The Pragmatic Superpower: Winning the Cold War in the Middle East PDF Download

Author: Ray Takeyh
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393285561
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
A bold reexamination of U.S. influence in the Middle East during the Cold War. The Arab Spring, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Iraq war, and the Syrian civil war—these contemporary conflicts have deep roots in the Middle East’s postwar emergence from colonialism. In The Pragmatic Superpower, foreign policy experts Ray Takeyh and Steven Simon reframe the legacy of U.S. involvement in the Arab world from 1945 to 1991 and shed new light on the makings of the contemporary Middle East. Cutting against conventional wisdom, the authors argue that, when an inexperienced Washington entered the turbulent world of Middle Eastern politics, it succeeded through hardheaded pragmatism—and secured its place as a global superpower. Eyes ever on its global conflict with the Soviet Union, America shrewdly navigated the rise of Arab nationalism, the founding of Israel, and seminal conflicts including the Suez War and the Iranian revolution. Takeyh and Simon reveal that America’s objectives in the region were often uncomplicated but hardly modest. Washington deployed adroit diplomacy to prevent Soviet infiltration of the region, preserve access to its considerable petroleum resources, and resolve the conflict between a Jewish homeland and the Arab states that opposed it. The Pragmatic Superpower provides fascinating insight into Washington’s maneuvers in a contest for global power and offers a unique reassessment of America’s cold war policies in a critical region of the world. Amid the chaotic conditions of the twenty-first century, Takeyh and Simon argue that there is an urgent need to look back to a period when the United States got it right. Only then will we better understand the challenges we face today.

Author: Melanie Jonasch
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789253594
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
The island of Sicily was a highly contested area throughout much of its history. Among the first to exert strong influence on its political, cultural, infrastructural, and demographic developments were the two major decentralized civilizations of the first millennium BCE: the Phoenicians and the Greeks. While trade and cultural exchange preceded their permanent presence, it was the colonizing movement that brought territorial competition and political power struggles on the island to a new level. The history of six centuries of colonization is replete with accounts of conflict and warfare that include cross-cultural confrontations, as well as interstate hostilities, domestic conflicts, and government violence. This book is not concerned with realities from the battlefield or questions of military strategy and tactics, but rather offers a broad collection of archaeological case studies and historical essays that analyze how political competition, strategic considerations, and violent encounters substantially affected rural and urban environments, the island’s heterogeneous communities, and their social practices. These contributions, originating from a workshop in 2018, combine expertise from the fields of archaeology, ancient history, and philology. The focus on a specific time period and the limited geographic area of Greek Sicily allows for the thorough investigation and discussion of various forms of organized societal violence and their consequences on the developments in society and landscape.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004414363
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 600

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Book Description
The focus of Regional Urban Systems in the Roman World is on urban hierarchies and interactions in large geographical areas rather than on individual cities. Based on a painstaking examination of archaeological and epigraphic evidence relating to more than 1,000 cities, the volume offers comprehensive reconstructions of the urban systems of Roman Gaul, North Africa, Sicily, Greece and Asia Minor. In addition it examines the transformation of the settlement systems of the Iberian Peninsula and the central and northern Balkan following the imposition of Roman rule. Throughout the volume regional urban configurations are examined from a rich variety of perspectives, ranging from climate and landscape, administration and politics, economic interactions and social relationships all the way to region-specific ways of shaping the townscapes of individual cities.

Author: Ali Smith
Publisher: Comma Press
ISBN: 1910974234
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Two unaccompanied children travel across the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat that has been designed to only make it halfway across… A 63-year-old man is woken one morning by border officers ‘acting on a tip-off’ and, despite having paid taxes for 28 years, is suddenly cast into the detention system with no obvious means of escape… An orphan whose entire life has been spent in slavery – first on a Ghanaian farm, then as a victim of trafficking – writes to the Home Office for help, only to be rewarded with a jail sentence and indefinite detention… These are not fictions. Nor are they testimonies from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly common experiences of Europe’s new underclass – its refugees. While those with ‘citizenship’ enjoy basic human rights (like the right not to be detained without charge for more than 14 days), people seeking asylum can be suspended for years in Kafka-esque uncertainty. Here, poets and novelists retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of Britain’s policy of indefinite immigration detention. Presenting their accounts anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims’ stories in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.

Author: Nicola Chiarenza
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110677067
Category : History
Languages : de
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Water is a global resource for modern societies - and water was a global resource for pre-modern societies. The many different water systems serving processes of urbanisation and urban life in ancient times and the Middle Ages have hardly been researched until now. The numerous contributions to this volume pose questions such as what the basic cultural significance of water was, the power of water, in the town and for the town, from different points of view. Symbolic, aesthetic, and cult aspects are taken up, as is the role of water in politics, society, and economy, in daily life, but also in processes of urban planning or in urban neighbourhoods. Not least, the dangers of polluted water or of flooding presented a challenge to urban society. The contributions in this volume draw attention to the complex, manifold relations between water and human beings. This collection presents the results of an international conference in Kiel in 2018. It is directed towards both scholars in ancient and mediaeval studies and all those interested in the diversity of water systems in urban space in ancient and mediaeval times.

