Статті в журналах з теми "Early Islam civil wars"

The study is dedicated to the complex relationship between the Alides (supporters of ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib and their descendants, later called the Shi’is) and the Qur’an, especially in the early times of Islam. Several points are examined in order to put these relations into perspective. First of all, it is important to remember that the Quranic corpus was elaborated in the atmosphere of the civil wars that marked the birth and the first developments of Islam. These wars seem to have played a major role in the elaboration of the official version of the Quran, which the Alides would have considered a falsified and hardly understandable version of the Revelation. The problem of falsification (taḥrīf) as well as the belief in the existence of a hidden meaning of the Quran led to the Shi’i doctrine on the necessity for interpretation (tafsīr, ta’wīl) in order to make the Sacred Text intelligible. It is also important to question the reasons for the civil wars between the faithful of Muḥammad. According to the Quran and the Hadith, Muḥammad came to announce the end of the world. He therefore also announced the coming of the Messiah, the Saviour of the end times. Now, according to some sources, ‘Alī is this Saviour. The problem is that after the death of Muḥammad, according to Shi’is, the opponents of ‘Alī took power. With the conquests and the birth of the Arab empire, the rewriting of history and the creation of a new collective memory seem to have become necessary in order to marginalise ‘Alī, among other reasons, and consolidate the caliphal power.

At the end of the last century, there was much talk about a future clash of civilisations, replacing the Cold War confrontation. However, the development of events in the early 21rst century has turned the focus upon the clash within one of the largest civilisations of the World: Islam and the Muslim countries. The outcome of the political violence from the civil wars and Salafist terrorism is deaths and casualties beyond imagination. Why cannot the Moslem countries regulate their religious tensions - Sunni-Shia, Salafist jihadism - through institutional innovation, allowing for peaceful settlement and the rule of law?

In this article I argue that notwithstanding intermittent conflicts and wars among the nomadic and sedentary peoples since early times, the Asian and Middle Eastern region has been characteristic of relative peace and prosperity. This region has been known for the boom in energy trade, globalization and amalgamation of local, national and global economies during the post-Cold War era. I show how, at least in part, the gradual improvement in the indicators of social sustainability, human security and economic growth, was the natural concomitant of the historical position of this region. Yet, speedy progress in the region, this article shows, is impeded by divergent geo-political, geo-economic and geo-strategic agendas of the regional and global powers; these find manifestation in the conflicts in Middle East, Caucasia, Afghanistan, Indian Kashmir, Chinese part of Turkistan (Xinjiang) etc. The conflicts are diverse in nature, time and space, and are pre-emptive of enormous malice, hatred and heart burning among the contending parties. To downs-size one another, they perpetually build military capability and enhance defense expenditure, in hundreds of thousands of US dollars at the cost of public works, human security and precious national resources. I conclude that the conflicts can be overcome through peaceful means rather than use of force. Several alternatives are warranted for the purpose: (i) engagement of conflicting parties in composite dialogue for generational sustainability, (ii) promotion of regional and economic integration while marginalizing ethno-national, ethno-geographic, ethno-religious and ethno-sectarian disputes, (iii) revival of the region’s rich tradition of multiculturalism and human co-existence, and (iv) glorification of peace message in Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and other religions. The objective is simply making history relevant to the contemporary society, and bolstering peace efforts of the nations, philanthropists and civil society in an otherwise war-torn and conflict-ridden Asian and Middle Eastern space.

From 1940 to 2000, Islam was involved in a disproportionately high number of civil wars compared with other religions, such as Christianity or Hinduism. To help explain the overrepresentation of Islam in these wars, this article introduces a theory of “religious outbidding.” The theory holds that embattled political elites will tender religious bids when they calculate that increasing their religious legitimacy will strengthen their chances of survival. In combination with three overlapping factors—the historical absence of an internecine religious civil war similar to the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, proximity of Islam's holiest sites to Israel and large petroleum reserves, and jihad (i.e., defense of Islam as a religious obligation), religious outbidding accounts for Islam's higher representation in religious civil wars. The article includes a statistical analysis of the role of religion in civil wars and tests the logic of the argument of religious outbidding in the case of Sudan's two civil wars.

