Books on the topic 'Central African Country'

This chapter examines the central role of Quaker women during the years 1675–1710 in developing the first colony founded by members of the Society of Friends in North America. As individuals, women Friends helped to fashion a multicultural society consistent with Quaker beliefs in religious liberty and pacifism by maintaining amicable relations with the Lenape Indians and non-Quaker European settlers. At the same time, however, Friends failed to acknowledge the inconsistency of exploiting enslaved African Americans with Quaker ideals. As leaders of the Salem, Burlington, Chesterfield, and Newton (later Haddonfield) monthly meetings, Quaker women also helped to shape West New Jersey society by strengthening rules of discipline to prevent their children and other Friends from marrying non-Quakers and adopting ‘outward vanities’.

This article examines the censorship of popular music in South Africa during the apartheid (1948–1994) and post-apartheid years, as well as changes in musical censorship resulting from the country’s transition to democracy. It considers the different forms of censorship in South Africa, paying particular attention to central government mechanisms of music censorship through the former Directorate of Publications and the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Despite the relaxation of formal mechanisms of censorship since the early 1990s and the significant freedom of expression enjoyed by musicians, the article shows that regulation and censorship of popular music remain in effect. Finally, it assesses the current situation with regards to musical censorship in South Africa and the implications of present legislation for the future.

This chapter presents four examples of how the Modular Approach could be designed and implemented in specific economic, institutional, and socio-economic frameworks. The country examples are fictional countries, but the factual background for each example is drawn from common characteristics of jurisdictions in the region. They illustrate how specific module choices can be made to create a fair, effective, and efficient MSME insolvency system. The first example is a European developed economy; the second is an Asia-Pacific newly industrialized economy; the third is an African emerging nation; and, finally, there is a European emerging nation country example, which could also apply to a central Asian emerging nation. These country examples are not proposing the optimal combination of modules; rather, they are to illustrate the types of choices that could be made, given particular socio-economic, financial, and institutional circumstances.

In 1969 Somalia, a country located in the Horn of Africa, suffered a military coup led by Siad Barre, a general who had integrated the colonial police of Somaliland and Italian Somalia. In this book we analyzed nine posters of governmental propaganda that comprise the period between 1974 -1975. The objective of this work is to discuss the construction of nationalism in the Barre Era, seeking similarities and discontinuities in relation to civil government. We use a vast historiography drawing to the maximum of local authors and theorists of the African continent. Through interdisciplinarity we aim to build a rich theoretical debate integrating anthropology, political science and history. The research used the theoretical model of historiographical analysis of Carlo Guinzburg, based on the investigation of clues in imagery sources. Elements of the local context, such as the process of decolonization of the Horn of Africa and conflicts with Ethiopia, have been emphasized, linking them to the global conjuncture of ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union in the so-called Cold War. The impacts of colonialism are one of the central themes of the dissertation, so we try to demonstrate that events that occurred during colonization were fundamental to the complex puzzle that became the African continent during the 1960s and 1970s. Somalia does not escape this political panorama and the research tries to demonstrate that the posters analyzed were produced by the military government with the intention of disseminating a certain model of political regime.

Fighting for Peace in Somalia provides the first comprehensive analysis of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), an operation deployed in 2007 to stabilize the country and defend its fledgling government from one of the world’s deadliest militant organizations, Harakat al-Shabaab. The book’s two parts provide a history of the mission from its genesis in an earlier, failed regional initiative in 2005 up to mid-2017, as well as an analysis of the mission’s six most important challenges, namely, logistics, security sector reform, civilian protection, strategic communications, stabilization, and developing a successful exit strategy. These issues are all central to the broader debates about how to design effective peace operations in Africa and beyond. AMISOM was remarkable in several respects: it would become the African Union’s (AU) largest peace operation by a considerable margin, deploying over 22,000 soldiers; it became the longest running mission under AU command and control, outlasting the nearest contender by over seven years; it also became the AU’s most expensive operation, at its peak costing approximately US$1 billion per year; and, sadly, AMISOM became the AU’s deadliest mission. Although often referred to as a peacekeeping operation, AMISOM’s personnel were given a range of daunting tasks that went well beyond the realm of peacekeeping, including VIP protection, war-fighting, counterinsurgency, stabilization, and state-building as well as supporting electoral processes and facilitating humanitarian assistance.

