of a particular father and son relationship.

This volume deals with the multiple impacts of the First World War on societies from South Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa, usually largely overlooked by the historiography on the conflict. Due to the lesser intensity of their military involvement in the war (neutrals or latecomers), these countries or regions were considered "peripheral" as a topic of research. However, in the last two decades, the advances of global history recovered their importance as active wartime actors and that of their experiences. This book will reconstruct some experiences and representations of the war that these societies built during and after the conflict from the prism of mediators between the war fought in the battlefields and their homes, as well as the local appropriations and resignifications of their experiences and testimonies.

Conceptualizing Mass Violence draws attention to the conspicuous inability to inhibit mass violence in myriads forms and considers the plausible reasons for doing so. Focusing on a postcolonial perspective, the volume seeks to popularize and institutionalize the study of mass violence in South Asia. The essays explore and deliberate upon the varied aspects of mass violence, namely revisionism, reconstruction, atrocities, trauma, memorialization and literature, the need for Holocaust education, and the criticality of dialogue and reconciliation. The language, content, and characteristics of mass violence/genocide explicitly reinforce its aggressive, transmuting, and multifaceted character and the consequent necessity to understand the same in a nuanced manner. The book is an attempt to do so as it takes episodes of mass violence for case study from all inhabited continents, from the twentieth century to the present. The volume studies 'consciously enforced mass violence' through an interdisciplinary approach and suggests that dialogue aimed at reconciliation is perhaps the singular agency via which a solution could be achieved from mass violence in the global context. The volume is essential reading for postgraduate students and scholars from the interdisciplinary fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, History, Political Science, Sociology, World History, Human Rights, and Global Studies.

The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict traces not only the tangled and bitter history of the Arab-Jewish struggle from the early twentieth century to the present, including the death of Yasser Arafat and recent proposals for compromise and co-operation, it also illustrates the current moves towards finding peace, and the efforts to bring the horrors of the fighting to an end through negotiation and agreed boundaries. In 227 maps, the complete history of the conflict is revealed, including: The Prelude and Background to the Conflict - from the presence of Jews in Palestine before the Arab conquest to the attitude of Britain to the Arabs and Jews since 1915 The Jewish National Home - from the early Jewish settlement and the Zionist plan for Palestine in 1919 to the involvement of the Arab world from 1945 to the present day The Intensification of the Conflict - from the Arab response to the United Nations partition plan of November 1947 to the declaration of Israeli independence in May 1948 The State of Israel - from the Israeli War of Independence and the Suez and Six Day Wars to the October War (the Yom Kippur War), the first and second intifadas, the suicide-bomb campaign, the Israel-Hezbollah War of 2006, Operation Cast lead against the Gaza Strip in 2009, the Gaza Flotilla of 2012 and Nakba Day 2011 The Moves to find Peace - from the first and second Camp David talks and the death of Arafat, to the continuing search for peace, including the Annapolis Conference, 2007, the work of the Quartet Emissary, Tony Blair 2007-2011, and the ongoing Palestinian search for statehood.

What is the value of medical research? With contributions from anthropologists, sociologists and activists, this approach brings into focus the forms of value - social, epistemic, and economic - that are involved in medical research practices and how these values intersect with everyday living. Though their work covers wide empirical ground -from HIV trials in Kenya and drug donation programs in Tanzania to industry-academic collaborations in the British National Health Service - the authors share a commitment to understanding the practices of medical research as embedded in both local social worlds and global markets. Their collective concern is to rethink the conventional ethical demarcations betwweenpaid and unpaid research services in light of the social and material organisation of medical research practices. . Rather than warn against economic incursions into medical knowledge and health practice, or, alternatively, the reduction of local experience to the standards of bioethics, we hope to illuminate the array of practices, knowledges, and techniques through which the value of medical research is brought into being. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Cultural Economy.

Disilliusioned by the Guomindang's corruption and ineptitude, China Weekly Review editor John William Powell and his staff continued publishing in Shanghai after the Chinese Communist takeover, urging better relations and understanding between America and China until his journal's involvement with bacteriological warfare charges against the US during the Korean War and his trial for sedition after returning home.

Audit professionals are valued members of society and are expected to be both skilled and ethical in their decision-making. The role of the auditor extends far beyond that of counting beans by demanding a social and political awareness, a technical knowledge, ethical principles and relationship skills. In addition, due to the team-oriented nature of the audit approach, auditors require strong team-building and interpersonal skills. This book offers expert descriptions of, and insights into, how such skills and responsibilities can be inculcated in tertiary education and professional training environments. Unlike other books which focus on auditing as a technical process, this volume examines auditing from a teaching and learning perspective. Expert contributors provide authoritative insights into an audit education which is embedded in accounting practice. The book's descriptions of these insights into improving education for future audit professionals may allow the introduction of new and challenging fields of enquiry. Audit Education will be of great interest to educators in tertiary institutions, trainers in professional firms, and key individuals in accounting professional bodies seeking to ensure their members possess acceptable levels of attainment for admission and continued membership. This book was originally published as a special issue of Accounting Education: an international journal.

