bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Global Assertion, Soft and Hard
Authors: Kohli Atul
Published: February 2020

This chapter analyzes America’s global assertion in the post–Cold War period. This assertion has followed both economic and military pathways. The imposition of the Washington Consensus on Latin American countries is an example of economic assertion. The United States was moved in this direction to first rescue highly indebted American banks and then to roll back statist models of economic development in the region. Economic benefits to the United States were considerable. Latin American countries experienced a lost decade of growth, followed by some resumption of growth, but were still mainly dependent on commodity exports. Hard militarism in the Middle East has been motivated by goals that were vaguer but included establishing primacy over an oil-rich region. The results have been at best, mixed. The war in Iraq was very costly. A half million Iraqis died. The benefits to the United States are not obvious and Iraq struggles to be a functioning state under American influence.
Conclusion
Authors: Kohli Atul
Published: February 2020

The conclusion summarizes the main findings of the study concerning the motives that drove British and American imperialism, their respective mechanisms of rule, and the impact of their global expansion, especially on the global periphery. The main motive that drove both the hegemonic powers of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries to expand overseas was to enhance their respective national prosperity. While Britain pursued both formal and informal empire, the United States settled mainly for the latter. Britain and the United States pursued formal empire when they could but accepted informal control when they met resistance. The impact of colonialism was more pernicious than that of informal empire. Colonies were exploited by metropolitan countries for their own advantage and seldom experienced economic growth. Countries under informal sway did experience more growth but failed to create diversified economies. Whether emerging China is also developing an informal empire is explored at the end.
Introduction
Authors: Kaicker Abhishek
Published: February 2020

That the ordinary people were merely the passive objects of sovereign authority has long served as a chief axiom in the study of precolonial India. The following pages offer, by way of introduction, an argument to the contrary. While premodern urbanites in South Asia have received little historical attention, the common people of the city of Delhi—regarded as little better than animals by the imperial elite—nevertheless emerged as subjects in a regime that had no conception of their place in politics. Offering an analysis of the evolving relation between sovereignty and popular politics in the period, this book lays out in the starkest terms the heretofore-unrevealed potential of Delhi’s urbanites for concerted action in extraordinary circumstances. This introduction sets the stage in precolonial India and outlines the subjects of each of the book’s seven chapters.
Anatomy of a Massacre
Authors: Kaicker Abhishek
Published: February 2020

In 1739, the Iranian ruler Nadir Shah spearheaded a rapid invasion of the Mughal realm, which culminated with his occupation of the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) and the extraction of a vast tribute from the Mughal king Muhammad Shah and his nobles. While Nadir Shah’s brief time in Delhi is remembered for his sanguinary massacre of the city’s inhabitants, this chapter demonstrates that Nadir Shah’s violence was driven by a forgotten but large-scale popular uprising against his troops. Through a close analysis of the uprising and its aftermath, this chapter shows that by 1739, elites and commoners in Delhi had developed divergent views about Mughal kingship: While the nobility were happy to cooperate with Nadir Shah, the ordinary people of the city would not consent to any ruler other than their own.
Islam as a Language of Popular Politics
Authors: Kaicker Abhishek
Published: February 2020

By the 1720s, disorderly gatherings and protests appeared to have become an integral part of urban life in Delhi. This chapter shows how such tumults of the city marked acts of everyday political assertion by ordinary people. Relying on the gestures and practices of Islam to publicly demand “justice” in the face of “oppression,” such protests appropriated the ideal of the ‘Community of Muslims’ for their own ends. Accordingly this chapter examines a central gesture in such political protests: the popular interruption of the Friday sermon. Although it emerged in a moment of sectarian controversy in 1711, the act of interrupting the Friday sermon quickly came to serve as the key symbolic means by which the people challenged the enunciation of imperial sovereignty when it did not lend its support to them.
The Shoemakers’ Riot and the Limits of Popular Politics
Authors: Kaicker Abhishek
Published: February 2020

In 1729, a minor clash between a group of Muslim shoemakers and a Hindu jeweler in the streets of the city spiraled into an extraordinary urban tumult that led to fierce fighting and much bloodshed in the courtyard of the city’s congregational mosque. Offering a detailed study of the shoemakers’ riot, as the event came to be known, this chapter explores the possibilities—and the limits—of everyday popular politics in the Delhi of the early eighteenth century. Despite their artifactual nature, accounts of the riot offer invaluable insight into the actions and intentions of the city’s lowest inhabitants at a moment of urban crisis, and the goal of the historical reconstruction in this chapter will be to illuminate the tangled happenings of March 1729, while still preserving the multiplicity of meanings assigned to them. The shoemakers’ agitation cannot be neatly subsumed into the standard categories of economic conflict or sectarian hatred that have given us the conventional understanding of the period. Instead of closing the meanings of the event in narratives of “larger significance,” this chapter attempts to behold the city of the eighteenth century from the eyes of the shoemaker.
Epilogue
Authors: Kaicker Abhishek
Published: February 2020