The prosecution of piracy and armed robbery off the Somali coast has been at the centre of political and academic discourse since the initiation of the counter-piracy campaign. Notwithstanding the principle of universal jurisdiction which is widely seen as applicable to piracy, the overwhelming majority of the states involved in counter-piracy operations have proved reluctant to prosecute alleged pirates within their national courts. The international community seems to have selected the establishment of piracy prosecution centres in other states in the region, mainly Kenya, the Seychelles, Mauritius, and Tanzania, while at the same time it is making efforts to enhance prison capability within Somalia for the transfer of tried pirates. International prosecution does not fit the crime of piracy and armed robbery and in any event seems not to be an option for the international community. Nevertheless, there are many jurisdictional issues to be addressed in relation to the prosecution of piracy off Somalia, especially by third states.

This chapter attempts to engage the racist assumptions held by many Americans about a black woman's ability to be First Lady and about the appropriateness of an African American First Family. Michelle Obama has been an essential complement to Barack Obama, a candidate viewed as a postracial phenomenon. She has helped her husband win the credibility and trust of many African Americans because of her firm and confident racial identity, her rootedness in Chicago's African American community, and her upholding of the values central to her own family. However, functioning as the perfect partner to Barack has come at an enormous price for Michelle. It seems an all too familiar paradox that given the persistent power of racial and gender dynamics in this country, Michelle Obama must button down her exceptional education and career background, and the “too much blackness” so essential to her identity, in order to secure Barack's presidential bid.

Chapter 4 describes how the author and his colleagues set about trying to tackle HIV/AIDS in Uganda through health education and prevention campaigns, collaborative research, and, ultimately, treatment. It covers how, through the work of the Joint Clinical Research Centre and active support from the country’s President, Uganda took the lead in many aspects of research and development, and how it became clear that the biggest challenges were securing access to treatments and confronting attitudes that the use of antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Africa was simply unfeasible. It also describes how ART became available and successful services were established throughout the country, how Uganda served as a model for many other countries in Africa, and explains the continuing need for investment and development to maintain and build on these successes.

This chapter examines the connections between the Miller Grove community of free Blacks and the Underground Railroad. Established in 1844, Miller Grove is a cluster of rural farmsteads named for Bedford Miller, whose family stood among the sixty-eight people who received their freedom from one of four White families in south-central Tennessee. Primary archaeological excavations at Miller Grove took place at the farmstead of William Riley Williams, a free-born African American from Tennessee. Among the original migrants, former slaveholder Henry Sides and his wife lived among the freemen and freewomen at Miller Grove. This chapter begins with a discussion of how the American Missionary Association, through its missionary work, linked known Underground Railroad participants across the country. It then considers abolitionist strategies, particularly the dissemination of antislavery literature among African Americans. By tracing the history of Miller Grove, the chapter reveals distinct details of community formation and interracial cooperation within regional Underground Railroad operations.

Since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Americans have viewed school integration as a central tenet of the Black civil rights movement. Yet school integration was not the only—or even always the dominant—civil rights strategy. At times, African Americans also fought for separate, Black-controlled schools dedicated to racial uplift, community empowerment, and self-determination. An African American Dilemma offers a social history of debates over school integration within northern Black communities from the 1840s to the present. This broad geographical and temporal focus reveals that northern Black educational activists vacillated between a preference for either school integration or separation during specific eras. However, there was never a consensus, so the dissent, debate, and counter-narratives that pushed families to consider a fuller range of educational reforms are also highlighted here. Presenting a sweeping historical analysis that covers the entire history of public education in the North, the book broadens our understanding of school integration by highlighting the diverse perspectives of Black students, parents, teachers, and community leaders all committed to improving public education. It finds that Black school integrationists and separatists have worked together in a dynamic tension that fueled effective strategies for educational reform and the Black civil rights movement. The book draws on an enormous range of archival data including the black press, school board records, social science studies, the papers of civil rights activists, and court cases.

