bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Out of the Shadows of Coups
Authors: Dwyer Maggie
Published: June 2019

This chapter details the book’s research design. The study takes two distinct but complementary approaches to examining mutinies. One is a dataset that documents the occurrence of mutinies in West and Central Africa from 1960 to 2014. The other approach involves in-depth case studies of mutinies in Sierra Leone, The Gambia, and Burkina Faso, which include extensive interviews with mutineers and others knowledgeable about the revolts. This chapter will also expand on the definition of mutiny used in the research and show how it differs from a coup d’état.
The Typical Mutiny
Authors: Dwyer Maggie
Published: June 2019

This chapter looks at common traits in the demands made by mutineers in Africa as well as the way revolts are carried out. It starts by briefly discussing the role of the military in African states to show the historic roots of many of the mutineers’ grievances. The focus of the chapter then shifts to the act of mutiny and an analysis of common tactics. Examples will demonstrate that often mutineers are not acting simply on impulse but rather have a strategy in their actions. Lastly, the chapter will discuss the success rates of mutinies.
A Coup Hidden in a Mutiny
Authors: Dwyer Maggie
Published: June 2019

This chapter focuses on a revolt involving roughly fifty soldiers on April 29, 1992 in Sierra Leone. A brief history of the role of the military in Sierra Leone prior to the revolt will help contextualize the soldiers’ grievances. The chapter will then examine the internal dynamics of the unit drawing on interviews with soldiers involved in the revolt. Their complaints and suspicions about political leaders crystalized into a plan for a mutiny and ultimately resulted in a coup. This case study builds on the discussion of the differences between coups and mutinies.
Mutinies with Unintended Consequences
Authors: Dwyer Maggie
Published: June 2019

This chapter focuses on a series of mutinies in The Gambia in the early 1990s. The chapter begins with a history of The Gambian military, which remains the youngest force in the region. Aspects of its unique development, often in collaboration with foreign contingents, contributed to the grievances expressed by mutineers in 1991 and 1992. Both mutinies also involved complaints about peacekeeping deployments. The final part of the chapter explores how the reversal of democratization in The Gambia under President Jammeh (1994-2017) made mutinies less likely.
An Escalating Cycle of Mutinies
Authors: Dwyer Maggie
Published: June 2019

This chapter focuses on the mass mutinies in Burkina Faso in 2011. A brief history of revolts in Burkina Faso will show that while the mutinies were exceptional in their size, they followed a pattern of previous similar incidents. An examination of the civilian demonstrations that also took place in Burkina Faso in 2011 will set the stage for the mutinies and illustrate how many of the themes expressed in the protests overlapped with military complaints.
Introduction
Authors: Lacroix Stéphane , Filiu Jean-Pierre
Published: June 2019

This book focuses on the few countries where actual transitions have happened: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Syria, where the authoritarian breakdown was only partial, will also be considered. Most of the book’s contributors adopt a comparative approach, either comparing those different countries among themselves, or comparing them with other Arab and non-Arab countries with similar features (i.e., Morocco, Algeria, and even Turkey). The choice was made to focus on a limited number of themes which have not received systematic comparative attention, and which offer crucial insights into the dynamics of the Arab transitions as they took place. The first part of this book deals with the dynamics of accommodation and polarization generated by the institutional process during transitions. The second part of the volume looks at the role of militaries in the different transitions. The third part of the book looks at several non-state actors that have impacted the transitions. The last part of the volume addresses the often overlooked issue of transitional justice, or the lack thereof.
Bullets Beat Ballots
Authors: Ashour Omar
Published: June 2019

After classifying the military’s involvement in politics in the Arab region according to four historical models, Omar Ashour focuses on Egypt, an example of what he calls the ‘dominant institution’ model. Here, he aims at explaining the series of political stances the army took in the wake of the 25 January 2011 uprising. The Egyptian military’s decision to oust elected Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi on 3 July 2013 presents a major puzzle, given the fact that the army’s interests were not being directly threatened under Morsi’s rule. Ashour shows that this move can only be properly understood by taking into consideration organizational and psychological factors.
Modern Mamlouks and Arab Counter-Revolution
Authors: Filiu Jean-Pierre
Published: June 2019

Jean-Pierre Filiu adopts a broad historical view by drawing a comparison between today’s military regimes in Egypt, Syria, Algeria and Yemen, and the ‘Mamluks’ who ruled Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1516. According to Filiu, the brutal way in which the ‘neo-Mamluk’ regime in Algeria derailed the political transition in Algeria from 1992 onwards set the ‘counter-revolutionary’ pattern which similarly conjured regimes in Egypt, Syria and Yemen followed in dealing with the 2011 uprisings and their aftermath. This goes a long way in explaining why the only country where the bases of a democratic political order were successfully established is non-Mamluk Tunisia.
Trashing Transitions
Authors: Lynch Marc
Published: June 2019

