Based on previously unused primary sources obtained from both sides of the Atlantic, this study provides a more fundamental, consistent, and balanced source-based assessment of the role of the US Peace Corps across its entire existence in Africa. The study sheds light on a new and intriguing historical perspective of the Peace Corps’ meaning and significance. Though the main trust is Cameroon, the study offers a window to understanding Peace Corps performance in all of Africa, and the larger global community. It examines volunteers’ service in countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, and Guinea, showing how the agency transitioned from and Cold War agency to the Post-Cold War era, while asking important questions about the continuous relevance of Peace Corps in Africa. In addressing the topic, the book goes beyond the Peace Corps and delves into America’s "Achilles heels," which was the culture of anti-black racism, showing how it impacted US foreign policy in the post-World War II era. The book delves into modernization theories showing how those ideas shaped the creation of the Peace corps, but ultimately contributed to the agency’s problems. The book questions the Peace Corps’ effectiveness as a development organization and much more. Yet for all the agency’s problems, the Peace Corps served as a rite of passage for returned Volunteers to make everlasting contributions to American life and society. This book contributes to modern African and American studies, and to diplomatic history.

Seeing like a city means recognizing that cities are living things made up of a tangle of networks, built up from the agency of countless actors. Cities must not be considered as expressions of larger paradigms or sites of human effort and organization alone. Within their density, size and sprawl can be found a world of symbols, bodies, buildings, technologies and infrastructures. It is the machine-like combination, interaction and confrontation of these different elements that make a city. Such a view locates urban outcomes and influences in the character of these networks, which together power urban life, allocating resources, shaping social opportunities, maintaining order and simply enabling life. More than the silent stage on which other powers perform, such networks represent the essence of the city. They also form an important political project, a politics of small interventions with large effects. The increasing evidence for an Anthropocene bears out the way in which humanity has stamped its footprint on the planet by constructing urban forms that act as systems for directing life in ways that create both immense power and immense constraint.

First Published in 1966. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Seeing like a city means recognizing that cities are living things made up of a tangle of networks, built up from the agency of countless actors. Cities must not be considered as expressions of larger paradigms or sites of human effort and organization alone. Within their density, size and sprawl can be found a world of symbols, bodies, buildings, technologies and infrastructures. It is the machine-like combination, interaction and confrontation of these different elements that make a city. Such a view locates urban outcomes and influences in the character of these networks, which together power urban life, allocating resources, shaping social opportunities, maintaining order and simply enabling life. More than the silent stage on which other powers perform, such networks represent the essence of the city. They also form an important political project, a politics of small interventions with large effects. The increasing evidence for an Anthropocene bears out the way in which humanity has stamped its footprint on the planet by constructing urban forms that act as systems for directing life in ways that create both immense power and immense constraint.

First Published in 1966. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book focuses on the links between deep earth (mantle) and shallow processes in areas of active tectonics in the Arabian Plate and Surrounding Areas. It also provides key information for energy resources in these areas. The book is a compilation of selected papers from the Task Force of the International Lithosphere Program (ILP). It comprises a set of research studies from the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean domain focusing on (1) the architecture, geodynamic evolution and modelling of the Red Sea rift system and its surroundings, and tectonics and sedimentation in the Gulf of Corinth, (2) the crustal architecture and georesources of the North Algerian Offshore, (3) Reservoirs, aquifers and fluid transfers in Saudi Basins, Petroleum systems and salt tectonics in Yemen and (4) Cretaceous-Eocene foreland inversions in Saudi Arabia.

This book is the product of four years of collaborative work within the framework of the European Science Foundation's Regional and Urban Restructuring in Europe (RURE) programme. With one exception, all of the chapters have been prepared by participants in RURE - the exception being that commissioned from Conti and Enrietti on Fiat and Italy to provide a fuller coverage of changes in the main automobile producing companies and countries of Europe. A - perhaps the - central theme around which the RURE programme was conceived is that the restructuring of the production system lies at the heart of the changing map of Europe. Equally, it continues to be the case that the automobile industry lies at the cutting edge of the search for viable new models of production. Some eighty years ago the automobile industry occupied a pivotal position in the transition from craft to mass production - indeed "Fordism" came to denote not just a particular micro-economic model of production organisation in the factory but a macro-scale model of economic development, characterized by a particular pattern of relations between mass production, mass consumption and national state regulation. From the late 1960s, however, it became increasingly clear that Fordism as a macro-scale model of advanced capitalist development was reaching its limits.

