My Syrian Diary A Memoir Of The Land The People And Geopolitics

Author : Soumen Ray
Publisher : Prowess Publishing
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2019-07-30
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781545747186

Get Book

My Syrian Diary: A Memoir of the Land, The People and Geopolitics by Soumen Ray Pdf

Among all other countries in the West Asia, Syria was the most tranquil one. There was a civil war in its neighbouring country, Lebanon for more than fifteen years. The Palestinians with various militant groups have ben attacking Israel on a continuous basis and the Israeli Defence Force punishing them regularly for their mischievous acts. Iraq on its eastern border, under the worst Arab dictator, was being punished by the international community. On top of these, Syria’s own relations with the mainstream Arab countries in general and, with the West in particular, were frosty. But in Syria the people were leading a normal peaceful life under the leadership of enigmatic President---Hafez al-Assad. The country’s economy was doing well. He ensured that Syria was never in the list of “regime change” of the US and its allies. While there was opposition to his authoritarian rule, it did not affect the social and political fabric of Syria. What went wrong immediately after his death? How his politically novice son and successor, Bashar al-Assad started committing one after another grave mistakes, took self destructive political moves, joined hands with international pariah militant groups to safeguard his position at the cost of Syria and ruined the peaceful oasis? How a secular country where people of different religious faiths living for hundreds of years with perfect harmony and peace, became the hub of militant Islamic fundamentalists and one of the “most dangerous places on the earth”? To provide a perspective to that, I wrote “My Syrian Diary”. I had served as an Indian diplomat in the Middle east for more than a decade. My three years’ tour of duty at the Indian Embassy, Damascus, gave me an excellent opportunity to know the country, its people and the geopolitics of the region.

Author : Suzy Hansen
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2017-08-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780374712440

Get Book

Notes on a Foreign Country by Suzy Hansen Pdf

Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Progressive "A deeply honest and brave portrait of of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country's violent role in the world." —Hisham Matar, The New York Times Book Review In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul. Hansen arrived in Istanbul with romantic ideas about a mythical city perched between East and West, and with a naïve sense of the Islamic world beyond. Over the course of her many years of living in Turkey and traveling in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iran, she learned a great deal about these countries and their cultures and histories and politics. But the greatest, most unsettling surprise would be what she learned about her own country—and herself, an American abroad in the era of American decline. It would take leaving her home to discover what she came to think of as the two Americas: the country and its people, and the experience of American power around the world. She came to understand that anti-Americanism is not a violent pathology. It is, Hansen writes, “a broken heart . . . A one-hundred-year-old relationship.” Blending memoir, journalism, and history, and deeply attuned to the voices of those she met on her travels, Notes on a Foreign Country is a moving reflection on America’s place in the world. It is a powerful journey of self-discovery and revelation—a profound reckoning with what it means to be American in a moment of grave national and global turmoil.

Author : Ilan Pappe
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 428 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2007-09-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781780740560

Get Book

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe Pdf

The book that is providing a storm of controversy, from ‘Israel’s bravest historian’ (John Pilger) Renowned Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe's groundbreaking work on the formation of the State of Israel. 'Along with the late Edward Said, Ilan Pappe is the most eloquent writer of Palestinian history.' NEW STATESMAN Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called 'ethnic cleansing'. Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East. *** 'Ilan Pappe is Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.' JOHN PILGER 'Pappe has opened up an important new line of inquiry into the vast and fateful subject of the Palestinian refugees. His book is rewarding in other ways. It has at times an elegiac, even sentimental, character, recalling the lost, obliterated life of the Palestinian Arabs and imagining or regretting what Pappe believes could have been a better land of Palestine.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'A major intervention in an argument that will, and must, continue. There's no hope of lasting Middle East peace while the ghosts of 1948 still walk.' INDEPENDENT

Author : Nahlah Ayed
Publisher : Penguin Canada
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2012-04-10
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780143184034

Get Book

A Thousand Farewells by Nahlah Ayed Pdf

A uniquely personal insight into the Middle East from one of Canada's most respected foreign correspondents In 1976, Nahlah Ayed's family gave up their comfortable life in Winnipeg for the squalor of a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan. The transition was jarring, but it was from this uncomfortable situation that Ayed first observed the people whose heritage she shared. The family returned to Canada when she was thirteen, and Ayed ignored the Middle East for many years. But the First Gulf War and the events of 9/11 reignited her interest. Soon she was reporting from the region full-time, trying to make sense of the wars and upheavals that have affected its people and sent so many of them seeking a better life elsewhere. In A Thousand Farewells, Ayed describes with sympathy and insight the myriad ways in which the Arab people have fought against oppression and loss as seen from her own early days witnessing protests in Amman, and the wars, crackdowns, and uprisings she has reported on in countries across the region. This is the heartfelt and personal chronicle of a journalist who has devoted much of her career to covering one of the world's most vexing regions.