Tensions in South African universities have traditionally centred around equity (particularly access and affordability), historical legacies (such as apartheid and colonialism), and the shape and structure of the higher education system. What has not received sufficient attention, is the contribution of the university to place-based development. This volume is the first in South Africa to engage seriously with the place-based developmental role of universities. In the international literature and policy there has been an increasing integration of the university with place-based development, especially in cities. This volume weighs in on the debate by drawing attention to the place-based roles and agency of South African universities in their local towns and cities. It acknowledges that universities were given specific development roles in regions, homelands and towns under apartheid, and comments on why sub-national, place-based development has not been a key theme in post-apartheid, higher education planning. Given the developmental crisis in the country, universities could be expected to play a more constructive and meaningful role in the development of their own precincts, cities and regions. But what should that role be? Is there evidence that this is already occurring in South Africa, despite the lack of a national policy framework? What plans and programmes are in place, and what is needed to expand the development agency of universities at the local level? Who and what might be involved? Where should the focus lie, and who might benefit most, and why? Is there a need perhaps to approach the challenges of college towns, secondary cities and metropolitan centers differently? This book poses some of these questions as it considers the experiences of a number of South African universities, including Wits, Pretoria, Nelson Mandela University and especially Fort Hare as one of its post-centenary challenges.

This chapter examines African American square dancing traditions in Martinsville, Henry County, Southwest Virginia. It tells the story of African American dances in Martinsville from the perspective of four people who were central to it through much of the twentieth century: fiddler Leonard Bowles and his wife, dancer Naomi Bowles, and caller Ernest Brooks and his wife. The chapter begins with a historical background on African American old time dancing in the Appalachian region, along with Martinsville and its black community. It then considers the old breakdown, first in the 1930s and 1940s and then in 1978, as well as its connection to the agrarian lifestyle in which it thrived. It also discusses the relationship between music and dance in Martinsville, the decline of the old breakdown, and the factors that brought new life to old time dancing during the 1970s and 1980s and beyond. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the future prospects for African American dancing traditions, including the old breakdown, in Martinsville.

Worldwide, in Africa and in South Africa, the importance of the doctorate has increased disproportionately in relation to its share of the overall graduate output over the past decade. This heightened attention has not only been concerned with the traditional role of the PhD, namely the provision of future academics; rather, it has focused on the increasingly important role that higher education - and, particularly, high-level skills - is perceived to play in national development and the knowledge economy. This book is unique in the area of research into doctoral studies because it draws on a large number of studies conducted by the Centre of Higher Education Trust (CHET) and the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST), as well as on studies from the rest of Africa and the world. In addition to the historical studies, new quantitative and qualitative research was undertaken to produce the evidence base for the analyses presented in the book.The findings presented in Doctoral Education in South Africa pose anew at least six tough policy questions that the country has struggled with since 1994, and continues to struggle with, if it wishes to gear up the system to meet the target of 5 000 new doctorates a year by 2030. Discourses framed around the single imperatives of growth, efficiency, transformation or quality will not, however, generate the kind of policy discourses required to resolve these tough policy questions effectively. What is needed is a change in approach that accommodates multiple imperatives and allows for these to be addressed simultaneously.

This report is an in-depth study of electoral commissions in six countries of West Africa Benin, Cape Verde, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone assessing their contribution in strengthening political participation in the region. As institutions that apply the rules governing elections, electoral management bodies (EMBs) have occupied, over the last two decades, the heart of discussion and practice on the critical question of effective citizen participation in the public affairs of their countries. The way in which they are established and the effectiveness of their operations have continued to preoccupy those who advocate for competitive elections, while reforms to the EMBs have taken centre stage in more general political reforms. Election Management Bodies in West Africa thus responds to the evident need for more knowledge about an institution that occupies a more and more important place in the political process in West Africa. Based on documentary research and detailed interviews in each country, the study provides a comparative analysis which highlights the similarities and differences in the structure and operations of each body, and attempts to establish the reasons for their comparative successes and failures.

BURUNDI: THE STATE AND SOCIETY (FROM THE COLONIAL PERIOD UNTIL THE PRESENT DAY) Burundi, a small country located in east-central Africa, is one of the most unstable countries on the continent. Similarly to the neighbouring Rwanda, over the last 50 years, the country has suffered tragic consequences of a civil war resulting from the conflict between politicians from the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups. The presented monograph covers a period of 130 years in a chronological manner, starting from the establishment of the foundations of the European colonial administration in the 1890s; however, the main emphasis is placed on the problems connected with the development of an independent country and strengthening (or even establishing) the national identity of its citizens. Burundi gained independence in 1962; the existing time gap allows for drawing certain conclusions and conducting an evaluation of the first 50 years of the independent existence of the country, which has little prospect of really changing the unfavorable development trends of, at least, the last three decades. At the moment, there are still no positive indications of a possible stable development of the country in the future, and the relatively stable years of the first half of the 20th century have been overshadowed by the subsequent decades of coups, genocides, and the governments’ lack of will to effectively establish peace and the rule of law.

