bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
From Displacement to Defection
Authors: Scott Erik R.
Published: June 2023

The trial of defector Victor Kravchenko was part of a broader contest between the Soviet Union and the United States over the control of migration in postwar Europe. While the United States and its allies initially cooperated in returning Soviet citizens, Western policy shifted to resisting repatriation requests, supporting a politicized refugee system, and, ultimately, encouraging flight from the socialist bloc. Over time, defection supplanted the wartime notion that those like Kravchenko who fled by choice were simply deserters, and those displaced by Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union were helpless victims of circumstances. A focus on defection’s emergence reveals how the Soviet and American systems for governing migration were shaped not just by prewar pathways and postwar circumstances, but also by their encounter with each other.
Socialist Borders in a Global Age
Authors: Scott Erik R.
Published: June 2023

Overseen by the KGB, Soviet border troops sought to be gatekeepers who could both open and close the state’s western boundaries to migrants, goods, and ideas in pursuit of Soviet foreign policy goals. They found increasingly sophisticated ways of doing so in an era of globalization, drawing on new technologies and an increased capacity for “prophylactic policing” to prevent defection before it happened. However, behind the façade of a solid “bloc,” the establishment of a common socialist border regime was a contested process. It was riven by tensions between the Soviet state and its socialist allies, distrust between Moscow and those living in the USSR’s multiethnic periphery, and suspicions that seeped into the ranks of the border troops.
International Waters
Authors: Scott Erik R.
Published: June 2023

The seizure of the tanker Tuapse and its aftermath epitomized the contradictions of the maritime expansion of the Soviet Union. Soviet authorities sought to use the episode to pry open the South China Sea and tar the United States as a supporter of “piracy.” At the same time, they viewed maritime zones as places of ideological transgression and strove to police the behavior of Soviet sailors. The state’s claims on its sailors were written into international agreements reached at the United Nations that created a framework for governing the high seas for the first time in history. The crew of the Tuapse were at the center of this struggle for the seas and the minds and bodies of those who sailed across them. The stranded sailors offered Soviet officials an opportunity to push their distinct vision of maritime mobility through legal proceedings, literary productions, and cinema.
The Lay of the Land
Authors: Saltzstein Jennifer
Published: June 2023

This chapter examines land use in Northern France during the long thirteenth century. This chapter lays a foundation for later chapters in which landscapes described in songs are compared to historical patterns of land use. It provides an overview of the climatic conditions and demographic changes. It compares the land use around urban areas to land use in rural estates. The chapter explores how land use was shaped by identity, with lifestyles conditioning the physical terrain. Cities were surrounded by the fields and vineyards that supplied urban dwellers with bread and wine. Rural estates included non-agricultural areas such as forests, deer parks, and gardens that were important to the self-image of aristocrats.
Conclusion
Authors: Rinke Stefan
Published: June 2023

This concluding chapter describes the Conquest of Tenochtitlan as the culmination of a Mesoamerican war. It clarifies that the Conquest should be understood as part of a long history of military conflicts between the Mexica and their countless enemies. The narrative of Hernán Cortés focused on psychological factors of the Conquest and posited that the Spaniards, with their supposedly superior civilization and rational viewpoint, and allegedly being aided by the one true God, confronted the enfeebled indigenous population. Scholars often blamed the Mexica’s fighting style for their defeat despite their clear numerical supremacy. The chapter looks at the factors that lead to the fall of Tenochtitlan, such as superior iron weapons, indigenous allies, epidemics from Europe, and the structural instability of the Mesoamerican world of city-states.
Introduction
Authors: Schmid Hans Bernhard
Published: June 2023

The Introduction develops the core idea of fundamental social ontology. Fundamental social ontology differs from conventional social ontology in that it involves us as the creators of the social world rather than just as the creatures thereof. Conventionally understood, we are who we are in virtue of our positions (or non-positions) in the social world. But we cannot understand ourselves, and the social world that we inhabit, if we take ourselves only to be the creatures or denizens of the social world. The social world is fundamentally of our own making. We are not only the conventional denizens of the social world, but the fundamental demiurges thereof, too. But who exactly is this mysterious demiurge, this “creator-we,” whom does it include, whom does it exclude, and how exactly is it that “we” make the social world?
What’s Shared in Shared Intention?
Authors: Schmid Hans Bernhard
Published: June 2023

Living together is a joint activity. Joint activity involves shared intention. The basic problem in understanding shared intention is knowing what exactly it is that is shared in shared intention. Intention can be analyzed in terms of content, subject, and mode. Content-accounts of shared intention argue that sharedness is limited to content. Subject-accounts argue that shared intentions involve a shared intentional subject. Mode-accounts argue that shared intention involves a special intentional mode. Each of the three alternative accounts struggles with serious objections. The strongest objection against subject-accounts, however, relies on a misconception of the intentional subject.
The Content of Shared Intention
Authors: Schmid Hans Bernhard
Published: June 2023

