The Shaken Lands

The volume focuses on violence during the breakdown of East Central European states brought by one of the most violent periods in modern European history: from the start of the Great War in 1914 until 1923 when Europe, finally, achieved peace after a series of civil conflicts and interstate wars. The contributors offer several case studies that cover the vast region stretching from the Baltic states to Hungary. They explore different types of violence against its civilian populations with a particular focus on communal violence committed by civilians onto their neighbors. They suggest that disintegration of state power brought by the Great War was a key condition that produced violence. Yet the process of post-WWI state building was equally or more violent as nascent East Central European states institutionalized the use of violence to achieve their political agendas.

Considered the southern border of Europe, a territory that the far right describes as a strange and wild land, full of overcrowded cities, empty villages, exotic landscapes, exuberant raw materials, successful footballers and hordes of menacing migrants, the regions of the Sahel and North Africa share and suffer from the pernicious effects of the decline of its traditional patterns of life, ruined by accelerated imposition of modernity, capitalism, communism, xenophobia, and incipient neo-colonialism: from misery to corruption, from unemployment, economic and social inequality, the technological gap, educational underdevelopment, lack of infrastructure, food and health insecurity, foreign interference, the blind ambition of their own leaders, religion extremism, the repeated violation of fundamental rights and the yoke of patriarchy. Also, the scourge of a new form of economy, the corsair or buccaneer economy, based on the smuggling of all kinds of products -arms, drugs, people, food, electrical appliances, fuel, and people- to which little attention is paid but which in reality articulates the entire region, becomes the problems chronic and is the only option for work and subsistence for millions of families. In There is no sacred land for the vanquished, the award-winning Spanish journalist Javier Martín takes a unique and complete journey through the routes of irregular migration, from central Africa to the rescue ships in the Mediterranean and discovers through the testimony of his protagonists -migrants, traffickers, military, aid workers- the establishment of a new social and economic system that, together with the European militarization of borders and the total privatization of wars like Libya, are deteriorating the true spirit of Africa, a continent in the one that migration is an ancestral asset, shapes its culture and sustains its soul.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies. Eula Biss explores race in America and her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays -- teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago's most diverse neighborhood. As Biss moves across the country from New York to California to the Midwest, her essays move across time from biblical Babylon to the freedman's schools of Reconstruction to a Jim Crow mining town to post-war white flight. She brings an eclectic education to the page, drawing variously on the Eagles, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Baldwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Joan Didion, religious pamphlets, and reality television shows. These spare, sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighborhoods participate in preserving racial privilege. Faced with a disturbing past and an unsettling present, Biss still remains hopeful about the possibilities of American diversity, "not the sun-shininess of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it."

In Russia's cultural memory, the Caucasus is a potent point of reference, to which many emotions, images, and stereotypes are attached. The book gives a new reading of the development of Russia's perception of its borderlands and presents a complex picture of the encounter between the Russians and the indigenous population of the Caucasus. The study outlines the history of a region standing in between Russian reveries and Russian imperialism. (Series: Studies on South East Europe, Vol. 19) [Subject: History, Russian Studies, Ethnology]