When rebels also employ terrorism, civil wars can become more intractable. Since the 1980s, jihadism, a form of violent transnational activism, has mobilized civil war rebels, outside entrepreneurs, foreign fighters, and organizers of transnational as well as domestic terrorism. These activities are integral to the jihadist trend, representing overlapping and conjoined strands of the same ideological current, which in turn reflects internal division and dissatisfaction within the Arab world and within Islam. Jihadism, however, is neither unitary nor monolithic. It contains competing power centers and divergent ideological orthodoxies. Different jihadist actors emphasize different priorities and strategies. They disagree, for example, on whether the “near” or the “far” enemy should take precedence. The relationship between jihadist terrorism and civil war is far from uniform or constant. This essay traces the trajectory of this evolution, beginning in the 1980s in the context of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Surveying civil war in the world today is striking in terms of how often religious cleavages and grievances have become central to armed conflict. How are the causes and outcomes of religious civil wars different than other civil wars, if at all? Is Islam implicated for the contemporary surge in religious civil war? The first section reviews the literature and addresses the importance of religion for civil war. I then introduce a dataset and describe key trends in religious civil war in the third section, while in the fourth section I present tests of whether Muslim or Arab Muslim societies in particular are more prone to religious strife. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the main findings.

This volume contains an introduction and seven case studies by anthropologists,historians, and theologians. The papers were originally presented at a1999 conference on “Religion and Social Upheaval in Africa” in Denmark.As a result, some of the papers are somewhat out-of-date, although the questionsthey raise are, sadly, just as relevant as ever to the continent’s currentsituation.As Niels Kastfelt points out in his introductory essay, the authors rejectany approach that seeks to understand African civil conflicts in terms of a“New Barbarism,” an irrational manifestation of “tribal” or religious atavism.This strategy, which is perhaps most typical of journalistic accountsbut also finds some support among academics, clearly constitutes an obstacletoward any meaningful comprehension of the phenomena in question. Ina similar vein, they equally reject any notion of a “conflict of civilizations”or that African civil wars can be explained in terms of the incompatible religiousvalues of Christianity, Islam, and indigenous African religions.Rather, their papers provide a detailed account of the local context in a historicalperspective by focusing on the political, economic, and explicitlyreligious phenomena.Indeed, the lines of cleavage in many of these cases are not defined inreligious terms. As a result, the nature of the relationships between “religion”and the civil wars in question are so disparate that the volume does notquite hang together. For example, René Devisch’s paper on Kinshasa is notreally about civil war, but rather about the effects of the collapse of stateauthority and the formal economy, both of which unleashed rampant violencein the city but also led to the emergence of independent Christian healingcommunes as a sort of refuge ...

Abstract Although relations between Catholic Croatia and Islam were burdened historically by more than three centuries of Ottoman/Bosnian-Habsburg/Croatian warfare on Croatian soil, creating an extremely negative image of Muslims in the Croatian culture and collective memory, during most of the 20th century, with exception of early 1990s, attitudes towards Islam and Muslims in Croatian society were surprisingly mostly positive. The legal status of the sole Muslim representative organisation, the Islamic Community in Croatia, was confirmed by special agreement with the state in 2002. The author argues that besides the obvious cultural and linguistic proximity of Bosnian Muslims and Croats, several factors contributed to this positive environment: the remoteness of Ottoman wars in time, a fear of a common political enemy (Serbia), and the Austro-Hungarian tradition of early legal recognition of Islam.

Islamic perspective views poverty as a result of several structural reasons, namely environmental damage due to human activity (Surah Ar Rum: 41); ignorance and the miserliness of the wealthy (Surah Al 'Imran: 180); tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of some people over others (Surah At-Tawbah: 34); political, bureaucracy, and economic power concentration in one hand (Surah Al Qasas; 1-88); poverty arising from external factors such as natural disaster or civil wars that drastically changed the rich become poor (Surah Saba ': 14-15). Islam proposes some strategies in order to reduce poverty which covers: 1) Promoting economic growth that benefits to the wider community (pro-poor growth); 2) Encouraging the construction of national budget which protect majority of people (pro-poor budgeting); 3) Assisting infrastructure development that aids many people (pro-poor infrastructure); 4) Establishing proper basic public services in favor of the broader community (pro-poor public services); and 5) Pushing equity and income distribution policies that prioritize the poor (pro-poor income distribution).

The “policy science” of civil wars, which emerged in the early 1990s, included deeply embedded assumptions about the nature of the international political system. It was taken for granted that the United States would remain the strongest power by a wide margin, and that it would lead a liberal coalition that included virtually all the other strong states in the world. Some students of international politics believe that the nature of the system is changing. Though the United States is likely to remain much more powerful than its global competitors, several consequential powers have emerged to challenge U.S. leadership and produce a multipolar system. As power begins to even out at the top of the international system, the influence of middle powers may also grow. This new constellation of power seems likely to magnify disagreements about how states suffering civil wars should be stabilized, limit preventive diplomacy, produce external intervention that will make for longer and more destructive wars, and render settlements more difficult to police.