Living together is a joint activity. Joint activity involves shared intention. The basic problem in understanding shared intention is knowing what exactly it is that is shared in shared intention. Intention can be analyzed in terms of content, subject, and mode. Content-accounts of shared intention argue that sharedness is limited to content. Subject-accounts argue that shared intentions involve a shared intentional subject. Mode-accounts argue that shared intention involves a special intentional mode. Each of the three alternative accounts struggles with serious objections. The strongest objection against subject-accounts, however, relies on a misconception of the intentional subject.
The Subject of Shared Intention
Authors: Schmid Hans Bernhard
Published: June 2023

Living together is a joint activity. Joint activity involves shared intention. The basic problem in understanding shared intention is knowing what exactly it is that is shared in shared intention. Intention can be analyzed in terms of content, subject, and mode. Content-accounts of shared intention argue that sharedness is limited to content. Subject-accounts argue that shared intentions involve a shared intentional subject. Mode-accounts argue that shared intention involves a special intentional mode. Each of the three alternative accounts struggles with serious objections. The strongest objection against subject-accounts, however, relies on a misconception of the intentional subject.
The Mode of Shared Intention
Authors: Schmid Hans Bernhard
Published: June 2023

Living together is a joint activity. Joint activity involves shared intention. The basic problem in understanding shared intention is knowing what exactly it is that is shared in shared intention. Intention can be analyzed in terms of content, subject, and mode. Content-accounts of shared intention argue that sharedness is limited to content. Subject-accounts argue that shared intentions involve a shared intentional subject. Mode-accounts argue that shared intention involves a special intentional mode. Each of the three alternative accounts struggles with serious objections. The strongest objection against subject-accounts, however, relies on a misconception of the intentional subject.
What Is an Intentional Subject?
Authors: Schmid Hans Bernhard
Published: June 2023

Intentional subjectivity involves pre-reflective self-awareness, the structure of which can be spelled out in terms of self-identification, self-validation, self-commitment, and self-authorization. Singularism is the view that these features are realized only in singular self-awareness (the “I,” or ego). There is plural pre-reflective self-awareness, and thus plural intentional subjectivity. However, a plural intentional subject (“we”) is not a collective singular subject.
Plural Self-Validation
Authors: Schmid Hans Bernhard
Published: June 2023

Intentional subjectivity involves pre-reflective self-awareness, the structure of which can be spelled out in terms of self-identification, self-validation, self-commitment, and self-authorization. Singularism is the view that these features are realized only in singular self-awareness (the “I,” or ego). There is plural pre-reflective self-awareness, and thus plural intentional subjectivity. However, a plural intentional subject (“we”) is not a collective singular subject.
Socialization: Joining In
Authors: Schmid Hans Bernhard
Published: June 2023

Understanding the social world presupposes an understanding of our own role therein. As plural intentional subjects, we are not only creatures of the social world, but also the creators thereof. We, together, create the social world by living together in the way we live together. As our way of living together, the social world is up to us. One precondition of living better together is recognizing ourselves as who we are—the plural intentional subjects of living together.
Social Norms: Doing It Our Way
Authors: Schmid Hans Bernhard
Published: June 2023

Understanding the social world presupposes an understanding of our own role therein. As plural intentional subjects, we are not only creatures of the social world, but also the creators thereof. We, together, create the social world by living together in the way we live together. As our way of living together, the social world is up to us. One precondition of living better together is recognizing ourselves as who we are—the plural intentional subjects of living together.
Society: Playing Our Roles
Authors: Schmid Hans Bernhard
Published: June 2023

Understanding the social world presupposes an understanding of our own role therein. As plural intentional subjects, we are not only creatures of the social world, but also the creators thereof. We, together, create the social world by living together in the way we live together. As our way of living together, the social world is up to us. One precondition of living better together is recognizing ourselves as who we are—the plural intentional subjects of living together.
Belisarius & Antonina
Authors: Parnell David Alan
Published: June 2023

He was a famous general, victor over the Persians, conqueror of the Vandals and Ostrogoths. She was a first-rate political operative, deposer of a pope, wielder of influence. Together, Belisarius and Antonina were the most powerful couple of the sixth-century Roman world, excepting only their sovereigns and friends, the Emperor Justinian (r. 527–565) and Empress Theodora. Belisarius and Antonina found strength in their marriage, which was not just a romance but also an enormously successful partnership. Antonina traveled around the Mediterranean with Belisarius, accompanying him on military campaigns to Mesopotamia, North Africa, and Italy. Together, the pair restored Roman rule to North Africa and Italy. Together, they deposed Pope Silverius in Rome and selected his replacement. Together, they became one of the wealthiest and most powerful couples in the Roman world. However, their relationship was far from perfect. Belisarius and Antonina occasionally argued over their children. Their constant historian, Procopius of Caesarea, accused Antonina of having an incestuous affair with her adopted son, and Belisarius of being too weak to put a stop to it. Even their public careers sometimes went off the rails, as when Belisarius was disgraced for plotting when Justinian fell ill with the plague that would eventually bear his name. Through it all, the partnership of Belisarius and Antonina sustained the couple. It was, without doubt, the most important nonroyal marriage of the century.
Afterlife and Legend
Authors: Parnell David Alan
Published: June 2023

