The social development strategy of the Shiites in Lebanon

This study examines what many scholars have neglected to investigate when addressing post Civil War issues in Lebanon. Most studies have addressed political issues surrounding activities of Shiite movements, such as Harakat Amal or Hizb Allah, while socioeconomic issues have been neglected.^ Imam Musa Sadr challenged the power of traditional Shiite leaders by creating official Shiites institutions and movements like Amal. The Iranian Revolution and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 sparked the creation of Hizb Allah which, not only struggled against its foes, but also provided social services to the Shiites. This development program has been central in creating political legitimacy for Hizb Allah, regardless of its military situation, which suggests that socioeconomic development can transform a militia into a legitimate actor on the Lebanese political scene. The survivability of Shiite parties is therefore tantamount to not only their military might, but also to their social involvement. ^

Comparative administrative reform: The rhetoric and reality of the Civil Service reform programs in Uganda and Tanzania

Administrative reform is a challenging endeavor for both developed and developing countries alike. For developing countries, the challenge is greater because numerous reforms are implemented concurrently sometimes under conditions of resource scarcity and political instability. So far there is no consensus as to what makes some reforms succeed and others fail. The current study seeks to fill that gap by offering an empirical comparative analysis of the administrative reforms initiated in Uganda and Tanzania since the early 1990s. The purpose of the study is to explain the similarities and differences, and give reasons for the successes and failures of the reform programs in the two countries. It focuses on four major areas; the size of the civil service, pay reform, capacity building, and ethics and accountability. Data were collected via in-depth face to face interviews with 35 key government officials and the content analysis of various documents. The results indicate that the reforms generated initial substantial reduction in the size of the public services in both countries. In Uganda, the traditional civil service was reduced from 140,500 in 1990 to 41,730 in 2004; while in Tanzania Ministries, Departments, and Agencies were reduced by 25%. Pay reform has generated substantial increases in civil servants' salaries in both countries but in Uganda, the government has not been able to abide by the pay strategy while in Tanzania the strategy guides the increments. Civil Service capacity building efforts have focused on enhancing the skills of the personnel. Training needs assessments were undertaken in all ministries in Uganda and a training policy was formulated. In Tanzania, the training needs assessments are still under way and a training policy has not yet been developed. Ethics and accountability are great challenges in both countries, but in Tanzania, there is more political will and commitment to improve the integrity of the civil service. The findings reveal that although Uganda started the reform with much more rigor and initial success, Tanzania has surpassed it and has a more stable, consistent, and promising reform record. This is because Uganda's leadership lacks political legitimacy. The country has since the late 1990s experienced a civil war in the northern and western parts of the country while Tanzania has benefitted from relative peace and high level political legitimacy.

Geografia emocional d'un exode: La retirada republicana de 1939

This thesis proposes to trace and explore an emotional geography and cartography of the republican withdrawal at the end of the Spanish Civil War in Catalonia during the months of January and February 1939. Thus, it complements existing historiographical scholarship on the Spanish Civil War and Spanish Republican Exile, especially with regard to what was experienced in Catalan territory. However, its main purpose is not that of the historian, to reveal and explain unexplored stories, but to locate existing narratives, memoirs, journals and testimonies carefully in the landscape in which they took place, exposing their emotional bonds with the places and spaces of the withdrawal of the protagonists of the Republican exodus of 1939. Whilst there has been significant work in recent years to “recover” spaces associated with violent of traumatic memories of conflict and displacement, including the creation of a network of “Democratic Memory” places in Catalonia, the spaces explored in this thesis have not so far been construed as places of memory. In part, this is because of the diversity of emotions and affective responses they provoked and continue to evoke, but also because the geography of the Retirada is characterized by mobility and multiplicity. So instead of an historical approach, despite being influenced by Walter Benjamin's concept of history, this thesis draws on existing methods and approaches related to cultural geography, in particular, the emerging interdisciplinary field known as emotional geographies. In order to create a vision of La Retirada that is sensitive to its mobility and multiplicity, the primary methodology used has been that of interdisciplinary assemblage, juxtaposing images, documents and stories of past and present, in a process redolent of that which Marianne Hirsch calls "post-memory".

