bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Obligation to Seek Justice
Authors: Cronin-Furman Kate
Published: May 2023

This chapter lays out the context for international pressure to seek accountability. It traces the origins of the perception that accountability for mass atrocities is a legal obligation as well as the emergence of international justice advocacy and its importance on the world stage. The obligation to hold accountable those most responsible for the most serious international crimes is generally traced to the post-World War II efforts to hold the Nazi regime accountable for its crimes at Nuremberg. The chapter stresses that the eventual emergence of the norm in the 1990s was a by-product of the timing of the international community's reach to the Nuremberg precedent to justify the creation of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. It talks about the international community's right to prosecute international crimes and individual states' duty to prosecute human rights violations within their territory.
Doing Just Enough?
Authors: Cronin-Furman Kate
Published: May 2023

This chapter demonstrates that the theory of quasi-compliance is a useful framework for understanding post-atrocity governments' reactions to international pressure for accountability. Using case studies of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Burma, the chapter examines interactions between international audiences and post-atrocity governments over accountability for mass atrocities. It points out how the two case studies illuminate the potential payoffs of quasi-compliance. In the case of DRC, deeply flawed accountability measures were accepted by relevant international audiences as good faith efforts to address conflict-related sexual violence. The chapter talks about Burma's repeated creation of commissions of inquiry and court martials to investigate crimes against the Rohingya, which were met with almost uniform derision from the members of the international community who had been calling for justice.
Feminism's Empire
Authors: Eichner Carolyn J.
Published: May 2023

This book investigates the complex relationships between imperialisms and feminisms in the late nineteenth century and demonstrates the challenge of conceptualizing “pro-imperialist” and “anti-imperialist” as binary positions. By intellectually and spatially tracing the era's first French feminists' engagement with empire, the book explores how feminists opposed—yet employed—approaches to empire in writing, speaking, and publishing. In differing ways, they ultimately tied forms of imperialism to gender liberation. Among the era's first anti-imperialists, French feminists were enmeshed in the hierarchies and epistemologies of empire. They likened their gender-based marginalization to imperialist oppressions. Imperialism and colonialism's gendered and sexualized racial hierarchies established categories of inclusion and exclusion that rested in both universalism and ideas of “nature” that presented colonized people with theoretical, yet impossible, paths to integration. Feminists faced similar barriers to full incorporation due to the gendered contradictions inherent in universalism. The system presumed citizenship to be male and thus positioned women as outsiders. The book connects this critical struggle to hierarchical power shifts in racial and national status that created uneasy linkages between French feminists and imperial authorities.
La Citoyenne
Authors: Eichner Carolyn J.
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on La citoyenne, which was founded by Hubertine Auclert to advocate French women's suffrage and full citizenship. To combat debates between civilization and savagery, La citoyenne articles contrasted the circumstances of French women with those of women in Niger, Tonkin, Tunisia, Italy, Ireland, Russia, and Turkey. Moreover, the newspaper reveals particular French republican, socialist, and feminist conceptions of race and female agency simultaneously in and out of Europe. La citoyenne became a laboratory for a nascent feminist critique of imperialism that provided an alternative to government propaganda and images of empire and with new conceptions of imperialism. The chapter also elaborates on Auclert's feminist imperialism.
Universal Language, Universal Education, Universal Revolution
Authors: Eichner Carolyn J.
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the correlation between language, education, and revolution. It starts with Louis Michel's championing for the Kanak, which implied her opposition to imperialism and colonialism. Michel also aims to revolutionize and decolonize the languages of France, New Caledonia, and Algeria by erasing international and class barriers to communication and expression. Moreover, language, education, and revolution formed the core of the worldview Michel wrought in New Caledonia, which then underpinned a universalism that was both potentially liberatory and imperialist. Moreover, Michel introduced the beginnings of a revolutionary postcolonial universalism after creating tools that subvert European hegemonic power and promote international unity.
Familiar Stranger
Authors: Eichner Carolyn J.
Published: May 2023

This chapter tackles the figure of “The Jew” that pervaded French intellectual, cultural, and social life, weaving in and out of political discourses throughout the nineteenth century. The representations shifted over time simultaneously in tension with the multiple realities of Jewish lives. The chapter expounds on how Olympe Audouard, Hubertine Auclert, and Louis Michel employed antisemitism and Jewish difference to support their conflicting political agendas. Feminists' imperial entanglements simultaneously utilized the figuration of Jews as a useful and comprehensible political tool. The chapter then highlights the Jewish Question, which is the debate over whether Jews could be integrated and assimilated into society.
Where They Need Me
Authors: Minn Pierre
Published: May 2023