The dynamic relation between enunciations of sovereignty and the rise of a popular politics that emerged over the course of the Mughal empire’s history was disrupted in the years after Nadir Shah’s invasion of 1739. Yet, even as the empire was reduced to a purely nominal entity, both the visions of sovereignty it engendered and the popular politics it enabled would persist for much longer. These concluding pages sketch the longer life of both conceptions of sovereignty and the workings of a popular politics, tracing their final manifestation in the great revolt of 1857.
Independence, Revolution and Mercenaries
Authors: Walker Iain
Published: February 2020

Chapter six begins with a survey of the local economy and the problems facing the new state. A coup d’état that occurred a month after independence led to a revolutionary government under Ali Soilihi, which took power and attempted to restructure the economy, as well as society more widely. Increasingly radical, faced with empty coffers and the return of 16,000 Comorians fleeing riots in Madagascar, the government was finally overthrown in a coup d’état in 1978, which ushered in a decade of despotic rule by Ahmed Abdallah, supported by Bob Denard and his mercenaries. Political repression and economic and political dependence on France and South Africa saw the country increasingly marginalized until Abdallah was finally assassinated in 1989. Meanwhile Mayotte moved closer to France, which had pledged a substantial investment program and showed no signs of abandoning the island.
The Comorian People
Authors: Walker Iain
Published: February 2020

The final chapter looks more closely at the islands’ people: their matrilineal kinship systems, age systems, associated rituals and powerful forces for social cohesion. It surveys their material culture, clothing, music and food, and explores the different types of social and ethnic identities that Comorians might invoke, particularly the hierarchies that continue to distinguish the noble born, those of Arab ancestry, and the descendants of slaves, the African, particularly on Ndzuani. On Mayotte, now firmly part of France, different identities are at play. The importance of the Comorian diaspora is explained, whether in Zanzibar, Madagascar or in France, and their contribution, particularly in terms of remittances, to local economic development. This chapter ends with some reflections on the future of the archipelago – both the independent state and French Mayotte.
Visibility
Authors: Callahan William A.
Published: February 2020

This short introduction to Part I, “Visibility/Visuality: A Framework for Analysis,” explains why visuals are important for international politics. It summarizes how Chapters 1–3, on visibility, visuality, and dynamic dyads, unpack arguments raised in the introduction. While it is popular to use the term “visuality” to discuss how images are more than objective reflections of reality, Part I argues that we need to differentiate between “meaning” and “doing.” It thus presents both a literature review of visual culture studies and visual IR research and an original analytical framework for understanding visual international politics.
Visibility, Visuality, and Mass (Self)Surveillance
Authors: Callahan William A.
Published: February 2020

Chapter 11 addresses a crossover domain in which images and artifacts co-exist in surveillance. It turns the question of visibility around: not just what we see, but how we are seen, including how we are constituted through various gazes. While most analyses of surveillance look to technology and security, this chapter explores the “culture of surveillance,” in which surveillance is an interactive practice of social-ordering and world-ordering. It traces the politics of surveillance through an analysis of historical and social trends in China and Euro-America: the pre-modern society of sovereignty, the modern society of discipline, and the contemporary networked society of control. It thus compares how surveillance provokes censorship, self-discipline, and creative social-ordering. Chapter 11 concludes that these are political rather than technical or cultural issues, and that they pose problems for both democratic societies and authoritarian states. It thus uses non-Western concepts and experiences to explore the sensible politics of visual artifacts.
Overview
Authors: Mehta Rupal N.
Published: February 2020

The overview accomplishes three goals. First, it presents the empirical research design and examines the utility of mixed-method research design that uses both quantitative and qualitative evidence. This approach is especially important given the “small-n” problem inherent in nuclear politics, that is, the relatively small universe of nuclear weapons proliferation cases over time. Second, it introduces broad characteristics and descriptive statistics underlying nuclear weapons activity from the historical record. Third, it presents an overview of the selection criteria, value, and sources of case studies and how they provide support for my theoretical framework. These cases illustrate the core hypothesis and key scope conditions that examine how instances of leadership change and political relationships with the United States influence nuclear decision-making and the likelihood of counterproliferation success and failure, in the shadow of military force.
India: Erstwhile Ally and Nuclear Reversal
Authors: Mehta Rupal N.
Published: February 2020