Marc Lynch examines the paradoxes of Arab media—in which he includes TV channels, radios and newspapers, both national and transnational, as well as websites and social media outlets, all of which form a single ‘media ecosystem’—which both proved crucial to the uprisings and contributed to the failure of democratic transitions. While discussing the significant differences that exist among Arab countries, he shows that the media’s susceptibility to political capture (by regional actors or domestic forces) and its tendency to magnify fear and uncertainty helped fuel the political polarization that would eventually tear the democratic transitions apart.
Not Ready for Democracy
Authors: Masoud Tarek
Published: June 2019

Comparing Egypt and Tunisia, Tarek Masoud argues that the distinctive make-ups and strengths of civil society in those two countries explain why their transitions took different paths. He dismisses previous arguments about the role of the army or the democratic commitment of politicians, arguing instead that Tunisian civil society was stronger and had a less pronounced religious coloration than Egypt’s, with the result that its secular politicians could easily acquire a substantial political base, leading to more balanced electoral results. As no single party or camp had hegemony, leading politicians were forced to make the necessary political compromises. Masoud then builds on this conclusion to suggest a more structural argument: that the greater economic development, industrialization and urbanization of Tunisia explains why its civil society had those specific features that Egypt’s lacked.
Introduction
Authors: Tomba Massimiliano
Published: June 2019

The first chapter outlines the need for a new historiographical paradigm that supersedes the modern conception of universal history by rearticulating history as a plurality of historical temporalities interwoven and in friction with each other. This pluralization of historical temporalities responds to the present need to understand and intervene in a globalized world, a need that involves, beside provincializing Europe, overcoming the provincialism of time, which imposes the linear trajectory of European history as normative for the rest of the world. Moreover, in this chapter I distinguish between juridical universalism and political universality. The universality that I call insurgent has to do with the democratic excess that disorders an existing order and gives rise to a new institutional fabric. The democratic excess is such that it goes beyond the constitutional armor of the representative state and calls into play a plurality of powers which citizens have access to in everyday political practice.
1793: The Neglected Legacy of Insurgent Universality
Authors: Tomba Massimiliano
Published: June 2019

Comparing the 1789 and 1793 declarations in their respective contexts, the second chapter clarifies the limits of rights declarations as juridical texts and presents a critique of their universal aspirations. In contrast to the juridical universalism of 1789, the insurgent universality of 1793 finds its own background in the insurgencies of women, the poor, and slaves, which questioned the presumed abstract character of the citizen. This chapter outlines an alternative conception of universality that the 1793 Declaration brings into view by examining the insurgencies that directly and indirectly took part in its drafting. These insurgencies, rather than asking for pure inclusion, challenged the social and political order and opened up the political form of the state, thus introducing possibilities for radical social and political change. The 1793 Declaration articulates a new form of agency, while also making a claim to universality that is not rooted in the idea of abstract humanity but, rather, in the particular and concrete struggles of women, slaves, and the poor. Likewise, a different, expansive conception of sovereignty can be found in the insurrectional practices of these diverse sets of actors.
1871: The Institutions of Insurgent Universality
Authors: Tomba Massimiliano
Published: June 2019

The third chapter discusses the Paris Commune and the way it prompts us to think about politics beyond a horizon that often assumes to be immutable representative democracy and the principle of private property. It analyzes the Declarations by members of the Commune that claimed the need to “universalize politics and property” via the new institutions of the Universal Republic. In the Commune, the rupture in the state machinery came about not with the seizure of power but through new political institutions that reclaimed other traditions of politics, channeling them into a new trajectory of modernity. The Communards were changing their present order by recombining alternative temporalities and traditions of modernity. Far from being a legal-political model to be realized, the Commune was a political practice that sought to define a new institutional fabric and a new subjectivity. This chapter shows how the Commune reconfigured the entire system of political and legal relations by reactivating intermediate authorities and integrating individual rights with those of groups and associations.
1994: Zapatistas and the Dispossessed of History
Authors: Tomba Massimiliano
Published: June 2019

The fifth chapter investigates the Zapatista Insurgency from the perspective of its declarations, documents, and challenges to the Mexico Constitution. The Zapatista insurgency is a field of experimentation and practice for new institutions that have been created in the intersection of different traditions, resuming indigenous practices of consensus and decision-making. The chapter highlights the conceptual incompatibility between indigenous conceptions of land and Western conceptions of private property in order to show that there are alternative theoretical and political trajectories, which need not be considered backward or residual. Instead, these ways can offer an opportunity to radically question the singularity of the Western political and juridical framework. In this chapter the practices of the commons and indigenous rights are considered as part of an alternative legacy of modernity and the tradition of insurgent universality.
In Lieu of a Conclusion
Authors: Tomba Massimiliano
Published: June 2019