Bringing together the most exciting and innovative work of the last ten years in the emerging field of cultural economy, "The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader" shows how this hybrid area of study is now posing a significant challenge to notions of the economic and what counts as economic action.

The pursuit of prosperity has always been a cultural performance. However, since the nineteenth century, with the rise of a separate profession of economics, such performance has either been neglected or actively denigrated. With the help of a substantial introduction from the editors, this "Reader" shows that the pursuit of prosperity is the pursuit of many goals at once - from meeting material needs and making profit to seeking symbolic satisfaction and fleeting pleasures. It goes beyond just adding "culture" to "economy."

Organized around categories such as production, finance and money, economic regulation, commodity chains, consumption, and passions, this volume introduces developments at the cutting edge of a new and vibrant field.

Part analysis of contemporary change and part vision of the future, post-Fordism lends its name to a set of challenging, essential and controversial debates over the nature of capitalism's newest age. This book provides an introduction to debates over the nature of capitalism's newest age and includes key texts by post-Fordism's major theorists and commentators.

At the heart of the book lie several related questions. Is the mass production era of Henry Ford now over, and has "Fordism" finished? Are new "information technologies" transforming western economies and creating new forms of social, political and cultural life in the process? The answers have been hotly contested, not least by writers sympathetic to a post-Fordist perspective.

From Ash Amin's indispensable introductory essay to Susan Christopherson's bracing account of the contemporary "fortress city," this book is a guide through post-Fordism's models, fantasies and phantoms of transition.

The other contributors are: Mark Elam, Josef Esser, Mike Featherstone, David Harvey, Joachim Hirsch, Bob Jessop, Alain Lipietz, Anders Malmberg, Margit Mayer, Jamie Peck, Charles Sabel, Michael Storper, Adam Tickell, and John Tomaney.

The impersonality of social relationships in the society of strangers is making majorities increasingly nostalgic for a time of closer personal ties and strong community moorings. The constitutive pluralism and hybridity of modern living in the West is being rejected in an age of heightened anxiety over the future and drummed up aversion towards the stranger. Minorities, migrants and dissidents are expected to stay away, or to conform and integrate, as they come to be framed in an optic of the social as interpersonal or communitarian. Judging these developments as dangerous, this book offers a counter-argument by looking to relations that are not reducible to local or social ties in order to offer new suggestions for living in diversity and for forging a different politics of the stranger.

The book explains the balance between positive and negative public feelings as the synthesis of habits of interaction in varied spaces of collective being, from the workplace and urban space, to intimate publics and tropes of imagined community. The book proposes a series of interventions that make for public being as both unconscious habit and cultivated craft of negotiating difference, radiating civilities of situated attachment and indifference towards the strangeness of others. It is in the labour of cultivating the commons in a variety of ways that Amin finds the elements for a new politics of diversity appropriate for our times, one that takes the stranger as there, unavoidable, an equal claimant on ground that is not pre-allocated.

At the time of the Egyptian Revolution in 1952, the population of Egypt was around 22 million. At the end of 2002, it stood at 69 million, and was growing at a rate of 1.33 million a year. What happens to a society that grows so quickly, when the habitable and cultivable land of the country is strictly limited? After the success of Whatever Happened to the Egyptians?, Galal Amin now takes a further bemused look at the changes that have taken place in Egyptian society over the past half century, this time considering the disruptions brought about by the surge in population. Basing his arguments on both academic research and his own personal experiences and impressions, and employing the same light humor and keen sense of empathy as in his earlier work, the author discusses how runaway population growth has not only profound effects on many aspects of society - from love and fashion to telephones, the supermarket, and religion - but also predictable effects on the economy.

This book develops a fresh and challenging perspective on the city. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of material and texts, it argues that too much contemporary urban theory is based on nostalgia for a humane, face-to-face and bounded city. Amin and Thrift maintain that the traditional divide between the city and the rest of the world has been perforated through urban encroachment, the thickening of the links between the two, and urbanization as a way of life.

They outline an innovative sociology of the city that scatters urban life along a series of sites and circulations, reinstating previously suppressed areas of contemporary urban life: from the presence of non-human activity to the centrality of distant connections. The implications of this viewpoint are traced through a series of chapters on power, economy and democracy.

This concise and accessible book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, geography, urban studies, cultural studies and politics.

