Context Of Civil War Research Articles

Another Author Driven By Desperation

A study of the black cookbook writer Malinda Russell and the Civil War context in which she published her Domestic Cook Book and the reception afforded the book since publication.

‘Quietist’ Salafis after the ‘Arab revolts’ in Algeria and Libya (2011–2019): Between insecurity and political subordination

ABSTRACT Revolutionary movements, like Salafi-jihadis, often capture public attention. However, as scholars of Salafism have long argued, quietist Salafis are the largest sub-group within, and in many ways the true heart of, Salafism in the southern Mediterranean and beyond. This article has two aims. First, it provides scholarship on Salafi groups in Libya and Algeria not tied to jihadi milieus. Second, it contributes new understandings of Salafi developments in two less-studied countries, namely Algeria and Libya. Via a comparative study of one prominent type of quietist Salafism, known as Madkhalism, in the post-2011 contexts of political transition and civil war (Libya) and limited political liberalization (Algeria), we show that whilst some Libyan Madkhalis partially constrained their rejection of taking up arms or of alliances with ideological competitors, their Algerian counterparts did not. We build on existing scholarship by explaining this divergence at the level of discrete political opportunity structures, both since and prior to the events of 2011, together with intra-Salafi framing competition and core quietist ideological convictions. Overall, we argue that Madkhalism has partially seen a bottom-up-driven shift over the last years that is likely to continue, further reshape the movement, and impact the countries in which its acolytes are embedded.

Another Author Driven By Desperation

A study of the black cookbook writer Malinda Russell and the Civil War context in which she published her Domestic Cook Book and the reception afforded the book since publication.

Counterinsurgency as order-making: refining the concepts of insurgency and counterinsurgency in light of the Somali civil war

ABSTRACT In this paper, we argue that the current insurgency and counterinsurgency discourse is dominated by concepts that are too narrow and too isolated from the wider civil war literature within which insurgency and counterinsurgency occur. Rather than accounting for the complex political processes and wide range of forces and actors that shape conflict dynamics, the dominant insurgency and counterinsurgency debate tends to reduce highly messy contexts to a competition between the often false dichotomy of insurgents and counterinsurgents, usually understood as the state versus one or more non-state violent actors. In order to understand civil war contexts like South-Central Somalia, we argue that orthodox reductionist concepts and assumptions underpinning the dominant insurgency and counterinsurgency discourse provide limited value. Building on recent critical literature, the paper proposes a refined conceptualization. Instead of understanding insurgency and counterinsurgency as peculiar forms of war, strategies, or sets of guerilla tactics, we follow Jaqueline Hazelton’s line of thought, suggesting that insurgency and counterinsurgency are mere elements of a broader process of violent order-making. Thus, insurgency and counterinsurgency are, in our view, comprehensive processes of organized challenge to and consolidation of established political order within the context of civil war.

Unburials and Skeletal Reconstructions: Narrative as Forensics in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost

Social scientists know how crucial it is to identify the bodies of the men, women and children who have died at sea or on land, or have been buried in mass burial grounds, and how consequential it is to engage (or not) in some form of ritual, of memorialization. If some scholars have focused on locating and numbering those victims, others have used forensic science to identify the bodies so that the families can get them back, engage in mourning and continue to live. Others, still, interrogate the lost objects of the death-bound migration. This essay will focus on a novel that deals with the exhumation and identification of bones in a civil war context. In Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Sri Lankan-born and North American-educated Anil Tissera goes back to Sri Lanka as a forensic anthropologist. She is sent by a human rights group to investigate mass burials during the Civil War and genocide of the Sri Lankan Tamils, thus returning from her diasporic abode after 15 years. In Anil's forensic search for identification, with bones being literally unearthed, what does the literary text perform for those lost or unidentified bodies that could not be accomplished otherwise? What kind of engagement does it offer? Using the angle of forensics and its Latin etymology, this essay will formulate the hypothesis that the literary text enables justice to be delivered in an open court of law (forensis). Moving beyond the stigmatization of the unritual, it will probe the fraught relationship between literature and forensics, investigating the possibility that the narrative, its staging of the unidentified body of the dead, and our relationship to it, could create a public space to be shared by all (forum).