The final chapter investigates to what extent democracy and private property are compatible with each other—and to what extent they are incompatible. This chapter shows how numerous insurgencies of modernity have created, reconfigured, and, through traditions, reactivated preexisting institutions of local self-government and communal management of property which challenge the normative trajectory of modernity based on the state, private property, and the capitalist mode of production.
Fracturing and Revival
Authors: Silva Jennifer M.
Published: June 2019

This chapter examines how the decline of the American Dream is lived and felt. It traces how three families attach meaning to their suffering, assign blame for it, and imagine a way out of it. The Lorino family blames politicians for offering government “handouts” to gain votes yet shielding their own daughter from the growing pains that might have made her strong enough to resist heroin. Although they are critical of corporations that place profit over workers, they turn to outsider candidates as a last-ditch effort to stem the tide of political corruption. The Adams’s, who have been disabled and out of work for years, fantasize about violent white supremacy to restore their family legacy. Finally, the Hunters, a newly arrived African American family with a history of trauma, drug abuse, and poverty, attempt to transcend the concerns of the outside world, turning safety and happiness into a matter of perception, rather than one of social change.
The Coal Miner’s Granddaughter
Authors: Silva Jennifer M.
Published: June 2019

This chapter documents how white working-class women mourn the loss of their subordinate roles as wives and mothers, even as they are victimized in those roles. Living on the edge of poverty, struggling to afford heat, housing, health care, and food for their children, white women wage their political battles within the context of the fragile and aggrieved working-class family. Some women reject the social safety net in the belief that suffering is good for the soul. Condemning their own family members for their inability to rise above pain serves as a way to feel validated, in control, and safe. Some women cut themselves off from family members who have hurt them by deciding that dependence makes them vulnerable, and isolation is the safest way to survive. For others, the impossibility of personal trust in the family simply renders impersonal trust in democracy unimaginable.
Democracy Denied
Authors: Silva Jennifer M.
Published: June 2019

This chapter examines what unites working-class people across race, birthplace, and gender: their disenchantment with mainstream social and political institutions, and their decision to disable themselves as a larger political group. The people in this chapter retain a sense of connection to “the people,” as opposed to the American government, which they unapologetically dismiss as fraudulent. But they firmly believe that their “vote means nothing” because inauthentic politicians will say or do whatever they need to in order to attract donors and stay in power. Instead, they embrace self-help mantras and conspiracy theories that promote individual over collective efficacy. What they have in common—distrust, a focus on self-efficacy over collective efficacy, and a dismissal of larger social concerns that do not seem to affect them personally—raises serious questions about the shared identities, alliances, and values upon which any kind of political mobilization might rest.
Conclusion
Authors: Silva Jennifer M.
Published: June 2019

This chapter considers whether affinities built around shared pain might serve as a bridge between working-class people and their broader communities, restoring connection and resilience. “Class” as a mediating identity between individual troubles and collective action is not working as it once did. The challenges of a sharply divided and deeply unequal postindustrial society in which the “working class” is no longer white, no longer male, and sometimes not even working underscored the thesis of this book. In the coal region, without these kinds of routines and interactions, people are largely on their own to connect their experiences up to politics, which often makes their political worldviews seem fractured, contradictory, or incomplete. Building robust public forums that counter self-insulation, and where pain and solutions can be shared openly, could provide a vehicle for collective mobilization.
Burying Jihadis
Authors: Kastoryano Riva
Published: June 2019

What should states do with the bodies of suicide bombers and other jihadists who die while perpetrating terrorist attacks? This original and unsettling book explores the host of ethical and political questions raised by this dilemma, from (non-)legitimization of the "enemy" and their cause to the non-territorial identity of individuals who identified in life with a global community of believers. Because states do not recognize suicide bombers as enemy combatants, governments must decide individually what to do with their remains. Riva Kastoryano offers a window onto this challenging predicament through the responses of the American, Spanish, British and French governments after the Al-Qaeda suicide attacks in New York, Madrid and London, and Islamic State's attacks on Paris in 2015. Interviewing officials, religious and local leaders and jihadists' families, both in their countries of origin and in the target nations, she has traced the terrorists' travel history, discovering unexpected connections between their itineraries and the handling of their burials. This fascinating book reveals how states' approaches to a seemingly practical issue are closely shaped by territory, culture, globalization and identity.
The Territory at Stake
Authors: Kastoryano Riva
Published: June 2019