Author : Ulf Hannerz
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2022-02-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781800733190

Get Book

Afropolitan Horizons by Ulf Hannerz Pdf

Introduction. Nigerian Connections -- Palm Wine, Amos Tutuola, and a Literary Gatekeeper -- Bahia-Lagos-Ouidah: Mariana's Story -- Igbo Life, Past and Present: Three Views -- Inland, Upriver with the Empire: Borrioboola-Gha -- The City, according to Ekwensi . . . and Onuzo -- Points of Cultural Geography: Ibadan . . . Enugu, Onitsha, Nsukka -- Been-To: Dreams, Disappointments, Departures, and Returns -- Dateline Lagos: Reporting on Nigeria to the World -- Death in Lagos -- Tai Solarin: On Colonial Power, Schools, Work Ethic, Religion, and the Press -- Wole Soyinka, Leo Frobenius, and the Ori Olokun -- A Voice from the Purdah: Baba of Karo -- Bauchi: The Academic and the Imam -- Railtown Writers -- Nigeria at War -- America Observed: With Nigerian Eyes -- Transatlantic Shuttle -- Sojourners from Black Britain -- Oyotunji Village, South Carolina: Reverse Afropolitanism.

Author : Amy Sodaro
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2018-01-23
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9780813592176

Get Book

Exhibiting Atrocity by Amy Sodaro Pdf

Today, nearly any group or nation with violence in its past has constructed or is planning a memorial museum as a mechanism for confronting past trauma, often together with truth commissions, trials, and/or other symbolic or material reparations. Exhibiting Atrocity documents the emergence of the memorial museum as a new cultural form of commemoration, and analyzes its use in efforts to come to terms with past political violence and to promote democracy and human rights. Through a global comparative approach, Amy Sodaro uses in-depth case studies of five exemplary memorial museums that commemorate a range of violent pasts and allow for a chronological and global examination of the trend: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; the House of Terror in Budapest, Hungary; the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile; and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. Together, these case studies illustrate the historical emergence and global spread of the memorial museum and show how this new cultural form of commemoration is intended to be used in contemporary societies around the world.

Author : Santanu Das
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 495 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2018-09-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781107081581

Get Book

India, Empire, and First World War Culture by Santanu Das Pdf

This is the first cultural and literary history of India and the First World War, with archival research from Europe and South Asia.

Author : Martin E. . Hellman,Dorothie L. Hellman
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2016-08-20
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 0997492317

Get Book

A New Map for Relationships by Martin E. . Hellman,Dorothie L. Hellman Pdf

Dorothie and Martin Hellman reveal the secrets that allowed them to transform an almost failed marriage into one where they reclaimed the true love that they felt when they first met fifty years ago. Surprisingly, they found that working on interpersonal and international challenges at the same time accelerated progress on both.

Author : Viet Lê
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2021-04-12
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781478012931

Get Book

Return Engagements by Viet Lê Pdf

In Return Engagements artist and critic Việt Lê examines contemporary art in Cambodia and Việt Nam to rethink the entwinement of militarization, trauma, diaspora, and modernity in Southeast Asian art. Highlighting artists tied to Phnom Penh and Sài Gòn and drawing on a range of visual art as well as documentary and experimental films, Lê points out that artists of Southeast Asian descent are often expected to address the twin traumas of armed conflict and modernization, and shows how desirable art on these themes is on international art markets. As the global art market fetishizes trauma and violence, artists strategically align their work with those tropes in ways that Lê suggests allow them to reinvent such aesthetics and discursive spaces. By returning to and refashioning these themes, artists such as Tiffany Chung, Rithy Panh, and Sopheap Pich challenge categorizations of “diasporic” and “local” by situating themselves as insiders and outsiders relative to Cambodia and Việt Nam. By doing so, they disrupt dominant understandings of place, time, and belonging in contemporary art.

Author : Jasmin Zine
Publisher : UBC Press
Page : 342 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2012-04-20
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780774822756

Get Book

Islam in the Hinterlands by Jasmin Zine Pdf

Muslim communities have become increasingly salient in the social, cultural, and political landscape in Canada largely due to the aftermath of 9/11 and the racial politics of the ongoing "war on terror" that have cast Muslims as the new "enemy within." Featuring some of Canada's top Muslim Studies scholars, Islam in the Hinterlands examines how gender, public policy, media, and education shape the Muslim experience in Canada. A timely volume addressing some of the most hotly contested issues in recent cultural history, it is essential reading for academics as well as general readers interested in Islamic studies, multiculturalism, and social justice.