The article reviews the status of the highly diverse community of American Muslims, with reference to US national identity and immigration history, history of Islam in the USA, and civil society organization. It is found that on average, and after the civil right movement of the 1960s, Muslims are very well assimilated into the US society and economy, in which the specific American civil society and religious organizations play an important enabling part, providing networks and inroads to society for newcomers as well as vehicles for preserving ethniccultural distinctiveness. This broad pattern of development has not changed in the aftermath of 9/11 and ensuing wars on terror. Compared with the Nordic context, where Muslims are often considered challenging to a secular social order, American Muslims do not stand out as more or differently religious, or any less American, than other religious communities. It is tentatively concluded that, downsides apart, US national identity and civil society structure could be more favorable for the social integration of Muslims than the Nordic welfare state model.

The concept of ‘peasant wars’ in 17th- and 18th-century Russia was borrowed by Soviet historians from Friedrich Engels’ work on the Peasant War in Germany. The four peasant wars of the early modern period were identified as the uprisings led by Ivan Bolotnikov (1606-1607), Sten’ka Razin (1667-1671), Kondratiy Bulavin (1707-1708) and Emel’ian Pugachev (1773-1775). Following a debate in the journal Voprosy istorii in 1958-1961, the ‘first peasant war’ was generally considered to encompass the period c.1603-1614 rather than simply 1606- 1607. This approach recognised the continuities in the events of the early 17th century, and it meant that the chronological span of the ‘first peasant war’ was virtually identical to that of the older concept of the ‘Time of Troubles’. By the 1970s the term, ‘civil wars of the feudal period’ (based on a quotation from Lenin) was sometimes used to define ‘peasant wars’. It was recognised by Soviet historians that these civil wars were very complex in their social composition, and that the insurgents did not exclusively (or even primarily) comprise peasants, with Cossacks playing a particularly significant role. Nevertheless the general character of the uprisings was seen as ‘anti-feudal’. From the 1980s, however, R.G. Skrynnikov and A.L. Stanislavskiy discarded the view that the events of the ‘Time of Troubles’ constituted an anti-feudal peasant war. They preferred the term ‘civil war’, and stressed vertical rather than horizontal divisions between the two armed camps. Western historians, with the notable exception of the American historian Paul Avrich, generally rejected the application of the term ‘peasant wars’ to the Russian uprisings of the early modern period, regarding them as primarily Cossack-led revolts. From the 1960s, however, Western scholars such as Teodor Shanin (following the American anthropologist Eric Wolf) began to use the term ‘peasant wars’ in relation to the role played by peasants in 20th-century revolutionary events such as those in Russia and China. Some of these Western historians, including Avrich and Wolf, used the term not only for peasant actions in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, but also for peasant rebellions against the new Bolshevik regime (such as the Makhnovshchina and the Antonovshchina) that Soviet scholars considered to be counter-revolutionary banditry. The author argues that, in relation to the ‘Time of Troubles’ in early 20th-century Russia, the term ‘peasant war’ is not entirely suitable to describe peasant actions against the agrarian relations of the old regime in 1905 and 1917, since these were generally orderly and non-violent. The term is more appropriate for the anti-Bolshevik uprisings of armed peasant bands in 1918-1921, as suggested by the British historian Orlando Figes.

