Postwar Family Research Articles

Family planning, the pill, and reproductive agency in Italy, 1945–1971: From ‘conscious procreation’ to ‘a new fundamental right’?

ABSTRACT The article analyses post-war family planning campaigning in Italy and the legalization of the Pill (1971), in order to illustrate wider processes of change in sexual norms and practices, the feminization of contraception, and the emergence of notions of individual rights in procreation. Situating the Italian family planning movement as part of a transnational network and a global agenda, it problematizes understandings of family planning as a site of individual liberation only, highlighting the hierarchization of reproductive bodies that underpinned the campaigns of many family planning activists. Drawing on archives, publications and memoirs by family planners in Italy and the US, this is the first scholarly analysis of the Italian family planning movement’s role in the (illegal) distribution of contraception and sexual information, as well as its key contribution to the legalization of the Pill. The article aims to offer an original contribution to the socio-political negotiation of reproductive agency in the post-war period, set against the backdrop of the globalization of demographic debate, secularization, changing gender roles and new medical technologies.

Deterioration of the Matrimonial Sentiments in the Post-War Family in Light of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger

Deterioration of the Matrimonial Sentiments in the Post-War Family in Light of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger

Race and Nation in Ella McFadyen’s Pegmen Tales

eader witnesses an Australian wishfulness read in the triumphant adventures of the small – of domestic objects brought to life through the imagination of children. In McFadyen’s highly didactic tales, clothes pegs stolen and deliberately misused come to embody an understated national ethos with biblical pretensions. The Peg family sail the world in their “Ark”, spreading antipodean wonder, cheer and ingenuity everywhere they go. The Pegs themselves – as home-made toys – represent the imaginative ingenuity of Australian children. These are toys any child could make, and so may be read as a social leveller. The dream bringing them to life is that of decent, healthy children and the Pegs (as post-war family, sans father, strive to set themselves and the world good standards). 
 Every anthropomorphism is deservedly read as comment on the human race or some department or aspect of it, and in this case it is Australian class, race and national pretensions which are promoted through the vehicle of mainly exemplary characters who, in their travels – for the sake of plot – negotiate a series of mildly ethical crises, and always come out smiling. 
 This paper proceeds by considering the issues raised above in relation a small number of episodes from the tales: these dealing with the invasion of rogue mice, the creation of the Pegmen, with Pongo (from the Congo) and the Australian Aborigines, with the Peg’s expedition to Antarctica and with the metamorphosis of swagmen into grey kangaroos.
 Race and Nation in Ella McFadyen’s Pegmen Tales

Rethinking "Post-war Family System"

Rethinking "Post-war Family System"

전후 영국사회의 금기를 다룬 연극과 영화 : 쉴라 딜레이니의 A Taste of Honey 다시 읽기

This paper reappraises the dramatic implications of Shelagh Delaney’s working-class drama, A Taste of Honey (1958), from the perspectives of media-crossing, gender, and class. In the late 1950s Britain, when the female voice was rarely heard on the British stage, Delaney was notable for her use of the Kitchen-Sink format, investigating taboos (racial discrimination, fragmented family, teen-age pregnancy, single unwed mothers, and homophobia) that contemporary male playwrights had largely shunned, and placing female characters at the centre of the action. In order to reexamine A Taste of Honey and its commentary on the insecurity, patience, and resilience of a dispossessed postwar family and society, this paper compares the original stage play for the 1958 Theatre Workshop premier, directed by Joan Littlewood, with the 1961 British New Wave film adaptation directed by Tony Richardson. It is argued that this play is uniquely significant for its portrayal of postwar British lives and taboos on stage and screen, and deserves deeper critical attention, especially since the issues addressed are still pertinent today.

El regreso de la Segunda Guerra Mundial ‘In Our Time’: post-memoria, historia y narración en The Soldier’s return y Son of War de Melvyn Bragg

This paper examines how Melvyn Bragg, British journalist, broadcaster and writer, portrays the aftermath of World War Two on family and community in The Soldier’s Return (1999) and Son of War (2001). I contend that Bragg’s apparently simplistic and minimalist style approximates what Michael Rothberg (2000) terms as traumatic realism. By blending the ordinary and the domestic with the extraordinary, he manages to evoke a meaningful absence and traumatic undertones at the same time as resonating with historical ‘truth’. Thus, I conclude that through the tension between an outer naivety and underlying disturbances, Bragg’s post-memorial discourse achieves a public disclosure which hitherto remained, primarily, in the intimate realm of postwar family life.