Belisarius and Antonina have lived on in myth and legend in the roughly 1,500 years since their deaths. This legend began in the Middle Ages, with a Greek tradition first written down in the 10th century in short form and then in a longer, epic form as the Novel of Belisarius in the 15th century. In this legend, Belisarius was blinded by Justinian (r. 527–565) after his last disgrace in 562. The blinded general then had to beg for his bread. This legendary tradition is unlikely to be historical, but was very popular in fictional works, both literary and artistic, about Belisarius. Gradually, this legend lost favor, and in most modern works inspired by the story of Belisarius and Antonina, the Secret History of Procopius is the favored source material. Belisarius and Antonina continue to feature in popular media, from video games to heavy metal music, in the 21st century.
Social Goodness
Authors: Witt Charlotte
Published: June 2023

Social Goodness presents an original, externalist answer to the question of the source or origin of social role normativity. Rather than ground social normativity in the attitudes of persons, the book argues for an externalism that roots social role normativity in the social world itself, in its positions, institutions, and larger architecture. The core insight of externalism is that the function or structural feature of an enterprise or activity can bring with it normative demands quite independently of the attitudes of those who engage with it. According to the artisanal model, just as a carpenter, a ceramicist, or a chef is responsive to and evaluable under a set of artisanal norms or techniques, so too is a mother and or an academic or a president. The source of normativity is the technique/expertise, and these are independent of the preferences, endorsements, or recognitive attitudes of individuals. The artisanal model for social role normativity has resources to explain both the “stickiness” or persistence of social norms, and our ability to criticize existing norms and to engage in normative self-creation—to create new normative selves. The artisanal model also has resources to capture and express the social situatedness, locality, and materiality of social roles. The relational ontology of social roles, implicit in the artisanal model, provides a useful frame to consider both hierarchical and oppressive social relations.
Social Role Normativity
Authors: Witt Charlotte
Published: June 2023

Internalists about social role normativity think that an agent is responsive to and evaluable under a set of norms because they prefer them or because they self-legislate them or because the norms have an intersubjective ground. The source of social role normativity for the internalist lies in the subject (or subjects), and in their attitude toward the norm in question rather than in their social position occupancy alone. In contrast, externalists about the source of social role normativity think that an agent is responsive to and evaluable under the norms simply by virtue of their social position occupancy. This chapter presents reasons for adopting the externalist position on the source of social role normativity.
Introduction
Authors: Lenard Patti Tamara
Published: June 2023

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the relationship between democracy and exclusion. A genuinely just democracy aims to include all citizens, in some form, in the central decision-making procedures that govern it. This book argues that too many people are unjustly excluded from various goods to which they are entitled, and it examines the mechanisms by which democracies exclude, from their membership and from their territory, to assess when and where exclusions are permissible. This chapter begins with the two major questions that have traditionally occupied the political theory of migration: first, whether states have the right to exclude migrants from their territory and, second, whether people have a basic human right to move. The chapter then considers the moral relevance of inequalities across borders and identifies four clusters of exclusion of non-citizens and citizens alike. The book demonstrates where and when individuals in each cluster of cases are subjected to state power in ways that warrant inclusion.
Subjection and Democratic Boundaries
Authors: Lenard Patti Tamara
Published: June 2023

This chapter begins by discussing democratic boundaries in general, looking at two alternative principles which explain who should be included and excluded. The all-subjected principle constrains the set of people who are entitled to inclusion to those who are subjected to a set of decisions made by a collective authority over an extended period of time. By contrast, the all-affected principle states that all those who are affected by a given policy choice, including those likely or possibly affected, ought to have a say both in decision-making procedures and in agenda-setting forums. Advocates of the all-subjected principle argue that subjection entitles one to “inclusion” and/or to participatory democratic rights, understood most frequently in terms of access to the vote. The chapter argues that subjection to power, both formal and informal, entitles those who are subjected to access the status of citizen; or, put differently, long-term, life-shaping subjection entitles subjects to protection against forcible and unwanted exclusion from both territory and membership in the form of citizenship status.
Revoking Citizenship Status
Authors: Lenard Patti Tamara
Published: June 2023

This chapter discusses the claim that citizenship status cannot be revoked by a state without the consent of the affected citizen. The thought that citizenship status can permissibly be revoked is central to many states’ responses to citizen-terrorists, who are increasingly subject to denationalization procedures. The chapter begins with an account of the right to citizenship, arguing that the right is inalienable, unconditional, and non-forfeitable. It then considers the claims made by those who argue that terrorist crimes warrant denationalization, assessing the appropriate state response to foreign fighters residing abroad. The chapter also looks at two alleged exceptions to the claim that denationalization is impermissible, namely, that (at least according to some) it is permissible where wrongdoers are dual nationals and where citizens have acquired their citizenship fraudulently. Ultimately, it argues that neither of these claimed exceptions holds much normative weight, concluding that the human right to citizenship is robust.
Visa Issuance and Denial in an Unequal World
Authors: Lenard Patti Tamara
Published: June 2023

