Maps and Spaces

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-145
Author(s):  
Christine Noelle-Karimi
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Middle East ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
State Building ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
The Past

Students of Afghan history come up against two sets of academic demarcations and appropriations. First, as Nile Green points out in his introduction to this roundtable, Afghanistan as a field of study tends to fall off the edge of the scholarly traditions associated with the regional denominations of the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia. Second, the tendency to view history through the lens of present-day national entities presents an impediment to historical inquiry and not only in Afghanistan. The attempt to streamline the past to fit a consistent narrative of state-building may serve to foster a national identity, yet it is of little use in gaining a deeper understanding of the political, social, and economic processes at work in a given period.

US-China Competition in Eurasia

2020 ◽  
pp. 157-190
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Markey
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Benign Neglect ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter summarizes the interplay between China and South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, then assesses the geopolitical implications for America, and offers recommendations for US policy. Marshalling evidence from previous chapters, it shows that anticipating the political consequences of China’s overseas activities in any particular instance requires an appreciation of the other state’s preexisting domestic political-economic conditions and geopolitical relationships. It finds that across Eurasia, China’s involvement tends to undercut healthy pressure for economic and political reform within states and appears to be exacerbating or rekindling tensions among them. The chapter evaluates current US policy in the context of global competition with China and identifies a range of strategies for Eurasia, including “benign neglect,” “peaceful accommodation,” “critical publicity,” “selective competition,” and “militarized competition.” To make the most of America’s limited influence, it argues that US policymakers should pursue a selective and localized strategy in Eurasia.

scholarly journals Morality, Coercion and State Building by Campaign in the Early PRC: Regime Consolidation and After, 1949–1956

2006 ◽  
Vol 188 ◽  
pp. 891-912 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Strauss
Keyword(s):  
Policy Implementation ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
State Building ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Campaign ◽  
The Past

The early to mid-1950s are conventionally viewed as a time when China broke sharply with the past and experienced a “golden age” of successful policy implementation and widespread support from the population. This article shows that the period should be seen as neither “golden age” nor precursor for disaster. Rather it should be seen as a period when the Chinese Communist Party's key mechanisms of state reintegration and instruction of the population – the political campaign and “stirring up” via public accusation sessions – were widely disseminated throughout China, with variable results. The campaigns for land reform and the suppression of counter-revolutionaries show that levels of coercion and violence were extremely high in the early 1950s, and the campaign to clean out revolutionaries in 1955 and after suggests some of the limits of mobilizational campaigns.

English in Asia, Asian Englishes, and the issue of proficiency

English Today ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kingsley Bolton
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
East Asia ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
English Learning ◽  
Outer Circle ◽  
Asian Region ◽  
The World ◽  
Basic Issue

ABSTRACTThe contemporary visibility and importance of English throughout the Asian region coupled with the emergence and development of distinct varieties of Asian Englishes have played an important part in the global story of English in recent years. Across Asia, the numbers of people having at least a functional command of the language have grown exponentially over the last four decades, and current changes in the sociolinguistic realities of the region are often so rapid that it is difficult for academic commentators to keep pace. One basic issue in the telling of this story is the question of what it is we mean by the term ‘Asia’, itself a word of contested etymology, whose geographical reference has ranged in application from the Middle East to Central Asia, and from the Indian sub-continent to Japan and Korea. In this article, my discussion will focus on the countries of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, as it is in these regions that we find not only the greatest concentration of ‘outer-circle’ English-using societies but also a number of the most populous English-learning and English-knowing nations in the world.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Laura Robson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
State Building ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Primary Mode

This chapter introduces the main question of the book: how did mass violence come to be a primary—perhaps the primary—mode of making political claims in the twentieth and twenty-first century Middle East? It asks when mass violence became a constitutive aspect of the political landscape of the region, why it took precedence over other strategies of state building and establishing political authority, and how governments, armies, and civilians alike came to think of mass violence as a viable and legitimate mode of claiming political space and national rights. Drawing on several different and largely separate historiographies, this introduction argues, makes it possible to produce a synthetic account of violence in the twentieth century Eastern Mediterranean that takes account of regional developments as much as individual national histories.