Author : Gabriele Balbi,Nelson Ribeiro,Valérie Schafer,Christian Schwarzenegger
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 295 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2021-09-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9783110740288

Get Book

Digital Roots by Gabriele Balbi,Nelson Ribeiro,Valérie Schafer,Christian Schwarzenegger Pdf

As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas. The first part, Technologies and Connections, historicises concepts like network, media convergence, multimedia, interactivity and artificial intelligence. The second one is related to Agency and Politics and explores global governance, datafication, fake news, echo chambers, digital media activism. The last one, Users and Practices, is finally devoted to telepresence, digital loneliness, amateurism, user generated content, fandom and authenticity. The book aims to shed light on how concepts emerge and are co-shaped, circulated, used and reappropriated in different contexts. It argues for the need for a conceptual media and communication history that will reveal new developments without concealing continuities and it demonstrates how the analogue/digital dichotomy is often a misleading one.

Author : Daniel Pipes
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 1992-03-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9780195363043

Get Book

Greater Syria by Daniel Pipes Pdf

While for many years scholars and journalists have focused on the more obvious manifestations of political life in the Middle East, one major theme has been consistently neglected. This is Pan-Syrian nationalism--the dream of creating a Greater Syria out of an area now governed by Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Turkey. Though not nearly as well known as Arab or Palestinian nationalism and hardly studied in depth, Pan-Syrianism has had a profound effect on Middle Eastern politics since the end of World War I. In Greater Syria, the noted Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes provides the first comprehensive account of this intriguing, important, and little understood ideology.

Author : Dick Cheney
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 578 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2011-08-30
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781439176238

Get Book

In My Time by Dick Cheney Pdf

In this eagerly anticipated memoir, former Vice President Dick Cheney delivers an unyielding portrait of American politics over nearly forty years and shares personal reflections on his role as one of the most steadfast and influential statesmen in the history of our country. The public perception of Dick Cheney has long been something of a contradiction. He has been viewed as one of the most powerful vice presidents—secretive, even mysterious, and at the same time opinionated and unflinchingly outspoken. He has been both praised and attacked by his peers, the press, and the public. Through it all, courting only the ideals that define him, he has remained true to himself, his principles, his family, and his country. Now in an enlightening and provocative memoir, a stately page-turner with flashes of surprising humor and remarkable candor, Dick Cheney takes readers through his experiences as family man, policymaker, businessman, and politician during years that shaped our collective history. Born into a family of New Deal Democrats in Lincoln, Nebraska, Cheney was the son of a father at war and a high-spirited and resilient mother. He came of age in Casper, Wyoming, playing baseball and football and, as senior class president, courting homecoming queen Lynne Vincent, whom he later married. This all-American story took an abrupt turn when he flunked out of Yale University, signed on to build power line in the West, and started living as hard as he worked. Cheney tells the story of how he got himself back on track and began an extraordinary ascent to the heights of American public life, where he would remain for nearly four decades: * He was the youngest White House Chief of Staff, working for President Gerald Ford—the first of four chief executives he would come to know well. * He became Congressman from Wyoming and was soon a member of the congressional leadership working closely with President Ronald Reagan. * He became secretary of defense in the George H. W. Bush administration, overseeing America’s military during Operation Desert Storm and in the historic transition at the end of the Cold War. * He was CEO of Halliburton, a Fortune 500 company with projects and personnel around the globe. * He became the first vice president of the United States to serve out his term of office in the twenty-first century. Working with George W. Bush from the beginning of the global war on terror, he was—and remains—an outspoken defender of taking every step necessary to defend the nation. Eyewitness to history at the highest levels, Cheney brings to life scenes from past and present. He describes driving through the White House gates on August 9, 1974, just hours after Richard Nixon resigned, to begin work on the Ford transition; and he portrays a time of national crisis a quarter century later when, on September 11, 2001, he was in the White House bunker and conveyed orders to shoot down a hijacked airliner if it would not divert. With its unique perspective on a remarkable span of American history, In My Time will enlighten. As an intimate and personal chronicle, it will surprise, move, and inspire. Dick Cheney’s is an enduring political vision to be reckoned with and admired for its honesty, its wisdom, and its resonance. In My Time is truly the last word about an incredible political era, by a man who lived it and helped define it—with courage and without compromise.

Author : Jon Martin Trondalen
Publisher : UNESCO
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2008-01-01
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9789231040863

Get Book

Water and Peace for the People by Jon Martin Trondalen Pdf

This book proposes practical and objective solutions to the entrenched water conflicts in the Middle East. The author reveals and clarifies the complexity of the water conflicts, drawing on years of experience facilitating and chairing water negotiations in the region. The bottom line is: Unless the countries involved co-operate, the consequences will be devastating. The lack of plentiful and clean water for the people will not only result in severe human suffering, but could also have grave geopolitical consequences. The book covers four critical areas: the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, where new documentation reveals alarming trends; the politically sensitive Golan Heights, with its water disputed by Israel and Syria; the Hasbani water dispute between Lebanon and Israel; the longstanding water resource dispute between the Israelis and Palestinians

Author : Chris Crawford
Publisher : Microscope Publications Limited
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 1986-01-01
Category : Computers
ISBN : 0914845977

Get Book

Balance of Power by Chris Crawford Pdf