This chapter contains the first of the three comparative case studies—Indian, Iranian, and North Korean nuclear weapons programs. It begins by presenting an in-depth case selection discussion and the utility of both an intra-case and comparative case selection method. The chapter continues by examining how India successfully, and clandestinely, developed a nuclear capability despite early counterproliferation attempts by the United States. The first half of the chapter describes the initial phase of the Indian program that culminated in the 1974 Peaceful Nuclear Explosion. Despite the United States’ early success in incentivizing the Indians to suspend their nuclear pursuit, U.S. efforts at nuclear reversal failed and the Indians ultimately became a full-fledged nuclear weapons state in 1998. The chapter concludes by describing the ultimate failure of counterproliferation attempts by the United States in accord with the expectations of the theoretical framework laid out in Chapter 2.
Iran: Adversaries and Nuclear Reversal
Authors: Mehta Rupal N.
Published: February 2020

This chapter presents an in-depth case study analysis of the Iranian nuclear program from its inception to the country’s ultimate decision to renounce its nuclear ambitions in 2015. The chapter begins by examining the trajectory of the Iranian nuclear program and some of the initial attempts by the international community to persuade Iran to end it. Using archival and interview-based data, this analysis demonstrates the powerful role of inducements offered by the United States and other members of the international community, in conjunction with the election of President Rouhani, that provided a window of opportunity that ultimately led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The chapter concludes with an update about the long-term viability of the Iran deal.
North Korea:
Authors: Mehta Rupal N.
Published: February 2020

In the last of the three comparative case study analyses, this chapter explores the greatest remaining challenge to the non-proliferation regime: North Korea. Its recent rise in belligerence toward its neighbors in the region and the United States presents a troubling prospect about peace and security in the region, especially in light of its continued nuclear and missile tests. Despite continued efforts by the U.S. and other key members of the international community to negotiate with Pyongyang, North Korea remains committed to its nuclear program. This chapter examines the history of the North Korean program and the myriad attempts by American leaders (beginning primarily with the Clinton Administration) to persuade the North Korean leadership to abandon its nuclear pursuit. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the current efforts to engage the North Koreans, the implications of this policy, and potential policy recommendations to help mitigate the challenges posed by the DPRK.
Immoral Times
Authors: Cook Ian M.
Published: February 2020

Cook examines the context and function of the ongoing moral and cultural policing of young people and minorities in Mangaluru by vigilante Hindu groups with government complicity. Based on long term ethnographic fieldwork with the city’s burgeoning population of students and underemployed youth, Cook argues that the violence is fueled by the resentment against what is seen as the cultural pollution of ‘excessive’ freedom among middle class youth. Many of the vigilantes are underemployed youth, structurally shut out from gainful employment and prestigious education. Instead they assume positions as self-appointed guardians of Indian culture and putative ‘Hindu values’, as well as protectors of young women against the seductions of western immorality, and the imagined sexual predation by men from the minority community. Cook explains this as a contradiction within neo-liberalism: a tension between the ‘Western cultural values’ that are resented by the vigilantes, and their simultaneous celebration of a neo-liberal culture of economic freedom that they hope will deliver them into a life of success. Their failure in the latter seems to fuel their commitment to combat the former.
How the Sangh Parivar Writes and Teaches History
Authors: Sarkar Tanika
Published: February 2020

Beginning with the writings on history by Savarkar and Golwalkar, Tanika Sarkar analyses how Hindu nationalists essentially understand Indian history as a Hindu history. She shows how this understanding of history has slowly percolated through the RSS network of schools and institutions. More recently, this version of history has been inserted into official curricula and history textbooks, from English language textbooks at both the national level, to a range of vernacular textbooks at the state level. Sarkar proceeds to demonstrate that an older and less known Hindu nationalist agenda for historical research has gained force across the country since 2014. This agenda consists of three main aims: a) to elevate the vast corpus of Sanskritpuranas (myths, legends, stories) to the status of literal historical sources; b) to refute the so-called ‘Aryan invasion hypothesis’ and to show that Brahmanical Hinduism is the original religion and civilization of the subcontinent; and c) to incorporate vast numbers of local and tribal gods and legends into an overall national and Brahmanical structure of history and sacred geography. All these initiatives are promoted and generated by a vast base of volunteers and RSS activists across India.
Dalits In Post-2014 India
Authors: Thorat Sukhadeo
Published: February 2020

The BJP’s 2014 election manifesto outlined the socio-economic elevation of Dalits as a priority by focusing on education and entrepreneurship, strengthening the prevention of atrocities against Scheduled Castes and bridging the human development divide between Scheduled Castes and others. This chapter empirically illustrates the low allocation of funds for many sectors including education, welfare schemes like Special Component Plan for Scheduled Castes (SCP) and the high number of incidents of violence against Dalits in BJP ruled states. As a result, Dalits are largely discontent and insecure, which reflects in voluntary uprisings and protests against policies of the incumbent government. At the political level, Dalit parties are joining hands with secular forces like the Bahujan Samaj Party’s understanding with Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh.
Kashmiris in the Hindu Rashtra
Authors: Rai Mridu
Published: February 2020