This chapter examines the visa-issuing regime. It begins by placing the visa system in the broader context of strategies that states use to externalize their borders and notes along the way that such a system persists in privileging citizens in relatively wealthier countries by giving them access to a wide range of easily accessible travel options. The distinction between permanent and temporary migration is muddy, in ways that states recognize and respond to, often unjustly. The chapter then considers the specific visa requirements that are attached to gaining the necessary travel documentation, assessing their justifiability. To gain access to visas, applicants must often prove that they are not criminals, or dangerous in other ways; they must prove that they are financially solvent, and often that they really do intend to return to their home countries when their visa expires; and they must consent to the restriction of certain rights, as a condition of accepting the visa for travel. The chapter argues that several of these conditions cannot be justified because they undermine a state’s claim to meet the minimum criteria of immigration justice.
Competition, Innovation, and Disruption
Authors: Rebitzer James B. , Rebitzer Robert S.
Published: June 2023

This chapter considers the diffusion of valuable innovations, which is often slow in healthcare. Even innovations recognized as potentially lifesaving can take many years until they are in general use. Competition often fails to force laggards to accelerate adoption. The chapter argues that dominant firms with market power are reluctant to innovate if transitioning to the new way of doing business is disruptive to ongoing operations. These switchover disruptions are endemic in healthcare. New entrants are blocked from upstaging slow-moving incumbents by high barriers to entry to healthcare markets. The result is a type of stagnation: innovations are welcomed only if they fit nicely with how incumbent firms already operate. It goes on to suggest that increasing demand for value-enhancing and cost-reducing innovations requires reducing the market power of incumbent firms and reducing switchover disruptions.
Dilemmas and Opportunities
Authors: Rebitzer James B. , Rebitzer Robert S.
Published: June 2023

This chapter considers healthcare innovation, which is too often disconnected from value creation and cost reduction. The reasons for this disconnect run deep, and its consequences for our society loom ever larger as healthcare expenditures take up a rising share of our national income. Connecting innovation to value creation and cost-reduction requires acting on multiple fronts. Incentives for value creation and cost reduction must be strengthened, while investments are made in a data infrastructure adequate to support innovators and implementers. The market power of entrenched incumbents must be reduced, through making markets more competitive. Finally, professional and social norms must be mobilized so that stewardship of scarce healthcare resources is seen as a way to heal patients and society.
Introduction
Authors: Kane Eileen , Kirasirova Masha , Litvin Margaret
Published: June 2023

The Arab world’s two centuries of Russian entanglements have been obscured by the area studies habit of studying the two regions separately, limiting our historical imaginations and obscuring transregional historical forces, networks, and individuals. Russian-Arab Worlds pieces this rich history back together using primary sources—archival, autobiographical, and literary texts—translated from Russian, Arabic, Armenian, Persian, French, and Tatar. Together, these sources show how various Russian/Soviet and Arab governments sought to nurture political and cultural ties and expand their influence, often with unplanned results. They illuminate transnational networks of trade, pilgrimage, study, ethnic identity, and political affinity that state policies sometimes fostered and sometimes disrupted. And they give voice to some of the resourceful characters who have sustained, embodied, and exploited Arab-Russian contacts: missionaries and diplomats, soldiers and refugees, students and party activists, scholars and spies. This Introduction explains how the book uses the terms “Russian” and “Arab”: understood in a capacious geographic sense, these terms denote the internally diverse, fluid, and overlapping societies that originated under tsarist and then Soviet rule and in the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In using these terms, this book neither projects contemporary formations onto the past nor reproduces the nationalist assumptions of those who would reduce these regions to the majority ethnic groups that have dominated them politically in recent years. In fact, the goal is to unsettle these traditional framings, bringing long-forgotten complexities and connections into view.
Shi‘i Worlds Interrupted
Authors: Azarbadegan Zeinab
Published: June 2023

Russia’s early nineteenth-century conquest of the South Caucasus imposed new borders that, among other effects, disrupted regional Shi‘i Muslim religious networks. Drawing on documents from the Qajar imperial archives, the chapter reveals how tsarist expansion created new issues for the three empires that met in the region—the Russians, Ottomans, and Qajars—and their regulation of religious institutions and practices. The focus here is on revenue-generating endowments (waqfs) in Yerevan that had long helped sustain the holiest Shi‘i shrines in Ottoman-ruled Karbala and Najaf, and on Shi‘i pilgrimage to these holy sites. This focus on religious networks and practices illuminates some of the consequences of the Russian conquest for Shi‘is living in the South Caucasus, and intersections between religion and imperial diplomacy.
Population Transfer
Authors: Hamed-Troyansky Vladimir , Hamed-Troyansky Vladimir , Obeid Khalid
Published: June 2023