The Mythological Machine in the Great Civil War (2001–2021): Oikos and Polis in Nation-Making

: The article revisits ‘sectarianism’ as an epistemic venue within the context of a Great Civil War in the Middle East (2001-2021), a label that includes the overarching narratives of political life in the aftermath of 9/11 up to the aftermath of the so-called ‘Arab Spring.’ By introducing the notion of the ‘mythological machine,’ it argues that ‘sectarianism’ is a myth, something that does not exist in real terms, but which has real world effects. The mythological machine is a device that produces epiphanies and myths; it is a gnoseological process, which has cultural, social and political effects through the generation of mythological facts and, as a machine, it does so through both guiding and automatized mechanisms. Through this interpretive shift, the article proceeds through several theoretical steps using a variety of cases from across West Asia and North Africa, contextualizing them within global political events. Firstly, the article argues that it is ‘civil war,’ shaped by the work of the mythological machine that governs state-society relations and transnational politics in the Middle East. Then, the article discusses how the mythological machine incorporates a semantic othering via mythological thinking, speak and practice that shapes the perception and experience of civil wars. To conclude, the article discusses how the mythological machine displaces people’s status in the context of civil wars leading to the emergence of new forms of belonging and nation-making. Ultimately, the mythological machine creates what Giorgio Agamben defines as a state without people, a condition exhausting the value of citizenship and the political.

Triumphal narratives in the American Civil War: A new nursing professional identity.

To analyse the evolving social role of female nurses in the American Civil War context in terms of gender, class and race and to examine whether their caring efforts correspond to the beginnings of a new nursing professional identity. Historical research. Thirteen American Civil War nurses' triumphal narratives written between 1865-1902 were analysed. The search and work were carried out between 2012-2020. Women's history and thematic analysis provided, respectively, the theoretical and analytical frameworks. The arrival of the war was the catalyst for change. The nurses' autobiographies were written in a hostile environment where class and racial tensions had to be released. This analysis points to nursing care being transformed from its traditional domestic traits to a progressive and intentional professional dimension. American Civil War nurses' autobiographies offer an innovative vision of their lives and their nursing work. Specifically, the autobiographical accounts provide new perspectives on the evolution of the authors' social dimension in terms of class, race and gender as well as the development of a new nursing professional identity in that context. Impact Illuminating overlooked meanings hidden in nurses' autobiographies improves women's visibility and their contribution to the history of nursing.

Successive epidemic waves of cholera in South Sudan between 2014 and 2017: a descriptive epidemiological study

SummaryBackgroundBetween 2014 and 2017, successive cholera epidemics occurred in South Sudan within the context of civil war, population displacement, flooding, and drought. We aim to describe the spatiotemporal and molecular features of the three distinct epidemic waves and explore the role of vaccination campaigns, precipitation, and population movement in shaping cholera spread in this complex setting.MethodsIn this descriptive epidemiological study, we analysed cholera linelist data to describe the spatiotemporal progression of the epidemics. We placed whole-genome sequence data from pandemic Vibrio cholerae collected throughout these epidemics into the global phylogenetic context. Using whole-genome sequence data in combination with other molecular attributes, we characterise the relatedness of strains circulating in each wave and the region. We investigated the association of rainfall and the instantaneous basic reproduction number using distributed lag non-linear models, compared county-level attack rates between those with early and late reactive vaccination campaigns, and explored the consistency of the spatial patterns of displacement and suspected cholera case reports.FindingsThe 2014 (6389 cases) and 2015 (1818 cases) cholera epidemics in South Sudan remained spatially limited whereas the 2016–17 epidemic (20 438 cases) spread among settlements along the Nile river. Initial cases of each epidemic were reported in or around Juba soon after the start of the rainy season, but we found no evidence that rainfall modulated transmission during each epidemic. All isolates analysed had similar genotypic and phenotypic characteristics, closely related to sequences from Uganda and Democratic Republic of the Congo. Large-scale population movements between counties of South Sudan with cholera outbreaks were consistent with the spatial distribution of cases. 21 of 26 vaccination campaigns occurred during or after the county-level epidemic peak. Counties vaccinated on or after the peak incidence week had 2·2 times (95% CI 2·1–2·3) higher attack rates than those where vaccination occurred before the peak.InterpretationPandemic V cholerae of the same clonal origin was isolated throughout the study period despite interepidemic periods of no reported cases. Although the complex emergency in South Sudan probably shaped some of the observed spatial and temporal patterns of cases, the full scope of transmission determinants remains unclear. Timely and well targeted use of vaccines can reduce the burden of cholera; however, rapid vaccine deployment in complex emergencies remains challenging.FundingThe Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Understanding Governance by Insurgent Non-State Actors: A Multi-Dimensional Typology

