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The West and Islam: Western Liberal Democracy versus the System of Shura (Routledge Islamic Studies Series)
By Mishal Fahm al-Sulami. 2003
This book analyzes the relationship between Western and Islamic political ideas. The focus is on the similarities and differences between…
Western liberal democracy and shura - often seen as the Islamic counterpart to Western democracy. This is the first work to provide a direct and detailed comparison between the two systems of ideas, as given expression in the concrete political systems which have emerged.During the six-and-a-half-year occupation of Japan (1945–1952), U.S. film studios—in close coordination with Douglas MacArthur's Supreme Command for the Allied…
Powers—launched an ambitious campaign to extend their power and influence in a historically rich but challenging film market. In this far-reaching "enlightenment campaign," Hollywood studios disseminated more than six hundred films to theaters, earned significant profits, and showcased the American way of life as a political, social, and cultural model for the war-shattered Japanese population. In Screening Enlightenment, Hiroshi Kitamura shows how this expansive attempt at cultural globalization helped transform Japan into one of Hollywood's key markets. He also demonstrates the prominent role American cinema played in the "reeducation" and "reorientation" of the Japanese on behalf of the U.S. government.According to Kitamura, Hollywood achieved widespread results by turning to the support of U.S. government and military authorities, which offered privileged deals to American movies while rigorously controlling Japanese and other cinematic products. The presentation of American ideas and values as an emblem of culture, democracy, and sophistication also allowed the U.S. film industry to expand. However, the studios' efforts would not have been nearly as extensive without the Japanese intermediaries and consumers who interestingly served as the program's best publicists. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from studio memos and official documents of the occupation to publicity materials and Japanese fan magazines, Kitamura shows how many Japanese supported Hollywood and became active agents of Americanization. A truly interdisciplinary book that combines U.S. diplomatic and cultural history, film and media studies, and modern Japanese history, Screening Enlightenment offers new insights into the origins of this unique political and cultural transpacific relationship.Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West 450-900 (Warfare and History)
By Guy Halsall. 2003
Guy Halsall relates warfare to many aspects of medieval life, economy, society and politics.This book recovers its distinctiveness, looking at…
warfare in a rounded context in the British Isles and Western Europe between the end of the Roman Empire and the break-up of the Carolingian Empire. Examining the raising and organization of early medieval armies and looks at the conduct of campaigns, the survey also includes a study of the equipment of warriors and the horrific experience of battle as well as an analysis of medieval fortifications and siege warfare. Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West uses historical and archaeological evidence in a rigorous and sophisticated fashion. It stresses regional variations but also places Anglo-Saxon England in the mainstream of the military developments in this era, and in the process, provides an outstanding resource for students of all levels.Mao's New World: Political Culture in the Early People's Republic
By Chang-Tai Hung. 2017
In this sweeping portrait of the political culture of the early People's Republic of China (PRC), Chang-tai Hung mines newly…
available sources to vividly reconstruct how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tightened its rule after taking power in 1949. With political-cultural projects such as reconstructing Tiananmen Square to celebrate the Communist Revolution; staging national parades; rewriting official histories; mounting a visual propaganda campaign, including oil paintings, cartoons, and New Year prints; and establishing a national cemetery for heroes of the Revolution, the CCP built up nationalistic fervor in the people and affirmed its legitimacy. These projects came under strong Soviet influence, but the nationalistic Chinese Communists sought an independent road of nation building; for example, they decided that the reconstructed Tiananmen Square should surpass Red Square in size and significance, against the advice of Soviet experts sent from Moscow.Combining historical, cultural, and anthropological inquiries, Mao's New World examines how Mao Zedong and senior Party leaders transformed the PRC into a propaganda state in the first decade of their rule (1949–1959). Using archival sources only recently made available, previously untapped government documents, visual materials, memoirs, and interviews with surviving participants in the Party's plans, Hung argues that the exploitation of new cultural forms for political ends was one of the most significant achievements of the Chinese Communist Revolution. The book features sixty-six images of architecture, monuments, and artwork to document how the CCP invented the heroic tales of the Communist Revolution.Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia
By Regine A. Spector. 2017