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict undeniably provides elements for an analysis in terms of territorial and non-territorial attachment, and local and global conflict. Jihad is in this case interpreted as a resistance movement in Palestine where the religious question is superposed on a territorial and geopolitical dimension.
Trajectories and Burials
Authors: Kastoryano Riva
Published: June 2019

The 9/11 jihadis were constantly on the move. They traveled continually, from Europe to Asia, from the Arabian Peninsula to America and within each of these continents, as though they came from no specific place and were headed to wherever the network took them. Their travel patterns indicate their ties with one or more other networks, their shift from one to the other, the invention of spontaneous and temporary clusters, with constant movements to and fro. No state claimed responsibility for their deed, no government took pride in their war, no authority sought to recover their bodies or even fragments of their bodies, as is customary for soldiers who died in combat. To this day, they are buried nowhere.
Local History and Its Global Representation
Authors: Kastoryano Riva
Published: June 2019

9/11 is clearly a turning point in world history, the event that marked the start of the twenty-first century. It posed a challenge to the territorial grounding of classic warfare and sounded the alarm as to the scope and range of transnational networks in this war. 2 Its effects are obvious not only in the transformation of space – the towers are gone from the horizon at the southern tip of Manhattan –, but also in movements to etch it onto the national memory. The goal is to enshrine the event in the local space and ensure its global representation.
The Global Nation and Its Enemies
Authors: Kastoryano Riva
Published: June 2019

The response to non-territoriality of Jihadi’s war is states’ extra-territorial war. 9/11 not only marked the topography of lower Manhattan, eliminating the towers from New Yorkers’ field of vision. The event also revealed the scale of globalization induced by transnational networks, with their war on “the most powerful nation on earth.”3 And turned the United States into a global actor, not only in its engagement in a “global war,” but also through the expression of worldwide solidarity expressed after the attacks.
Trajectories and Burials
Authors: Kastoryano Riva
Published: June 2019

Unlike the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, who had traveled all over and settled nowhere, the young men charged with 11M attacks were first-generation immigrants. They were born in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt. Some were legal migrants, others were not. Some were students, others shopkeepers. A few of them were naturalized Spanish. The burial follows the example of ETA s terrorist that is the return of the bodies to families “back home”. All had found in Spain a gateway to Europe, or a path to escape unemployment and poverty on the opposite shore of the Mediterranean. In addition to classic jihadi circuits – training in Afghanistan or Pakistan, combat in Bosnia or Chechnya –, the trajectories of the perpetrators of the Madrid attacks linked North Africa to Europe and interconnected the various European cities
Enmity or Friendship?
Authors: Mara Gerald M.
Published: June 2019

Chapter 1 interprets statements offered by two twentieth-century philosophers, Carl Schmitt, principally in The Concept of the Political, and Jacques Derrida, in his critique of Schmitt in The Politics of Friendship. Both works make the importance of political philosophy’s frame of reference explicit, though they offer opposed characterizations of its content. I argue that the substantive positions taken in the two works share more characteristics than initially apparent. Schmitt’s characterization of enmity as the essence of politics must accommodate a kind of mutuality. And Derrida’s political friendship eventually constructs its own distinctive enemy. Those complicating parallels diminish confidence in either author’s ability to settle the question of how political thought should be framed and prompt a reconsideration of how allegedly overarching imperatives of war and peace have been treated within the history of Western political philosophy.
War Is History
Authors: Mara Gerald M.
Published: June 2019

Chapter 4 examines two different treatments of war, understood historically, those offered by G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche. Initially, they seem to understand human activity through nearly opposite lenses. Hegel traces how the creation of modernity’s social order has actualized free rationality, overcoming primitive impulses to war-making. Nietzsche reasserts the value of aggression, not merely as the sign of robust politics but as the core of a psychic energy continually expended in self-overcoming. As a result, both thinkers eventually diminish the pragmatic importance of political conflict for philosophy. Instead, such conflicts are institutionalized within the practices of the ethical state (Hegel) or transformed into active self-disruption and re-creation (Nietzsche). Yet both narratives leave spaces for the continuation or re-emergence of wars that their philosophical perspectives cannot critically engage. I contend that similar questions beset treatments of politics offered by Hegel’s modern and Nietzsche’s postmodern descendants.
Neuronal Assembly
Authors: Buzsáki György
Published: June 2019