ABSTRACT The phenomenon of governance by insurgents characterises many contexts of civil war and influences political, security, social, and economic dynamics in the original conflict zone and beyond. Therefore, understanding how different insurgents govern seems of crucial importance. However, in the existing literature no typology has been advanced that captures the multiple dimensions of rebel governance and allows to develop detailed and comparable assessments of the different patterns of rule implemented by different rebels. Considering this gap a limit to the study of insurgent governance, the present paper aims to propose a multi-dimensional typology for investigating how rebels govern.

Caudillos, democracy, and constitutionalism in mid nineteenth-century Argentina

ABSTRACT Since the early years of Independence, through the failed constitutional projects of 1819 and 1826, and culminating in the 1853 Constitutional Convention of 1853, the River Plate provinces witnessed a varied number of juridical and political debates on the status of democracy and its different meanings: as an expression of social forces announcing the dawn of a new form of social organization; as an ideal of representative government that was to accompany the transition from monarchical to republican forms of government; and as a number of possible electoral regimes and technical solutions to the problem of representation. On the other hand, constitutionalism promised not only a way of structuring the new governments but also the adoption of the idea of individual rights as an ideological foundation for the new liberal regimes, and a project to transcend the inorganic rule of provincial caudillos. This paper explores the different languages in which nineteenth-century Argentine constitutionalism was shaped, through an analysis of political and constitutional debates and the writings of many of the actors of the period, taking into account the ways in which the conflictive context of independence, civil wars, national unification, and state building delineated a particular conception of liberal constitutionalism.

Literary and political strategies in a literary field: The case of Tahar Ouettar

This article aims to show the relationship writers have with politics, especially in historical circumstances where the literary field enjoys little autonomy. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, I use the notion of strategy as a middle point between deterministic and ‘rational choice’ explanations of political stances. For writers, politics can be the continuation of literature by other means. The case under study is the shift of Algerian writer Tahar Ouettar from the left to supporting Islamists during the 1990s civil war. I argue that an explanation of this shift should not rely solely on social provenance, or on opportunism, but rather on his ‘strategic’ attempt to regain a central position in the Algerian literary field. In a civil war context where all literary acts are perceived as political, it was his competition with other main writers such as Rachid Boudjedra, who happened to be anti-Islamist, that led him to support the opposite side. Beyond just the writer’s relative position in the Algerian literary field, the specific structuring of the field (bilingual and transnational) also helps to understand the strategies developed by this writer.

Проблема прав человека в условиях Гражданской войны в США

Проблема прав человека в условиях Гражданской войны в США

Dante in Mogadishu: The Divine Comedy in Nuruddin Farah's Links

This article aims to explore the complex network of intra-textual and intertextual references to Dante’s The Divine Comedy in Nuruddin Farah’s novel Links (2005). By analyzing the quotations from the poem, this essay wishes to show how the Comedy informs the novel at various levels, from the paratext (since Dante’s tercets from Inferno are chosen as an epigraph) to the text itself (since Inferno appears to be deeply constitutive of Links). The analysis then suggests that, on the one hand, Farah employs Dante’s poem to address, represent and understand the civil-war context of Somalia from the protagonist’s point of view. On the other, he subverts and re-contextualizes Inferno to create new meanings and to distance his novel from Dante’s literary antecedent. Therefore, by analyzing the practices of intertextuality between the two texts, this essay aims to investigate both the converging and conflicting strategies enabled in the novel.