The half century before World War I saw mass population movements from Russia to the Middle East. One of the largest of these was the migration of Muslims (muhajirs) from Russia’s North Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire. This chapter focuses on one strand of this mass migration: after anticolonial unrest in the region of Chechnya in 1864, the Russian and Ottoman governments cooperated in resettling thousands of Chechen Muslims in the Ottoman domains. The chapter juxtaposes and analyzes three documents: 1865 reports by the Russian ambassador in Istanbul, Nikolai Ignat’ev, and by the chief of staff of the Caucasus Army, Aleksei Kartsov; and Chechen migrant leader Jantemir’s 1870 petition in Arabic to the Ottoman Interior Ministry. These documents offer insights into how officials in the two empires negotiated the resettlement of Chechens and the migrants’ experience of being moved.
Manufacturing Russian Attachments to Palestine (1894–1903)
Authors: Astafieva Elena , Kane Eileen
Published: June 2023

This chapter, like the ones before and after it, explores how Russia established the trans-imperial Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society, with institutions connecting villages and towns across the tsarist empire to the Ottoman Holy Land. The chapter shows that Russian Orthodox Christians’ spiritual bond with Jerusalem, and their mass pilgrimages to the Holy Land by the late nineteenth century, did not result from spontaneous religious feelings; rather, trained Church and lay leaders systematically cultivated these ties through a massive outreach program under the auspices of the IPPO. To raise funds and inspire pilgrimages to the Holy Land, the IPPO convened “reading sessions” intended for illiterate peasants in remote Russian villages, using the popular late nineteenth-century technology of magic lantern projection shows. This chapter includes the “Rules” for conducting such readings, a list of printed pictures, vistas and other propaganda material, and one sample of a pilgrim narrative written for these readings.
Orthodoxy across Borders
Authors: Kane Eileen
Published: June 2023

This chapter, like the two before it, is about the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society (IPPO). The IPPO was a missionary organization that promoted Russia’s shared Orthodox Christian history and culture with Arabs in Palestine and Syria. The IPPO sponsored educational initiatives (both in Russia and across Ottoman Syria and Palestine), and also built and ran medical facilities and churches in the Holy Land. This chapter maps for the first time the vast institutional network the IPPO had built by the eve of World War I: more than 100 elementary schools, as well as medical facilities and churches, and over 50 diocesan branches across the Russian Empire.
Russian and Soviet Oil Exports to the Persian Gulf (1903–1933)
Authors: Kirasirova Masha , Kane Eileen , Kirasirova Masha
Published: June 2023

This chapter spotlights tsarist and Soviet Russia’s efforts to export goods, particularly kerosene, to the Persian Gulf and neighboring Red Sea region. This export trade developed as part of late imperial Russia’s rapid, capital-intensive modernization; it grew after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Russia’s modernization involved not only its domestic railway network but also a state-funded expansion of Russia’s maritime commercial fleet, ROPiT, into the Persian Gulf. In 1903, ROPiT’s new direct Odessa-Basra service helped Russia join the lucrative European trade with Persia. Russia’s new consulate in Basra worked with its Baghdad counterpart and professional ROPiT agents to bring crates of Baku kerosene and other goods to Iraqi and Persian markets. The USSR inherited this infrastructure, reviving the export trade in the late 1920s to help fund its own rapid modernization. In fact, kerosene was the largest single Soviet export to the Arab world until Arabian Peninsula petroleum reserves were discovered.
Memo to Stalin
Authors: Kirasirova Masha
Published: June 2023

After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the new Soviet regime had to decide on a diplomatic approach to the so-called foreign East, which included Muslim-majority regions and states in Asia including the post-Ottoman Arab states. This chapter brings to light a memo to Stalin by veteran Armenian diplomat Lev Karakhan (1889–1937), who successfully argued for the Soviet state to invest in contacts with the Hejaz and to reprise pre-Soviet outreach to Mecca and involvement in the hajj. Karakhan saw the Arab states as “vulnerable sites of European imperialism,” and thus, the chapter suggests, as crucial to the global socialist revolution the Soviets were aspiring to promote. This chapter integrates the USSR into the story of European involvement in the post-Ottoman Arab lands. It also highlights the Soviets’ repurposing of tsarist-era policies and institutions to establish themselves in Arabia.
Soviet Muslims at the Congress of the Muslim World in Mecca (1926)
Authors: Naganawa Norihiro
Published: June 2023

The USSR in February 1926 became the first country to recognize the state that would become Saudi Arabia. This chapter looks at Soviet involvement in that year’s Congress of the Muslim World (convened by Ibn Saud) as part of Bolshevik efforts to challenge British domination of post-Ottoman Arab lands. It presents excerpts of two articles that examine Soviet Muslims’ participation in the Congress and emphasize the USSR’s anti-imperialist support for Arab sovereignty. The chapter reveals how the early Soviet government tried to expand its international ties and influence through strategic mobilization of Islam and a focus on Mecca, and by trying to reimagine the Muslim world as a space that included the Soviet Union and was united by anti-imperialism.
Wartime Schism in the Iraqi Communist Party
Authors: Bishop Elizabeth
Published: June 2023

