Knowledge and Skills Transfer as Peace-Building Mechanisms

Author(s):  
Yusuf Sheikh Omar

Somalia has been involved in a prolonged war that commenced in the 1990s, and millions of her citizens have fled their homeland in search of protection and safety in other countries, particularly in the West. This chapter therefore examined the Somali diasporas with particular focus on their levels of knowledge and skills transfer as contributions to peace and nation building in their homeland. It also examined how their engagement on issues such as transnational networking, remittances, investments in the economy and education, media development, advocacy, politics and governance, as well as humanitarian endeavors have helped build capacities in the country. The chapter highlights the opportunities and challenges faced by Somali diasporas, especially the uncertain security atmosphere in the country.

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-103
Author(s):  
Aliaksandr Bystryk

Abstract This paper deals with the topic of conservative West-Russianist ideology and propaganda during World War I. The author analyzes the most prominent newspaper of the movement at the time – Severo-Zapadnaia Zhizn (The North-Western Life). The discourse of the newspaper is analyzed from the perspective of Belarusian nation-building, as well as from the perspective of Russian nationalism in the borderlands. The author explores the ways in which the creators of the periodical tried to use the rise of the Russian patriotic feelings to their advantage. Appealing to the heightened sense of national solidarity which took over parts of Russian society, the periodical tried to attack, delegitimize and discredit its ideological and political opponents. Besides the obvious external enemy – Germans, Severo-Zapadnaia Zhizn condemned socialists, pacifists, Jews, borderland Poles, Belarusian and Ukrainian national activists, Russian progressives and others, accusing them of disloyalty, lack of patriotism and sometimes even treason. Using nationalist loyalist rhetoric, the West-Russianist newspaper urged the imperial government to act more decisively in its campaign to end ‘alien domination’ in Russian Empire, and specifically to create conditions for domination of ‘native Russian element’ – meaning Belarusian peasantry, in the Belarusian provinces of the empire.


1994 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 37-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibel Bozdoğan

Deeply rooted in “the great transformation” brought about by capitalism, industrialization and urban life, the history of modern architecture in the West is intricately intertwined with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Modernism in architecture, before anything else, is a reaction to the social and environmental ills of the industrial city, and to the bourgeois aesthetic of the 19th century. It emerged first as a series of critical, utopian and radical movements in the first decades of the twentieth century, eventually consolidating itself into an architectural establishment by the 1930s. The dissemination of the so-called “modern movement” outside Europe coincides with the eclipse of the plurality and critical force of early modernist currents and their reduction to a unified, formalist and doctrinaire position.


2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Susan Kollin

AbstractDirector Kelly Reichardt has been celebrated as an independent filmmaker who takes risks in developing complicated and often fraught storylines, especially for her female characters. In Meek’s Cutoff (2010), she uses the aesthetics of slow cinema to show details frequently overlooked in the Western. In doing so, the film lays bare the violence of the settler-colonial West, highlighting the underside of European-American dreams of progress and prosperity. Addressing settler women’s investments in nation-building projects, the film traces how their commitments to Whiteness helped underwrite expansionist history. Noting the limits as well as the forms of agency White women claimed in the West, Reichardt pushes the boundaries of the women’s Western in ways that foreground Indigenous lives and the possibilities of decolonization.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Guillaume Lancereau

This article examines late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historiographical practices and convictions in Third Republic France. It shifts the focus from the question of whether French academic historians were nationalists to the issue of how they were nationalists. If republican academic historians took a critical stance on nationalist distortions of the past, they nevertheless associated the teaching of history with patriotism and opposed historiographical “pan-Germanism” in ways favorable to French cultural and territorial claims. Meanwhile, the growing internationalization of the field stimulated scholarly competition across the West and spurred reflections about nationals’ epistemological privilege over national histories, methodological nationalism, and the invention of national historiographical traditions. Uncovering the anxieties of continual debate with foreign historians and the nationalist right wing, this article offers a prehistory of present-day dilemmas over global, national, and nationalist histories in an international field characterized by structural inequalities and academic competition.


