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At the end of World War II, the international community deemed genocide a crime against humanity. Yet, at the dawn of the twenty-first century it has occurred repeatedly. This book explains why genocide began to occur in the twenty-first century and why the United States has been ineffective at preventing it and stopping it once it occurs.
Beyond Bodies examines the Ihanzu sensibilities about gender through a fine-grained ethnography of rainmaking rites.
Much has already been written about the effects of the changes of the Cold War on conflict. The ongoing disengagement of East and West from bipolar Cold-War politics has resulted in an unstable international political situation which is characterized by regional conflicts. Most analyses now concentrate on the consequences for Europe and the former communist Central and East European states. This book, however, explores the effects for the Third World. The contributors provide major theoretical analyses of the causes of conflict in developing countries. Four main factors are distinguished: the processes of state-formation and nation-building; the rise or return of ethnicity and nationalism; socio-economic factors; and the armaments-conflict nexus. The volume also provides in-depth regional analyses, as well as policy perspectives on the issue of conflict and development.
Highlife Saturday Night captures the vibrancy of Saturday nights in Ghana—when musicians took to the stage and dancers took to the floor—in this penetrating look at musical leisure during a time of social, political, and cultural change. Framing dance band "highlife" music as a central medium through which Ghanaians negotiated gendered and generational social relations, Nate Plageman shows how popular music was central to the rhythm of daily life in a West African nation. He traces the history of highlife in urban Ghana during much of the 20th century and documents a range of figures that fueled the music's emergence, evolution, and explosive popularity. This book is generously enhanced by audiovisual material on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia website.
In the Ottoman Empire, many members of the ruling elite were legally slaves of the sultan and therefore could, technically, be ordered to surrender their labor, their property, or their lives at any moment. Nevertheless, slavery provided a means of social mobility, conferring status and political power within the military, the bureaucracy, or the domestic household and formed an essential part of patronage networks. Ehud R. Toledano’s exploration of slavery from the Ottoman viewpoint is based on extensive research in British, French, and Turkish archives and offers rich, original, and important insights into Ottoman life and thought. In an attempt to humanize the narrative and take it beyo...
The sacred and musical phenomenon of trance
“An innovative and original study that sheds light on masculinity, youth culture, performative violence, and the circuit of global imagery.” —Stephan F. Miescher, author of Making Men in Ghana During the 1950s and 60s in the Congo city of Kinshasa, there emerged young urban male gangs known as “Bills” or “Yankees.” Modeling themselves on the images of the iconic American cowboy from Hollywood film, the Bills sought to negotiate lives lived under oppressive economic, social, and political conditions. They developed their own style, subculture, and slang and as Ch. Didier Gondola shows, engaged in a quest for manhood through bodybuilding, marijuana, violent sexual behavior, and o...
Explores activist scholarship in relation to feminist and social movements in the Americas. Taking Risks offers a creative, interdisciplinary approach to narrating the stories of activist scholarship by women. The essays are based on the textual analysis of interviews, oral histories, ethnography, video storytelling, and theater. The contributors come from many disciplinary backgrounds, including theater, history, literature, sociology, feminist studies, and cultural studies. The topics range from the underground library movement in Cuba, femicide in Juárez, community radio in Venezuela, video archives in Colombia, exiled feminists in Canada, memory activism in Argentina, sex worker activis...
Born in 1945, the United Nations came to life in the Arab world. It was there that the UN dealt with early diplomatic challenges that helped shape its institutions such as peacekeeping and political mediation. It was also there that the UN found itself trapped in, and sometimes part of, confounding geopolitical tensions in key international conflicts in the Cold War and post–Cold War periods, such as hostilities between Palestine and Iraq and between Libya and Syria. Much has changed over the past seven decades, but what has not changed is the central role played by the UN. This book’s claim is that the UN is a constant site of struggle in the Arab world and equally that the Arab world serves as a location for the UN to define itself against the shifting politics of its age. Looking at the UN from the standpoint of the Arab world, this volume collects some of the finest scholars and practitioners writing about the potential and the problems of a UN that is framed by both the promises of its Charter and the contradictions of its member states. This is a landmark book—a close and informed study of the UN in the region that taught the organization how to do its many jobs.