This book examines the work of Haitian health professionals in humanitarian aid encounters. Haiti is the target of an overwhelming number of internationally funded health projects. While religious institutions sponsor a number of these initiatives, many are implemented within the secular framework of global health. This book illustrates the divergent criteria that actors involved in global health use to evaluate interventions’ efficacy. Haitian physicians, nurses, and administrative staff are hired to carry out these global health programs, distribute or withhold resources, and produce accounts of interventions’ outcomes. In their roles as intermediaries, Haitian clinicians are expected not only to embody the humanitarian projects of foreign funders and care for their impoverished patients but also to act as sources of support for their own kin networks, while negotiating their future prospects in a climate of pronounced scarcity and insecurity. The book argues that a serious consideration of these local health care providers in the context of global health is essential to counter simplistic depictions of clinicians and patients as heroes, villains, or victims as well as to move beyond the donor–recipient dyad that has dominated theoretical work on humanitarianism and the gift.
Market
Authors: Maskiell Nicole Saffold
Published: May 2023

This chapter looks at the emergence of developed and expansive Northeastern enslaved networks. It is here that New York as the center of a slaveholding Northeastern world feels most familiar. However, the chapter investigates this as part of an expansive slaveholding past rather than as the first decades of a new era whose slave-trading excess would fuel the later debates on liberty and slavery, as it is most commonly presented. Thie chapter seeks to unpack a slaveholding Northeastern world that influenced every sector of society, from the docks, to print culture, to academia. Ultimately, the chapter argues that elites like the Livingstons expanded their portfolios while including vital and visceral connections to their family's slaveholding Dutch past. These identities infused their global ambitions for trade and family empire. It then emphasizes how Northeastern places, and family and regional elites, graced the names of slave ships, and family members' regional footprint in the Chesapeake, South Carolina, and the Caribbean grew alongside increasing Northeastern influence.
China’S Effective Model of Technological Advancement
Authors: Cheung Tai Ming
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on the high-level techno-security development model that leverages the core strengths of the country's political, economic, social, defense, and technological systems. It emphasizes that these assets include a formidable mobilization system, an imposing authoritarian leadership structure, a determined absorption and innovation apparatus, and a disciplined approach to project selection and implementation. This is the Selective Authoritarian Mobilization and Innovation (SAMI) model, or what is more commonly known in China as the Two Bombs, One Satellite approach. The chapter discusses how the SAMI model illustrates the relationship between innovation and industrialization in the making of China's strategic technological capabilities. As the chapter argues, these core features tell us that even though innovative thinking and advanced research and development capabilities are important, the main drivers responsible for China's successful outcomes so far in large-scale, complex, multiyear technological projects are sustained high-level leadership attention and engagement coupled with whole-of-nation support and mobilization.
First Contact
Authors: Iandolo Alessandro
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses the first contact of the Soviet Union with Ghana, Guinea, and Mali. Since Ghana, Guinea, and Mali were among the very first sub-Saharan African territories to win independence from a European colonial empire, the Soviet Union pursued them as partners in the Third World. The chapter elaborates on how the Cold War in West Africa took shape as the United States, West Europe and USSR scrambled to impose their influence in the region. It cites France's main intelligence agency's alarming warning of the Soviet Union establishing a foothold in the continent even though it was still under colonial powers. The factors that helped the Soviet government to establish relations with the newly independent countries were Moscow's perseverance, clumsy movement from the West, and West African elites' preferences and decisions.
Things Fall Apart
Authors: Iandolo Alessandro
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers the causes behind the USSR's decision to stop its engagement with West Africa. It notes the 1950s were a decade of economic optimism in the Soviet Union as the USSR's economy grew at high rates, postwar reconstruction was completed, and living standards increased significantly. However, after the 1950s, Soviet economic growth lost most of its dynamism when the Soviet Union experienced a bad year for agricultural production. The chapter looks into the Soviet commercial exchanges with Guinea, Mali, and Ghana, referencing the USSR's rigidity concerning trade agreements. It also notes the impact of the Cold War entering a new phase wherein the United States challenged the Soviet advances in the Third World.
The End of the Affair
Authors: Iandolo Alessandro
Published: May 2023

This chapter elaborates on the long-term consequences of the USSR withdrawal from West Africa, which also triggered the end of the socialist or non-capitalist model of development in the region. It details the work of Nikita Khrushchev until his passing and subsequent burial in the Kremlin wall. The USSR failed to establish a model of development in the region because of its own inability to bear the costs of modernization. Additionally, Cold War historiography has highlighted the extent and success of the People's Republic of China's efforts to establish itself as a leading political and economic force in the Third World. The chapter mentions that state capitalism and the wish to construct an alternative to capitalist development in the Third World survived the Soviet Union.
The City by the Lake
Authors: Gundur R. V.
Published: May 2023