To effectively send a message, a single neuron must cooperate with its peers. Such cooperation can be achieved by synchronizing their spikes together within the time window limited by the ability of the downstream reader neuron to integrate the incoming signals. Therefore, the cell assembly, defined from the point of view of the reader neuron, can be considered as a unit of neuronal communication, a “neuronal letter.” Acting in assemblies has several advantages. A cooperative assembly partnership tolerates spike rate variation in individual cells effectively because the total excitatory effect of the assembly is what matters to the reader mechanism. Interacting assembly members can compute probabilities rather than convey deterministic information and can robustly tolerate noise even if the individual members respond probabilistically.
Internalization of Experience
Authors: Buzsáki György
Published: June 2019

This chapter describes how perceptual and navigation functions can become disengaged from their dependence on the external world. The key physiological mechanism that allows this “internalization” process is the corollary discharge system, which can interpret the activity of action circuits even in the absence of overt movement and sensory feedback from muscles. Within such an internalized world, brain networks can anticipate the consequences of imagined actions without the need to act them out. Instead the outcomes can be tested against previously acquired knowledge, which creates new knowledge entirely through self-organized brain activity. Neuronal circuits can perform both input-dependent and input-disengaged operations. Even simple brains of small animals have elements of internal operations (“cognition”). As the complexity of neural networks increases in larger brains, the share and efficacy of internalized computation also increases and can predict consequences of the brain’s actions over longer time scales and in more complex environments.
Space and Time in the Brain
Authors: Buzsáki György
Published: June 2019

The science of space and time began with the invention of measuring instruments, which changed these dimensionless concepts into distance and duration with precise units. This process created a special problem for neuroscience. If space and time correspond to their measured variants, we may wonder what space and time mean without such instruments, including for non-human animals who cannot read those instruments. Nonetheless, contemporary neuroscience still lives within the framework of the classical physics view. Our episodic memories are defined as “what happened to me, where, and when.” This is a typical outside-in approach: assume the concepts and search for their homes in the brain. Yet I argue in this chapter that almost everything that we attribute to space and time in the brain can be accomplished by sequential cell assemblies or neuronal trajectories.
Gain and Abstraction
Authors: Buzsáki György
Published: June 2019

Gain and normalization are fundamental computational mechanisms that can support various functions in the brain. Numerous neuronal mechanisms support gain control, including divisive inhibition, short-term plasticity of synapses, and subcortical neuromodulators. Gain control allows inputs from the retina and the positions of the eyes in their sockets, the head, and the hands to affect the magnitude of responses to visual inputs in multiple brain regions, particularly the parietal cortex. Gain control mechanisms can shift coordinate representations; for example, from visual space to head space to hand space, or recognize an object as the same when it is viewed from different directions. The mechanisms of translation and object invariance are the neuronal basis of abstraction, a process of ignoring features that are not essential for recognizing entities. Gain control allows judgment of distances independent of locomotion speed. Attention may be viewed as internalized gain control.
Everything Is a Relationship
Authors: Buzsáki György
Published: June 2019

This chapter discusses the hypothesis that the strongly skewed nature of our perceptions and memory result from log-normal distributions of anatomical connectivity at both micro- and mesoscales, synaptic weight distributions, firing rates, and neuronal population activity. Nearly all anatomical and physiological features of the brain are part of a continuous but wide distribution, typically obeying a log-normal form. This organization implies that the interactions that give rise to this distribution involve multiplication or division of random factors, resulting in values that can span several orders of magnitude. Neuronal networks with such broad distributions are needed to maintain stability against competing needs, including wide dynamic range, redundancy, resilience, homeostasis, and plasticity. These features of the brain may explain the Weber-Fechner law: for any sensory modality, perceptual intensity is a logarithmic function of physical intensity. Neuronal systems organized according to log rules form brain networks that can produce good-enough and fast decisions in most situations using only a subset of the brain’s resources.
Principles for “Unprincipled Men”
Authors: Antonello Alessandro
Published: June 2019

This chapter investigates the scientific arguments for and diplomatic negotiation of the conservation of Antarctic wildlife between 1959 and 1964. The subject of wildlife conservation was raised by biologists working within the newly created Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), and they proposed a series of measures to the Antarctic Treaty consultative parties. The treaty parties negotiated the matter, passing the Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora in 1964. This chapter argues that nature conservation became a tool of advancement and power both for biologists, who wanted institutional standing within the Antarctic scientific community, and for diplomats, who wanted to fill the gaps and silences of the Antarctic Treaty with meaning and with structures for controlling each other. The Agreed Measures were the first step away from the geophysical conception of Antarctica that undergirded the negotiation of the Antarctic Treaty.
Mining the Deep South
Authors: Antonello Alessandro
Published: June 2019