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" In Conflicts of Fitness: Islam, America, and Evolutionary Psychology, A.S. Amin examines various aspects of Islamic tradition through a Darwinian framework. Islam's allowance of polygamy, the underlying reasons for the subordination of women in many Muslim societies, and the seeds of political instability and terrorism in the Muslim world are just a few of the important issues this book addresses. Amin also offers original insight into many aspects of American society and history. Through the filter of biologically based theories, he explores the reasons behind the monumental changes in sexual mores that have occurred in the United States over the past century, the underpinnings of feminism, and the differences between liberals and conservatives. This text also analyzes the lyrics of many famous rappers, in the belief that hip-hop has arguably become the most influential form of cultural expression in America today. An astute and entertaining work that compares and contrasts American culture with that of the Muslim world from a perspective inspired by evolutionary psychology, Conflicts of Fitness presents many thought-provoking tools to those in search of greater understanding of these two dynamic cultures and worlds. "

The impersonality of social relationships in the society of strangers is making majorities increasingly nostalgic for a time of closer personal ties and strong community moorings. The constitutive pluralism and hybridity of modern living in the West is being rejected in an age of heightened anxiety over the future and drummed up aversion towards the stranger. Minorities, migrants and dissidents are expected to stay away, or to conform and integrate, as they come to be framed in an optic of the social as interpersonal or communitarian. Judging these developments as dangerous, this book offers a counter-argument by looking to relations that are not reducible to local or social ties in order to offer new suggestions for living in diversity and for forging a different politics of the stranger.

The book explains the balance between positive and negative public feelings as the synthesis of habits of interaction in varied spaces of collective being, from the workplace and urban space, to intimate publics and tropes of imagined community. The book proposes a series of interventions that make for public being as both unconscious habit and cultivated craft of negotiating difference, radiating civilities of situated attachment and indifference towards the strangeness of others. It is in the labour of cultivating the commons in a variety of ways that Amin finds the elements for a new politics of diversity appropriate for our times, one that takes the stranger as there, unavoidable, an equal claimant on ground that is not pre-allocated.

Mankind is defined not as the animals that have souls, but as the animals that can INVENT ideas, and then TALK about them, (inventiveness and language). Signs of these two momentous abilities are documented to have SUDDENLY started only about 30,000 years ago. The G-SAT Theory, detailed in this book, offers a SCIENTIFIC frame, for a master-planned, purely physical process, that initiated Mankind. DNA is NOT synonymous with 'GENES'. DNA is the ink and paper on which the encoded messages of the genes get recorded. Every year, we come closer to deciphering how these messages work. With this rapidly progressing scientific discipline, we are getting closer, by the day, to scientifically proving my pre-determined-encoded theory.

As one of Egyptian theater's leading contemporary playwrights, Alfred Farag has had a profound influence on shaping Arabic drama and Egyptian cultural politics during the past five decades. His plays interrogate the human condition, exposing the struggles of nonheroic individuals faced with political, social, and economic abuse. Farag's dramatic themes, his tireless campaign to democratize the theater, and his encouragement of cultural awareness in the remote and rural regions of Egypt in addition to the cities led to his imprisonment, battles with censorship, and exile. This remarkable writer's indomitable spirit is clearly evidenced in his spending a large part of his time while imprisoned writing plays for performances by his fellow prisons. In the first book-length examination of his work in English, Dina Amin chronicles Farag's career and offers a critical perspective on his creative output and the condition of Egyptian theater in the 1970s through the 1990s. Farag is best known for the folkloric and neorealist plays he produced during the sixties, but critics have consistently overlooked the immense body of work produced in the thirty years that followed. Filling that gap, Amin offers an account of the sophisticated development of his later work, revealing his bold experimentation and successful embrace of modernist, absurdist, and post-modern styles. With fresh insight, Amin contextualizes these works within Farag's own creative history and the larger history of Arabic theater. This book, with the inclusion of four plays and a monologue (translated for the first time into English), will bring a much-deserved wider audience to the work of this extraordinary dramatist.

This book develops a fresh and challenging perspective on the city. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of material and texts, it argues that too much contemporary urban theory is based on nostalgia for a humane, face-to-face and bounded city. Amin and Thrift maintain that the traditional divide between the city and the rest of the world has been perforated through urban encroachment, the thickening of the links between the two, and urbanization as a way of life.

They outline an innovative sociology of the city that scatters urban life along a series of sites and circulations, reinstating previously suppressed areas of contemporary urban life: from the presence of non-human activity to the centrality of distant connections. The implications of this viewpoint are traced through a series of chapters on power, economy and democracy.

This concise and accessible book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, geography, urban studies, cultural studies and politics.