This chapter questions whether Chicago is representative of “the modern American city,” and examines the criminological problems that characterize it. While Chicago has been used time and again as a sociological laboratory, the chapter notes that many lessons that have been learned are not necessarily applicable to other big-city contexts. The chapter discusses how Chicago differs from El Paso and Phoenix in terms of geography, history, demographics, and crime. It emphasizes that its sheer size made it a difficult place to study with the modest resources available to the author. The chapter details the context and depth of Chicago gang life. It emphasizes that Chicago is an important point of comparison in any study of gangs, the retail and wholesale drug trade, and international drug trafficking. Though negotiating access in Chicago proved to be difficult, it was still a place where law enforcement's historical priorities vis-à-vis the drug trade—getting drug pushers off street corners and getting drug lords off their perches—and the consequences of those priorities were on full display.
Logistics
Authors: Gundur R. V.
Published: May 2023

This chapter reviews the violent reputation that drug trafficking organizations such as the Sinaloa Federation possessed not only in Mexico but also in the American public consciousness. By discussing the Flores twins' and Zambada Niebla's plea agreements and sentencing memoranda, the Guzmán trial, the public record, and the author's conversations with people who are part of the drug trade on the streets of Chicago, the chapter unfolds five lessons that dispel some of the sensational attributes that the public often associates with drug trafficking organizations. It argues that these lessons illustrate the processes and opportunities that link the people and businesses of the drug trade. The chapter begins by noting that drug trafficking organizations are specialist bulk logistics providers that respond to and compensate for stresses in the market. It also emphasizes that most of the organizations, transporting bulk shipments of illicit drugs into and within the United States, are best described as “contractors” rather than “subsidiaries” of Mexican drug trafficking organizations. Ultimately, the chapter investigates how the arrests of kingpins do not significantly curb drug supply in the medium to long term.
Winning by Process
Authors: Bertrand Jacques , Pelletier Alexandre , Thawnghmung Ardeth Maung
Published: May 2023

This book asks why the peace process in Myanmar stalled in the decade from 2011 to 2021 despite a liberalizing regime, a national ceasefire agreement, and a multilateral peace dialogue between the state and ethnic minorities. The book argues that stalled conflicts are more than pauses or stalemates. “Winning by process,” as opposed to winning by war or agreement, represents the state's ability to gain advantage by manipulating the rules of negotiation, bargaining process, and sites of power and resources. In Myanmar, five such strategies allowed the state to gain through process: locking in, sequencing, layering, outflanking, and outgunning. The Myanmar case shows how process can shift the balance of power in negotiations intended to bring an end to civil war. During the last decade, the Myanmar state and military controlled the process, neutralized ethnic minority groups, and continued to impose their vision of a centralized state even as they appeared to support federalism.
Industrialists and Consolidation in Central Europe (1867–1914)
Authors: Rigó Máté
Published: May 2023

This chapter tackles the Central European order, which was a German order from the outset. It notes Alsace and East-Central Europe as traditional areas of settlement for Jewish immigrants from Germany and Russian Poland. Thus, moving within Central and Eastern Europe was attractive for businessmen and craftsmen. However, even though Alsace-Lorraine was one of the most industrialized regions in Central Europe, its industrialists were struck by the tariff walls that cut them off from French markets after the Franco-Prussian War. The chapter cites the correlation between Alsace-Lorraine's appearance on the map of Europe and Transylvania's disappearance in the early 1870s. The chapter explains that the accommodation to the new political environment became a reality in both Alsace-Lorraine and Transylvania by the 1900s, which then highlighted the dilemmas of imperial integration.
Imperial Currencies after the Fall of Empires
Authors: Rigó Máté
Published: May 2023

This chapter notes the challenges of forging new national communities by spreading national currencies on formerly Austro-Hungarian and German territories. It starts with the frequency of currency smuggling in Europe after the First World War. Successor states of Germany and Austria-Hungary faced enormous challenges when they decided to convert imperial currencies because they had no idea of the exact amount of “enemy” currency in circulation in new territories and lacked the funds to convert it. Greater Romania was on the brink of financial collapse after it converted imperial currencies in September 1920. Thus, Paris had to exert pressure on French banks to step in as lenders of last resort in an effort to sustain its financial hegemony in the region in an increasingly competitive environment.
The Pauline Legacy
Authors: Cohen Jeremy
Published: May 2023