Black college football began during the nadir of African American life after the Civil War. The first game occurred in 1892, a little less than four years before the Supreme Court ruled segregation legal in Plessy v. Ferguson. In spite of Jim Crow segregation, Black colleges produced some of the best football programs in the country. They mentored young men who became teachers, preachers, lawyers, and doctors--not to mention many other professions--and transformed Black communities. But when higher education was integrated, the programs faced existential challenges as predominately white institutions steadily set about recruiting their student athletes and hiring their coaches. Blood, Sweat, and Tears explores the legacy of Black college football, with Florida A&M’s Jake Gaither as its central character, one of the most successful coaches in its history. A paradoxical figure, Gaither led one of the most respected Black college football programs, yet many questioned his loyalties during the height of the civil rights movement. Among the first broad-based histories of Black college athletics, Derrick E. White’s sweeping story complicates the heroic narrative of integration and grapples with the complexities and contradictions of one of the most important sources of Black pride in the twentieth century.

How did southern white ministers who believed that racial segregation was against God’s teachings attempt to convince people in their churches and their communities to abandon fears of integration and overcome prejudices? This book is about important episodes in United States history, southern history, church history, and the power of faith. Southern white ministers who aligned with the Civil Rights Movement experienced harassment, vilification, jailing, beating, and psychological pain. Their sermons, efforts, and sacrifices on behalf of school integration and the Civil Rights Movement are chronicled in this book. Did their efforts help change southern society? Scholars differ in opinions. Most argue that black leaders and organizations brought an end to segregation, Others contend that the federal government speeded the process, but this book shows that southern white ministers were also influential, sometimes only locally, sometimes only personally, but counted together their actions become significant. Clinton High in Tennessee and Central High in Little Rock where ministers accompanied African American students amid angry and jeering mobs, today, are good functioning schools with interracial student bodies. The University of Mississippi, where an Episcopal vicar was knocked off a pedestal while trying to quell a bloody riot, has made great strides towards racial reconciliation. These ministers welcomed black people into their churches in spite of closed-door policies. A Baptist minister established an interracial farm that has endured for seventy-six years, a farm that birthed Habitat for Humanity. The sacrifices of these ministers showed African Americans that not all white people were enemies.

The global scale of the cardiovascular disease epidemic is unquestionable, with cardiovascular disease causing a greater burden of mortality and morbidity than any other disease, regardless of country or population. With demographic change and ageing populations, the prevalence of cardiovascular disease and its risk factors is set to increase. The commonest cardiovascular diseases are atherosclerotic, affecting all arterial territories. The ‘burden of disease’ approach has highlighted the fact that cardiovascular disease and non-communicable diseases are not simply diseases of affluence but affect people of all countries, with enormous costs in terms of public health, healthcare, and overall economies. Coronary artery disease is the leading cause of mortality in all regions of the world apart from sub-Saharan Africa, followed by cerebrovascular disease. It should be noted, however, that there has been a major decline in cardiovascular disease mortality in Western Europe, the US, and Japan over the past 40 years. There are multiple factors underlying these favourable trends but understanding the epidemiology and characterizing individual risk factors for cardiovascular disease has been central in formulating preventive and treatment strategies. The INTERHEART study showed that 90% of cardiovascular risk can be explained by nine easily identifiable risk factors; an awareness of these, and the discovery of novel factors, will continue to serve in the fight to reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease. Geoffrey Rose first championed population-wide approaches versus strategies which target only high-risk individuals. Prevention aims to ‘catch the disease’ upstream, therefore delaying, reducing, or eliminating the risk of coronary artery disease. Surrogate markers for coronary artery disease have emerged in efforts to detect disease at earlier stages, and in order to better understand the pathophysiology. For example, coronary artery calcium scoring is emerging as a marker of future risk of coronary artery disease. Risk stratification scores are increasingly used as tools to individualize a person’s future risk of coronary artery disease in order to better target treatment and prevention strategies.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.