Comparative Administrative Reform: The Rhetoric and Reality of the Civil Service Reform Programs in Uganda and Tanzania

Administrative reform is a challenging endeavor for both developed and developing countries alike. For developing countries, the challenge is greater because numerous reforms are implemented concurrently sometimes under conditions of resource scarcity and political instability. So far there is no consensus as to what makes some reforms succeed and others fail. The current study seeks to fill that gap by offering an empirical comparative analysis of the administrative reforms initiated in Uganda and Tanzania since the early 1990s. The purpose of the study is to explain the similarities and differences, and give reasons for the successes and failures of the reform programs in the two countries. It focuses on four major areas; the size of the civil service, pay reform, capacity building, and ethics and accountability. Data were collected via in-depth face to face interviews with 35 key government officials and the content analysis of various documents. The results indicate that the reforms generated initial substantial reduction in the size of the public services in both countries. In Uganda, the traditional civil service was reduced from 140,500 in 1990 to 41,730 in 2004; while in Tanzania Ministries, Departments, and Agencies were reduced by 25%. Pay reform has generated substantial increases in civil servants’ salaries in both countries but in Uganda, the government has not been able to abide by the pay strategy while in Tanzania the strategy guides the increments. Civil Service capacity building efforts have focused on enhancing the skills of the personnel. Training needs assessments were undertaken in all ministries in Uganda and a training policy was formulated. In Tanzania, the training needs assessments are still under way and a training policy has not yet been developed. Ethics and accountability are great challenges in both countries, but in Tanzania, there is more political will and commitment to improve the integrity of the civil service. The findings reveal that although Uganda started the reform with much more rigor and initial success, Tanzania has surpassed it and has a more stable, consistent, and promising reform record. This is because Uganda’s leadership lacks political legitimacy. The country has since the late 1990s experienced a civil war in the northern and western parts of the country while Tanzania has benefitted from relative peace and high level political legitimacy.

‘The voice speaking, desired, awaited’: Jack Lindsay’s 1649, Textual Form and Communist Historiography

This article examines the 1938 historical novel 1649: A Novel of a Year by the Anglo-Australian communist polymath Jack Lindsay in the context of the politics of the Popular Front, and identifies the aesthetic and historiographic debates questions that inform Lindsay’s inventive rendition of the historical novel. The novel may be considered in light of what Lindsay later called his desire ‘to use the novel to revive revolutionary traditions’, as well as his ‘struggle to achieve an understanding of the Novel while writing novels’. Lindsay’s novel figures a reality becoming prosaic: it reproduces contemporary textual sources – tracts, pamphlets, newspapers – as part of its meditation on a nascent print culture whose products circulate in processes that mirror the increasingly conspicuous flow of commodities. In this sense, the novel offers a marxist reflection on its own conditions of possibility in emergent bourgeois culture, as well as intervening in the vexed question of the Civil War as a ‘bourgeois revolution’. The novel however seeks to capture a dialectical method of representing the revolution that acknowledges defeat while rearticulating the utopian content of the defeated radicals, a practice integral to Lindsay’s vision of popular history as a transhistorical dialogue. That utopian content is transmitted through two forms: popular song, which acts to supplement political writing; and the heroic portrayal of the Leveller John Lilburne on trial, whose conduct exemplifies praxis conceived as a unity of word, thought and action.

Spanish Photography Yearbooks between the Autarchy and the Transition A Documentary Analysis (1958-1980)

The first yearbook on Spanish artistic photography was published in 1924 and following the Civil War of 1936-1939, Madrid’s Real Sociedad Fotográfica, through its Sombras magazine, published two others in 1946 and 1948. There would not be another publication until 1958, when the Agrupación Fotográfica Almeriense put out the third yearbook, during a period of economic recovery following the country’s admission to the U.N. at the end of 1955. However, it was not until 1972 when Spanish photography resumed the publication of annual summaries of the authors and their works. From then on until 1980, nine yearbooks were published by two institutions: The Consorcio del Libro Técnico (Cotec) and the Editorial Everest publishing company. The object of this study is to analyze the contents of these yearbooks in order to determine and furnish new data on the history of Spanish photography: authors, works, publications, national and international relations and the purpose of their publications as a means for supporting photography.

Travel, back and forth, to the myth. Cinema´s contribution to the formation of the tourist iconography of Mallorca

Mallorca, the largest of the Balearic Islands, is a well-known summer holidays destination; an ideal place to relax and enjoy the sun and the sea. That tourist gaze reflected on postcards results from advertising campaigns, where cinema played an important role with documentaries and fiction films. The origins of that iconography started in the decades of the 1920’s and 1930’s, reflecting the so-called myth of the “island of calm”. On the other hand, the films of the 1950’s and 1960’s created new stereotypes related to the mass tourism boom. Busy beaches and the white bodies of tourists replaced white sandy beaches, mountains and landscapes shown up in the movies of the early decades of the 20th century. Besides, hotels and nightclubs also replaced monuments, rural landscapes and folk exhibitions. These tourist images mirror the social and spatial transformations of Mallorca, under standardization processes like other seaside mass tourist destinations. The identity was rebuilt on the foundations of "modernity". Although "balearization" has not ceased, nowadays filmmaking about Mallorca is advertising again a stereotype close to that one of the 1920s and 1930s, glorifying the myth of the "island of calm". This singular identity makes the island more profitable for capital that searches socio-spatial differentiation in post-fordist times.