This chapter reflects on some interpretations of Romans, which range between extant patristic and medieval commentaries for their diversity, interest, and influence and Christian theologians wrestled with Paul's predictions and puzzles. The obscurities of Paul's prophecy of the salvation of Israel overshadowed the clarity of its meaning. Moreover, the interpretations of these passages influenced the regulation of the status of the Jews in Christendom. The chapter compares the interpretations of Romans from Origen of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Ambrosiaster, and Pelagius. It references Pelagius' commentary, which suggests that divine rejection and election correspond directly to the concerned individuals.
Celebrating Sorrow
Authors: D'Etcheverry Charo B.
Published: May 2023

This book explores the medieval Japanese fascination with grief in tributes to The Tale of Sagoromo, the classic story of a young man whose unrequited love for his foster sister leads him into a succession of romantic tragedies as he rises to the imperial throne. The book is a translation of a selection of Sagoromo-themed works, highlighting the diversity of medieval Japanese creative practice and the persistent and varied influence of a beloved court tale. Medieval Japanese readers, fascinated by Sagoromo's sorrows and success, were inspired to retell his tale in stories, songs, poetry, and drama. By recontextualizing the tale's poems and writing new libretti, stories, and commentaries about the tale, these medieval aristocrats, warriors, and commoners expressed their competing concerns and ambitions during a chaotic period in Japanese history, as well as their shifting understandings of the tale itself. By translating these creative responses from an era of uncertainty and turmoil, the book shows the richness and enduring relevance of Japanese classical and medieval literature.
Sagoromo
Authors: D'Etcheverry Charo B.
Published: May 2023

This chapter returns us to Kyoto, if not the palace, with the Noh play Sagoromo, translated here as Sagoromo: Narrow Robes to highlight its focus on garments and related financial constraints. It underlines that the libretto was written by courtier and scholar Sanjōnishi Sanetaka, the most famous member of the family that recorded early commentaries on the tale in their copies of its text. The chapter first recounts how shogun Ashikaga Yoshihisa requested Sanetaka to write this play. It then follows how playwright Kanze Nobumitsu later scored and choreographed Sanetaka's libretto and, after consulting with him on how to sing it, staged it twice at the shogun's palace in 1503. The chapter then shifts to chronicle how Sanetaka used the structure of a ghost play to recall a glorious past, sidestepping inconvenient details like the Second Princess's hatred for the hero just like the earlier song and poetic collections and reversing the subplot's grim conclusion to create the fantasy centered on elegant clothing. As the chapter mentions, Sanetaka pawned his own robes at least once to supplement his finances, leaving him unable to attend an event at the palace and suggesting a personal stake in the play's sartorial focus. The chapter concludes by noting how Sanetaka's extant libretto suggests the tale's value to late medieval elites, as a symbol of glories they hoped to bring back.
Introduction
Authors: Congdon Lee
Published: May 2023

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the contributions of George Kennan, twentieth-century America's most distinguished diplomat. Kennan served as ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and as a senior official in Switzerland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic states. He played a key role in the development of the Marshall Plan that fueled postwar Europe's recovery and he formulated the containment policy that governed US actions and reactions during the Cold War. From 1933, when he first went to Moscow, to 1953, when he retired from the Foreign Service, he was involved in virtually every one of the nation's major foreign policy decisions. A realist in foreign policy, Kennan maintained that the United States should act in the world only in defense of the national interest, narrowly defined.
The Evolution of Performing Arts Patronage in Bali, Indonesia
Authors: Catra I Nyoman
Published: May 2023

This chapter outlines a general history of performing arts patronage in Bali. It contextualizes a detailed analysis of the role of contemporary arts clubs—sanggar—that have flourished on the island since Reformasi. To get a broader picture of the current state of sanggar in Bali today, the chapter considers how arts activities were managed and recognized in previous generations. While prior forms of patronage were overwhelmingly hierarchical (via the courts) or communal (through village, temple, or neighborhood support), the chapter stresses that modern sanggar are often organized and controlled by charismatic individuals with independent means. It emphasizes that sanggar also afford forms of sociality independent of traditional social networks, aligned instead along aesthetic affinity. The chapter concludes by noting that their emergence represents a major new node in the Balinese art ecology, interfacing with the traditional scenes of educational institutions, festivals, and religious ceremonies.
The Politicization of Religious Melody in the Indonesian Culture Wars of 2017
Authors: Rasmussen Anne K.
Published: May 2023