A Survey of Family Transformations in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Globalization has strong impact on individuals and societies at large and family as most the most essential and fundamental cell in society is no exception. Nowadays, family has lost some of its basic internal functions whilst widespread and all present technological aids, strong needs for independence and individualism furthermore contribute to estrangement of and family members’ alienation. At the same time, status and roles of family members within family are changing as well. Despite these global trends and changes, family continues to be considered the most essential and supremely significant social institution, which gratifies and serves many individual and collective functions. This paper surveys family systems and transformations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially post-war and contemporary family developments.

How to Set a Table (and Other Things): On the Aesthetics and Politics of a Postwar West German Film about Domestic Work

ABSTRACTDomestic space became highly visible in West German media of the 1950s. A wide variety of exhibitions, advice books, journals, and films about proper housekeeping, good design, and the perfect spatial layout aimed to educate a large audience on how to furnish their homes and live in them. More than just promoting certain types of furniture and household goods, these home representations were about the production of knowledge regarding the spatial constitution of subjects, bodies, and gender. This article examines the aesthetics and politics of the narratives and images these media produced,focusing on one educational film from 1952, The Well-laid Table, produced by West Germany's leading educational media institution, the Institut für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht. In a close reading of this film, I analyze the spaces, objects, and figures the film portrayed, asking how the story of an idyllic postwar family home, the visualization of “good” design, the staging of a highly choreographed performance of housework, and a female body were interlinked and what meaning this elaborate domestic setting produced.

Silent Voices: Mothers who Kill their Children and the Women's Liberation Movement in 1970s Japan

In the early 1970s Japan witnessed the emergence of a new women's liberation movement that put forward an unprecedented gendered critique of Japanese post-war society. Known as ūman ribu (woman lib) or simply ribu (lib), this movement appeared at a historical time when the numerical increase in cases of mothers who killed their own children prompted the news media to describe maternal filicide as a dramatic social phenomenon. This article explores ribu's engagement with the increased public visibility of mothers who kill. It contends that the solidarity and support the movement demonstrated for these criminalised mothers radically challenged idealised notions of motherhood, maternal love and the sanctity of the mother—child bond, and deeply questioned the post-war nuclear family as the cornerstone of society. The article investigates the revolutionary potential of ribu's preoccupation with murderous mothers by framing it in the context of the movement's call for consciousness transformation and for the pursuance of a more genuine relationality, and it gestures towards an understanding of what might be at stake in reading maternal filicide through the interpretative grid of a revolutionary agenda.

戦後民主化と家族の情緒

敗戦直後の家族研究は，「制度から友愛へ」という図式に象徴されるように，戦前と戦後の家族の対比を，後者の「民主主義的家族」の情緒的関係を強調する形で描いたとされる．しかし，家族関係に民主主義の理念を適用する「民主主義的家族」は，「明るくなごやか」な家族なのだろうか．本稿は「家族の民主化」論における，「家族制度」と「民主主義的家族」の対立を，家族の情緒的関係を中心に検討する．その結果，当時の家族研究者は「家族制度」を情緒的な空間とみなし，「民主主義的家族」に適用される「権利義務」や「主体性」といった「民主主義」の理念を，家族の情緒的関係と緊張関係にあるとしていたことが明らかになった．いわばその対立は，「明るくなごやかでありえた家族制度」と「必ずしも明るくなごやかにならない民主主義的家族」というものだった．結論部では，本稿でとらえ直した枠組みのもと，「家族の民主化」論の限界と可能性について考察した．

The causal effects of Vietnam-era military service on post-war family dynamics

Past work has suggested a lasting impact of military service on the lives of veterans. By intervening at a critical stage in the lives of young men, service may open up opportunities for disadvantaged youth. In contrast, the negative consequences of exposure to combat may offset these presumed advantages. Induction into the military is also a nonrandom process that makes identifying the effects of service exceedingly difficult. In this study we use an instrumental variable (IV) approach to model the causal impact of Vietnam-era military service on two outcomes, marital stability and co-residence with adult offspring. We find limited evidence to suggest that military service may have a lasting effect on family life. In particular, we find that service reduces the probability of marital dissolution for white men. Service also significantly increases the probability of filial co-residence for men of other races.