This chapter introduces a letter to Moscow from the Communist International (Comintern) personnel file of Yusuf Salman Yusuf (1901–1949), an Iraqi communist leader known as Fahd (“Leopard”). The letter was likely written between September 1942 and May 1943, while Fahd was general secretary of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). Written in coded form and in English to evade Iraqi censors, the letter complains of a rival organization and seeks to keep the Communist International from recognizing this splinter group as the representative of Iraq’s communists. The letter illustrates the confusion of Iraqi communists amid the Soviet Union’s fast-changing alliances in World War II.
The Abandoned Comrades
Authors: Ginat Rami , Kirasirova Masha
Published: June 2023

This chapter presents two letters sent to Moscow in 1953 pleading for Soviet intervention on behalf of forty-three incarcerated members of the Egyptian Communist Party (ECP). The letters, addressed to Grigorii T. Zaitsev, head of the Near and Middle Eastern Department of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, describe the arrest, show trials, and torture of Egyptian communists at the hands of the nominally socialist regime of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Participants in the Egyptian communist movement, these letters show, paid a heavy price for the realpolitik policy adopted by Stalin and his successors.
From Nazareth to Moscow
Authors: Khayat Nicole , Vologzhanina Maria
Published: June 2023

This chapter excerpts three essays by Kulthum ‘Awda (1892–1965), also known as Klavdia Ode-Vasilieva, one of the most important Soviet scholars of Arabic and possibly the first Arab woman to work as a professor in any country. Born to an Arab Orthodox Christian family in Nazareth, ‘Awda studied and taught in Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society (IPPO) schools before moving to Russia, where she was stranded by World War I and spent the next half century, teaching in Leningrad and later Moscow. In these writings translated from Arabic and Russian, ‘Awda explains the philosophy of her “happy life,” conducts an ethnographic visit to villagers of Arab descent in Uzbekistan, and reminisces for a Russian audience about her childhood and IPPO education.
A Communist Mourning Icon
Authors: Takesh Suheyla
Published: June 2023

This chapter analyzes several works by Mahmoud Sabri (1927–2012), an Iraqi painter who studied at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow from 1960 to 1963. A member of the Iraqi Communist Party, Sabri worked for a decade on the series Janāzat al-Shahīd (Funeral of the Martyr) memorializing fellow Iraqi communist Nu‘man Muhammad Saleh, who died during a prison hunger strike in 1951. Sabri’s Martyr paintings draw on a long Iraqi tradition of depicting mourning and martyrdom in art and literature, but also, starting in the 1960s, reflect his formal interest in Russian Orthodox Christian icon painting. While focusing on Iraqi subject matter, he incorporates formal and compositional aspects of these works including the undulating contours, oval-shaped faces, elongated facial features, and warm copper glow of the skin, but also their embodiment of tragedy.
Soviet Yerevan’s Outreach to Armenians in Lebanon (1967–1969)
Authors: Sanjian Ara
Published: June 2023

Four documents from the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic reveal the complexity of Soviet efforts to conduct ethnically based cultural outreach to Lebanon and other Arab-majority countries in the late 1960s. The documents show Soviet Armenian officials in Yerevan disagreeing with (ethnically Russian) Soviet diplomats in Moscow and Beirut over what share of cultural visits by Soviet artists and athletes should target Lebanese Armenians (about 5% of Lebanon’s population) rather than Lebanese society as a whole. The Moscow diplomats worried: “Armenian comrades do not always care about the quality of things.” Meanwhile the Armenian SSR’s foreign ministry argued that outreach to the Armenian diaspora served Soviet diplomatic objectives. Tacitly, it also took Soviet cultural diplomacy programs as an opportunity to consolidate links with Armenians abroad and promote Armenian cultural identity.
Lotus Magazine
Authors: Djagalov Rossen
Published: June 2023

The Cold War competition between the two superpowers opened up space not only for the Third World as a political project but also for such cultural formations as the Afro-Asian Writers Association and its quarterly literary magazine, eventually called Lotus, published from 1967 to 1991. This chapter presents excerpts from the transcripts of the 1969 and 1970 Lotus editorial board meetings in Moscow and Cairo, respectively. These conversations show the magazine slipping from Soviet cultural bureaucrats’ grasp, as Cairo-based editors Yusuf al-Sibai and colleagues protect their local priorities and a wide range of African and Asian writers vigorously debate the identity and purpose of this Soviet-funded magazine published in English, French, and Arabic, but never Russian.
Soviet Advisers in Egypt before, during, and after Their “Expulsion” (1972)
Authors: Ginor Isabella , Remez Gideon
Published: June 2023