Order at the Bazaar delves into the role of bazaars in the political economy and development of Central Asia. Bazaars…
are the economic bedrock for many throughout the region—they are the entrepreneurial hubs of Central Asia. However, they are often regarded as mafia-governed environments that are largely populated by the dispossessed. By immersing herself in the bazaars of Kyrgyzstan, Regine A. Spector learned that some are rather best characterized as islands of order in a chaotic national context. Spector draws on interviews, archival sources, and participant observation to show how traders, landowners, and municipal officials create order in the absence of a coherent government apparatus and bureaucratic state. Merchants have adapted Soviet institutions, including trade unions, and pre-Soviet practices, such as using village elders as the arbiters of disputes, to the urban bazaar by building and asserting their own authority. Spector’s findings have relevance beyond the bazaars and borders of one small country; they teach us how economic development operates when the rule of law is weak.Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia
By Paul J. Heer. 2018
George F. Kennan is well known for articulating the strategic concept of containment, which would be the centerpiece of what…
became the Truman Doctrine. During his influential Cold War career he was the preeminent American expert on the Soviet Union. In Mr. X and the Pacific, Paul J. Heer explores Kennan’s equally important impact on East Asia.Heer chronicles and assesses Kennan’s work in affecting U.S. policy toward East Asia. By tracing the origins, development, and bearing of Kennan’s strategic perspective on the Far East during and after his time as director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff from 1947 to 1950, Heer shows how Kennan moved from being an ardent and hawkish Cold Warrior to, by the 1960s, a prominent critic of American participation in the Vietnam War.Mr. X and the Pacific provides close examinations of Kennan’s engagement with China (both the People’s Republic and Taiwan), Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Country-by-country analysis paired with considerations of the ebb and flow of Kennan’s global strategic thinking result in a significant extension of our estimation of Kennan’s influence and a deepening of our understanding of this key figure in the early years of the Cold War. In Mr. X and the Pacific Heer offers readers a new view of Kennan, revealing his importance and the totality of his role in East Asia policy, his struggle with American foreign policy in the region, and the ways in which Kennan’s legacy still has implications for how the United States approaches the region in the twenty-first century.Traders in Motion: Identities and Contestations in the Vietnamese Marketplace
By Kirsten W. Endres, Ann Marie Leshkowich. 2018
With essays covering diverse topics, from seafood trade across the Vietnam-China border, to street traders in Hanoi, to gold shops…
in Ho Chi Minh City, Traders in Motion spans the fields of economic and political anthropology, geography, and sociology to illuminate how Vietnam's rapidly expanding market economy is formed and transformed by everyday interactions among traders, suppliers, customers, family members, neighbors, and officials.The contributions shed light on the micropolitics of local-level economic agency in the paradoxical context of Vietnam's socialist orientation and its contemporary neoliberal economic and social transformation. The essays examine how Vietnamese traders and officials engage in on-the-ground contestations to define space, promote or limit mobility, and establish borders, both physical and conceptual. The contributors show how trading experiences shape individuals' notions of self and personhood, not just as economic actors, but also in terms of gender, region, and ethnicity. Traders in Motion affords rich comparative insight into how markets form and transform and what those changes mean.Contributors:Lisa Barthelmes, Christine Bonnin, Gracia Clark, Annuska Derks, Kirsten W. Endres, Chris Gregory, Caroline Grillot, Erik Harms, Esther Horat, Gertrud Hüwelmeier, Ann Marie Leshkowich, Hy Van Luong, Minh T. N. Nguyen, Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh, Linda J. Seligmann, Allison Truitt, Sarah TurnerThe Petroleum Triangle: Oil, Globalization, and Terror
By Steve A. Yetiv. 2011
In The Petroleum Triangle, Steve A. Yetiv tells the interconnected story of oil, globalization, and terrorism. Yetiv asks how Al-Qaeda,…
a small band of terrorists, became such a real and perceived threat to American and global security, a threat viewed as profound enough to motivate the strongest power in world history to undertake extraordinary actions, including two very costly wars. Yetiv argues that Middle East oil and globalization have combined to augment the real and perceived threat of transnational terrorism. Globalization has allowed terrorists to do things that otherwise would be more difficult and costly: exploit technology, generate fear beyond their capabilities, target vulnerable economic and political nodes, and capitalize on socio-economic dislocation. Meanwhile, Middle East oil has fueled terrorism by helping to bolster oil-rich regimes that terrorists hate, to fund the terrorist infrastructure, and to generate anti-American and anti-Western sentiments about American support for oil-rich regimes and perceived Western designs on Middle East oil. Together, Middle East oil and globalization have combined in various ways to help create Al-Qaeda's real and perceived threat, and that of its affiliates and offshoots. The combined effect has shaped important contours of the Petroleum Triangle and of world affairs. A sweeping analysis of contemporary world politics and American foreign and military policy, The Petroleum Triangle convincingly argues that it is critical to understand the connections among oil, globalization, and terrorism if we seek to comprehend modern global politics. What happens within the Petroleum Triangle will help determine if the death of Osama bin Laden will ultimately cripple Al-Qaeda and its affiliates or be yet another milestone in an ongoing age of terrorism.Qatar: Small State, Big Politics