"Ad nostram scientiam referatur": la supervisión administrativa imperial de la aplicación de las leyes durante la dinastía constantiniana

Constantino y sus sucesores, Constancio II, Constante y Juliano, expresaron su particular interés por supervisar la aplicación de determinadas leyes imperiales mediante el uso de la fórmula ad nostram scientiam referatur y de otras similares. Constantino fue el príncipe que la empleó con más frecuencia, especialmente durante el período de 313-324, exceptuando el intervalo de 315-316, cuando la confrontación con Licinio le obligó a renunciar a atender directamente las cuestiones administrativas. La progresiva disminución de la inclusión de estas cláusulas en los textos legales imperiales a partir de la unificación del Imperio en 324 se debe poner en relación con la aparición de los curiosi y luego de los agentes in rebus, como oficiales encargados de vigilar la observancia de las normas vigentes.

Discovery and settlement of Alaska coaster

Tsar Peter the Great ruled Russia between 1689 and 1725. Its domains, stretching from the Baltic Sea in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. From north to south, its empire stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the borders with China and India. Tsar Peter I tried to extend the geographical knowledge of his government and the rest of the world. He was also interested in the expansion of trade in Russia and in the control of trade routes. Feodor Luzhin and Ivan Yeverinov explored the eastern border of the Russian Empire, the trip between 1719 and 1721 and reported to the Tsar. They had crossed the peninsula of Kamchatka, from west to east and had traveled from the west coast of Kamchatka to the Kuril Islands. The information collected led to the first map of Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands. Tsar Peter ordered Bering surf the Russian Pacific coast, build ships and sail the seas north along the coast to regions of America. The second expedition found equal to those of the previous explorers difficulties. Two ships were eventually thrown away in Okhotsk in 1740. The explorers spent the winter of 1740-1741 stockpiling supplies and then navigate to Petropavlovsk. The two ships sailed eastward and did together until June 20, then separated by fog. After searching Chirikov and his boat for several days, Bering ordered the San Pedro continue to the northeast. There the Russian sailors first sighted Alaska. According to the log, "At 12:30 (pm July 17) in sight of snow-capped mountains and between them a high volcano." This finding came the day of St. Elijah and so named the mountain.

Difficult Labor: Troublesome Company at the New Birth of Freedom

Extended contribution to a roundtable on Mark A. Lause's Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class, emphasizing the wartime labor movement's great difficulty in responding to rapid industrialization brought on by the war, and to the increasing diversity of the labor force brought about by mass immigration.

Du Bois's Prolific "Error" and the Break with Color-Blind Orthodoxy

Contribution to a roundtable on the 70th anniversary of the publication of W. E. B. DuBois's classic study of US slave emancipation, Black Reconstruction, 1860-1880, including original research on the context in which the book was launched and reflections on its impact on the recent historiography of the American Civil War and its aftermath. 

La Comunità ebraica di Shanghai

The Jewish community in Shanghai was among the first to settle in the Treaty Ports which were opened after the Opium war. Jewish population grew until the rendition of the foreign settlements to the Chinese authorities, and its history broadly consists of three periods.The first Jews came to Shanghai in the XIX century were sephardits from Iraq and India. Among those emigrated to Shanghai following the expansion of the British commerce in China were such famous families as Sassoons, Hardoons and Kadoories.The second wave arrived with the White Russians exodus after the October Revolution; they were askanzits Jews who fled from pogroms and the Russian civil war. The third wave were Jews fleeing from central Europe in the 1930s. This group was the largest of the three.The first settlers saw Shanghai as a port of opportunities, while the others came there seeking refuge.The interwar Shanghai could offer protection and a temporary place of residence for Jewish people. In the 1920s and 1930s Jews coming to Shanghai were helped by local Jewish associations, which supported them in the search for accommodations and jobs. This net of associations was effective until WWII. The war, however, made them face increasing number of contraints. In this constrained situation we should remember that the Japanese authorities, occupying the International Settlement, imposed a ban for new Jewish arrivals to settle in the Hongkou district; while the French authorities under the Vichy government imposed a complete ban on Jewish residents in their concession. Finally, the Jewish immigration to Shanghai had stopped completely in 1942, because there were no more ways to get there.Japanese authorities, however, were not interested in applying the racial laws as their priority lay in the conquest of China. And although the Jews were in an enemy's territory, they were not persecuted. In fact, when the war was over they left Shanghai directly to the United States and Israel.