Why Progressives Should be Pro‐Family

For egalitarians, families are part of the problem. By bringing together advantages and passing on to their children, families redouble and (literally) reproduce inequalities. And, by cordoning off a private sphere into which government cannot roam, the family marks the limits of any progressive agenda. But defending families should be part of any answer to social injustice. Family relationships should be seen as a primary good: we need close, caring committed relationships no matter what else we want in life. Families are also increasingly important to one's chances in life. The gulf is widening between those rich and those poor in family life. This should worry egalitarians because lacking good, stable family relationships is a major disadvantage, and one that holds back progress towards other aspects of social justice.

Fossil-Fuel Futurity: Oil inGiant

Giantis a sprawling narrative, centered around the Benedict family, Texas cattle ranchers, and Jett Rink, a nouveau riche oilman. Originally serialized inLadies'Home Journalin 1952, subsequently published as a novel, then adapted into George Stevens's 1956 film starring James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor,Giantis a text that dramatizes the domestication and naturalization of the oil industry in the postwar United States while endorsing a multiracial vision of Texas. This essay explores howGiantultimately arrives at nationalistic pluralism after representing the radical changes brought about by the modern oil industry in the US, particularly the erosion of traditional class divisions as Jett Rink's oil wealth exceeds the Benedict's ranching wealth. The subsumption of oil into liberal pluralism marks what this essay names “fossil-fuel futurity,” an ideological configuration in which normative life is produced through the commodities and modes of transportation made available by fossil-fuel culture. The essay then putsGiantinto a broader context of narratives about oil in the postwar US, especially the television seriesDallas(1978–91) and the filmThere Will Be Blood(2007). In all three texts, oil culture becomes postwar US culture, saturating aesthetic, affective, and family relations. The challenge for us, then, is to imagine a mode of futurity that does not replicate the ideological valences of “fossil-fuel futurity.”

Review: Crombie Taylor: Modern Architecture, Building Restoration and the Rediscovery of Louis Sullivan by Jeffrey Plank; Ira Rakatansky: As Modern as Tomorrow by John Caserta and Lynnette Widder, editors

Jeffrey Plank. Crombie Taylor: Modern Architecture, Building Restoration and the Rediscovery of Louis Sullivan . Richmond, California: William Stout, 2010, 324 pp., 54 color and 111 b/w illus. $65, ISBN 9780979550812 John Caserta and Lynnette Widder, editors. Ira Rakatansky: As Modern as Tomorrow . Richmond, California: William Stout and Rhode Island School of Design, 2010, 207 pp., 74 color and 100 b/w illus. $40, ISBN 9780981966700 Though the global economy has crippled commercial architectural publishing in recent years, the monograph remains a surprisingly durable genre, and minor figures from the modern period continue to arouse the interests of scholars and audiences. The latest beneficiaries of this trend are Crombie Taylor of Chicago and Ira Rakatansky of Providence, two midcentury architects with clear connections to modernist masters. Taylor is the more significant of the two, and Jeffrey Plank provides the more serious and extensive study. Crombie Taylor: Modern Architecture, Building Restoration and The Rediscovery of Louis Sullivan is a big book in every sense: well-researched, beautifully designed and printed. Charles Crombie Taylor (1914–1999) was a man of many interest and abilities. While he designed “spare, even severe” houses (13) that evoke a more reductive Mies van der Rohe, he also devoted many years to restoring Louis Sullivan masterworks and reconstructing Sullivan's method of creating pattern and ornament. He did double-duty as an architectural historian and color photographer, earning NEH and NEA grants for experimental multiscreen presentations of historic buildings. He also served as director for Chicago's Institute of Design (New Bauhaus), and later taught architectural history at the University of Southern California (USC) for several years. Plus he loved the English countryside. Plank weaves these “contradictory” facets together to create a seamless portrait of Taylor where each aspect of his work seems to complement and enrich the others (15). If you have visited Adler & Sullivan's Auditorium Building—the banquet hall, the Sullivan room, or the auditorium itself—you have experienced Taylor's great achievement. He led the restoration work from 1954 to 1963, and that project clearly remains a masterwork in the field of historic preservation. When Taylor began, many original elements had been lost, and in particular the …