The Islamic East a millennium ago: Biruni’s world

Biruni ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
George Malagaris
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Complex World ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Historical Aspects ◽  
Medieval Islam

Biruni constantly investigated his complex world in its natural and historical aspects. He perceived his homeland of Khwarazm in the manner of a modern physical geographer while simultaneously maintaining awareness of its underlying cultural currents and far-flung connections with distant lands. He appreciated that the notion of a region depended on cultural and political factors; indeed, the modern usage of the terms Central Asia, Middle East, and South Asia implies a multiplicity of histories, as he doubtlessly would have understood. Biruni himself frequently commented on its significance and persistently sought to interpret its underlying tendencies throughout his writing. Whether he touched on the topics of ancient Iran, late antique Hellenism, or early medieval Islam, Biruni added to the knowledge of his contemporaries, and the survival of his works has augmented our own.

The Origins of the Park Jung-hee Syndrome in South Korea

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (01) ◽  
pp. 1950003
Author(s):  
EUNJUNG CHOI ◽  
JONGSEOK WOO
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Political Socialization ◽  
Empirical Test ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
South Korean ◽  
The Past ◽  
System Output ◽  
The Empirical Analysis

In the past few decades, post-democratization politics in South Korea have witnessed an upsurge in authoritarian nostalgia, called the “Park Jung-hee syndrome.” This paper examines the origins of public nostalgia for the authoritarian dictator by putting two theoretical arguments, i.e., the socialization thesis and the system output thesis, to an empirical test. This paper utilizes the 2010 Korea Democracy Barometer from the Korea Barometer and the 2010 and the 2015 Korean National Identity Survey from the East Asia Institute. The empirical analysis of the South Korean case strongly supports the political socialization argument, suggesting that citizens’ yearning for Park Jung-hee is not merely an outcome of the negative evaluations of the democratic governments’ performances. Rather, their authoritarian nostalgia is in large part an outcome of their political socialization during the Park dictatorship. The analysis implies that, although a resurgence of the Park Jung-hee syndrome in post-democratization South Korea is not expected to derail the country’s route to democratic deepening, it may continue to be a main source of political division in partisan and electoral politics in the future.

Mai Masri: Mothering Film-makers in Palestinian Revolutionary Cinema

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Van de Peer
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Women Filmmakers ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
Children’S Perspectives ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Occupied Territories

In Palestine, it is hard to find resident women filmmakers as the Palestinian people are so dispersed in exile throughout the world, and finding the means to make films inside the Occupied Territories is extremely difficult. Mai Masri, a Palestinian resident in Lebanon, was the first woman to start to make films about Palestinians in refugee camps throughout the Middle East. She is one of the pioneers of Palestinian documentary and especially of the trend that has become dominant in Palestinian filmmaking: a focus on children’s experience of Palestine. Her films illustrate how the struggle for a national identity in Palestine is often mixed with the struggle for personal, physical freedom. Motherhood, wifehood and womanhood are politicised identities in Palestine. In her earliest films such as Children of Shatila (1998) and Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (2001), she offers up children’s perspectives to illustrate the politicisation of even the most unlikely participants in the struggle against oppression. A child’s perspective is portrayed as a struggle with the past and the future that is on-going, as the child represents the hope as well as the hopelessness of the Palestinian cause.

Process Tracing and the Political Economy of Development in the Middle East

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Waldner
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Qualitative Methods ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Case Analysis ◽  
State Building ◽  
Process Tracing ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Development ◽  
Analysis Process

In this chapter, David Waldner explores the development of qualitative methods of within-case analysis. Process tracing is a method that can be employed to make valid claims from data gathered in the field. Using his own research work from the 1990s on state building and late development, Waldner discusses the reasons for developing process tracing methods, some early efforts at their development, some critiques of these early efforts, and more recent refinements. The chapter demonstrates the close interplay between theory, evidence, and methods.

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