This chapter investigates the debates surrounding possible exploitation of minerals in Antarctica between 1969 and 1977. In the late 1960s several mineral and oil companies began investigating whether Antarctica could be exploited. This worried the Antarctic Treaty parties, for there was no agreed upon framework for regulating mineral exploitation. In the context of (apparent) global resource scarcity and the spread of offshore oil exploitation in the Arctic, the treaty parties tried to develop a framework for managing mineral exploitation. Although by 1977 they had only agreed on a moratorium, this chapter demonstrates the contours of their debates, especially the temporalities of their negotiations (focused on the future), and the centrality of the concept of “environmental impact” in the conceptual frameworks of both scientists and diplomats.
Revenants of the German Empire
Authors: Wempe Sean Andrew
Published: June 2019

This book addresses the various ways in which Colonial Germans attempted to cope with the loss of the German colonies after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The German colonial advocates who are the focus of this monograph comprised not only those individuals who had been allowed to remain in the mandates as new subjects of the Allies, but also former colonial officials, settlers, and missionaries who were forcibly repatriated by the mandatory powers after the First World War. These Kolonialdeutsche (Colonial Germans) had invested substantial time and money in German imperialism. This work places particular emphasis on how colonial officials, settlers, and colonial lobbies made use of the League of Nations framework, and investigates the involvement of former settlers and colonial officials in such diplomatic flashpoints as the Naturalization Controversy in South African-administered Southwest Africa, and German participation in the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) from 1927 to 1933. The period of analysis ends in 1933 with an investigation of the involvement of one of Germany’s former colonial governors in the League of Nations’ commission sent to assess the Manchurian Crisis between China and Japan. This study revises standard historical portrayals of the League of Nations’ form of international governance, German participation in the League, the role of interest groups in international organizations and diplomacy, and liberal imperialism. In analyzing colonial German investment and participation in interwar liberal internationalism, the project also challenges the idea of a direct continuity between Germany’s colonial period and the Nazi era.
A Question of Respectability
Authors: Wempe Sean Andrew
Published: June 2019

Chapter 1 explores the demands for colonial restitution by the former officials, with particular emphasis on Heinrich Schnee, the last governor of German East Africa, and Theodor Seitz, the last governor of German Southwest Africa. In order to maintain imperial/national conceptions of the “self,” these individuals argued against the idea of colonial guilt and reasserted German Europeanness in a world where empire was an essential component of this identity. They engaged with the new political vocabulary of empire and civilization made normative by the Allies and the League, using it in conventional ways to legitimate past actions and to reassert German Europeanness as well as manipulating it to claim moral superiority. Their arguments against colonial guilt can therefore be broken into three categories: (1) pointing to past praise of Germany’s colonial record; (2) reconfiguring the relationships between the terms “violence,” “European,” and “civilization”; and (3) highlighting Allied hypocrisies and claiming to be the only true embodiment of the new ideals of empire. The intention of this threefold line of argument was to preserve imperially constituted identifiers of the German nation in a postcolonial situation. The end result was a tricky negotiation of Colonial Germans’ identity as a group. German colonial irredentists simultaneously claimed the status of victim alongside their former colonized subjects, and yet insisted they were separate from and more advanced than these groups. They demanded recognition of the word “German” as synonymous with the term “European,” and yet also claimed moral superiority over the rest of European civilization.
“O Afrika, Meine Seele ist in dir geblieben”
Authors: Wempe Sean Andrew
Published: June 2019

Chapter 2 looks at memory and imperial identity among former German settlers, those repatriated to Germany from East Africa after the First World War. Many former settlers, both those who had been repatriated and those who remained in Africa in the new mandates controlled by Britain and South Africa, sought naturalization in other European empires or petitioned the new international system in hopes of autonomous rule for a German-African state that would answer only to the League of Nations itself. Like Pieter Judson’s ethnic communities in the Habsburg borderlands and Tara Zahra’s “nationally indifferent” Germans in the Bohemian lands, German settlers in and from Africa mercurially adapted their understandings of nationality in pursuit of their own self-interests. This chapter analyzes the ways in which the colony became the preferred locus of German identity for civilians who had lived in Germany’s largest settler colonies, German East Africa. The author focuses on memoirs of repatriated settlers who spent seven years or more in East Africa in order to demonstrate how the colony became a site of memory that served as a foil to what they viewed as the decaying German nation in Europe. Narratives of individuals from the German settlements of Morogoro, Tanga, Iringa, and Dar Es Salaam feature in this section, offering a balance of interior and coastal settings. The sample includes male and female settlers, taking into account a number of occupations and varying durations of settlement in the colonies.
Echte Deutsche or Half-Baked Englishmen
Authors: Wempe Sean Andrew
Published: June 2019