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Based on both academic research and the author's own personal experiences and impressions, this delightful and informative book examines the underlying causes of some of the more disturbing social, political, economic, and cultural phenomena that characterize Egyptian society in the 1990s. Egypt's crisis of culture and other woes are often attributed to the 'open door policy' (Infitah) initiated under President Sadat in the mid-1970s, and to the large-scale migration of Egyptian workers to the oil-rich states of the Gulf that began around the same time. Galal Amin contends, however, that these factors alone are insufficient to explain the fundamental changes in behavior and attitudes that characterize modern Egyptian life. The 'missing link, ' Amin argues, lies in the social mobility unleashed by the July Revolution of 1952, which was later accelerated by Infitah and workers' migration. The sudden upward mobility and attendant prestige, self-confidence, and purchasing power of a large segment of Egyptian society-and the desire to display this new-found social position as conspicuously as possible-have had an enormous effect on the attitudes and allegiances of these groups. Through a fascinating and often highly entertaining examination of issues ranging from the middle class, religious fanaticism, and attitudes to the West and Western culture, to the Egyptian institution of the summer holiday by the sea and the performing arts and entertainment, Amin posits that social mobility has changed the customs and habits, moral and material values, and patterns of consumption and investment of the aspiring classes, and has, furthermore, induced the Egyptian people to ignore national and ideological issues of grave importance. This insightful book will prove a thought-provoking read for those concerned with emerging economies, international development, and privatization, and will intrigue anyone with an interest in the social history of Egypt. The Arabic edition of this book was awarded the Cairo International Book Fair Prize for the best book in Social Studies in 1998.

In this unique volume, leading scholars examine how Cameroonians organize and experience their lives under Cameroonian leadership and local responses to that leadership. The volume offers essential case studies that allow us to examine the lives of ordinary people in post-colonial Africa through five lenses: politics, society and culture, economy, international relations, and migration. It places the nation's contemporary challenges within a broader political, economic, and socio-cultural context, and uses that to make recommendations for future directions. The book also celebrates areas in which the country has done well and calls on its citizens to build on those achievements. This volume is forward-looking and as such raises important questions about issues of development, ethnicity, wealth, poverty, and class.

Based on previously unused primary sources including extensive interviews in Cameroon, personal journals, diaries, responses to questionnaires, and a variety of secondary sources, this study is a critical analysis of US study abroad programs in Africa. Using the University of Dayton Cameroon Immersion program as a case study, the work examines different aspects of experiential learning including selection, orientation, activities of US college students in Cameroon, post-immersion meetings, and impact of program. The nation of Cameroon and University of Dayton are uniquely ideal for the study as Cameroon is considered "Africa in miniature" and serves as a window to understanding many of Africa's political, economic, cultural, and social complexities. Located in the American Midwest, the University of Dayton, while unique, shares many similarities with other American universities. The study expands the boundaries of scholarship on study abroad. By comparing the impact of the African experience on students to that of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers who served in that continent, the study opens up avenues for comparative analyses. Africa is vital to the global community and, with its complex political, economic, cultural, and social systems, offers important lessons to understanding students' ability to adapt to change in a rapidly changing global environment.

Based on previously unused primary sources including extensive interviews in Cameroon, personal journals, diaries, responses to questionnaires, and a variety of secondary sources, this study is a critical analysis of US study abroad programs in Africa. Using the University of Dayton Cameroon Immersion program as a case study, the work examines different aspects of experiential learning including selection, orientation, activities of US college students in Cameroon, post-immersion meetings, and impact of program. The nation of Cameroon and University of Dayton are uniquely ideal for the study as Cameroon is considered "Africa in miniature" and serves as a window to understanding many of Africa's political, economic, cultural, and social complexities. Located in the American Midwest, the University of Dayton, while unique, shares many similarities with other American universities. The study expands the boundaries of scholarship on study abroad. By comparing the impact of the African experience on students to that of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers who served in that continent, the study opens up avenues for comparative analyses. Africa is vital to the global community and, with its complex political, economic, cultural, and social systems, offers important lessons to understanding students' ability to adapt to change in a rapidly changing global environment.

"Egypt's Economic Predicament contains a succinct and lucid analysis of virtually all the major economic problems of Egypt: their origin, development and the prospect of solving them. It presents today's economic problems of Egypt in a wider historical context and shows their relationship to current social issues, including the growth of religious fanaticism.
The book also contains a powerful critique of the "Structural Adjustment" program of reform, which constitutes today's conventional wisdom.
The subtitle of the book describes it as "a study in the interaction of external pressure, political folly and social tension," and as such it should be of interest not only to scholars and students of development in Egypt and the Middle East, but to those occupied with other Third World countries as well.