This chapter follows the archipelago's Islamic musical traditions since 1945 and looks at how “the pendulum [swings] between the sound worlds of the Arab Gulf” and local Indonesian traditions. It investigates a 2017 debate at the intersection of religion, politics, and the arts, in which Islamist hard-liners (Islam keras), aligned with contemporary Saudi forms of piety, vigorously protested a single performance of Qur'anic recitation in a style labeled langgam jawa rather than Arab maqamat. The chapter then unpacks the vehement objections to performance of a Qur'anic reciter at the presidential palace. It considers Simon Frith's explanation of “bad music” and employs Jonathan Neufeld's concept of “aesthetic disobedience.” In studying melodies that are thought to be either “obedient” or “disobedient” in the contemporary moment, the chapter turns to the creeping soft power of Saudi Arabia, which is made audible in the reciters' world through economies of mass media. The chapter suggests that any perception of melodic stability may be more of a mirage in the shifting sounds of this aestheticized political terrain. It then exposes the ways in which political muscle and religious subjectivities are expressed through a variety of media, even through melody.
Being Caught
Authors: Praspaliauskiene Rima
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on the experiences of patients and their caregivers as they manage the network of relations, expectations, and desired outcomes wrapped up in enveloped care. Their stories illustrate how knowledge and beliefs about enveloped practices are transmitted, and how in that process envelopes have become imbued with both practical and symbolic efficacy. It considers the envelope as both a mechanism for coping with the limitations of biomedicine in Lithuania and a healing force that can have a direct effect on the body. The chapter discusses the dynamics that lead to “being caught” in the envelope, wherein patients and caregivers interpret all medical encounters through the lens of the envelope when they are “caught.” As the failure to eradicate the informal economy of envelopes illustrates, the health care system itself is caught in the envelope.
Epilogue
Authors: Praspaliauskiene Rima
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers the envelope as a polyvalent object and a concept that resists simple explanations based on rationality, socioeconomic status, institutional violence, corruption, generosity, or the force of habit. The envelope is an interpretative framework through which patients and caregivers make sense of medical encounters and relationships. It also describes the envelope as part of the treatment and healing process itself. The chapter highlights how the envelope expresses a situated relationship to caring, one that leads to more nuanced understandings of good and bad care. The envelope is an embodiment of the uncertainty and ambiguity people continue to experience in the context of institutionalized medicine in both capitalist and socialist regimes.
Narratives of civic Duty
Authors: Hur Aram
Published: May 2023

This book investigates the impulse behind a sense of civic duty in democracies. Why do some citizens feel a responsibility to vote, pay taxes, or take up arms in defense of one's country? Through comparing democratic societies in East Asia and elsewhere, the book shows that the sense of obligation to be a good citizen—upon which the resilience of a democracy depends—emerges from a force long thought to be detrimental to democracy itself: national attachments. Nationalism's illiberal and exclusive tendencies are typically viewed as disruptive to democratic processes, but the book argues that there is nothing inherently antidemocratic about nationalism. Rather, whether nationalism helps or hinders democracy is shaped by the historicized relationship between a national people and their democratic state. When national stories portray that relationship as one of mutual commitment, nationalism strengthens democracies by motivating widespread civic duty among citizens. Drawing on personal narratives, statistical surveys, and experiments, the book offers a provocative national theory of civic duty that cuts to the heart of what makes democracies thrive.
Cigarettes and Soviets
Authors: Starks Tricia
Published: May 2023

Enriched by color reproductions of tobacco advertisements, packs, and anti-smoking propaganda, this book provides a comprehensive study of the Soviet tobacco habit. The book examines how the Soviets maintained the first mass-smoking society in the world while simultaneously fighting it. It is at once a study of Soviet tobacco deeply enmeshed in its social, political, and cultural context and an exploration of the global experience of the tobacco epidemic. The book examines the Soviet antipathy to tobacco yet capitulation to market; the development of innovative cessation techniques and clinics and the late entry into global anti-tobacco work; the seeming lack of cultural stimuli alongside massive use; and the expansion of smoking without the conventional prompts of capitalist markets. The book tells the story of Philip Morris's “Mission to Moscow” campaign for the Soviet market, the triumph of the quintessential capitalist product—the cigarette—in a communist system, and the successes and failures of the world's first national antismoking campaign. The interplay of male habits and health against largely female tobacco producers and medical professionals adds a gendered dimension. Smoking developed, continued, and grew in the Soviet Union without mass production, intensive advertising, seductive industrial design, or product ubiquity. The Soviets were early to condemn tobacco, and yet, by the end of the twentieth century, Russians smoked more heavily than most other nations in the world. The book challenges interpretations of how tobacco use rose in the past and what leads to mass use today.
Mobilized
Authors: Starks Tricia
Published: May 2023