From the moment South Africa made the unorthodox decision to allow Germans to remain in the mandate territory, this group of settlers became the focal point of a unique diplomatic struggle. Who had jurisdiction over German communities in the mandates—the Weimar Republic, the Union of South Africa, the British Empire, or the League of Nations? What citizenship status—and therefore, what rights—did this particular body of “Germans abroad” living in a mandate have? This chapter investigates how the search for answers to these questions transformed into an international dispute in the early 1920s, culminating in the Naturalization Crisis of 1922–1924 when the Union of South Africa attempted to automatically naturalize all Germans in Southwest Africa as British subjects. In the midst of German colonialist organizations pressuring them to fight to retain their German citizenship and debates in the League about the legality of South Africa’s naturalization of individuals within a mandate, Southwest African Germans constructed their own views on the purpose and value of citizenship as they strove to build not only an independent German identity in Africa, but also a self-governing state.
Suicide as a Public Health Burden
Authors: Wilcox Holly C. , Clarke Diana , Grzenda Adrienne , Smith Stephanie G. , Eaton William W.
Published: June 2019

This chapter reviews the burden associated with suicide in the United States and around the world as a leading cause of death. There are many factors associated with higher risk for suicide, and there are a range of conceptual approaches to understanding it, including the sociological perspective, originally proposed by Durkheim in the 19th century and elaborated in many ways since then. American Indians and Alaskan Natives; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals; middle-aged men and women; and military personnel and veterans have higher than expected rates of suicide. Suicide sometimes occurs in imitation of public figures who take their own life, and the manner of journalistic reporting can affect the size of the imitative response in the population. Future directions for suicide prevention should focus on the need for data linkage and upstream approaches to identify novel predictors, evaluate the effectiveness of prevention techniques, and expand on prevention paradigms.
Models of Stress and Adapting to Risk
Authors: Rebok George W. , Bradshaw Catherine P. , Volk Heather E. , Mendelson Tamar , Eaton William W. , Letourneau Elizabeth J. , Kellam Sheppard G.
Published: June 2019

This chapter describes the role of stress in the conduct of both public mental health research and practice. It includes a discussion of the leading definitions and theories of stress proposed in relation to the experience of mental problems, followed by an examination of the multiple perspectives related to the measurement and study of stress. A broad life-span perspective is used to highlight the significance of both human development and the social context in examining the link between stress and mental health problems. A range of developmental stressors are identified spanning different life stages, and their effects on mental health and adjustment problems are described. The concept of resilience is discussed to help explain why not all individuals exposed to stress will develop mental and behavioral disorders.
Community and Public Mental Health Services in the United States
Authors: Everett Anita , Lee-Tauler Su Yeon , Bommersbach Tanner
Published: June 2019

This chapter reviews the history and current status of community behavioral health organizations (CBHOs) in the United States. The vast majority of individuals receiving behavioral health care today are served by outpatient community settings, with only a small proportion receiving care in inpatient facilities. This chapter provides an understanding of the vital role CBHOs play in providing both therapeutic and rehabilitative services to some of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens. It outlines the origins of CBHOs within the publicly funded health care system in the United States, provides examples of available programs and services, and delineates the range of challenges faced by contemporary CBHOs as they strive to meet the needs of people with serious mental illnesses.
Hopes and Challenges Moving Forward
Authors: Fallin M. Daniele , Holingue Calliope , Ostrow Laysha , Leaf Philip J. , Manderscheid Ronald W. , Shern David L. , Thrul Johannes , Zandi Peter P. , Eaton William W.
Published: June 2019

The field of public mental health has seen many advances in policy and discovery, yet there is much more to be done. We must move beyond a narrow focus on clinical interventions to now embrace the impact of community and population dynamics in promoting mental health, preventing mental illnesses, and fostering recovery. We must take advantage of emerging technologies, tools and strategies to expand discovery of the causes of mental illness that will inform new prevention and treatment strategies. Emerging tools can also guide the best implementation of individual and systems-level changes. Finally, we must continue to monitor the frequency of illness and related outcomes among individuals and populations to gauge our progress and highlight areas for continued improvement.
Introduction
Authors: Balci Bayram
Published: June 2019

Some twenty-five years after the end of the USSR, the time has come to take stock of the changes in the countries and societies that emerged from that multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state. Here we shall be examining the development of Islam in two parts of the region: Central Asia and the Caucasus. At certain points in its history, the Soviet Union projected itself as a Muslim power, and contemporary Russia boasts several million practising Muslims whom it places at the centre of its policy of rapprochement with the Muslim world. The so-called ‘Muslim’ countries that emerged from the Soviet Union—i.e. the republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, which possess a predominantly Muslim population and heritage—are also affirming a new relationship with Islam. And, whether they like it or not, as sovereign subjects on the international scene they are interacting in a new way with various countries from which they import or experience religious influences. Thus, the initial premise of the present work is that from 1991 onwards the Caucasus and Central Asia joined in the globalization of religion. Consequently, in order to understand changes in Islam there, we need to examine the way in which its states have dealt with various foreign influences and the conduct of public policy on religion in the light of such influences. The latter derive from countries which, prior to Russian conquest and Soviet domination, were in contact with Central Asia and the Caucasus. ...
Iran
Authors: Balci Bayram
Published: June 2019

