Africans in World Wars I and II

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Lunn
Keyword(s):  
Social Impact ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
African History ◽  
Central European ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Face ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
P Mobilization ◽  
Human Costs

World Wars I and II were very probably the most destructive conflicts in African history. In terms of the human costs—the numbers of people mobilized, the scale of violence and destruction experienced--as well as their enduring political and social impact, no other previous conflicts are comparable, particularly over such short periods as four and ten years, respectively. All told, about 4,500,000 African soldiers and military laborers were mobilized during these wars and about 2,000,000 likely died. Mobilization on this scale among African peasant societies was only sustainable because they were linked to the industrial economies of a handful of West Central European nation states at the core of the global commercial infrastructure, which invariably subordinated African interests to European imperial imperatives. Militarily, these were expressed in two ways: by the use of African soldiers and supporting military laborers to conquer or defend colonies on the continent, or by the export of African combat troops and laborers overseas—in numbers far exceeding comparable decades during the 18th-century peak of the transatlantic slave trade—to Europe and Asia to augment Allied armies there. The destructive consequences of these wars were distributed unevenly across the continent. In some areas of Africa, human losses and physical devastation frequently approximated or surpassed the worst suffering experienced in Europe itself; yet, in other areas of the continent, Africans remained virtually untouched by these wars. These conflicts contributed to an ever-growing assertiveness of African human rights in the face of European claims to racial supremacy that led after 1945 to the restoration of African sovereignty throughout most of the continent. On a personal level, however, most Africans received very little for their wartime sacrifices. Far more often, surviving veterans returned to their homes with an enhanced knowledge of the wider world, perhaps a modicum of newly acquired personal prestige within their respective societies, but little else.

Suicide Voices

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Waters
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Economic Order ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Critical Questions ◽  
Human Labour ◽  
Neoliberal Economics ◽  
The Face ◽  
Human Costs ◽  
Conditions Of Work

This book examines the phenomenon of work suicides in France and asks why, in the present historical juncture, conditions of work can push individuals to take their own lives. During the 2000s, France experienced what commentators have described as a ‘suicide epidemic’, whereby increasing numbers of workers in the face of extreme pressures of work, chose to take their own lives. This book analyses a corpus of testimonial material linked to 66 suicide cases across three large French companies during the period from 2005 to 2015. A key aim is to consider what the extreme and subjective experiences of self-killing narrated in suicide letters can tell us about the contemporary economic order and its impact on flesh and blood experiences of work. What do rising work suicides tell us about conditions of human labour in the 21st century? Does neoliberal economics condition a desire for suicide? How do suicidal individuals describe the causes and motivations of their self-killing? Combining critical perspectives from sociology, history, testimony studies, economics, cultural studies and public health, the book raises critical questions about the human costs of the shift to a finance-driven neoliberal order and its everyday effects within the localised spaces of the French workplace.

scholarly journals Religious Engagement and the Migration Issue: Towards Reconciling Political and Moral Duty

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 236
Author(s):  
Joanna Kulska
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Religious Engagement ◽  
The Face ◽  
Religious Actors

The increasingly acknowledged post-secular perspective has resulted in the emergence of some new approaches theorizing this phenomenon. One such approach has been the concept of religious engagement, which calls for the redefinition of the perception of religious non-state actors towards including them as important partners in the process of identifying and realizing political goals. According to this view, due to the multidimensional role played by religious communities and non-state religious actors, they need to be recognized as pivotal in creating a new form of knowledge generated through encounter and dialogue of the political decision-makers with these subjects. Among numerous others, the challenge of migration calls for enhanced debate referring to both political and ethical issues. When such a perspective is applied, the question is raised of the duties and limits of nation-states using more or less harsh political measures towards refugees and migrants based on the concept of security, but also short-term political goals. In the face of a state’s lack of will or capacity to deal with the problem of migration, the question of religion serving not only as the service-provider but also as the “trend-setter” with regard to fundamental ethical questions needs to be considered.

scholarly journals "It feels like we're going back in time": rights of children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome and their caregivers in the face of two epidemics