This chapter explains how smoking became the formative experience of people mobilized in the Red Army for World War II. At the front line, rear smoking became a stand-in for feeling full, being rested, or finding comfort. Soldiers suffered from a lack of tobacco and workers struggled through bombings, starvation, and evacuations to get papirosy to them. Thus, the Soviets chose to mobilize makhorka for the troops because of a long-established link between the military and tobacco and the importance accorded to tobacco by those in command. The chapter explains how the movement of the workforce across the Soviet Union affected the shortage of tobacco during wartime.
Pressured
Authors: Starks Tricia
Published: May 2023

This chapter expounds on how the public demanded action from the Soviet government to mitigate the smoking problem and its subsequent health effects. It looks into the Soviets' immense strides in public health during the 1960s. Smoking took on a strong resonance in the commentary on male authority, social decline, and Soviet power. Soviet smoking rates were high in the 1960s, but the connections to health concerns being made in the west were not being made by Soviet authorities. The chapter features graphic art of anti-smoking campaigns and propaganda. It acknowledges the shift in public reactions and media coverage following the surge of anti-smoking materials in the 1960s and the 1970s.
On the Army’s Payroll
Authors: Kiernan Vincent
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on a key objective among American leaders after the United States entered World War II in December 1941 following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor: to maintain public support for the war effort. It delves into a little-known project by the army's Office of the Surgeon General to generate positive press coverage about steps the army was taking to protect the health of soldiers deployed overseas. The chapter also examines how William Laurence's involvement in that project would presage his more widely known participation in the Manhattan Project later in the war. It underlines that the army project arose from a concern among military and medical officials in the United States that poor public understanding about military medicine might undermine public support for the war effort. The chapter then introduces Morris Fishbein, MD, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, who wielded enormous power throughout the medical community. It stresses that he had been a prime mover in creating a system of advance access by selected journalists to articles being published in his journal. Ultimately, the chapter analyzes how Fishbein and the government would direct the journalists in the topics they covered and the messages the coverage advanced. It also reviews Laurence's first involvement with the US Army and his application to work for the federal government.
Atomic Plagiarism in the South Pacific
Authors: Kiernan Vincent
Published: May 2023

This chapter begins with a discussion on the fourth atomic blast, the so-called Able experiment of the War Department's Operation Crossroads, with almost two hundred other journalists watching one of history's biggest demonstrations of military power from the deck of a navy destroyer in the South Pacific. It describes that Operation Crossroads was the US government's first set of nuclear tests after World War II and the kickoff of many more that the United States would set off in the South Pacific over the ensuing years. The chapter emphasizes that its goal was to evaluate the effects of nuclear blasts on naval ships and equipment. Others saw a different motive: to emphasize the atomic strength of the US military. The chapter also focuses on a major act of brazen plagiarism committed by William Laurence. It chronicles how he submitted a front-page story that he copied, almost in its entirety and without attribution, from a lengthy Operations Crossroads press release describing the Able test.
Atomic Dialogue
Authors: Kiernan Vincent
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on the United States' full-out atomic arms race with the Soviet Union. In the view of American weapons scientists, the chapter emphasizes that it required the United States to conduct myriad atomic test explosions. With a view to keeping ahead of the Soviet competition, the chapter notes that some of the atomic tests refined the designs of current fission weapons; others sought to advance the knowledge for future fission weapons; and still others focused on developing techniques and technology for the all-important hydrogen bomb. Faced with the high demand for atomic testing, the chapter reveals that the US government decided to resume nuclear explosions in the continental United States. It particularly looks at a new nuclear testing ground in Nevada with Operation Ranger, a series of five tests of devices dropped from bombers over the site's Frenchman Flat. The chapter emphasizes that the key aim of the tests was to check atomic designs that were to be incorporated into the subsequent Greenhouse series of four explosions at Enewetak Atoll in the South Pacific. The chapter examines how the George test in the Greenhouse series achieved a landmark, and how the Charlie event illustrated the change in science communication wrought by television, undercutting the primacy of newspapers in communicating facts and impressions about scientific news up to that time.
The U-Bomb
Authors: Kiernan Vincent
Published: May 2023

This chapter delves into how the United States made tremendous technical strides toward a hydrogen bomb. It pays attention to the atomic test in the South Pacific, code-named Castle Bravo, which was both a tremendous success and a catastrophic disaster for the nascent US weapons program. The chapter examines how Bravo also triggered a different type of chain reaction—a cascade of events that would undermine William Laurence's standing with his editors and contribute to the end of his career as a daily-news reporter. The chapter begins by describing the classified features of the Castle Bravo device, code-named Shrimp. It then shifts to narrate how Japanese scientists made and publicized measurements of the types and amounts of radioactive contamination from Castle Bravo, such as fallout that was detected on the boat and in fish. Under public pressure, the Atomic Energy Commission widened its estimates of the size of the geographic zone affected by fallout from Castle Bravo. The chapter concludes by examining the rushed release of the Ivy Mike film and how the Eisenhower administration lost control of the narrative about the fallout problem. As the chapter argues, the images of the enormous blast combined with the ongoing news coverage of the Castle Bravo and Castle Romeo tests—each of which was more powerful than the Ivy Mike blast shown in the movie—heightened public worry about the threat posed by fallout.
The Politics of Care
Authors: Danely Jason
Published: May 2023