By Mehran Kamrava. 2013
The Persian Gulf state of Qatar has fewer than 2 million inhabitants, virtually no potable water, and has been an…
independent nation only since 1971. Yet its enormous oil and gas wealth has permitted the ruling al Thani family to exert a disproportionately large influence on regional and even international politics. Qatar is, as Mehran Kamrava explains in this knowledgeable and incisive account of the emirate, a "tiny giant": although severely lacking in most measures of state power, it is highly influential in diplomatic, cultural, and economic spheres.Kamrava presents Qatar as an experimental country, building a new society while exerting what he calls "subtle power." It is both the headquarters of the global media network Al Jazeera and the site of the U.S. Central Command’s Forward Headquarters and the Combined Air Operations Center. Qatar has been a major player during the European financial crisis, it has become a showplace for renowned architects, several U.S. universities have established campuses there, and it will host the FIFA World Cup in 2022. Qatar’s effective use of its subtle power, Kamrava argues, challenges how we understand the role of small states in the global system. Given the Gulf state’s outsized influence on regional and international affairs, this book is a critical and timely account of contemporary Qatari politics and society.Losing Hearts and Minds: American-Iranian Relations and International Education during the Cold War
By Matthew K. Shannon. 2017
Matthew K. Shannon provides readers with a reminder of a brief and congenial phase of the relationship between the United…
States and Iran. In Losing Hearts and Minds, Shannon tells the story of an influx of Iranian students to American college campuses between 1950 and 1979 that globalized U.S. institutions of higher education and produced alliances between Iranian youths and progressive Americans. Losing Hearts and Minds is a narrative rife with historical ironies. Because of its superpower competition with the USSR, the U.S. government worked with nongovernmental organizations to create the means for Iranians to train and study in the United States. The stated goal of this initiative was to establish a cultural foundation for the official relationship and to provide Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with educated elites to administer an ambitious program of socioeconomic development. Despite these goals, Shannon locates the incubation of at least one possible version of the Iranian Revolution on American college campuses, which provided a space for a large and vocal community of dissident Iranian students to organize against the Pahlavi regime and earn the support of empathetic Americans. Together they rejected the Shah’s authoritarian model of development and called for civil and political rights in Iran, giving unwitting support to the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran.Frontier Contact Between Choson Korea and Tokugawa Japan
By James B. Lewis. 2003
East Asia from 1400 to 1850 was a vibrant web of connections, and the southern coast of the Korean peninsula…
participated in a maritime world that stretched to Southeast Asia and beyond. Within this world were Japanese pirates, traders, and fishermen. They brought things to the Korean peninsula and they took things away. The economic and demographic structures of Kyongsang Province had deep and wide connections with these Japanese traders. Social and political clashes revolving around the Japan House in Pusan reveal Korean mentalities towards the Japanese connection. This study seeks to define 'Korea' by examining its frontier with Japan. The guiding problems are the relations between structures and agents and the self-definitions reached by pre-modern Koreans in their interaction with the Japanese. Case studies range from demography to taxation to trade to politics to prostitution. The study draws on a wide base of primary sources for Korea and Japan and introduces the problems that animate modern scholarship in both countries. It offers a model approach for Korea's northern frontier with China and shows that the peninsula was and is a complex brocade of differing regions. The book will be of interest to anyone concerned with pre-1900 East Asia, Korea in particular, and especially Korea's relations with the outside world. Anyone interested in early-modern Japan and its external relations will also find it essential reading.Television Across Asia: TV Industries, Programme Formats and Globalisation (Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia)
By Michael Keane, Albert Moran. 2003
This book explores the trade in television program formats, which is a crucially important ingredient in the globalisation of culture,…