The Horror of “Honey, I’m Home!”: The Perils of Postwar Family Love in the Domestic Sitcom

1950s Sitcom in Memory, Fantasy, and Fact In the 1970s, Rick Nelson (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet; ABC, 1952-66) and Desi Arnaz (/ Love Lucy; CBS, 1951-7) hosted NBC's Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975present). Nelson had been a nice boy role model and Arnaz's Ricky Ricardo was among the prototypes for the 1950s domestic patriarch, but, after their television heydays, both were associated with substance abuse, criminal activity, and infidelities (Arnaz; Bashe 207).1 Since SNL's baby-boomer writers satirized the hypocrisy that they saw in the older generation, they solicited the talents of Nelson and Arnaz for their remarkable shared capacity: to evoke the past and to register its troubled passing, virtually on sight (Shales and Miller 60; Gray, Jones, and Thompson 23). Dan Ackroyd - impersonating (CBS, 1959-64) host Rod Serling - introduced a sketch, itself called The Zone: Meet Ricky Nelson, age 16: a typical American kid in a typical American kitchen in a typical American black-andwhite-TV family home. Nelson - now Ricky again, as he was called on Ozzie and Harriet - is lost in suburbia, trying to locate his house in time for dinner. He enters a kitchen, grabs a bottle of milk, and meets June Cleaver of Leave it to Beaver (CBS, 1957-8; ABC, 1958-63), who offers him a brownie and an invitation - don't care who you are; you must stay for - but encourages him to wash first. Realizing that he is in the wrong house, Ricky leaves, and Ackroyd's Serling interrupts: A 16year-old teenager walking through Anytown, USA, past endless Elm Streets, Oak Streets, and Maple Streets, unable to distinguish one house from the other, for he's just entered a strange neighborhood, a neighborhood known as the Zone. Ricky now finds himself at the Andersons' of Father Knows Best (CBS, 1954-60), where he is also offered a brownie, dinner, and the suggestion to wash. pattern continues, so that, having excused himself from the Andersons, Ricky mistakenly visits the Williamses of Make Room for Daddy/The Danny Thomas Show (ABC, 1953-7; CBS, 1957-64) and finally ends up in the midst of one of Ricardo's raucous kitchen meltdowns in I Love Lucy. SNL's The Zone skit represents the typical intellectual treatment of 1950s domestic sitcoms as interchangeable, milquetoast fantasias of conservative social norms (Halberstam 583; Donaldson 131-2; Himmelstein 88; Newcomb 121; Lears 1420; Denis and Denis 48; Marc 140; Jezer 196). Though the other characters have never met Ricky (Nelson), his appearance barely phases them, so trapped are they in their routines: Eddie Haskell is obnoxiously obsequious, Betty Anderson has a date, the Williamses make fun of Danny's nose, and spectacularly fails to satisfy expectations for domestic management. sitcom universe is strange - a Twilight Zone - precisely because of these endless repetitions. However predictable its elements - the ruined dinner and the celebrity guest - I Love is often seen as an exceptional vehicle, starring a truly funny woman who will not fall in line with the brownie-bearing sitcom wives. Television critics' assessments have largely failed to differ here,2 and that critical conformity might account for the bold parodies of / Love when Desi Arnaz hosted SNL, because Arnaz's skits dramatized a repetition that critics typically have ignored, thus insulating audiences and performers alike from its implications. most poignant of these episodes is Loathe which begins like an average I Love episode. Ricky comes home from the club, and the Ricardos embrace and engage in cute chitchat, only for Ricky to turn suddenly on Lucy, shoving her, throwing a drink in her face, pulling her in for a kiss only to push her down, while berating her, as the live SNL audience roars with laughter. But the Loathe Lucy skit is uproarious, perhaps, because it elevates one of I Love Lucy's most persistent tropes - Lucy's fear of her husband - to thematic, and therefore hyperbolic, level. …