Author(s):  
Sachin Sinha ◽  
Deepti Sinha

Globalisation, technology, migration, competition, changing markets and transnational environmental and political challenges have added a new urgency to develop the skills and knowledge needed in the 21st century. Educators, governments, foundations, employers and researchers refer to these abilities as ‘higher-order thinking skills' ‘deeper learning outcomes' and ‘complex thinking and communication skills'. We need to understand how students today are different from those of yesteryears. Although everyone believes that the knowledge and skills that students need today are different from what they needed yesterday, terminology differs from country to country, as does the composition of knowledge, skills and values. This chapter is broadly divided into four sections. The main objectives of the narrative are to understand the growth and evolution of teaching, to develop an understanding of the differences between the teaching of the East and that of the West, to explore teaching as an art and a skill and finally to prepare ourselves for the burgeoning demands of digital-age teaching.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
CÉLINE CODEREY

Abstract In the aftermath of independence, obtained in 1948, the Burmese government launched a project to valorize and promote traditional medicine which comprised the institutionalization and standardization of the teaching, practice, and production of medicines. The government justified this project by asserting the importance of protecting and improving—in terms of both quality and accessibility—this precious national heritage. Having contributed to the maintenance of people's health for centuries, it was nevertheless under threat of vanishing because of the dominance of biomedicine and because traditionally it had been passed down through a plurality of lineages using an esoteric language. Although recognizing the official motivation behind this project, this article suggests that it was also motivated by the need to unify and ‘Burmanize’ the country in the name of nation-building. Indeed, constructing a medicine that could compete with biomedicine, if not overtake it, would help in marking the country's distance and autonomy vis-a-vis the West. Spreading a standardized medicine, largely based on the Burman tradition, across the country would help eliminate inter-ethnic differences as well as the esoteric elements inherent in traditional medicine that were perceived as a potential threat to the state's authority. While claiming to protect a national heritage, the state was in fact crafting a new heritage that complied with a specific image of the nation—a unified modern Buddhist nation—in order to help it attain its political goals. The article also discusses to what extent this project has been successful by examining the limits of its implementations and the response of healers and manufacturers.


Author(s):  
Joseph Takougang

The union between the former French Cameroun and the British Southern Cameroons on October 1, 1961, to form the Federal Republic of Cameroon was a unique experiment in nation building and the struggle for independence in Africa. For instance, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), the first truly nationalist party in the former French trusteeship that advocated immediate independence and reunification with the British Cameroons, was banned in May 1955 by French colonial authorities because of its radical views, since France was still reluctant to grant its African colonies complete independence. For France, the choice of who and which party could lead the territory to independence depended on who French authorities thought could guarantee continued relations with France following independence. In the end, Ahmadou Ahidjo and his Union Camerounaise (UC) emerged as the best candidate to meet France’s objectives in a postcolonial Cameroun. On the other hand, because of the colonial arrangement that allowed Britain to administer its section of the former German colony as part of its colony of Nigeria to the west, the nationalist struggle took a different trajectory and was more against Nigerian rather than British colonial domination. In other words, for many Southern Cameroonians, the focus by the two major parties (Kamerun National Democratic Party (KNDP) and Cameroons Peoples’ National Convention (CPNC)) during the campaign leading to the plebiscite on February 11, 1961, was whether the territory should be part of the Republic of Cameroun, which was engulfed in violence and bloodshed following its independence on January 1, 1960, or face the threat of Igbo domination if Southern Cameroonians decided to become part of an independent Nigeria.


2020 ◽  
pp. 48-57
Author(s):  
Brian M. Napoletano

As part of a deconstruction of national identity, Jennifer Jolly, in her Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas, analyzes the tourist town of Pátzcuaro in the west-central Mexican state of Michoacán as a microcosm of cultural power in which tourism, art, history, and ethnicity were woven together under the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (1934–40).


2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Callum Gilmour ◽  
David Rowe

Professional sport has been radically altered by global capitalism, expanding from its once highly localized origins into an increasingly internationalized, mediatized, and commoditized cultural form. Like other commodities, sport has branched out from saturated domestic markets in the West. The rapid development of Asian economies has witnessed a wave of economic and cultural modernization, and the subsequent emergence of middle-class consumption has seen internationally recognizable commodity signs like the English Premier League (EPL) desired for their symbolic link to global cosmopolitanism. This paper addresses the Malaysian context, where the nation-building process has been problematized by the complex racial, cultural and religious make-up of its population. It analyses the obstructive tension between local sporting developmental agenda and the orchestrated intrusion of global (predominantly Western) sports commodities.


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