El posicionamiento social de los inmigrantes y el problema del orden social

Hobbes formuló el problema del orden social en un contexto de guerra civil. ¿Es la perspectiva del problema del orden social aplicable a la integración en la España del siglo 21? Los ataques terroristas en EEUU (2001) y, más recientemente, en Europa perpretados por ciudadanos de países musulmanes o por ciudadanos europeos con origen inmigrante y musulmán han provocado un miedo al inmigrante generalizado. La radicalización de jóvenes de origen musulmán, las bandas de delincuentes juveniles (bandas latinas en España) y la inmigración masiva desde países pobres en un contexto de profunda crisis económica plantean una preocupación para las poblaciones de los países occidentales. Se adapta el concepto de posicionamiento social a los procesos de inmigración. Se desarrollan análisis estadísticos con los datos del European Social Survey para España. El objetivo es desvelar la percepción de la población española y de los inmigrantes sobre el posicionamiento social de los inmigrantes en el orden social español.Hobbes formulated the social order problem in a context of civil war. Is the social order problem perspective applicable to tackle with immigration in 21st century Spain? Terrorist attacks in the USA (2001) and, more recently in Europe carried out by citizens of Muslim countries or by European citizens with immigrant and Muslim background, have provoked a fear of the generalized immigrant. Radicalisation of young people of Muslim background, youth gangs (Latin gangs in Spain) and mass immigration from poor countries in a context of deep economic crisis raise a concern for Western countries ́ populations. The concept of social positioning is adapted to the immigration processes. Statistical analyses are developed based on the European Social Survey data for Spain. The aim is to unveil the perception of Spanish population and of immigrants about the social positioning of immigrants in the Spanish social order.

Tribal militias and political legitimacy in British India and Pakistan

ABSTRACT Scholars have argued that governments rely on pro-government militias forces due to low state capacity or international pressure that limits how they use military force within the context of civil wars. This article argues that governments also strategically use militias both inside and outside of civil wars to support the political legitimacy of local systems of governance in developing states, especially in peripheral areas with limited government control. This suggests that long-term political motivations need to be considered alongside short-term tactical goals for a comprehensive understanding of militia support. This theory is supported by case studies of Pashtun tribal militias in British India and Pakistan based on archival research, interviews, and relevant secondary sources.

Constructing a national narrative in civil war: history teaching and national unity in South Sudan

ABSTRACTThis article analyses history teaching in South Sudanese secondary schools and focuses on the interplay of local context, curricular intentions, and teachers’ agency. Drawing on ethnographic data, the article focuses on how the main objectives of national unity and critical thinking are enacted by teachers in the classroom. Through theories of history teaching and learning in divided societies, I explore how teachers teach the recent violent past and how they navigate and mediate ‘invisible’ tensions among opposing truths in the classroom. Foregrounding the context of civil war, the article illustrates how narratives of current and previous civil wars in the country limit teachers’ ability to fulfil the goals of the syllabus. Despite the role of teachers as key mediators for a peaceful classroom, the context of war limits the ideological space for them to promote a culture of peace among students in the classroom.

Adaptive Peacemaking in Protracted Conflicts: IGAD Mediation in the Second Sudanese Civil War

AbstractThe dynamic quality of protracted intra‐state conflicts is a factor that complicates and sometimes confounds the efforts of peacemakers. Building on this insight, and given the prevalence of conflicts of this type in the contemporary international system, this paper takes up a central question: how can peacemakers adapt to changing dynamics along the parameters of a protracted intra‐state conflict in order to cultivate effective resolution of the conflict? Inspired by the theme of this special issue on new diplomacy in new conflicts, this paper draws on and modifies the concepts of ‘adaptive peacemaking’ and ‘adaptive peacebuilding’ (de Coning, 2018; Okulski, 2017) in order to provide a heuristic device for evaluating peacemaking efforts within protracted intra‐state conflicts. In that vein, this paper examines third‐party mediation within the setting of the second Sudanese civil war through the lens of a modified adaptive peacemaking approach. The resulting analysis allows for a conceptual and empirical assessment of the prospects as well as the perils of ‘adaptive peacemaking’ within the context of protracted civil wars.

