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10641. "Ignorance Cannot Be Realistic: A Critique of the Mearsheimer-Walt Thesis"

Author:
Ofira Seliktar
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Middle East Review of International Affairs
Institution:
Global Research in International Affairs Center, Interdisciplinary Center
Abstract:
The debate about American support for Israel has been part of the U.S. foreign policy discussion for more than half a century. In their 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt depict this support in a negative light. The authors claim that the Israel lobby, acting as an agent of the State of Israel, has seized control of Washington's foreign policy and undermined the American national interest. Particularly damning is the accusation that the lobby pushed the United States into an unnecessary and disastrous war in Iraq.
Political Geography:
Iraq, America, and Israel

10642. "Impediments to Stability in Iraq: The Elusive Economic Dimension"

Author:
Robert Looney
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Middle East Review of International Affairs
Institution:
Global Research in International Affairs Center, Interdisciplinary Center
Abstract:
Of the major contributors to stability in Iraq--military, political, and economic, the economic dimension has received the least attention from both the United States and the Iraqi authorities. In turn, the country's failed economy has undermined efforts in the other two key areas. While many mistakes have been made in trying to jump-start the economy, a number of lessons emerge from these efforts. Rather than piece-meal programs, economic recovery must be part of a comprehensive strategy oriented toward creating a virtuous circle whereby improved security leads to economic gains which in turn facilitate improvements in governance and market reforms.
Political Geography:
United States and Iraq

10643. "Harsh Readjustment: The Sunnis and the Political Process in Contemporary Iraq"

Author:
Ronen Zeidel
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Middle East Review of International Affairs
Institution:
Global Research in International Affairs Center, Interdisciplinary Center
Abstract:
This article is the first in-depth analysis of the situation of the Sunni Arabs in Iraq after April 2003. Beginning with the Sunni predicament before 2003, it goes on to show how the threat to Sunni identity contributed to the construction of a distinctive identity after 2003. Although Sunni Arab cohesion is challenged by the debate over the political process and internal strife, the article delineates the Sunni Arab vision for a future Iraq.
Political Geography:
Iraq and Arabia

10644. "The Relationship Between Traditional and Contemporary Islamist Political Thought"

Author:
Sherko Kirmanj
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Middle East Review of International Affairs
Institution:
Global Research in International Affairs Center, Interdisciplinary Center
Abstract:
This article discusses links between the political theories and ideas of medieval and modern Islamists, showing how the latter is a continuation of the former's writings. It also shows how episodes of Islamist thought have coincided with both external conflicts with non-Muslim powers and internal ones with local regimes.

10645. "Pakistan on The Tightrope"

Author:
Isaac Kfir
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Middle East Review of International Affairs
Institution:
Global Research in International Affairs Center, Interdisciplinary Center
Abstract:
This article examines Pakistan following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the recent parliamentary elections within the confines of the challenges that arise from the need to embrace democracy. The article accepts that Pakistan must contend with a powerful military, rising Islamism, tribalism, an unstable political system, quarrelling leaders, and difficult foreign policy issues while it strives to continue to play its role in the global war on terror. The author concludes that only by uniting the different actors and seeking a stable Pakistan can the Islamist threat be defeated.
Political Geography:
Pakistan

10646. On Musical Cosmopolitanism

Author:
Martin Stokes
Publication Date:
08-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Two broad areas of consensus reign on matters of musical globalization: one I will refer to as “popular” and the other “critical.” The popular consensus goes something like this. Advances in communication technologies over the last four decades—by which I mean increases in their power, capacity, and reach, coupled with their miniaturization and distribution across the social field—have wrought fundamental changes in the way music circulates. Music once confined to localities now circulates across the globe. Music that languished in archival obscurity can now be accessed at the click of a mouse. Music once perceived as foreign and outlandish has become familiar. Isolated musical practices now interact with others, producing energetic new hybrids, global “soundscapes.” Cultural hierarchies have been toppled as societies reckon with unexpected new sounds coming from without or below. Once we were locals; now we are cosmopolitans. Today we have choice, agency, and democratic possibilities for exchange and interaction—and a pleasurable vantage point on the musical goings-on of the world, a feast to enjoy.

10647. Chinese Music and its Globalized Past and Present

Author:
Joseph Lam
Publication Date:
08-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
In September 2006, I toured China with a group of highly educated and musically sophisticated American businessmen, professionals, and retirees. During the tour, we took a boat ride upstream on the Agricultural Progenitor's Stream (Shennongxi), a tributary of the Yangtze River. There and then, we witnessed boatmen calls and female tour guides singing Chinese ethnic songs and American favorites. Prompted by the tour guides, we also sang, creating American echoes in scenic and tourist China.
Political Geography:
China and America

10648. Global (Re)vision: Musical Imagination in African America

Author:
Ingrid Monson
Publication Date:
08-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
African American music has always been global, for it would never have come into being without that international trade in human beings known as the Atlantic slave trade. As historians of the slave trade have noted, Americans of African descent came from a variety of ethnic groups primarily from Central and West Africa. Many stopped first in the Caribbean before being transported for sale in various American cities of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. In the United States, unlike in the Caribbean, large groups of enslaved Africans from the same cultural group often did not reside together, which resulted in a synthesizing of diverse African cultural practices and values. People taken from what was then known as Senegambia (present day Senegal and Guinea) predominated numerically in the 17th century, but by the end of the North American slave trade approximately 40% of Africans in America came from central Africa (present day Cameroon, Gabon, both Congos, Central African Republic, Angola), 30% from the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin (present day Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Benin), 15% from Senegambia, and 15% from elsewhere on the continent. As Robert Farris Thompson's book Flash of the Spirit noted long ago, many traces of Yoruba, Kongo, and Mande cultural expression, religion, and visual arts can be found in North America.
Political Geography:
Africa, America, North America, and Nigeria

10649. Response to Lam - 1

Author:
Hector F. Pascual Alvarez
Publication Date:
08-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Music has often been described as the most noise conveying the least information. This International Roundtable lifts a skeptical eyebrow to such an assumption. The essays presented here demonstrate the critical role that music plays in human exchanges and in making us human. They engagingly foreground the significance of music as a multilayered text that can be “read” and interpreted outside of its subjective, formal, and sonic qualities. They also emphasize the power of music in shaping the symbolic dimension that permeates all facets of life, from the imaginative-emotional to the politico-social. I am very pleased to see how academic dialogue actively confronts the harmful prejudices which hold that the arts are less useful disciplines than, say, politics, economics, anthropology or sociology, to understand and engage with the world and its phenomena. Dr. Joseph Lam is a scholar who demonstrates how useful indeed the study of the arts can be in understanding the mechanisms of globalization.

10650. 24 Response to Lam - 2

Author:
Chuen-Fung Wong
Publication Date:
08-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Over the last decade or so, “globalization” has swiftly become one of the favorite buzzwords in various fields of Chinese studies, music being one of the last to embrace such interdisciplinarity. This is particularly salient among writings by the indigenous scholars who often join their “research subjects” in imagining a globalizing China in which music should not be ignored in the process. Optimistic critics deploy languages of modernist reformism and argue for a better and faster integration of Chinese music into the imagined global music family in which a seat is due to be secured. Pessimists, on the other hand, are never indolent in reminding their colleagues of the danger of cultural dilution and other unwelcome consequences in the seemingly irreversible wave of globalization.
Political Geography:
China