Mridu Rai discusses the location of Kashmiri Muslims in India after the BJP’s electoral win in 2014, identifying how Kashmiri Muslims are made to serve as contrapuntal symbols for constructing a mythical Hindu nation – of terrorist violence, illegitimate religious impulses and sedition. Rai argues that the evocatory purpose Kashmiris serve is so essential to Hindutva that it dissipates the possibility of resolving the Kashmir question under the Modi-led BJP. The preference for militaristic modes of dominance has allowed India to eschew its responsibility of administering Kashmir through democratic engagement and of seeking negotiated settlement with all segments of the public. This governance confines Kashmiris to a reality of daily atrocities, including shootings, mass graves and gendered violence. The study of the mistreatment of Kashmiris by the Indian state and Hindu nationalists is important, as similar repressive strategies are being deployed in the heartland of India against other minority groups.
Playing the Waiting Game
Authors: Longkumer Arkotong
Published: February 2020

Longkumer offers a preliminary examination of how the BJP has been able to negotiate its status in the region. Based on ethnographic data and media reports, Longkumer argues that the BJP honed a self-sufficient and dynamically structured political machine and adopted an agenda that transcended religious, social and cultural boundaries. Longkumer focuses on two aspects of the BJP’s approach: its utilization of key alliances that have emerged in reaction to the failures of regional and central governments, and its projection of itself as a secular party that encompasses, but also moves beyond, exclusively ‘Hindu’ sentiments. The chapter highlights this ‘double-think’ – the situational/ regional differences in political self-presentation that demonstrate the malleability of Hindu nationalist ideology, while at the same time managing the BJP’s complex relationship with the RSS.
Sculpting the Saffron Body
Authors: Puri Jyoti
Published: February 2020

Jyoti Puri examines Hindu nationalism’s traffic in a popular strand of yoga, one aimed at enhancing health and wellbeing, which has become popular in India and across the world, and while many ‘yogas’ coexist, this chapter enquires into the Hindu Right’s mobilization of this iteration of yoga in representing India as Hindu, which has gained purchase in India, US, Europe and elsewhere. Puri explores the convergence of support around yoga, raising the question of its political and cultural significance to pro-Hindu forces. Looking at nation branding through the lens of yoga provides an opportunity to consider the image-making that is currently underway, advancing Hindutva’s exclusionary programs at home while navigating imperatives of international politics, business and foreign investment, and other fundamental elements of neoliberal capital.
Aggressive Hindu Nationalism
Authors: Agnes Flavia
Published: February 2020

This chapter scrutinizes the triple talaq issue in the context of an aggressive Hindu nationalism in India to provide the intersectional and historical context for the overemphasis on triple talaq and the lack of reporting on the progress in Muslim women’s rights, and to challenge popular misconceptions surrounding Muslim personal law. Why is there an overemphasis on triple talaq today to the exclusion of all other gender concerns? Agnes highlights how the discourse around triple talaq has constrained the discussion of abandoned women within the confines of Muslim communities, even while separated and abandoned Hindu women number 2 million out of 2.3 million in India. Through reflecting on the triple talaq issue, she seeks to find effective strategies to secure dignity and economic rights for women in a context where women’s rights are posed as oppositional to (Muslim) community rights.
‘Belief’ in the Rule of Law and the Hindu Nation and the Rule of Law
Authors: Kapur Ratna
Published: February 2020

Ratna Kapur illustrates how the Indian judiciary, through mobilizing a politics of ‘belief,’ has endorsed the identity of the Indian state as a Hindu nation through the discourse of rights and has underscored such practice through the constructed opposition between Islam and gender equality in the advocacy of the Hindu Right. The article analyses the role of religion in the constitutional discourse of secularism in India and how this has been used as a technique to establish and reinforce Hindu majoritarianism. The article focuses on the relationship between secularism, equality, and religion in law, which is pivotal to the Hindu Right’s project of constructing the Indian Nation as Hindu. Kapur notes that the judiciary has played a central role in legitimizing the Hindutva project, and that this project has gained traction in the legal arena to reshape the meaning of equality, gender equality, and religious freedom.
Remaking the Hindu/Nation
Authors: Chatterji Angana P.
Published: February 2020

