Matriarchy Patriarchy And Imperial Security In Africa

Matriarchy, Patriarchy and Imperial Security in Africa will appeal to professionals and students of imperial and world history, international security and conflict resolution, development, globalization, and gender studies. The author argues that terrorism, piracy, acts of sabotage, and austerity budget mass protests will continue in Africa, Asia and the West until ordinary people around the world have positive answers to the Primordial Question: Will my family eat today and sleep peacefully through the night?

This history-rich volume details the sociopolitical, economic, and artistic aspects of African kingdoms from the earliest times to the second half of the 19th century. Africa has a long and fascinating history and is a place of growing importance in the world history curriculum. This detailed encyclopedia covers the history of African kingdoms from antiquity through the mid-19th century, tracing the dynasties' ties to modern globalization and influences on world culture before, during, and after the demise of the slave trade. Along with an exploration of African heritage, this reference is rich with firsthand accounts of Africa through the oral traditions of its people and the written journals of European explorers, missionaries, and travelers who visited Africa from the 15th century and onward. Alphabetically arranged entries cover a particular kingdom and feature information on the economic, cultural, religious, political, social, and environmental history of the regime. The content references popular culture, movies, and art that present contemporary reenactments of kingdoms, emphasizing the importance of history in shaping modern ideas. Other features include primary source documents, a selected bibliography of print and electronic resources, and dozens of sidebars containing key facts and interesting trivia.

The Islamist Challenge and Africa examines Islamist militancy among Africans historically and at present, a topic largely ignored in the United States. It examines Islamist militancy’s longstanding presence in Africa and its diaspora, Islamist militancy’s distinct ideological features among Africans, and ways to minimize its violence.

Tired of Cold War political analysis about post-Cold War events, zero-sum game theories, and world history as only one war after another? Disobedient Histories in Ancient and Modern Times: Regionalism, Governance, War and Peace breaks tradition by considering some alternative Western and non-Western international relations theories found in historical, anthropological, literary, archaeological, genetic and physical evidence from some ancient and modern societies in Europe, Africa and Asia. Chapters in this comparative history book explore the deep backstory of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the Association for Southeast Asian Nations, Scandinavian Progressivism in international development, Welsh cultural preservation, North African feminism and political traditions in Tunisia, and the Gulf Cooperation Council. Other chapters explore the backstory of ideas leading to the rise of the ultranationalist National Front political party and the Charlie Hebdo magazine attack in France and also the zombie economics behind Boko Haram in Nigeria. The international relations theories in these disobedient histories suggest that the global peace, prosperity and dignity present in the United Nations Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals are viable.

Why bother to invert the history of Western women? We must do so to fight an insidious, fallacious assumption that patriarchy is universal and eternal, and we must do so to nullify the amnesic effects of Domesticity’s potent semantics. We must resist this two-pronged attack that reduces women to powerless incubators. When we invert the patriarchal hegemony and center the ordinary woman as empowered owner and hostess to her life story, we find women, rich and poor, who chose when, where, how and if they would cooperate with the rules of patriarchy, rules often supported by other women. Our heroines demanded the rights due them for properly occupying their societal place in the home, in church or on the street corner. We find this to be consistent across time and space. We start in the seventeenth century with European women on three continents: Europe, North Africa and North America. We present Isabel de Jésus, Alida Schuyler Van Rensselaer Livingston, and soldiers’ wives, widows and femes sole of the Tangier and Gibraltar garrisons. Here we have women of different religions, language groups and social classes, and they all used patriarchal laws to protect their rights. We move across time to the turn of the twentieth century in Ireland, Puerto Rico and the United States where we find women as wives of rich men in Toledo’s Woman Suffrage Association, as middle class professionals in the civilizing missions of the Christian Church in Puerto Rico, the magdalen homes of Ireland, and the eugenics movement in the US, and as sex workers serving tradesmen in Ireland. Again, these women manipulated the legal systems and demanded the powers due them from legislators, mission boards, and judges. The microhistories of women in this volume adulterate the assumption of universal and eternal patriarchy. As these women claimed the rights due them for properly occupying their prescribed social roles, they also created alliances with men who partnered with them in their feminist projects. Why should we invert Women’s history with microhistory? We must do so to liberate men and women from fallacious, patriarchal oppression.

Lesser Civil Wars: Civilians Defining War and the Memory of War is an edited volume that surveys three hundred years of the Memory of war and the Will to war in the greater Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes region. Military theorists from von Clausewitz, to Dingiswayo and Chandragupta, calculated the Will of their own soldiers and of the enemy’s soldiers. Sometimes the Will is assigned an erroneously low strength, as Abraham Lincoln learned quickly at the onset of the United States Civil War. In this volume, we examine the civilian production of the national Will to fight future wars through the least civil war – each individual’s war to remember or to forget – and no armistice or accord brings this internal battle to an end. This is not a book about the atrocities committed during war. This is a book about the very nature of the Will-Memory-Will cycle, where the Memory of war continues for generations until a new war requires the resurrection of the Will. As these essays show, sometimes it only takes a few individuals to prosecute these Memory wars with rules of engagement that do not necessarily include civil behavior. By focusing on microhistories from a specific region and by bracketing the US Civil War with an essay about a century prior to it and essays about the century following it, we are able to demonstrate the power and energy of the incubating stage of Memory in the Will-Memory-Will cycle. In the greater Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes region, ordinary civilians controlled and incubated the memories of the Iroquois Wars, the French and Indian/Sevens’ Years War (1756–1763), the American Revolution (1776–1783) and the War of 1812, and they converted Memory into the Will to fight the US Civil War and the Vietnam War. In these chapters, we present micro-wars between civilians over control of the Will of a nation. They are, indeed, lesser civil wars.

This book examines the highly problematic politics of the past surrounding the archaeology of ancient empires in Iran. Discussing their personal and professional experiences, the authors exemplify the real, ethical dilemmas that archaeologists confront in the Middle East, calling for reflectivity and awareness among the archaeologists of the region