THE PHANTOM MENACE: FEAR, RUMOURS AND THE ELUSIVE PRESENCE OF AQIM IN SOUTHEASTERN MAURITANIA

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Vium
Keyword(s):  
Al Qaeda ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Islamic Republic ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
Local Livelihoods ◽  
Nomadic Pastoralist

Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania (between 2001 and 2012), this article investigates how the intensifying regional insecurity is perceived and (re)acted upon by people inhabiting the frontier provinces of south-eastern Mauritania. It is argued that armed insurgencies and the emergence of nebulous assemblages such as the AQIM (Al-Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb), must be analysed as constitutive elements in a complex convergent crisis which is currently undermining local livelihoods in multiple ways. In Mauritania and much of the Saharan and Sahelian regions, crisis has become chronic, and while people exhibit tremendous capacities to anticipate the uncertain and navigate a disequilibrated natural and political environment in general, a new kind of protracted fear is spreading. This article establishes how the AQIM is enacted locally as a phantom menace, which asserts itself through a form of omnipresent fear, nurtured by an inherent opaqueness. As this fundamental fear progressively permeates the nomadic landscape, it engenders a recasting of mobile strategies among the nomadic pastoralist groups who inhabit the interstitial desert spaces.

scholarly journals The Politics of Iranian Cinema

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 117-119
Author(s):  
Lina Khatib
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Islamic Republic ◽  
Form Part ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

If there is one element of the politics of Iranian cinema that is understudied,it is that of the relationship between Iranian films and the Iranian film audience.Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad’s book, The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Filmand Society in the Islamic Republic, fills this glaring gap by providing aunique insight into how Iranian films are received in Iran; what political andsocial debates they spark; and how they form part of a larger nexus of powernegotiations between the state, artists, and film viewers. The book takes anexpansive approach to “politics,” not favoring hard politics over soft politics or vice versa, but showing how the two go hand in hand in defining the filmmakingprocess in Iran.The book’s uniqueness lies in its reliance on participant observation, inaddition to interviews, as one method of studying the Iranian film audience.Through this, the reader gets a sense of people’s reactions to the films discussed.Zeydabadi-Nejad often reproduces sections of conversation amongfilm viewers that bring to life his statements about the films’ relationshipwith the political environment. The cynicism expressed by a group of youngpeople after watching Bahman Farmanara’s 2001 film House on the Water(p. 86), for example, serves as a sharp illustration of the disillusionment withstate ideology among the urban middle class — an issue covered elsewherein the literature on Iranian cinema, but usually presented in generalized termsrather than through the prism of individual reactions found here ...

The Ideological Drivers of Submerged Statehood in the Afterlife of The Hijaz

The Hijaz ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 279-338
Author(s):  
Malik R. Dahlan
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Al Qaeda ◽  
Islamic Republic ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia ◽  
Negative Space ◽  
Absolute Control ◽  
Positive Space ◽  
Islamic Revivalism

This Chapter focuses on the idea of positive vs. negative space in ideology and religion. It discusses Islamic revivalism and Wahhabism in detail in the context of statehood. discuss the fragility of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as well as Iran- the Islamic Republic. It considers the religious and cultural differences within the region noting in particular Shi’ite and Sunni peculiarities. It also covers the views and ideologies of al-Qaeda and Daesh. It covers in great detail Islamic governance and thereby dispels the false claims and doctrines of post-modernist al-Qaeda and neo-medievalist Daesh which seeks absolute control of religion, population and, imperial territory. The Chapter looks at counter efforts, namely, Islamic Centrism, by using historical evidence to demonstrate the characteristics of pan Islamic governance as a positive space in The Hijaz.

Space, Loss and Resistance: A Haunted Pool-Map in South-Eastern Turkey

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 440-469
Author(s):  
Umut Yıldırım
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
Regional Studies ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
Eastern Turkey ◽  
Turkish State ◽  
Neoliberal Restructuring ◽  
A Site ◽  
Anthropological Literature

Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2005 to February 2007, and March and August 2008) in Diyarbakır, southeastern Turkey, this article explores the conceptual intersection of recent anthropological literature on space, neoliberalism and resistance to study the affective life of politics in the context of the war between the Partiye Karkêren Kurdistan and the Turkish State in the 1990s. Offering a contribution to regional studies on the neoliberal restructuring of the urban space and to the anthropology of resistance, this article seeks to make ‘the political’ into a conceptual thread. The article deploys this approach to think through dissonant affects at a site where uncountable deaths are woven into the neoliberal restructuring of space, yet denied through the form that such governance takes.

European Bodies?

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paweł Lewicki
Keyword(s):  
Civil Servants ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Member States ◽  
National Cultures ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Visual Markers ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
Gender Performances ◽  
The Eu

Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork between 2007 and 2011 in Brussels, this article shows how visual markers, class distinctions and classification of gender performances come together to create a ‘Euroclass’ among European civil servants. These markings, distinctions and classifications are denoted on bodily hexis and body performance and evoke stereotypes and essentialised representations of national cultures. However, after the enlargements of the EU in 2004 and 2007 they also reveal a postcolonial and imperial dynamic that perpetuates the division into ‘old’ and ‘new’ Europe and enables people from old member states to emerge as a different class that holds its cultural power firm in a dense political environment permeated by networks.

9/ 11, International Intervention, and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan

Afghanistan ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barnett R. Rubin
Keyword(s):  
Al Qaeda ◽  
Islamic Republic ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Osama Bin Laden ◽  
Run Up

What happened in the run-up to 9/11? Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leaders of al-Qaeda, returned to Afghanistan from Khartoum, Sudan, in May 1996. There they joined a small but growing group of international radical Islamists belonging to different groups. Uzbeks were...

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