Angana P. Chatterji excavates the contemporaneous practices of Hindu majoritarianism in Uttar Pradesh surrounding the 2014 elections. This chapter elaborates on the emergent relations between Hindu cultural dominance and nationalist Hinduism that induce and deepen cultural anxiety, xenophobia, misogyny, as well as hate and violence. This chapter also details select examples of actions to discipline and terrorize religious minority/ othered subjects (including Adivasis and Dalits) undertaken by Sangh Parivar organizations in Uttar Pradesh between January 2014 and September 2018, and those resultant from the undercurrent of hate and estrangement fostered by the majoritarian culture at large. These events pertain to the Ayodhya campaign, forcible conversions to Hinduism, framing ‘love jihad’, opposing reservations and cattle slaughter, and the promotion of hate speech. The everyday and episodic targeting of vulnerable communities is supported by the deeply rooted inequities of caste, class, and hetero/ normative gender, and such targeting, the chapter argues, strengthens cultures of violence and facilitates governance through fear.
The Political Philosophy of Fénelon
Authors: Hanley Ryan Patrick
Published: February 2020

Fénelon may be the most neglected of all the major philosophers of early modernity. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet to now we have lacked a single interpretive monograph in English devoted specifically to his thought. This monograph aims to correct this by providing the first such book-length study. In focusing specifically on Fénelon’s political thought, it has three primary aims. The first is to provide a reconstruction of Fénelon’s political ideas accessible to those who might be encountering Fénelon directly or at length for the first time. The second is to demonstrate the connections between Fénelon’s political thought and several other fields to which he made significant and long-recognized contributions, including not only philosophy and political science but also economics, education, literature, theology, and spirituality. Third, the book aims to cut several new edges in our extant understanding and appreciation of Fénelon’s political thought and its significance. On this front, it specifically argues that Fénelon is better understood as a moderate and modern thinker rather than as a radical or reactionary, and that Fénelon deserves to be seen not merely as a political thinker but as a political philosopher. Finally, The Political Philosophy of Fénelon argues for Fénelon’s relevance to our political world today. Fénelon was a nuanced and insightful diagnostician of ills from egocentrism and social atomism to authoritarianism and imperialism, and our understanding of these political phenomena so familiar to us today can benefit from attending to his insights.
Introduction
Authors: Hanley Ryan Patrick
Published: February 2020

The introduction has three aims. First, it sets forth the reasons why a monongraph on Fénelon’s thought is needed: namely in order to remedy the striking neglect Fénelon has received in the Anglophone world given his historical influence, his intrinsic interest, and his present relevance. Second, it provides an introduction to Fénelon’s life and works to familiarize readers with his context and the range of his intellectual contributions. Third, it presents the three interpretive contributions, beyond reconstruction of his system, that this book makes to the extant scholarship.
Justice, or On Statesmanship
Authors: Hanley Ryan Patrick
Published: February 2020

Chapter 4 examines Fenelon’s ideas on statesmanship. Focusing on his views on the relationship of moral virtue to political virtue, it emphasizes his core teaching that good governance of others begins with good government of the self. Yet the self-rule and self-control that Fénelon asks of political leaders is distinct from the renunciation and “annihilation” of the self central to his spirituality of pure love. Good rulers, he argues, need to cultivate both mastery of pernicious pleasures and openness to true pleasures, as each disposition has a crucial political function. To show this, the chapter begins with Fénelon’s distinction between true pleasure and false pleasure, and then shows how this distinction shapes his lessons on how a ruler ought to be disposed toward ministers and counselors. The chapter concludes by examining Fénelon’s understanding of the practical political institutions most necessary for justice in the state.
Love, or On the Best Life
Authors: Hanley Ryan Patrick
Published: February 2020

Chapter 7 focuses on Fénelon’s concept of pure love and its relationship to his political philosophy. In so doing, it contests the common claim that Fénelon sought to realize pure love in political practice. In contrast, it argues that his political philosophy is in fact animated by a deep awareness of the gap that separates the world of human glory from the world of divine glory, the earthly city from the heavenly city. To this end it proceeds in three parts. The first part examines his definition of pure love, and the degree to which this definition comports with the categories of his political thought. The next section examines Fénelon’s understanding of the life of pure love, and how it compares to the lives led by political rulers and philosophers. The final section offers a brief consideration of Fénelon’s own life seen through the lens of pure love.
Exercises Using the Skills
Authors: Churchill Larry R.
Published: February 2020

This chapter offers a set of prompts designed to probe our understanding and use of the skills described in chapters 2 and 3. These prompts are grouped under 8 headings: curiosity about the contours and adequacy of one’s own moral sensibilities; a broad empathy; conceptual agility to see moral questions from multiple perspectives; identifying emotional registers; sensitivity to suffering; moral certainty/uncertainty; moral authority; and happiness. Multiple prompts under each heading seek to get at the same capacity in a different way. Readers are encouraged to respond to these prompts orally first and then in writing. The exercises are designed for use in pairs or with three people, with each person taking a turn as responder to the prompt and then as a careful listener who voices a follow-up.
Some Common Pitfalls
Authors: Churchill Larry R.
Published: February 2020