Böhler , Jochen Civil War in Central Europe, 1918–1921: The Reconstruction of Poland (review)

SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 376 historians in the Arkhangel´ region, although she does cite them in footnotes. In footnote 3 of chapter 4, she states that ‘This book’s interpretation differs from those of Soviet and the majority of post-Soviet historians who tend to see the Civil War in the North as first and foremost a product of the foreign intervention’ (p. 252). Ironically, as I began to read the book, I heard, quite independently, about local Arkhangel´ historians being critical of her work. I cannot fully explain their differences, but suspect that they perhaps arise out of both genuine divergences in interpreting events and the almost the inevitable tension between local scholars and an outsider from the capital. Novikova provides an interesting history of a relatively less known area of the revolution and civil war. Ironically, however, she does acknowledge that whatever the local population’s activity and outlook in 1917–1920, ‘it was clear that the future of Archangelsk province would be decided in Moscow rather than in the North’ (p. 154). George Mason University Rex A. Wade Böhler, Jochen. Civil War in Central Europe, 1918–1921: The Reconstruction of Poland. The Greater War, 1912–1923. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2018. xiii + 253 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Archives consulted. Works cited. Travelogue. Glossary. Index. £35.00. This recent study by Jochen Böhler offers an alternative perspective on Poland’s reconstruction following the Great War, and is based on extensive archival research in Poland, Lithuania, the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. It includes printed memoirs as well as primary and secondary sources in Czech, French, German, Polish and English. The book focuses on a decisive three-year period in which the modern Polish nation-state’s borders were delineated and constructed through a means of diplomatic negotiation and armed, on-the-ground combat. From the outset this approach may not seem novel. However, Böhler’s investigation shies away from the traditionalist historiographical narrative, questions it and provides a new hypothesis: that the formative process of the Polish people and state stemmed from the throes of civil war and paramilitary violence — a phenomena present in East Central Europe after 1918 and experienced by already war-weary societies. According to the author, paramilitary experiences in state formation are key to better understanding the dynamics and connections between internal and external conflicts faced by the Polish Republic in the first years of its critical, uncertain existence. Böhler’s Polish case study is part of what he refers to as REVIEWS 377 the greater Central European Civil War, or the war of nations. In this context, he claims that the borderland and border struggles Poland engaged in were in fact civil wars, rather than conventional wars between established states. By analysing Poland’s rebirth through the context of civil war, Böhler establishes that, like constructive factors, destructive ones also played a prominent, if not a greater role in state formation. Both appeared in the quintessential problem Poland faced after 1918: the presence of ethnic groups within reconstructing territory. Ethnic minority questions were directly linked to Polish territorial ambitions, since the state was envisioned as being a political project meant for only one titular ethnic group. Approaches towards non-Poles were reflected in two dominant yet paradoxical political leaderships which were split over how to establish Polish supremacy on lands which, for example, hosted large Belarusian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Jewish populations. Józef Piłsudski’s federal concept envisioned cooperation with neighbours in the east under Polish leadership, while Roman Dmowski’s National Democratic ethno-centrist model aimed at their forceful assimilation. These positions also influenced the various military units which formed post-war Poland’s national armed forces and remained present throughout the existence of the Second Republic. As the author shows, the political orientations of militarized forces correlated with the level of vengeance displayed in battle, and that Poland’s ethnic composition after 1921 was determined by armed conflict influenced by these political visions. Böhler presents some interesting facts that, although already well known, have not until now been examined in the context of civil war. He argues...

THE CENTENNIALS OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND CIVIL WAR IN THE EUROPEAN-WIDE CONTEXT OF THE HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONS, COUNTER-REVOLUTIONS AND IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICTS: THE METHODOLOGY OF THE COMPARATIVE APPROACH

The centennials of the Russian revolution and Civil War offer Russian and foreign historians wide possibilities of investigating the revolution and civil war in the European-wide context of the history of revolutions, counter-revolutions, and ideological conflicts. This article examines the author’s methodology for a comparative analysis of the Russian Revolution and Civil War in the context of the classical European revolutions beginning with the French and other revolutions of the late XVIII century. The comparative approach to studying revolutions has a long history. In fact, Russian revolutionaries in 1917 often compared their revolution with the French revolution and drew their own conclusions about the progress of the revolution in Russia. The comparative approach does not diminish the significance of the Russian revolution and Civil War. On the contrary, this approach helps us determine elements of uniqueness in the Russian revolution. One can suggest that, in many ways, the Russian revolution and Civil War were turning points in the European history of revolutions. On the one hand, the revolution and Civil War mark the culmination and completion of the stage of classical European revolutions. On the other hand, the events of 1917 ‑1921 opened a new stage in the history of ideological conflicts in Europe.