This chapter elaborates on the politics of care shaped by historical and cultural norms, values, social welfare institutions, and policies. It raises the argument that bringing carer narratives into juxtaposition with one another allows the discernment of cultural and historical patterns that shaped those spaces. One of the issues regarding paid care has to do with the bureaucratic rationalization of profit-driven institutions, which reduces the more holistic functions of caring to specific measurable tasks. The chapter then examines the system of Long-Term Care Insurance from the perspective of paid care workers in Japan. It also considers the everyday ethics of care management.
The Name of God
Authors: Bulgakov Sergii
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on the important question in Orthodox theology: that of the Name of God, and Its sacred mystery. This question breaks down into two parts: on the one hand, the Name of God is a name to which are proper all the general signs of a name, and on the other hand, singular and exceptional features are inherent in it that are connected with its theophoric nature. Every predicate that we ascribe to the Godhead is at the same time a naming of God: Provider, Creator, Good, Eternal, Blessed, Holy, etc. God reveals himself to humans and in humans, and humans name God, give Him names by analogy with how they give them to their own kind. Of course, God gives himself these names in and through human beings by His own revelation; however, this occurs through religious experience, mystical contemplation, philosophical speculation, scientific comprehension, and moral struggle, in a word, through human creativity and life. The chapter then considers the nature of icons and the issue of icon veneration.
Law, Anthropology, and Expert Witness
Authors: Hinton Alexander Laban
Published: May 2023

This chapter tells the story of navigating the structures and constraints of law to make a pedagogical contribution to the process of justice. It reviews the author's experiences that raise important questions about whether and to what extent there is a place for the public scholar and anthropological witness in the courtroom. It also confirms whether scholars can serve as expert witnesses and effectively contribute to tribunals for international atrocity crimes, focusing on legal guilt as opposed to academic explanation. The chapter uses character development, providing background on and giving a sense of Nuon Chea, a key courtroom legal personnel. It highlights the anthropological ways of knowing or epistemological assumptions that provide anthropological witness in a court of law.
Lived Experience
Authors: Hinton Alexander Laban
Published: May 2023

This chapter talks about one of the hallmarks of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), which is its extensive victim participation and the direct involvement of civil parties. It highlights the author's questioning by civil party lawyers, who asked about the radical transformation of Cambodian life under the Khmer Rouge. These questions raised issues about the broader goals of the court in terms of providing redress and having a minimalist focus on legal accountability and maximalist emphasis on collective reparation and healing. The chapter also discusses the civil party questions that directly referred to anthropological research on the experience of living under the Khmer Rouge and the local understandings of the ECCC. The author's discussion of this lived experience and local knowledge constituted a second keyway in which the chapter was able to bring the insights of anthropology into the courtroom.
Denial
Authors: Hinton Alexander Laban
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses the author's direct exchange with Nuon Chea, which took place at the end of his three and a half days of testimony. Nuon Chea finished his remarks by posing two questions to the author about the role of foreign powers in the Cambodian genocide and the violence wrought by US carpet-bombing. The chapter considers Nuon Chea's arguments as a form of genocide denial, which are at odds with existing scholarship and findings about the Cambodian genocide. The chapter emphasizes that it was the Khmer Rouge leadership, not foreign actors, that held control over the security apparatus, gave the orders, and were the ones directly responsible for genocide. Like many denialist arguments, Nuon Chea's defense mixes fact and fiction to manufacture a seemingly reasonable alternative account.
The Escalation of Immigration Control
Authors: Andreas Peter
Published: May 2023

This chapter details the amplification of the United States' effort to police the cross-border flow of unauthorized Mexican migrants in the 1990s. It elaborates on how the escalation of border enforcement influenced where, how, and how often unauthorized immigrants crossed the border. The Immigration Reform and Control Act's (IRCA) main impact of legalization involves the reinforcement and expansion of a well-established cross-border migration network. However, the consequence of IRCA was the powerful backlash against unauthorized immigration in the 1990s, especially in California. The chapter notes the transformation of the southwestern border's landscape due to high-profile immigration control initiatives such as operations Hold-the-Line and Gatekeeper. The intensive border policing triggering more professional smuggling, greater corruption, and border fatalities resulted in the powerful political and symbolic appeal of a border that appeared more orderly and secure.
Mineral Meets Migrant Metallurgies
Authors: Morris Julia Caroline
Published: May 2023