Ethics can go wrong in a variety of ways, some of the experiences and the interpretive related to inept use of the skills described in chapters 2 and 3. Five errors are singled out for special consideration as commonplace in ethics. These are the trap of either/or thinking (a simplistic understanding of ethical choices), expecting too much from theory (overestimating the importance of theory and undervaluing the insights of practice), the desire for a unifying conception of ethics (the misguided search for foundations), restricting what experiences have moral weight (truncating the potential sources of moral discernment), and treating mysteries as moral problems (failing to acknowledge the limits of ethics).
Moral Concepts in Practice II
Authors: Churchill Larry R.
Published: February 2020

This chapter continues the exploration of important concepts in ethics. These are ideas that most of us will find to be of crucial value at some point, and many of them will find routine use. The first concepts defined and explored in this chapter are voluntary and nonvoluntary responsibility. It is argued that the more holistic notion of a responsible person is preferable to a focus on separate responsible acts. The other concepts discussed are justice and the measures of impartiality used in justice, liberty, moral rights, conscience, and death. It is argued that conscience is an important facet of moral judgments, but not a final or unassailable authority. Death, it is argued, is an enabler of ethics, and a feature of moral life that gives it intensity and meaning.
Skills and Concepts for Ethics beyond the Lifespan
Authors: Churchill Larry R.
Published: February 2020

The skills and concepts presented in previous chapters are here illustrated for their relevance for the problem of global warming, a calamity whose full effects will occur beyond the lifespan of many readers. This is arguably the most urgent ethical problem we now face. Five debilitating features of our current thinking are described: our focus on the present; political ineptness; the idea that humans are the crown of the creation; consumerism; and our mechanistic view of nature, including our own physical bodies. It is argued that the way forward is not through correcting our concepts but recognizing our grounding in Earth and embracing it. This kind of love of Earth and other life forms is related to but distinguished from that of scientists such as E. O. Wilson and Stephen J. Gould.
Cracking the Case, and Cases to Consider
Authors: Churchill Larry R.
Published: February 2020

This concluding chapter deals with the nature and usefulness of ethical cases, and it opens with a prompt to readers to describe a moral problem relevant to their lives. It is argued that the most helpful ethical cases are the ones closest to home, which we have experienced or conceivably could experience. In the first section of this chapter, readers are taught to interrogate case presentations for their assumptions and biases, and some measures of effective ethics cases are offered. In the final section, 12 wide-ranging, contemporary cases are presented, along with prompts for how to explore them further. These are nonprescription use of Adderall; self-driving cars; vaccine refusal; arming school teachers; businesses that provide services selectively; paying student-athletes; cows and global warming; the effects of social media; choosing the sex of one’s children; age as a screen for expensive therapies; buying and selling organ; and divisive monuments.
Race and the Imagined Community
Authors: Abbas Tahir
Published: February 2020

This opening section of the book explores a set of overarching themes relating to matters of ethnicity, politics and religion that impact on discussions relating to the nature of the relationship between the concepts of Islamophobia and radicalization. It provides personal history by way of an introduction to the author and includes a summary of the key perspectives from which the issues at hand are considered in the book, which includes history, politics, sociology, culture, security studies and international relations. The overall argument made here suggests that Islamophobia is an identifiable form of racism and hostility to an actual and perceived ‘other’. This Islamophobia has the effect of radicalizing young Muslims in the Global North, which leads to further instances of Islamophobia, creating a perpetual cycle.
Framing Muslims
Authors: Abbas Tahir
Published: February 2020

This chapter provides an overview of the experiences of Muslim minority communities in Britain, as well as in other parts of Western Europe. It explores the nature of the immigration process and its associations with the changing nature of the economy and society. Over time, a myopic concentration on ethnic, racial and religious differences has fed into Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment, where a discourse on mutually recognized integration has shifted into forced assimilation, partially into a dominant framing of ‘values’. For example, the discourse in relation to Britishness has shifted away from a focus on celebrating diversity and differences in society as part of a vision of a unitary political whole, and instead moved towards one in which ethnic nationalism, in the form of an idealized notion of Englishness in the case of the UK, is the centerpiece. Examining immigration in the contexts of politics, culture and identity, this chapter reveals the complexity of contested identities in post-industrial urban settings that were once the initial sites of immigration for these groups, focusing on Britain and other important centers of Muslim politics and populations across Western Europe. How such conditions provoke specific types of responses from these Muslim groups is also explored, and two aspects of the nature of the fissures within Islamism are also introduced – one is potentially regressive and reactionary, with the other being worldly and spiritual.
Islamism Redux
Authors: Abbas Tahir
Published: February 2020