U.S.—Israel Relations

ZEV CHAFETS. A Match Made in Heaven: American Jem, Christian Zionists, and One Man 's Expiration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007. Pp. viii + 231.ZVI GANIN. An Uneasy Relationship: American Leadership and Israel, 1948-1957. Modern History. Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2005. Pp. xxi + 255.MICHAEL B. OREN. Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007. Pp. xxii + 778.WILLIAM PENCAK. Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654-1800. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 321.ELIZABETH STEPHENS. U.S. Policy towards Israel: The Role of Political Culture in Defining the Special Relationship. Brighton, England: Sussex Academic Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 338.JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER and STEPHEN M. WALT. The Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Pp xxii + 484.In 1918 members of the U.S. House and Senate expressed support for the British Government's Balfour Declaration of November of the previous year. Numerous pro-Declaration statements by individual congressmen alluded to the recent British victory over the Turks in Palestine, seeing it as confirmation and fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Representative William E. Cox of Indiana stated that just as Moses had led the Israelites out of bondage, so the Allies are now redeeming Judea. Judea, in the senator's mind, merited redemption: for Rome taught mankind government of law . . . but it remained for and her to give mankind the true Christian (Stephens, pp. 12-13). In Cox's formulation, and in the understanding of many Americans of the period, Christians were in debt to Jews, for it was from Judaism that Christianity sprang. That debt could be fulfilled by supporting the establishment of Jewish National Home in Palestine. It is instructive to recall that these congressional statements were made long before there was State of or an Israel Lobby.Though the stated objective of the Balfour Declaration was the establishment of national home for the people, the centrality and sanctity of was understood by American Protestant elites as Christian issue. If Jews as nation were to be accepted into the postwar family of nations, American Protestants had role to play in this acceptance - for they could explain to the world that Christianity was in debt to Judaism and that Jews were entitled to land of their own. As Representative Cox noted in his 1918 statement, ideals and teachings of the true Christian religion given to searching mankind, makes and her the greatest on earth (Stephens, p. 13).Thus, thirty years before the establishment of the State of Israel, Judea had replaced Palestine as an American way of referring to Palestine. The preconception that Judea belonged to the Jews was so powerful it erased consideration of the majority Arab population in the Land without people that awaited a without land. This American perception of Judea as territory explains some of current American support for Israel. But biblical understanding of the issue is an important factor not emphasized sufficiently in the six books discussed in this essay.Explaining U.S. support of and fascination with requires varied tool kit and highly skilled analysis. No one explanation including biblical one, is sufficient. Elizabeth Stephens's book focuses on the aspects of the question, which she contrasts with the rational choice theory of many political scientists. These theorists, according to Stephens, would deny altogether the importance of culture predispositions. Stephens notes that political culture approach does not provide the researcher with systematic theory of political action that can be subjected to the scrutiny of scientific rigour (p. …

Norbert Elias and Figurational Sociology: The Comeback of the Century

Norbert Elias (1897-1990) has been recog nized belatedly in American sociology, even though the prefaces to his collected works claim he was one of the great sociologists of our time. This more British and European judgment-Elias won the first versions of both the Theodor Adorno Award (1977) and the European Amali Prize for social science (1987)-would generally as a surprise for American sociologists. Indeed, if sociol ogy were a sport, Elias would win the come back of the century award (Gordon 2002: 68). Yet as Edward Shils once pointed out, the success and visibility of sociological ideas have only a weak relationship to their enduring validity. Shils' case in point, writ ing in 1970, was that whereas Frankfurt School Critical Theory had become popular primarily because of its politics and strategic location, Karl Mannheim's soci ology had been unjustly marginalized despite its greater sociological depth (Shils 1980). Despite the tendentiousness of his comparative judgments, Shils' sociological argument about the marginalizing effects of ecological locations could be applied even more tellingly to Elias, Mannheim's onetime assistant. Ironically, however, from the per spective of critical social theory all three of these cases can now be viewed in a very dif ferent political context as more complemen tary than competing, sharing a historicist, post-empiricist conception of social theory whose post-Kantian interpretive structural ism could not be comprehended within the categories of logical empiricism and posi tivism. Following a doctorate on Kant in philoso phy, Elias became a sociology student of Alfred Weber (Max's younger brother) in Heidelberg in 1925 for his Habilitation research (necessary for a teaching position). There he also met and befriended Mannheim, becoming his assistant when he left in 1930 for a chair in Frankfurt. Though only 4 years younger than Mannheim, he had lost considerable career time because of trau matic World War I military duty and post war family economic problems. In contrast to Mannheim, however, Elias lived a long-as Early Writings, by Norbert Elias. The Collected Works of Norbert Elias, Volume 1, edited by Richard Kilminster. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Dublin, IE: University College Dublin Press/Dufour Editions, 2006. 136pp. $74.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781904558392.