This chapter emphasizes the need to train Nauruans in conducting refugee status determination, which is a commonplace industry practice. It explains how refugee legal systems are implicated as forms of border enforcement, which looks to distil the “deserving” from “undeserving” migrant under the banner of humanitarianism. It also brings Nauru's major industries into conversation to detail the harms that are a part of both extractive sectors. The chapter examines the extractive practices that operate in Nauru whereby the country's mineral and migrant resources are assessed from raw materials into commodities. It focuses on phosphate processing, which sieves valuable mineral from dry rock.
Securing the Offshore Industry
Authors: Morris Julia Caroline
Published: May 2023

This chapter draws on ethnographic fieldwork and moves against simplistic assumptions that depict Nauru as a “black site” outside of international oversight. Offshore contexts are frequently depicted and indeed can be financially successful because they operate as havens outside of international accountability. The chapter analyzes the “racist rhetorics of representation” surrounding Nauru that are replete with colonial imaginaries of Western salvationalism extending to the Conradian darkness of the “savage” world. It argues that offshore refugee processing has been exceptionally politically and economically valuable for the Australian and Nauruan governments and their industry contractors. In Nauru, contracted organizations could not avoid the hazards that a human extractive sector presents.
Caliph and Mahdī
Authors: Balbale Abigail Krasner
Published: May 2023

This chapter lays out heated debates among rulers and scholars over new ideas concerning the caliphate and righteous authority at a time of major demographic transition in the Islamic world. As newly Muslim groups began to form dynasties that challenged or supported the Arab caliphate, some military strongmen emerged as sultans ruling in the name of the caliphate. The chapter looks at political theories developed by scholars, such as al-Māwardī and al-Ghazālī, that justified the law-giving aspects of governance in the name of the unity of the global Muslim community under a single caliphate. It also discusses several messianic movements appearing in North Africa and al-Andalus that sought to recenter religious and political power in the hands of a single figure. The chapter points out the debate over the meaning of the caliphate that forms the nucleus of the conflict between the Almohads and Ibn Mardanīsh.
Rebel against the Truth
Authors: Balbale Abigail Krasner
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on the Almohad caliphate and its battles with fellow Muslims. Ibn Mardanīsh, as the Almohads' most substantial rival in al-Andalus, fought fellow Muslims for a quarter of a century from his capital in Murcia. It used Almohad chronicles, chancery documents, and poetry to narrate the history of Ibn Mardanīsh's reign and shows how the Almohads portrayed him and other Muslim rebels against them as the ultimate enemies and the most important targets of jihad. It talks about the Jihad, which was a uniquely labile tool that could augment a ruler's religious legitimacy while simultaneously serving as a practical means for eliminating rivals. Although much contemporary scholarship focuses on medieval battles between Muslims and Christians, the chapter shows that intrareligious conflicts were often even more intense, since competing conceptions of righteous authority were at stake.
Material Genealogies and the Construction of Power
Authors: Balbale Abigail Krasner
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers the ways in Ibn Mardanīsh's cultural programs expressed affiliation with the caliphate in the east, adopting motifs and forms en vogue among the Abbasids and the Fatimids. It details how Ibn Mardanīsh built palaces, oratories, and a series of fortifications across his territory at regular intervals, producing spaces and objects that echoed those found in the Islamic East. The iconography of the palace Ibn Mardanīsh constructed in Murcia, Dār al-Ṣughrā incorporated highly stylized repetitive Arabic inscriptions that have been adapted from Fatimid ṭirāz. The chapter reveals that iconography frequently understood as generic and courtly carried specific ideological weight for Ibn Mardanīsh. It mentions Dār al-Ṣughrā's figurative paintings as one of the elements that indicate Ibn Mardanīsh's impiety, which are key components of political culture in the Islamic and Mediterranean worlds and beyond.
France and the Thirty Years’ War
Authors: Bartoletti Andrea
Published: May 2023

This chapter provides an overview of the historiographical debate on the Thirty Years' War (1635–1648). It explores how the Spanish encirclement of France triggered a double security dilemma that led to the formation of a rival-based network of alliances and to the adoption of increasingly aggressive measures that increased the chances of war. It also shows that France decided to launch an attack against Spain as a measure of last resort to prevent actualized encirclement, which would have resulted from an increase in the invasion ability of the Hapsburg. The chapter investigates the logic of war contagion by showing that the Swedish and Austrian interventions on the side of their allies were driven by concerns that their own immediate rival would increase its invasion ability. It discusses how theories that stress hegemonic ambitions or the role of religion cannot explain the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War.