While examining racism has permeated the discussion in the book thus far, this chapter explores how Islamophobia behaves as a form of racism in relation to the experiences of Muslim minorities in the Global North. With the UK as a focal point, the origins of this Islamophobic racism are traced over the last four decades or so, using case studies in education and media to illustrate the argument that Islamophobia has been growing continuously due to a host of structural and cultural factors. This also refers to policy responses that are specific to the experiences of Muslim minorities, such as the northern disturbances of 2001, the emergence and development of counterterrorism thinking and policy, and the Grenfell Tower tragedy of 2017. This entire terrain is compounded by a perennial discussion of ‘us’ and ‘them’, where ‘them’ is code for Islam and Muslims. However, given the tremendous exposure to these categories, racism is rendered invisible, where religiosity as akin to radicalization and inherent political violence is the dominant discourse framing the subject.
The Postcolonial Subject’s Discontent
Authors: Abbas Tahir
Published: February 2020

The prevailing post-war paradigm on education and social class is based on a direct association between these two concepts, such that they are inseparable in the minds of many. That is, education leads to class mobility as a direct result of the education system. In extending this argument, the idea that minority children underperform in education due to their ethnic and class characteristics should hold sway, but research has also claimed that stronger schools can raise the average performance levels of pupils from weaker backgrounds, while weaker schools tend to reduce the average performance of pupils from lower-class backgrounds. Many see educational underperformance among young Muslims as an intractable problem; however, in reality, the poor educational performance of young British Muslims is often due to policy decisions made at a local or national level. The education of British Muslims has evolved in the context of the policies of post-war immigration, integration and diversity policy. In reality, in situating these groups, popular systems of multiculturalism endorse notions of tolerance and secularity through the popularization of a multiculture that racializes the civilized, modern or backward in the construction of national identities.
In Conclusion
Authors: Abbas Tahir
Published: February 2020

This chapter focuses on a range of acute crises facing the world. Britain’s post-war approach to multiculturalism has differed from the other countries comprising ‘Old Europe’, such as France and Germany, for example. All three countries once had empires but later had to reach out to their once-colonized peoples to reduce employment gaps created by the loss of men and infrastructure during the Second World War. However, the idea of history as a dialectical process, propounded by Friedrich Hegel and later enhanced by Karl Marx, was challenged by Francis Fukuyama, who obtained notoriety during the early 1990s for his end of history thesis. Fukuyama suggested that Western capitalism had championed in the conflict between communism and free market economics. In the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun also wrote about the rise and fall of civilizations. But the crises of civilizations are man-made. They are not inevitable.
Service as Duty
Authors: Melber Henning
Published: February 2020

This chapter presents a summary background to the influences Dag Hammarskjöld was exposed to by his family during his upbringing, and the influence his father had as a Prime Minister appointed by the King during World War I. It summarizes his influential role in bringing about the Swedish welfare state as an economist (without a party membership) in the Social Democratic government during the 1930s and 1940s. It explains his internalized value system, which was that of a Swedish civil servant loyal to the public interest and the people, and how he defined and understood his contribution. It stresses his emphasis on integrity and service as a duty of life, views which were inspired by the protestant ethics of Max Weber.
The United Nations Between Empire and Emancipation
Authors: Melber Henning
Published: February 2020

This chapter revisits the normative frameworks on which the establishment of the United Nations were based after World War II. It includes discussion about the Atlantic Charter as a precursor to the UN Charter, and recapitulates the differences in interpretation of self-determination and sovereignty between the Western states and the nationalist movements in the Global South that were fighting against colonialism for Independence. Reference to the normative and political power of human rights discourses challenge claims that these were ineffective by Mark Mazower and Samuel Moyn. Rather, this chapter argues that their utilization by representatives of the nationalist movements in colonized territories show their relevance and the support they offered to their struggles. The condemnation of South Africa for its treatment of the Indian population is used to illustrate this point.
The Scope and Limits of Dag Hammarskjöld’s Diplomacy
Authors: Melber Henning
Published: February 2020

This chapter uses the case studies of the Suez crisis (1956) and the UN mandate for peacekeeping in the Congo (1960-61) to illustrate and analyze in detail the Hammarskjöld diplomacy within his value-based framework, and the context of the rivalry between the Western and Eastern bloc as well as the non-aligned countries of the Global South emerging. It suggests that Hammarskjöld practiced an anti-hegemonic policy. Particular attention is paid to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, and the limitations placed on securing lasting peace and stability after the secession of Katanga under Moise Tshombe, and also his support from Belgium. In addition, this chapter discusses the dilemmas Hammarskjöld faced due to having a vague mandate and also increasingly conflicting with the interests of both the East and the West in the UN Security Council. It seeks to balance his achievements and failures, putting Hammarskjöld’s individual leadership into the wider context of the institutional framework. The UN Security Council’s mandates set boundaries and demarcations, which not only allowed for interventions, but often limited decisive action.
Death at Ndola
Authors: Melber Henning
Published: February 2020