First published in 1985, this is a comprehensive study of the Middle East's most strategic country, set against the background of the Islamic heritage of Iran and the rise and fall of the Pahlavi dynasty. Dilip Hiro describes the various phases through which the Islamic revolution has passed, gives an incisive account of the first Gulf War, and provides an historical survey of Iran's relations with the West, the Soviet bloc, and other countries of the region.

This book examines the process of secularization in the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th century through an analysis of the transformation and abolition of Islamic Caliphate. Focusing on debates in both the center of the Caliphate and its periphery, the author argues that the relationship between Islam and secularism was one of accommodation, rather than simply conflict and confrontation, because Islam was the single most important source of legitimation in the modernization of the Middle East.

Through detailed analysis of both official documents and the writings of the intellectuals who contributed to reforms in the Empire, the author first examines the general secularization process in the Ottoman Empire from the late 18th century up to the end of the 1920s. He then presents an in-depth analysis of a crucial case of secularization: the demise of Islamic Caliphate. Drawing upon a wide range of secondary and primary sources on the Caliphate and the wider process of political modernization, he employs discourse analysis and comparative-historical methods to examine how the Caliphate was first transformed into a "spiritual" institution and then abolished in 1924 by Turkish secularists. Ard also demonstrates how the book 's argument is applicable to wider secularization and modernization processes in the Middle East.

Deriving insights from history, anthropology, Islamic law and political science, the book will engage a critical mass of scholars interested in Middle Eastern studies, political Islam, secularization and the near-global revival of religion as well as the historians of Islam and late-Ottoman Empire, and those working in the field of historical sociology and the sociology of religion as a case study.

Authored by a stellar line-up of top China scholars from the US, Europe, Australia and China. Interdisciplinary in approach, so will appeal to courses on Chinese society, politics and history. Writing style is excellent and the chapters are truly connected due to the bok being co-authored.

Religious authority and political power have existed in complex relationships throughout India 's history. The centuries of the early modern in South Asia saw particularly dynamic developments in this relationship. Regional as well as imperial states of the period expanded their religious patronage, while new sectarian centres of doctrinal and spiritual authority emerged beyond the confines of the state. Royal and merchant patronage stimulated the growth of new classes of mobile intellectuals deeply committed to the reappraisal of many aspects of religious law and doctrine. Supra-regional institutions and networks of many other kinds - sect-based religious maths, pilgrimage centres and their guardians, sants and sufi orders - flourished, offering greater mobility to wider communities of the pious. This was also a period of growing vigour in the development of vernacular religious literatures of different kinds, and often of new genres blending elements of older devotional, juridical and historical literatures. Oral and manuscript literatures too gained more rapid circulation, although the meaning and canonical status of texts frequently changed as they circulated more widely and reached larger lay audiences.

Through explorations of these developments, the essays in this collection make a distinctive contribution to a critical formative period in the making of India 's modern religious cultures.

This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

The Comintern and the Global South: Global Designs/Local Encounters studies the relations and productive tensions between the Third International, intellectual histories of racial justice and anti-imperialism, as well as other forms of internationalism. Building on extant institutional histories of the Third International, it moves in new directions by focusing on the points of intersection - often conflictual and short-lived - with anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and nationalist organizing, making the Third International a site of encounter between a global political project and more local and regional contexts. Due to the broad range of geographic and linguistic expertise of the contributors, this book traces routes of exchange that are often elided in existing studies of the Third International. The chapters address how actors from Global South contexts shaped key debates on, for example, the role of Black, Indigenous, and migrant labor, the "Islamic question," and the "peasant question," which challenged Bolshevik epistemological frameworks. All such "questions" involved political subjectivities that the Comintern tried to reductively frame within a global revolution driven by Moscow, resulting in the Comintern's ultimate disintegration. Nevertheless, this juncture between the Comintern's global designs and its local encounters left a significant legacy that would later be reconfigured in mid-century anticolonial movements.

This volume records the history of the Persian Gulf from the very earliest records until the 1920s. It records the rise and fall of ancient Empires and discusses the rule of Turks and Arabs. It chronicles the Western maritime nations ? the Portuguese, Dutch, French and British ? outstrip one another in trade and influence.