Flexible Employment, Flexible Families, and the Socialization of Reproduction

The progress of markets erodes traditional relations of social solidarity that are essential for the stability and performance of societies. As markets advance, pressures build on the state to replace informal social obligations with formal ones. Regulation may fail, however, which tends to give rise to demands for public services substituting for private reciprocity and compliance with institutionalized normative expectations. As a result, demands on public finances increase. The paper demonstrates this sequence by describing how the pressures and attractions of labor markets undermined the 'Fordist family' of the 1960s; how the complex interaction between increasingly more flexible employment and loosening family structures resulted in declining fertility in a variety of modern societies; and how providing for societies' physical reproduction increasingly became a matter of public policy in some countries but not in others. Parallels are drawn to active labor market policy and the recent rescue of the money-making industry by Western governments. Moreover, special attention is paid to differences between countries, especially Sweden on the one hand and the United States on the other, in particular to the conditions under which governments apparently can afford not to heed calls for ever deeper and ever more expensive intervention in social relations. Exploring the increasingly negative relationship between fertility and 'familialism,' the paper also shows how advanced commodification of labor and individualization of social life has effectively made it impossible to return to traditional social arrangements, such as the postwar family.

The Political Economy of Postwar Family Policy in Japan: Economic Imperatives and Electoral Incentives

In recent years, Japanese family policy has shifted from policies that reinforce traditional gender roles to policies that enable women to balance work and family. This article focuses on the political economy of maternity leave, parental leave, and childcare policy in the postwar period prior to changes in the 1990s. The analysis reveals that while traditional views of women's caregiving roles dominated the political agenda, they were subject to a more flexible interpretation when the economic needs of the family or society warranted it. Specifically, labor shortages, the demand for female labor, and the electoral fortunes of the Liberal Democratic Party were key factors driving the expansion of publicly funded childcare and leave legislation.

Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and possibilities, edited by Matt Bryden. Lawrenceville NJ and Asmara: The Red Sea Press Inc., 2005. viii + 393 pp. £29.95 (paperback). ISBN 1-56902-229-1 (paperback).

This collection of essays provides a unique and insightful account of Somaliland’s post-1991 reconstruction process from the perspective of Somalilanders themselves. It is the product of a collaborative research project undertaken by WSP International (formerly the War-torn Societies Project) and the Academy of Peace and Development (a local Somaliland institution) between 1999 and 2002. In accordance with WSP International’s aims, Rebuilding Somaliland concentrates on analysing the specific challenges Somaliland is perceived to face in its ongoing reconstruction process. The final outcome, however, is a book that, in addition to dealing with those challenges, provides a general portrait of the secessionist north-western part of Somalia, a rare success story of post-conflict reconstruction and credited, by South African academic Iqbal Jhazbhay, as ‘Africa’s best kept secret’. WSP’s Somaliland programme generated two different types of written document. First, there is the ‘self-portrait’, which was intended to build ‘a foundation of information and analysis on which a national discourse of post-war priorities could subsequently take place’ (p. 359). Second, there are four ‘entry points’ (the results of workshops and working group deliberations) that aim to portray the ‘debates and concerns of the Somaliland community’ (p. 360) and advance an analysis of, and recommendations for, the relevant issues. It is these five written products that form the core of the book. The introductory chapter is a succinct version of the (previously published) Self-Portrait of Somaliland, which provides an overview of Somaliland’s history and the plethora of perceived challenges in political, economic, and social rebuilding. The four ‘entry points’ (chapters 3–6) deal with various issues. Chapter 3 addresses political representation, decentralization of administration, taxation, and equity in the context of Somaliland’s transition from the clan-based ‘beel system’ to a multiparty democracy. Chapter 4 explores the role of the media in Somaliland’s democratization process. Chapter 5 examines the important issue of regulation of Somaliland’s livestock economy. And finally, chapter 6 examines the changing values, roles, and relationships within the family, the socio-economic effects of qaad use on the family, and social support systems for the post-war family. In addition to these five texts, the book has a chapter on the specific Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology used in the research (chapter 2) and an external evaluation of the project (chapter 7).