This chapter presents the circumstances of Hammarskjöld’s death on his way to Ndola in Northern Rhodesia for a meeting with Tshombe in a plane crash that also killed 15 others on board. Preliminary findings and evidence – which suggests that this occurrence was in fact not an accident, but rather the result of direct impact by another plane in the air – is also summarized. The steps towards a renewed investigation decided by the UN General Assembly are presented, as well as the several rounds of UN investigations and their findings until the end of 2018. The insights available suggest that it can be assumed that the plane crashed as a result of another plane being in the air when it approached for landing at Ndola, possibly with active participation of mercenaries operating in Katanga.
Foreign Policy
Authors: Klein Menachem
Published: February 2020

This chapter deals with Arafat and Abbas’ foreign policy, particularly their peace talks with Israel and the USA mediation from 1993 Oslo Accords to John Kerry failed mission. Special attention is given to Trump’s Deal of the Century, Israel’s occupation methods, Abbas’ worldview and his historical narrative.
Joining The Church of Almighty God
Authors: Introvigne Massimo
Published: February 2020

The chapter discusses the phenomenal growth of The Church of Almighty God and explores the possible reasons for it. While hostile sources claim the church is “against the family,” a study of the church’s sacred scriptures shows that its view of the family is in fact surprisingly positive and conversions often occur through relatives. Five stories of persons who converted are then presented: a young woman raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, a young Chinese man born in the United States, a couple owning a small business in Arizona, and a pastor of an evangelical church in the Philippines. Their narratives reflects the emic narrative of conversion and insist on the persuasiveness of theology. A survey conducted among diaspora church members in three countries (South Korea, USA, the Philippines) shows that most members were in fact converted by relatives, and in turn tried to convert other relatives.
Introduction
Authors: Giustozzi Antonio
Published: February 2020

The book is based on extensive research among the Taliban, with hundreds of interviews carried out at all levels and in every region of activity. This allowed an unprecedented in-depth study of the Taliban.
The Apogeum Of The Quetta Shura, 2005–9
Authors: Giustozzi Antonio
Published: February 2020

Funding to the Taliban started accruing in substantial amounts in 2005, mostly reaching the so-called Quetta Shura. This allowed it to emerge as the main center of Taliban power, and gradually start extending its influence over scattered groups of Taliban.
Organisational Adaptation
Authors: Giustozzi Antonio
Published: February 2020

Originally, the Taliban were also poorly organized. Under pressure from 2009 onwards, they had to complement their trademark polycentric organization with centralized structures, which enabled great coordination in the battlefield and unity of command.
The Troubled Comeback Of The Quetta Shura 2014-
Authors: Giustozzi Antonio
Published: February 2020

From 2014 the Quetta Shura started recovering influence among the Taliban, mostly due to its ability to re-direct funding away from other centers of power. Still the Quetta Shura remained divided internally, and unable to act coherently in order to exploit the opportunities that the withdrawal of western combat troops offered.
US Exceptionalism
Authors: Gifford Paul
Published: February 2020

It has been widely accepted that the secularization thesis is wrong because the most modern of all societies, the modern United States, remains profoundly religious. This chapter argues the US is not more substantially religious than Europe, and the Evangelical Revival and the American New Age or counterculture are better understood as cultural and political movements; they are religious only according to a very loose definition of religion. American religion has become a part of American capitalist society. The widespread prosperity gospel is better understood as inculcating the American dream of victory and achievement in the capitalist system. Many churches are thus effectively reduced to preaching motivation, self-help and fulfillment of potential. Christian universities illustrate the triumph of the modern scientific mindset, for the great majority have lost all but the most rudimentary reference to their original denominational supernaturalism in adopting the this-worldly cognitive style. The religion of President Obama is used to further illustrate the internal secularization of America’s Christianity.
The Future
Authors: Gifford Paul
Published: February 2020

This chapter addresses the limits of religious change. It argues that invoking the notion of change is sometimes less helpful than admitting that something has been discarded or hollowed out or evacuated. A new mentality has arisen in the West, which has marginalized the awareness of the otherworldly that is indispensable to ‘religion’ as substantively understood. Moving to this new cognitive style has constituted a definitive break (the ‘Great Ditch’) in the history of humankind. This new cognitive style is the essential plank of modernity. Modernity can be manifested in a variety of cultural expressions but the concept of ‘multiple modernities’ is misleading if it suggests that modernity is possible without it. Religious institutions persist in the West, in many cases with considerable power and influence, but they have been largely NGO-ized or reduced to the role of pressure groups or agencies within civil society. Their role today is as promoters of human values; it is hardly the role traditionally claimed, which was relating the human to the otherworldly. It is not that religion ‘poisons everything’, as some New Atheists say; it is that a new cognitive style has changed the human situation irrevocably.