Thanks to its various legacies in Central Asia and the Caucasus, Iran—just like Turkey—was eager to develop strong relations with the former Soviet states as soon as they became independent. However, paradoxically, Iran’s religious influence in Central Asia has been very limited, because of the difference between Central Asian Islam, mainly Sunni, and Iranian Shia Islam. Contrary to Central Asia, the Caucasus has been more permeable to Iranian Islamic influences and particularly so in Azerbaijan, because historically, Azerbaijan and Iran were part of the same Empire, where Shia was the official religion. Islamic cooperation between the two spheres remains very dynamic. Indeed, 70 per cent of Shia Muslims in Azerbaijan are turned toward Iran rather than toward Turkey, a country that seeks to develop its own vision of Islam. Iranian Islamic influence in the Caucasus is also significant in Georgia, among the Azeri minorities in Tbilisi and at the border with Azerbaijan.
Mirrored Loss
Authors: vom Bruck Gabriele
Published: June 2019

Mirrored Loss tells the story of Amat al-Latif al Wazir, only daughter of 'Abdullah al-Wazir, the leader of Yemen's constitutional movement of the mid-twentieth century for reform of the autocratic imamate. Her relationship with her adored father, who was accused of treason, takes center stage in this biographical narrative. Amat al-Latif enjoyed a privileged childhood in a high-ranking family at the heart of Yemeni politics; yet the failed revolt of 1948 was the family's downfall, leaving her and other close relatives exposed to social indignities and privation. She then spent many years in exile, where she suffered a personal calamity that compounded the earlier catastrophe. Through one family's story, Gabriele vom Bruck explores how violence translates into tragedy in the personal realm, and how individual lives and larger cultural and political worlds intersect in Yemen. Her narrative makes these tragic events compellingly tangible, especially at the level of gendered subjectivity ‒ female Yemenis have been either unknown to or deemed insignificant by most male historians of this period. Mirrored Loss is a significant step in righting that omission.
Introduction
Authors: vom Bruck Gabriele
Published: June 2019

This chapter introduces readers to key issues raised in the book: What questions and struggles come to the fore when one shifts one’s gaze from men’s heroic political narratives to the struggles of women who had been entitled and accustomed to their support and protection? What did bearing witness to violence and the death of relationships do to their subjectivity? The chapter offers a brief review of Yemeni biographical writings in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It includes reflections on life writing, methodology, and the modalities of Amat al-Latif’s remembrance such as the disconnection between time and space. It also informs readers about the ways the book deals with intergenerational memory and "memory transfer".
Epilogue
Authors: vom Bruck Gabriele
Published: June 2019

This chapter analyses central foci of Amat al-Latif’s life trajectory and memory world. Recounting her life from a relational perspective, Amat al-Latif wishes to establish an enduring memory of her relationship with her father and exonerate him from accusations of treason. Asserting that allegations regarding his involvement in Imam Yahya’s assassination were belied by his devoutness and disapproval of violent overthrow, she offers an alternative appraisal of the events of 1948. Exploring women and men’s biographies, this chapter unsettles the notion of gendered memory, and argues that the normative constraints of gender on processes of remembering cannot be analyzed adequately without taking class into account. Selective twentieth-century biographies written by Yemeni men reveal that gender does not foreclose men’s employment of emotive parameters. Nor are they necessarily characterized by a disavowal of the personal and the domestic, often taken to be central features of women’s life writing. The chapter concludes that all (auto-)biographies studied in Mirrored Loss are none the less implicated in the politics of memory in different ways.
Displacements
Authors: vom Bruck Gabriele
Published: June 2019

“Displacements” centers on Amat al-Latif’s endeavor to remake her world with her second husband in Beirut and Amman where they raised their three children. However, a couple of decades after having suffered grievous loss her life became overshadowed by her husband’s marriage to another woman. This part of the book includes her account of her mental torment and conflicting emotions after being confronted with a fait accompli she had dreaded all her life. It also deals with her children’s subject-positions vis-à-vis their father’s taking a second wife. Their mother’s narrative negotiates the disparities between men’s and women’s ethical reasoning and practice, offering insights into the gender dynamic of multiple concurrent marriages. In the United States, where the family settled at last, Amat al-Latif also had to endure her beloved full-brother’s terminal illness.