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thais Maria Moreira Valim ◽  
Barbara Marciano Marques ◽  
Raquel Lustosa
Keyword(s):  
Zika Virus ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
New Disease ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Face ◽  
Risk Of Exposure ◽  
Common Profile

Over the past few months living and facing the COVID-19 pandemic, the fact that the virus and its spread are not democratic has already been proven: the most common profile among victims of the new disease are black, indigenous, and poor people. In addition, it is also racialized and people on the periphery have been experiencing the greatest economic and social impact of the pandemic. COVID-19, in this sense, seems to be consistent with other documented health crises, making its way along the wide avenues of inequality. In this article, we seek to describe how the paths of inequality traced by COVID-19 intersect with the paths of another epidemic, which is now almost invisible in the public eye: that of the Zika Virus. Based on field diaries from research carried out in Recife / PE between 2016 and 2020, we seek to show how families previously affected by Zika now face COVID-19, pointing to structural factors common to the two health crises that put the same people at greater risk of exposure.

scholarly journals Does a Payment-for-Outcomes Model Improve Indigenous Wellbeing? Commissioning Agencies and Social Impact Bonds in New Zealand

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Louise Humpage
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Policy Innovation ◽  
Social Outcomes ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Improved Outcomes ◽  
Social Impact Bonds ◽  
Funding Mechanisms ◽  
The Government

Commissioning agencies and social impact bonds are two examples of New Zealand’s shift towards payment-for-outcomes funding mechanisms over the last decade, as the government attempted to improve both policy innovation and social outcomes. This article highlights that although the commissioning agencies have been more successful than social impact bonds, neither has completely achieved these goals of innovation and improved outcomes. This is particularly concerning given Indigenous Māori are disproportionately impacted by both policies. Discussion concludes by highlighting some of the problems associated with applying a payment-for-outcomes model to Indigenous Peoples, given these funding mechanisms are becoming increasingly popular in other settler nation states.

After the Therapeutic Revolution

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Disease Control ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Human Fight ◽  
New Public Health ◽  
Nation States ◽  
New Public ◽  
Lifestyle Choices ◽  
Control And Prevention ◽  
The Face ◽  
Models Of Disease

As nation states became concerned about disease in the later eighteenth century, government actors joined the age-old human fight against disease. Given the limitations of medicine’s curative powers before the 1890s, preventive models of disease control were prioritized, and constituted the first line of defense. This changed during the brief era from about 1945-1980, the age of the “therapeutic revolution.” Since then, new strategies of disease control and prevention have been constructed according to the economic and political pressures shaping state policies, and by a new cultural environment where health is linked to lifestyle and individual subjectivity. In the “new public health” environment, state intervention appears permissible only in the face of dire, external epidemic treat. Prevention efforts are limited to attempted manipulations of individual lifestyle choices.

‘Freeman stand, or freeman die’: liberty and slavery

2018 ◽  
pp. 194-216
Author(s):  
Alison Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Common Currency ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Thomas Gray ◽  
True State ◽  
Working People ◽  
The Face ◽  
English Nationalism

The words ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’ feature in forty-three poems in this collection, indicative of the centrality of this theme to the radical discourse of the day. In an era of almost unprecedented repression and the curtailment of rights, working people wished to rid themselves of their chains and reclaim their lost liberties, as a way of asserting English nationalism in the face of a ‘foreign’ monarchy. The twelve poems and songs in this section celebrate both the forthcoming return of liberty, presented as a goddess, and Henry Hunt as liberty’s human representative. The restoration of liberty as an end to slavery is a common trope within English radical discourse and poems often depict the radical patriot endeavouring to rescue his country from an imposed and unnatural tyranny and return it to its true state of liberty; however, this trope predates the era of revolution when such rhetoric was common currency and this section explores the prevalence of the theme of liberty in the mid-eighteenth century and the subsequent influence of William Collins and Thomas Gray on the poems in this collection. The introduction also seeks to explain the lack of references to the transatlantic slave trade in these poems at a time when the issue of rights was at the fore. It includes poems written by Samuel Bamford and the Spencean Robert Wedderburn.