L'Idéologie politique des empereurs flaviens (69-96) à travers les sources épigraphiques et numismatiques

La dynastie des Flaviens est souvent mal connue et appréciée en raison de sa situation chronologique, « coincée » entre la famille des descendants de César et d’Auguste et celle allant de Trajan à Marc Aurèle. Elle passe parfois pour une simple dynastie de « transition » qui aurait uniquement servi de passerelle entre deux familles considérées comme plus brillantes qui ont par ailleurs laissé un souvenir plus durable. En un peu plus d’un quart de siècle (69-96), Vespasien, Titus et Domitien ont pourtant davantage fait pour la stabilité de Rome et de l’Empire que certains de leurs prédécesseurs ou successeurs. Sorti vainqueur des troubles civils de l’année des quatre empereurs (68-69), Vespasien ramena la paix en Orient et en Italie en plus de s’attacher à stabiliser les institutions et de reconstituer les finances de l’État, passablement écornées par les dernières années du Principat de Néron (54-68) et la guerre civile elle-même. Plus que la paix et la stabilité à l’intérieur et aux frontières de l’Empire, il fit cependant en sorte de refonder les bases institutionnelles du Principat en assumant sa transformation en un régime monarchique et héréditaire. Un principe parfaitement admis puisque ses deux fils adultes, Titus et Domitien, lui succédèrent sans difficulté. Davantage peut-être que les récits laissés par les sources littéraires anciennes, les inscriptions romaines et italiennes ainsi que les monnaies émises par l’atelier de Rome sont probablement le meilleur témoignage permettant de saisir le plus précisément et le plus profondément l’idée que les Flaviens se faisaient d’eux-mêmes et du pouvoir dont ils étaient investis. Le contenu de leur titulature officielle comme leurs choix iconographiques permettent ainsi de dégager leurs différents thèmes de propagande qui laissent finalement apparaitre une vraie continuité dans leur idéologie du pouvoir et leur manière de gouverner. Vespasien a ainsi posé des fondations idéologiques et politiques que ses fils ont globalement poursuivies et respectées, ce qui renforce l’idée selon laquelle les Flaviens ont effectivement suivi un « programme » qui les distinguait de leurs prédécesseurs et de leurs successeurs. Malgré des différences parfois importantes dans leurs pratiques, les inscriptions et l’iconographie monétaire permettent ainsi de mettre en lumière le fait que Titus et Domitien ont finalement moins cherché à faire preuve d’originalité qu’à s’inscrire dans la continuité de l’œuvre de leur père afin de garantir le maintien de la paix et avec elle la prospérité et la stabilité de l’État, et avec elles la satisfaction et la tranquillité de l’ensemble de la société.

The Persistence of Torture: Explaining Coercive Interrogation in America’s Small Wars

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-08

The Janus-faced City: A Sensory History of the London Blitz 1940–1941

The city of London was, during the years of 1940–1941, a city under fire. The metropolis seemed to have two faces, like the Roman deity Janus: the face of the daylight hours, so normal, and yet so deceiving in its false quietness – and at nightfall, the city turned, and the face of it was the face of the devil himself, transforming London into a living inferno. This thesis examines the sensescapes of the Blitz, through the diaries and memoirs written of that time. The primary sources consist of seven different diaries, two autobiographies, and four research volumes that contain multiple diary- and memoire entries, mostly from the Mass Observation Archives and from the Imperial War Museum. The sensory approach is a new orientation in the field of history – it studies the five senses in their cultural contexts, interpreting the often subtle ways in which the senses affect into society, politics, culture, and class hierarchies, to name only but few. The subject of the sensory history of war is a theme widely unexamined: this thesis contributes to this frontier field by unveiling the sensorium of the London bombings, comparing the differences between the halves of nychtemeron, and examining how the Blitz was communicated by the writers as a lived, bodily experience. This study reveals the very different sensory worlds in which the Londoners lived, during a time that is often described with the mythical solidarity that was thought to exist between the people. The reality of the homeless, working class, and poor were in the foul smelling tubes, poor law -dated rations, and in the smoking ruins of East End – the contrast was massive reflecting it to the luxury hotels and restaurants of the upper classes, opportunities for evacuation, sheltering possibilities, and overall comforts of life.