in Asia. It examines how much traffic there is in program formats, the principal direction of flow of such traffic, and the economic and cultural significance of this trade for the territories involved, and for the region as a whole. It shows how new technology, deregulation, privatisation and economic recession have greatly intensified competition between broadcasters in Asia, as in other parts of the world, and discusses how this in turn has multiplied the incidence of television format remakes, with some countries developing dedicated format companies, and others becoming net importers and adapters of formats.Sexual Cultures in East Asia: The Social Construction of Sexuality and Sexual Risk in a Time of AIDS
By Evelyne Micollier. 2003
Using case-studies from East and Southeast Asia, this book examines sexuality and AIDS-related sexual risk in the context of Asian…
cultures. It offers a complementary perspective, documented with sociological and anthropological data, to historical studies and looks at commercial sex work, kinship systems, matrimonial strategies, gender, power relations, and the relevance of cultural constructs such as Confucianism and Taoism for the analysis of sexual cultures in Asia.Japan's Early Experience of Contract Management in the Treaty Ports
By Yuki Allyson Honjo. 2003
This is the first in-depth study of the early trial-and-error experiences of contracting between Japanese and western merchants trading in…
the Japanese Treaty Ports in the eighteen year period immediately following the opening of the ports in 1859. Fundamental to the equation were the inevitable east-west cultural and legal ambiguities that impacted on the traders. The learning curve for both westerners and Japanese regarding the nature and application of western contracting law was predictably difficult, tortuous and open to constant misunderstanding. Nevertheless, it was within such a framework that the principal benchmarks for trade with Japan were set down and which, in essence, have lasted to the present day.The Chinese Journalist provides an intriguing introduction to Chinese journalists and their roles within society for both students of Media…
and Asian Studies. The book initially offers a background history of journalists and the media in Communist China before examining the origins and development of Chinese journalism in the nineteenth century.The Crusader States and their Neighbours: 1098-1291 (The Medieval World)
By P. M. Holt. 2003
The book will be welcome for tackling the Crusades from a fresh but important angle; the relations of the Crusader…
states with their neighbours, both Christian (the Byzantines) and, especially, Islamic – the rulers of Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Cairo etc. It contributes to the very fashionable approach of seeing the Crusades as a prime example of early European colonialism, and investigating them much more for their social, political and ethnic impact on the region than for their ostensible ideological and religious motives. Holt uses original Arabic sources, which are generally difficult for Western historians, and therefore this book is an important addition to literature about the Crusades.Oil, Transition and Security in Central Asia
By Sally Cummings. 2003
Approaching Central Asia from the perspective of geopolitics, transition, oil and stability, the authors provide a very broad and diverse…
analysis of the region, examining domestic and international developments since 1991. The book both provides an introduction to the region and presents advanced research on international pipeline projects, political risk and developments after September 11th. The authors draw on a variety of disciplines, including economics, politics, international relations, law and sociology.Global Japan: The Experience of Japan's New Immigrant and Overseas Communities
By Paul White, Roger Goodman, Ayumi Takenaka, Ceri Peach. 2003
The Japanese have long regarded themselves as a homogenous nation, clearly separate from other nations. However, this long-standing view is…
being undermined by the present international reality of increased global population movement. This has resulted in the establishment both of significant Japanese communities outside Japan, and of large non-Japanese minorities within Japan, and has forced the Japanese to re-conceptualise their nationality in new and more flexible ways.This work provides a comprehensive overview of these issues and examines the context of immigration to and emigration from Japan. It considers the development of important Japanese overseas communities in six major cities worldwide, the experiences of immigrant communities in Japan, as well as assessing the consequences for the Japanese people's view of themselves as a nation.Chinese Business in Southeast Asia: Contesting Cultural Explanations, Researching Entrepreneurship
By Edmund Terence Gomez, Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao. 2003
Presents empirical findings from different South-East Asian countries to demonstrate that Chinese businessmen employ a variety of strategies in their…
networking, entrepreneurship and organisational and firm development; and concludes that much more research is needed in order to provide a full understanding of Chinese business success.This companion volume to the highly successful Islam in Malaysian Foreign Policy explores the extent to which foreign policy in…
the world's largest Muslim nation has been influenced by Islamic considerations.