The Old Chisholm Trail: From Cow Path to Tourist Stop by Wayne Ludwig, and: The Chisholm Trail: Joseph McCoy’s Great Gamble by James E. Sherow

Reviewed by: The Old Chisholm Trail: From Cow Path to Tourist Stop by Wayne Ludwig, and: The Chisholm Trail: Joseph McCoy’s Great Gamble by James E. Sherow Andrew Offenburger The Old Chisholm Trail: From Cow Path to Tourist Stop. By Wayne Ludwig. Nancy and Ted Paup Ranching and Heritage Series. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. Pp. xx, 307. $37.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-671-5.) The Chisholm Trail: Joseph McCoy’s Great Gamble. By James E. Sherow. Public Lands History. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Pp. xxii, 338. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-6053-5.) For most of the nineteenth century, a network of cattle trails connected southern Texas with major transportation nodes in New Orleans, Louisiana; St. Joseph, Missouri; and Abilene, Kansas. Men drove their herds to market over these paths despite complicated geographical and political lines; they forded the Trinity River near Fort Worth, Texas, as much as they attempted to cross from South to North during the nation’s midcentury political crisis. Though hindered by the Civil War, vast drives resumed when national markets reopened, unimpeded by separatism. Cattlemen like Jesse and Thornton Chisholm and stockyard investors like Joseph McCoy recognized the potential for profit that soon gave rise to the famous Chisholm Trail, over which millions of Texas cattle tramped their way to midwestern railheads and, eventually, to urban markets in the Northeast. The heyday of these cattle drives occurred between 1867 and 1872, a blip in time compared with the Chisholm Trail’s cultural significance, which has been enshrined in popular depictions of the West ever since. Two recent books explain this history in distinct ways. Wayne Ludwig’s The Old Chisholm Trail: From Cow Path to Tourist Stop, researched with passion and attention to detail, immerses the reader in the region’s history of cattle trails. He explains how one small segment came to be known as the authentic Chisholm Trail, and how it was transformed “from a simple path to a legend” (p. xv). Ludwig sets his goal “to avoid preconceived conclusions, seek the facts, follow the trail of evidence wherever it led . . . and just let the chips fall where they may” (p. xiv). This investigative approach often produces rewarding and straightforward explanations, with clarity fit for lectures to undergraduates. Such passages include a description of how cowboys broke horses to accept saddles, a functional overview of a standard herd and drive on the trail, an analysis of stampedes, and a description of how the trails came to an end with the entrenchment of settler society in Kansas and with barbed-wire fencing, agriculture, and ranching. At other times, Ludwig’s clinical approach to history can test a reader’s patience. The author examines and analyzes evidence, guiding readers through a series of possibilities before discarding some and coming to an informed conclusion. This strategy appears in the text when the author separates documented facts from trail lore. For example, in chapter 6, “Two Chisholms and a Chisum,” readers are introduced to a series of hypotheses on the origin of the trail’s name. The result leaves readers full of facts and minutiae but hungry for meaning. James E. Sherow, in The Chisholm Trail: Joseph McCoy’s Great Gamble, dishes out context by the ladleful, crafting a broader narrative informed by economic, cultural, and environmental history. The great cattle drives could not [End Page 931] have existed, the author persuasively argues, without increased demand for beef in the urbanizing United States. Yet cities like New York City could no longer tolerate the trade’s foul-smelling consequences. After setting the industry in this post–Civil War context, Sherow is able to explain the results of urban demand. He focuses on the drives from the hinterlands of Austin, Texas, to markets in Abilene, Kansas, and on all of the human and ecological entanglements they created, understanding them as an environmental historian does—as transfers of energy. What others have called good business sense, Sherow explains through the environment: how “prairie grass, the stored solar energy fueling the trade,” allowed cattle to make trips from Texas pastures to Kansas stockyards, to fatten, and then to board stockcars headed...