Author: Ralph Mathisen
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292729839
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Skin-clad barbarians ransacking Rome remains a popular image of the "decline and fall" of the Roman Empire, but why, when, and how the Empire actually fell are still matters of debate among students of classical history. In this pioneering study, Ralph W. Mathisen examines the "fall" in one part of the western Empire, Gaul, to better understand the shift from Roman to Germanic power that occurred in the region during the fifth century AD Mathisen uncovers two apparently contradictory trends. First, he finds that barbarian settlement did provoke significant changes in Gaul, including the disappearance of most secular offices under the Roman imperial administration, the appropriation of land and social influence by the barbarians, and a rise in the overall level of violence. Yet he also shows that the Roman aristocrats proved remarkably adept at retaining their rank and status. How did the aristocracy hold on? Mathisen rejects traditional explanations and demonstrates that rather than simply opposing the barbarians, or passively accepting them, the Roman aristocrats directly responded to them in various ways. Some left Gaul. Others tried to ignore the changes wrought by the newcomers. Still others directly collaborated with the barbarians, looking to them as patrons and holding office in barbarian governments. Most significantly, however, many were willing to change the criteria that determined membership in the aristocracy. Two new characteristics of the Roman aristocracy in fifth-century Gaul were careers in the church and greater emphasis on classical literary culture. These findings shed new light on an age in transition. Mathisen's theory that barbarian integration into Roman society was a collaborative process rather than a conquest is sure to provoke much thought and debate. All historians who study the process of power transfer from native to alien elites will want to consult this work.

Author: Dante Fedele
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004447121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 719

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Book Description
Dante Fedele’s new work of reference reveals the medieval foundations of international law through a comprehensive study of a key figure of late medieval legal scholarship: Baldus de Ubaldis (1327-1400).

Author: Rino Coluccello
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137280506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
The Sicilian Mafia, or Cosa Nostra, is one of the most intriguing criminal phenomena in the world. It is an unparalleled organised criminal grouping that over almost two centuries has been able not only to successfully permeate licit and illicit economy, politics and civil society, but also to influence and exercise authoritative power over both the underworld and the upper-world. This criminal phenomenon has been a captivating conundrum for scholars of different disciplines who have tried to explain with various paradigms the reasons behind the emergence and consolidation of the mafia. Challenging the Mafia Mystique provides an analysis of the changes the Sicilian mafia has undergone, from legitimisation to denunciation. Rino Coluccello highlights how, from the very emergence of the organised criminal groups in Sicily, a culture existed that was protective and tolerant of the mafia. He argues that the various conceptualisations of the mafia that dominated the public and scientific debate in the nineteenth and more than half of the twentieth century created a mystique, which legitimised the mafia and contributed to their success. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of organised crime, Italian politics and Italian literature.

Author: Deborah Puccio-Den
Publisher: Hau
ISBN: 9781912808250
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"The Mafia? What is the Mafia? Something you eat? Something you drink? I don't know the Mafia. I have never seen it." So said Mommo Piromalli, a 'Ndrangheta crime boss, to a journalist in the seventies. In Mafiacraft, Deborah Puccio-Den explores the Mafia's reliance on the force of silence, and undertakes a new form of ethnographic inquiry that focuses on the questions, rather than the answers. For Puccio-Den, the Mafia is not a stable social fact, but a cognitive event shaped by actions of silence. Rather than inquiring about what has previously been written or said, she explores the imaginative power of silence and how it gives consistency to special kinds of social ties that draw their strength from a state of indetermination. What methods might anthropologists use to investigate silence and to understand the life of the denied, the unspeakable, and the unspoken? How do they resist, fight, or capitulate to the strength of words, or to the force of law? In Mafiacraft, Puccio-Den's addresses these questions with a fascinating anthropology of silence that opens up new ground for the study of the world's most famous criminal organization.

Author: Giovanna Bianchi
Publisher: All’Insegna del Giglio
ISBN: 8878149888
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The nEU-Med project is part of the Horizon 2020 programme, in the ERC Advanced project category. It began in October 2015 and the University of Siena is the host institution of the project. The project is focussed upon two Tuscan riverine corridors leading from the Gulf of Follonica in the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Colline Metallifere. It aims to document and analyze the form and timeframe of economic growth in this part of the Mediterranean, which took place between the 7th and the 12thc. Central to this is an understanding of the processes of change in human settlements, in the natural and farming landscapes in relation to the exploitation of resources, and in the implementation of differing political strategies. This volume presents the multi-disciplinary research focussed upon the key site of the project, Vetricella, and its territory. Vetricella is thought to be the site of Valli, a royal property in the Tuscan march. It is the only Early Medieval property to be extensively studied in Italy. Located on Italy’s Tyrrhenian coast, the archaeology and history of this site provide new insights on estate management, metal production and wider Mediterranean relations in the later first millennium. Apart from reports on the archaeology, the finds from excavations and environmental studies, three essays consider the wider European historical and archaeological context of Vetricella. Future monographs will feature studies by members of the project team on aspects of Vetricella, its finds and territory.