Pastoralists at War: Violence and Security in the Kenya-Sudan-Uganda Border Region

The majority of those living in the border region of Kenya, Sudan, and Uganda are pastoralists, whose livelihoods are dictated by the upkeep and size of their herds. Harsh environmental conditions force pastoralists to migrate in search of water and pasturelands during the dry season. With limited access to water and competing rights to land, inter-tribal conflict arises when pastoralists from one tribe enter the territory of another. The increased availability of small arms in the region from past wars increasingly makes ordinary clashes fatal. Governments in the region have responded with heavy-handed coercive disarmament operations. These have led to distrust and subsequent violent clashes between communities and security providers. This report reviews the scale, consequences of, and responses to the many pastoral conflicts, utilizing methodological tools such as key informant interviews, retrospective analy¬sis, and a thorough review of available literature.

The Use of Ships' Protests for Reconstruction of Synoptic-Scale Weather and Tropical Storm Identification in the Late Eighteenth Century

Ships’ protests have been used for centuries as legal documents to record and detail damages and indemnify Captains from fault. We use them in this article, along with data extracted through forensic synoptic analysis (McNally, 1994, 2004) to identify a tropical or subtropical system in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1785. They are shown to be viable sources of meteorological information. By comparing a damaging storm in New England in 1996, which included an offshore tropical system, with one reconstructed in 1785, we demonstrate that the tropical system identified in a ship’s protest played a significant role in the 1785 storm. With both forensic reconstruction and anecdotal evidence, we are able to assess that these storms are remarkably identical. The recurrence rate calculated in previous studies of the 1996 storm is 400–500 years. We suggest that reconstruction of additional years in the 1700s would provide the basis for a reanalysis of recurrence rates, with implications for future insurance and reinsurance rates. The application of the methodology to this new data source can also be used for extension of the hurricane database in the North Atlantic basin, and elsewhere, much further back into history than is currently available.

Ship Newspapers and Passenger Life Aboard Transoceanic Steamships in the Late Nineteenth Century

Despite the many technological innovations that had for some time contributed to a significant reduction of global travel times, intercontinental ship passages in the late nineteenth century were no quick affair. Depending on the route, such journeys could last between a few weeks and several months. During this time, crew and passengers shared the narrow space of the ship—largely isolated from the rest of the world and basically suspended between origin and destination. On many long-distance steamers, the production and consumption of ship newspapers became one possible means of whiling away the time in transit for the passengers. In this article, we seek to demonstrate how these extraordinary publications can serve as lenses not only on shipboard life but actually on historical actors of globalisation in a more general context. First, we seek to highlight why and how ship newspapers played an important role in the shaping of the peculiar social space of the passenger ship. We will then give a brief overview of the context in which these newspapers were produced and what kind of news they contained. In a third step, we will introduce two brief examples of topics discussed in ship newspapers and outline possible fields of research on which ship newspapers will be able to shed new light.

How gender fair are German schoolbooks in the twenty-first century? An analysis of language and illustrations in schoolbooks for mathematics and German

Schoolbooks convey not only school-relevant knowledge; they also influence the development of stereotypes about different social groups. Particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, many studies analysed schoolbooks and criticised the overall predominance of male persons and of traditional role allocations. Since that time, women’s and men’s occupations and social functions have changed considerably. The present research investigated gender portrayals in schoolbooks for German and mathematics that were recently published in Germany. We examined the proportions of female and male persons in pictures and texts and categorized their activities, occupational and parental roles. Going beyond previous studies, we added two criteria: the use of gender-fair language and the spatial arrangements of persons in pictures. Our results show that schoolbooks for German contained almost balanced depictions of girls and boys, whereas women were less frequently shown than men. In mathematics books, males outnumbered females in general. Across both types of books, female and male persons were engaged in many different activities, not only gendertyped ones; however, male persons were more often described via their profession than females. Use of gender-fair language has found its way into schoolbooks but is not used consistently. Books for German were more gender fair in terms of linguistic forms than books for mathematics. For spatial arrangements, we found no indication for gender biases. The results are discussed with a focus on how schoolbooks can be optimized to contribute to gender equality.