Why Did Starvation Not Become the Paradigmatic War Crime in International Law?

2021 ◽  
pp. 370-388
Author(s):  
Nicholas Mulder ◽  
Boyd van Dijk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Legal History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

In the late twentieth century, the starvation of civilian populations as a method of warfare came to be prohibited in international law. Yet starvation is still commonly used today. In retrospect, what is striking about its international legal history is that the ban itself happened so late and appears still so incomplete. Why did depriving non-combatants of the essential means of sustenance not come to be seen much earlier as a cruel form of wartime behaviour that should be unambiguously outlawed? This chapter critically analyses the history of the anti-starvation norm and explains not only why some political agendas for starvation were frequently tolerated, but also why others failed to reach the stage of codification, and what this tells us about its past and future. Understanding how and why people starve, what role the use of blockade and international law play, and to what degree Schreibtischmörder might be held responsible for it, gets to the heart of questions of contingency and international law.

The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-99
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Colby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Despite the central importance of festival and devotional piety to premodernMuslims, book-length studies in this field have been relatively rare.Katz’s work, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, represents a tour-deforceof critical scholarship that advances the field significantly both throughits engagement with textual sources from the formative period to the presentand through its judicious use of theoretical tools to analyze this material. Asits title suggests, the work strives to explore how Muslims have alternativelypromoted and contested the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth atdifferent points in history, with a particular emphasis on how the devotionalistapproach, which was prominent in the pre-modern era, fell out of favoramong Middle Eastern Sunnis in the late twentieth century. Aimed primarilyat specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, especially scholarsof history, law, and religion, this work is recommended to anyone interestedin the history of Muslim ritual, the history of devotion to the Prophet, andthe interplay between normative and non-normative forms ofMuslim beliefand practice ...

The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Freidenfelds
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Maternal Education ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Unrealistic Expectation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy is a history of why Americans came to have the unrealistic expectation of perfect pregnancies and to mourn even very early miscarriages. The introduction explains that miscarriage is a common phenomenon and a natural part of healthy women’s childbearing: approximately 20 percent of confirmed pregnancies spontaneously miscarry, mostly in the first months of gestation. Eight topical chapters describe childbearing and pregnancy loss in colonial America; the rise of birth control from the late eighteenth century to the present; changes in parenting from the early nineteenth century to the present that increasingly focused attention on the emotional relationship between parent and child; the twentieth-century rise of prenatal care and maternal education about embryonic growth; the twentieth-century blossoming of a consumer culture that marketed baby items to pregnant women; the abortion debates from the mid-twentieth century to the present; the late twentieth-century introduction of obstetric ultrasound and its evolution into a pregnancy ritual of “meeting the baby” as early as eight weeks’ gestation; and the late twentieth-century introduction of home pregnancy testing and the identification of pregnancy as early as several days before a missed period. The conclusion offers suggestions for how women and their families, health-care providers, and the maternity care industry can better handle pregnancy and address miscarriage.

EXODUCTION

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Schechner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Oral Transmission ◽  
Transmission Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This essay by Richard Schechner dedicated to a mythical figure of the theater of the late twentieth century; a work of critical reconstruction that has contributed decisively to consolidating the legacy of Grotowski, just a few months after his death. In addition to fixing some essential terms of the vocabulary, together with the contents and the periodization of the Grotowskian work (aspects that Grotowski in life were entrusted exclusively to oral transmission), the essay retraces the formation of Grotowski, the aspects linked to his character, the specific forms of his research and his transmission of knowledge, the exercise of leadership, the role of his collaborators, the sources, the mystical side, his relationship with the spirit of time, the importance (and weakness) of his opera, in the history of twentieth century theater.

Mourning Otherwise

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Athena Athanasiou
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
Military Violence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
A Site ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter engages the discursive conditions that made ethno-nationalist ideologies and armed conflicts of the 1990s possible and probable. Indeed, the question of how to recall the late twentieth-century history of former Yugoslavia constitutes a central aspect of the Women in Black labour of memory. The dissolution of Yugoslavia, especially the normalization of nationalist military violence in the mid-1990s, has manifested gendered norms as constitutive of nationalist discourses. Drawing on the ways in which the movement performatively brings forth an alternative public to embody the potentiality of displaced memory, this chapter argues in favor of breaking through the universalist, moralist, and humanist scripts of mourning. It seeks to make sense of the politically enabling ways in which these activists stage mourning as a site of agonistic resignification in order to interrogate the injustices and foreclosures which sustain dominant regimes of grievability, in Judith Butler’s terms.

My Path

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Luc Marion
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Religious Background ◽  
Academic System ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
New Philosophers ◽  
French Intellectuals ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter explains Marion’s intellectual, cultural, and religious background and academic pathway. It provides an account of French intellectual life in the late twentieth century, including the student revolutions and the movement of the “New Philosophers.” It also discusses the contribution of several prominent French intellectuals. Marion outlines the history of the founding of the Catholic lay journal Communio and comments on the importance of several twentieth-century theologians. He also discusses the French academic system and its future.

Introduction

Mahjong ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
Changing Roles ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The Introduction provides an orientation to the book and its key questions: What did it mean to become “modern” in the early twentieth century? How did American ethnicities take shape in the years leading up to and after World War II? How did middle-class women experience and shape their changing roles in society, before the social revolutions of the late twentieth century? How are these things related? The Introduction also covers an overview of mahjong’s trajectory in the United States. It examines background related to the history of leisure, gender, and consumerism in addition to introducing key sources and methodologies. The introduction sets up the book to tell the story of mahjong’s role in the creation of identifiably ethnic communities, women’s access to respectable leisure, and how Americans used ideas of China to understand themselves.

History and the Militarized Landscape

2018 ◽  
pp. 162-184
Author(s):  
David Biggs
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Environmental Processes ◽  
Central Vietnam ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global Discourse ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The environmental history of war, especially its impacts on landscape, encompasses a much broader scope than the conflicts and the historiography of the late twentieth century. Ideas on the social and environmental processes of conflict draw from a much longer, global discourse. This chapter uses the ancient-to-modern conflict landscape of central Vietnam to argue for a multi-layered, broader analysis of the environmental history of conflict.

The History of Markets and the Theory of Market Design

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Mirowski ◽  
Edward Nik-Khah
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Market Design ◽  
Information Space ◽  
Neoclassical Economics ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Curiously, early neoclassical economics was a theory of agents, not markets as such. But changes in markets in the late twentieth century began to highlight this lacuna. How information was incorporated into the theory began to suggest that economists could not just describe The Market, but could also design boutique markets for clients. We trace the resulting narrative trajectory of this epoch-making departure using an abstract Information Space graphic showing combinations of types of agent epistemology, with different types of models of information.

Concepción Arenal and the place of women in modern international law

2020 ◽  
Vol 88 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 211-253
Author(s):  
Ignacio de la Rasilla
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
International Congress ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Academic Study

Summary This article examines the long-forgotten first book-length treatise on international law ever published by a woman in the history of international law. The first part places Concepción Arenal’s Ensayo sobre el Derecho de gentes (1879) in the historical context of the dawn of the international legal codification movement and the professionalisation of the academic study of international law. The second part surveys the scattered treatment that women as objects of international law and women’s individual contributions to international law received in international law histories up to the early twentieth century. It then draws many parallels between Arenal’s work and the influential resolutions of the first International Congress of Women in 1915 and surveys related developments during the interwar years. The conclusion highlights the need of readdressing the invisibility of women in international legal history.

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