REVISITING ḤAḌAR AND BADŪ IN KUWAIT: CITIZENSHIP, HOUSING, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A DICHOTOMY

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farah Al-Nakib

AbstractKuwait today is 99 percent urbanized. Though hosting a substantial desert population in the past, Kuwait no longer contains any Bedouin who practice a nomadic or pastoral lifestyle. And yet the term badū remains in popular use in Kuwait to designate a group considered sociologically and culturally distinct from the ḥaḍar, or settled urbanites, which in Kuwait's context refers solely to descendants of the pre-oil townspeople. This article explores why these social designations still exist in Kuwait and analyzes the origins of the conflictual relationship between the two groups. I argue that the persistence of the ḥaḍar/badū dichotomy is an outcome of state-building strategies adopted in the early oil years, mainly linked to citizenship and housing policies, that contributed to fixing ḥaḍar and badū as not only socially distinct but also geographically bounded groups. These state policies implemented between the 1950s and 1980s fostered the political integration but social exclusion of the badū. The article examines the lived realities of these incoherent policies as one way of explaining how the badū shifted from being the rulers’ main loyalty base in the early oil decades to becoming their primary opposition today.

2006 ◽  
Vol 188 ◽  
pp. 891-912 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Strauss

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.


Africa ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Ruel

AbstractIn pre-colonial times ‘seers’, abarooti, played an important role in the political and especially in the military organisation of Kuria, harassed as they were by neigh-bouring Maasai and other Kuria. Seers foretold and in effect planned cattle raids undertaken by warriors, but they also acted more generally to warn of impending events and thus to influence the course of political action. They were distinguished by their more public role from diviners but theirs was not a formal office and it drew upon personal qualities, individual success and local renown. Their predictive ability was identified as ‘dreaming’ (okoroota) but the term is used freely in a metaphorical as well as literal sense. Seers varied considerably in their status and field of influence. The introduced term omonaabi, ‘prophet’, was in use by the 1950s to describe the more outstanding seers of the past, and they were credited with foretelling many of the circumstances that Kuria were later to experience. But by then it was only their prophecies and not they themselves, or their role, that had survived. A short postscript comments on the circumstances and use of these terms in 1990.


Author(s):  
Tobias Warner

In the 1950s, linguistic research became privileged terrain for articulating political and aesthetic visions in soon-to-be independent Senegal. The poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s eventual first president, made the study of African languages into a source of political and artistic legitimation even as he consecrated French as the language of culture. This chapter traces Senghor’s research on African languages and explores his intellectual rivalry with Cheikh Anta Diop, the progenitor of modern Wolof writing. After independence, polemics over how to write Wolof culminated in the censorship of Ousmane Sembène’s film Ceddo, which was banned for its use of a double letter “d” in its title (a spelling convention that Senghor had made illegal). This chapter explores how debates over writing systems came to figure the stakes of decolonization—who was authorized to speak for the past and who would shape the terms in which the future would be imagined.


2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-145
Author(s):  
Christine Noelle-Karimi

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.


Author(s):  
Richard Jobson

This chapter assesses the political significance of Labour’s nostalgia in the 1950s and early 1960s. During this period, leading revisionists within the party, including Hugh Gaitskell and Anthony Crosland, argued that Labour’s attachment to the past was negatively impacting on its electoral fortunes. They stated that Labour’s continued commitment to widespread public ownership (as envisaged in Clause IV of the party’s 1918 constitution) was the product of nostalgia for a bygone era and that it left the party out of touch with modern developments. This chapter shows that these claims contained a great deal of merit. More specifically, it demonstrates how the party’s resistance to Hugh Gaitskell’s attempt to revise Clause IV in 1959-60 was defined by its nostalgic impetus. Gaitskell’s failure in this area was indicative of the continued strength and resilience of the party’s nostalgia.


2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-116
Author(s):  
Jairo Lugo-Ocando

This article analyses how the political right in parts of the Global South has appropriate agendas and issues that in the past were often associated to the political left and presented them instead as their own. It does so by articulating narratives around poverty and social exclusion in the context of anti-globalisation and nationalistic discursive regimes that appeal to popular ‘common sense’. The piece explores this argument by examining the case of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Reviewing a sample of Brazilian news media outlets and the type of messages in relation to poverty during the most recent presidential elections, it is suggested that by linking themes of social exclusion with nationalism in the news media, the political right has been able to explain poverty by means of increasing globalisation and liberalism and co-opt this agenda.


2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Lovell

The political, economic and social changes experienced by China over the past decade have been mirrored by transformations in the literary realm. Writers, editors, critics and readers have contended with the acceleration of commercialisation, the rise of the Internet, and the Communist Party's subtly changing attitude to creative freedom. This essay examines the creative responses of three critically acclaimed generations of novelists – born between the 1950s and 1980s – to this new climate. It considers the way in which writers have become entrepreneurs, managing their own personality cults over the Internet and through media spin. It discusses widespread corruption in literary reviewing; the weaknesses in editorial standards that affect the work of even the most mature voices writing today; and the fluid way in which novelists often abandon fiction for other professions or expressive forms, such as film. Finally, it considers the limits of literary freedom in China's one-party cultural system.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Benoit Challand ◽  
Joshua Rogers

This paper provides an historical exploration of local governance in Yemen across the past sixty years. It highlights the presence of a strong tradition of local self-rule, self-help, and participation “from below” as well as the presence of a rival, official, political culture upheld by central elites that celebrates centralization and the strong state. Shifts in the predominance of one or the other tendency have coincided with shifts in the political economy of the Yemeni state(s). When it favored the local, central rulers were compelled to give space to local initiatives and Yemen experienced moments of political participation and local development.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Yorgos Christidis

This article analyzes the growing impoverishment and marginalization of the Roma in Bulgarian society and the evolution of Bulgaria’s post-1989 policies towards the Roma. It examines the results of the policies so far and the reasons behind the “poor performance” of the policies implemented. It is believed that Post-communist Bulgaria has successfully re-integrated the ethnic Turkish minority given both the assimilation campaign carried out against it in the 1980s and the tragic events that took place in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This Bulgaria’s successful “ethnic model”, however, has failed to include the Roma. The “Roma issue” has emerged as one of the most serious and intractable ones facing Bulgaria since 1990. A growing part of its population has been living in circumstances of poverty and marginalization that seem only to deteriorate as years go by. State policies that have been introduced since 1999 have failed at large to produce tangible results and to reverse the socio-economic marginalization of the Roma: discrimination, poverty, and social exclusion continue to be the norm. NGOs point out to the fact that many of the measures that have been announced have not been properly implemented, and that legislation existing to tackle discrimination, hate crime, and hate speech is not implemented. Bulgaria’s political parties are averse in dealing with the Roma issue. Policies addressing the socio-economic problems of the Roma, including hate speech and crime, do not enjoy popular support and are seen as politically damaging.


Author(s):  
Nguyen Van Dung ◽  
Giang Khac Binh

As developing programs is the core in fostering knowledge on ethnic work for cadres and civil servants under Decision No. 402/QD-TTg dated 14/3/2016 of the Prime Minister, it is urgent to build training program on ethnic minority affairs for 04 target groups in the political system from central to local by 2020 with a vision to 2030. The article highlighted basic issues of practical basis to design training program of ethnic minority affairs in the past years; suggested solutions to build the training programs in integration and globalization period.


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