This chapter presents an excerpt from a memoir by Aleksey Smirnov, a Soviet army lieutenant and radio technology specialist who served in Egypt from 1971 to 1973. The authors question the widely repeated claim that Soviet advisers were expelled by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat on July 18, 1972, supposedly due to a rift with Moscow during the Soviet détente with the United States. Rather, the memoir details how “Smirnov” (likely a pseudonym for Soviet veteran Boris Krokhin), stayed on in Egypt, one of many military advisers who helped maintain Soviet military communications systems and prepare Egypt for the October War of 1973. It also reveals the Soviets’ complex and ambiguous attitudes toward their Egyptian colleagues as the latter prepared to fight to regain Sinai and redeem Egypt’s military honor after their defeat in 1967.
Two Soviet Responses to Frantz Fanon (1978–1979)
Authors: Casula Philipp
Published: June 2023

This chapter juxtaposes contrasting analyses of postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon by two Soviet academics: Rostislav Ulianovskii (1904–1995), a key figure in the Communist Party International Department, and Aleksandr Gordon (b. 1937), a Soviet historian of the French Revolution who is much more sympathetic to Fanon. The two texts illustrate the range of Soviet responses to Fanon, showing how this “people’s tribune of anticolonial struggle” (Ulianovsky), offering a heterodox Marxism increasingly attractive to socialist interlocutors from African and Asian countries and the West, forced Soviet thinkers to engage with some uncomfortably abstract and non-material aspects of colonial modernity.
“The Intellectual Is a Hybrid Creature”
Authors: Litvin Margaret
Published: June 2023

This chapter presents an interview with exiled Syrian-born novelist Khalil Alrez (b. 1956) and an excerpt from his novel The Russian Quarter (2019), shortlisted for the 2020 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. In the interview, Alrez reflects on his literary influences and his experiences living and working in the USSR, then Russia, from 1984 to 1993. He also discusses his return to Syria amid the economic chaos that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse. The excerpt from Alrez’s novel, set in a zoo in a fictional Damascus neighborhood called “The Russian Quarter,” shows a motley menagerie of Russian- and Syrian-born characters, humans and animals alike, struggling to maintain an oasis of peace on the edge of the Russian-fueled Syrian civil war.
Distinguishing Empathic Concern from Personal Distress
Authors: Batson C. Daniel
Published: June 2023

Distinguishing empathic concern from personal distress can be done with the six-item Empathic Concern Index and an eight-item Distress Index, items for which are also embedded in the Emotional Response Scale. Statistical analyses indicating the distinctiveness of these emotional states are reported. The distinction isn’t quantitative; it’s qualitative, with low-impact needs (adjustment/coping) producing empathy and high-impact needs (physical suffering) producing distress. Although low-impact needs are less likely to produce personal distress, high-impact needs can produce high levels of both empathic concern and personal distress. Yet, even when these emotional states co-occur, they’re experienced as qualitatively distinct. Complicating measurement, adjectives used to report personal distress are more likely to reflect empathic distress (a form of empathic concern not personal distress) when respondents report reactions to another’s coping/adjustment problem. But when reacting to another’s physical suffering, the distress adjectives provide a valid measure of personal distress.
Empathic Concern’s Evolutionary Roots
Authors: Batson C. Daniel
Published: June 2023

Evolutionary roots for empathic concern are suggested to lie in human parental nurturance and in our ability to generalize this nurturance beyond offspring to a range of others. The human parental instinct seems to include (a) cognitively sophisticated perceptions of need, (b) other-oriented tender (empathic) emotions, and (c) flexible goal-directed action rather than cue-based responses. Neuroscience research reveals links between the brain regions and neurochemistry related to parental care and the regions related to empathic concern for non-progeny. These regions include the periaqueductal gray, medial and anterior insula, and anterior cingulate cortex. The relevant neurochemistry includes oxytocin. Psychological research reveals that infant-like features and perceived vulnerability increase empathic concern. These findings are consistent with, but not conclusive support for, the suggestion that the evolutionary roots of empathic concern lie in parental nurturance.
Behavioral Consequences
Authors: Batson C. Daniel
Published: June 2023

Behavioral consequences of feeling empathic concern are most obvious at the interpersonal level—in our relations with other individuals. Research supports a wide range of interpersonal benefits, including (a) more sensitive parental care; (b) more attention and responsiveness to the needs of romantic partners, friends, and strangers; (c) less aggression toward and derogation of the targets of empathy; and (d) increased concern for stigmatized individuals. In both the West and the East, religion has been claimed to be a source of similar interpersonal benefits, although evidence is mixed. Whether religion provides benefits because it increases empathic concern for those in need is, at present, unclear.
Behavioral Consequences
Authors: Batson C. Daniel
Published: June 2023