Trade and Financial Relations between India and Pakistan

2020 ◽  
pp. 161-182
Author(s):  
Pallavi Raghavan
Keyword(s):  
Terms Of Trade ◽  
The Other ◽  
Boundary Line ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Face ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

In this chapter, I chart out how partition shifted the terms of trade between two points now divided by the boundary line. While, on the one hand, both governments made lofty declarations of carrying out trade with one another as independent nation states—taxable, and liable to regulations by both states—on the other, they were also forced to come to a series of arrangements to accommodate commercial transactions to continue in the way that they had always existed before the making of the boundary. In many instances, in fact, it was actually impossible to physically stop the process of commercial transactions between both sides of the border, and the boundary line. Therefore, the question this chapter is concerned with is the extent to which both governments’ positions were amenable to the necessities of contingency, demand, and genuine emergency, in the face of a great deal of rhetoric about how the Indian and Pakistani economies had to be bolstered on their own merits.

scholarly journals Weeping in the Face of Fortune: Eco-Alienation in the Niger-Delta Ecopoetics

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abba A. Abba ◽  
Nkiru D. Onyemachi
Keyword(s):  
Niger Delta ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Delta Region ◽  
Niger Delta Region ◽  
Cultural Implications ◽  
The Face ◽  
Oil Wealth ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Universe

Scholarship on Niger Delta ecopoetry has concentrated on the economic, socio-political and cultural implications of eco-degradation in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of the South-South in Nigeria, but falls short of addressing the trope of eco-alienation, the sense of separation between people and nature, which seems to be a significant idea in Niger Delta ecopoetics. For sure, literary studies in particular and the Humanities at large have shown considerable interest in the concept of the Anthropocene and the resultant eco-alienation which has dominated contemporary global ecopoetics since the 18th century. In the age of the Anthropocene, human beings deploy their exceptional capabilities to alter nature and its essence, including the ecosystem, which invariably leads to eco-alienation, a sense of breach in the relationship between people and nature. For the Humanities, if this Anthropocentric positioning of humans has brought socio-economic advancement to humans, it has equally eroded human values. This paper thus attempts to show that the anthropocentric positioning of humans at the center of the universe, with its resultant hyper-capitalist greed, is the premise in the discussion of eco-alienation in Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues and Home Songs (1998) and Nnimmo Bassey’s We Thought It Was Oil but It Was Blood (2002). Arguing that both poetry collections articulate the feeling of disconnect between the inhabitants of the Niger Delta region and the oil wealth in their community, the paper strives to demonstrate that the Niger Delta indigenes, as a result, have been compelled to perceive the oil environment no longer as a source of improved life but as a metaphor for death. Relying on ecocritical discursive strategies, and seeking to further foreground the implication of the Anthropocene in the conception of eco-alienation, the paper demonstrates how poetry, as a humanistic discipline, lives up to its promise as a powerful medium for interrogating the trope of eco-estrangement both in contemporary Niger Delta ecopoetry and in global eco-discourse.

scholarly journals Terrorism as war by other means: national security and state support for terrorism

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faruk Ekmekci
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
National Security ◽  
Conventional Approach ◽  
State Support ◽  
Terrorist Organizations ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Face ◽  
State Actors

The conventional approach in the discipline of International Relations is to treat terrorist organizations as "non-state" actors of international relations. However, this approach is problematic due to the fact that most terrorist organizations are backed or exploited by some states. In this article, I take issue with the non-stateness of terrorist organizations and seek to answer the question of why so many states, at times, support terrorist organizations. I argue that in the face of rising threats to national security in an age of devastating wars, modern nation states tend to provide support to foreign terrorist organizations that work against their present and imminent enemies. I elaborate on my argument studying three cases of state support for terrorism: Iranian support for Hamas, Syrian support for the PKK, and American support for the MEK. The analyses suggest that, for many states, terror is nothing but war by other means.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document