Empathic concern’s most serious liability for intergroup relations is its in-group bias (i.e., when more empathy is felt for an in-group member in need than for an out-group member experiencing the same need). Research suggests that there are two sources of in-group bias, each of which applies to a different type of out-group. The needs of distant out-group members are less likely to be recognized and appreciated, but if we adopt an imagine-other perspective toward them, we can feel and respond much as we do to the needs of in-group members. Conflict out-group members face more intractable bias. Because their welfare and ours are at odds, we’re likely to negatively value their welfare. As a result, we may recognize their needs but feel schadenfreude, the opposite of empathic concern, leading us to harm not help. Further, in-group empathy can at times intensify conflict out-group harm—as can dehumanization of conflict out-group members.
#MosqueMeToo and Muslim Cultures
Authors: Murtza Ayesha , Murtaza Atiya
Published: June 2023

In 2018, a Pakistani woman posted on Facebook that she was sexually assaulted several times during Hajj in Mecca. Later, Mona Eltahawy used #MosqueMeToo to share that she was also sexually assaulted twice in Mecca. #MosqueMeToo soon started trending and became transnational. Citing some of these incidents and employing Islamic feminist theories, this chapter contends that #MosqueMeToo unveils the flawed foundation of most arguments that are unequivocally employed by a large majority of Muslim men, women, and legislative/government bodies to shame, blame, or disbelieve victims of sexual violence. #MosqueMeToo is particularly critical because more often than not distance from Islam, abandonment of religious values, physical appearance, and immodesty are recurring excuses used to blame the victim in Muslim societies, along with the recommendation that practicing religious dictates and following sharia would stop sexual harassment. This chapter complicates the role of religion and religious practices in systemic and institutionalized sexual violence against women.
#MeToo in the Post–Arab Spring Era
Authors: Zakarriya Jihan
Published: June 2023

This chapter investigates the contemporary #MeToo movements in the Middle East. The #MeToo movement generated responses from all over the Arab world, where women broke deep-seated taboos and spoke about their experiences with sexual violence. In this chapter, the author argues that Arab #MeToo movements inform and are informed by major political and cultural changes in the region, including the Arab Spring and the subsequent development of human rights and democratic resistance movements. For instance, during protests, women in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria faced systematized and politically motivated processes of gendered violence in public spaces as a political weapon of oppression. Therefore, the Arab #MeToo movements discuss widespread aspects of sexual violence in public spaces, workplaces, and domestic violence as intertwined with and motivated by politics. This examination of #MeToos in the Arab world establishes these movements as continuous forms of resistance to all forces of gender-based political oppression, discrimination, and fear in the post–Arab Spring era.
The Missing Link: The Importance of Collegiality for Judicial Behavior
Authors: Hazelton Morgan L.W. , Hinkle Rachael K. , Nelson Michael J.
Published: June 2023

This chapter outlines major theories of judicial decision-making and discusses how they largely overlook the importance of collegiality. Appellate judges in the U.S. Courts of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court wield enormous influence, yet face a significant constraint on their power: their colleagues. Surprisingly, leading theories of judicial behavior relegate collegiality to the background. Neither attitudinal theories nor strategic accounts emphasize the possibility that the small-group decision-making environment may produce genuine changes in belief or a willingness to temper one’s disagreement to prevent souring working relationships. This chapter introduces the importance of collegiality, arguing that much has been lost by a myopic focus on individual judges over the small-group context in which appellate judges decide cases and make law. It concludes with an overview of the remainder of the book and its conclusions.
Understanding Collegiality
Authors: Hazelton Morgan L.W. , Hinkle Rachael K. , Nelson Michael J.
Published: June 2023

This chapter explains how collegiality can affect judicial behavior. It begins by defining collegiality in terms of cooperative relationships among co-workers, placing it in a relatable general context. Next, it surveys and integrates existing theories regarding collegiality in policymaking broadly speaking. It then addresses the judicial context. Building on work in political psychology, small-group decision-making, and beyond, the chapter draws upon original elite interviews with judges and appellate clerks to assert that interpersonal contact can lead to either genuine persuasion through the deliberative process or the suppression of disagreement, that is, “going along” to prevent ruffling feathers. Critically, collegiality should operate most noticeably among colleagues who tend to disagree. Additionally, it likely will dampen the effect of ideology. This chapter also contributes to our understanding of judicial decision-making by describing why collegiality is particularly important in the judiciary and how the effects of collegiality should vary by context, such as level of court.
Interpersonal Contact and Publicizing Disagreement
Authors: Hazelton Morgan L.W. , Hinkle Rachael K. , Nelson Michael J.
Published: June 2023

This chapter examines collegiality’s effects in the U.S. Courts of Appeals with a specific focus on when judges publicize disagreement by voting to dissent or concur. This chapter suggests that judges’ ideological considerations are intertwined with the effects of collegiality such that the effects of collegiality are greatest when two judges have severe ideological disagreements and that the effect of ideological disagreement is dampened by heightened collegiality concerns. It tests these expectations using all published U.S. Courts of Appeals search and seizure opinions issued from 1953 to 2010. It introduces a novel measure of judicial collegiality: whether two judges have their home chambers in the same courthouse. The results demonstrate that collegiality and ideological disagreement are linked: when two judges have their home chambers in the same building, the effect of ideology on their decision to dissent or concur disappears.