In this critically insightful and highly readable book of political ethnogra- phy, Aisha Ahmad, a political scientist at University of Toronto, seeks to explain how and why Islamist movements continue to militarily prevail and politically succeed in forming proto-states, over clan, ethnic, and/or tribal based competitions, amidst the chaos and disorder of civil wars across the contemporary Muslim world, from Mali to Mindanao. To this end, Ahmad seeks to go beyond the usual expositions that center the explanatory power of Islamist ideologies and identities, which dominate the scholarly fields of political science, international relations, security studies as well as the global public discourse shaped by journalists, politicians, and the punditry of shouting heads everywhere. Through a deep, immersive study of power in Afghanistan and Soma- lia, Ahmad demonstrates the profoundly symbiotic relationship between Islamists and the local business class. While recognizing the interconnec- tions between violent conflict and illicit trade is nothing new, Ahmad’s explication of the economic logics of Islamist proto-states furnishes a nov- el two-stage dynamic to explain the indispensability and ubiquity of this Islamist-business alliance in conflict zones. The first is the gradual social process of conversion of the business class’ worldview and practice to align them with Islamist identity formations, which is “aimed at mitigating un- certainty and improving access to markets” (xvii). Alongside this long-term socialization is a second, short-term political-economic dynamic of rapid shift in the business class’s collective patronage of a new Islamist faction, based on the assumption that it will lower the cost of business. The for- midable alliance between business class interests and Islamist institutions brings forth the new Islamist proto-state. Chapter one of the book adum- brates this two-stage argument and offers justifications for the two case studies, namely the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia. The second chapter unpacks the two-stage dynamic in detail. We learn that in modern civil wars across the Muslim world, business communi- ties intentionally adopt ardent Islamist identities as a practical means to- ward building trust and lowering cost. Islamist factions, aspiring toward hegemony, offer the possibility of economic relationships that transcend the ethnic boundaries which limit rival factions rooted in clan, tribal, or ethno-linguistic social formations. This leads to the second, faster conver- gence of business-Islamist interests, wherein the Islamist groups leverage their broader social identity and economic market to offer stronger secu- rity at a lower cost. This development of an economy of scale leads the local business elites to throw their financial support behind the Islamists at a critical juncture of militant competition. Once this threshold is met, Islamist factions rapidly conquer and consolidate territories from their rel- atively socially constrained rivals to form a new proto-state, like the Taliban regime and the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). When we look at the timeline of their development (the Taliban in 1994 and the ICU in 2006), we notice a similar length of gestation, about 15 years of war. This similarity may be coincidental, but the political-military threshold is the same. Both societ- ies, ravaged by civil war, reached a stalemate. At this critical juncture the positional properties of Islamist formations in the field of civil war factions gives the Islamists a decided economic (cost analysis) and social (trust building across clan/tribal identities) advantage. Chapters three to six examine each of the two processes for the se- lected sites of inquiry. Thus chapters three and five, respectively, explore the long-term Islamist identity construction within the smuggling industry in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderland, and the Somali business elites’ gradual convergence with Islamists. In chapter four, Ahmad explores the second dynamic in the context of rising security costs during the Afghan civil war. Mullah Omar’s Taliban provided the order and security across the borderland that had previously eluded the variety of industries. This allowed the Taliban to expand on the backs of voluntary donations, rather than extortions like their rival tribal warlords, which in turn allowed them to recruit and retain more disciplined fighters (81). The source of these donations was the business class, especially those involved in the highly lucrative transit trade, which, before the rise of Taliban, paid immense op- portunity cost at the hands of rapacious local and tribal warlord fiefdoms and bandits. Instead of the multitude of checkpoints crisscrossing south- ern Afghanistan and the borderlands, the Taliban presented a simplified administration. While the rest of the world took notice of their repressive measures against women’s mobility, education, and cultural expression, the men of the bazaar appreciated the newly acquired public safety to ply their trade and the lowered cost of doing business. Chapter six, “The Price of Protection: The Rise of the Islamic Courts Union,” demonstrates a similar mutually beneficial Islamist-business relationship emerging out of the incessant clan-based militia conflicts that had especially plagued southern Somalia since the fall of the last national government in 1991. Businesspeople, whether they were tycoons or small business owners, had to pay two types of tax. First was what was owed to the local racket or warlord, and the second was to the ever-fragmenting sub-clan militias and their checkpoints on the intercity highways. Unlike their rival, the Transitional Federal Government (TGF), ICU forged their supra-clan institutional identity through a universalist legal discourse and practice rooted in Islamic law and ethics. They united the courts and their associated clan-based militias, including al-Shabaab. Ahmad demonstrates, through a synthesis of secondary literature and original political ethnogra- phy, the economic logics of ICU’s ability to overcome the threshold of ma- terial and social support needed to establish the rule of law and a far-reach- ing functioning government. If the Taliban and the ICU had solved the riddle of creating order and security to create hegemonic proto-states, then what was their downfall? Chapter seven gives us an account of the international interventions that caused the collapse of the two proto-states. In the aftermath of their de- struction, the internationally supported regimes that replaced them, de- spite immense monetary and military aid, have failed to gain the same level of legitimacy across Afghanistan and Somalia. In chapter eight, Ahmad expands the scope of analysis to North/Western Africa (Al-Qaeda in the Is- lamic Maghrib: AQIM), Middle East (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: ISIS), and South Asia (Tahrik-i Taliban-i Pakistan: TTP). At the time of this book’s publication, these movements were not yet, as Ahmad posits, closed cases like the Taliban and the ICU. Thus, the data from this chapter’s comparative survey furnishes suggestive arguments for Ahmad’s larger thesis, namely that Islamist proto-states emerge out of a confluence of economic and security interests rather than mere ideological and identity politics. The epistemic humility of this chapter signals to this reader two lines of constructive criticism of some aspects of Ahmad’s sub- stantiation of this thesis. First, the juxtaposing of Islamist success against their clan-/tribal iden- tity-based rivals may be underestimating the element of ethnic solidarity in those very Islamists’ political success. The most glaring case is the Taliban, which in its original formation and in its post-American invasion frag- mentations, across the Durand Line, was more or less founded on a pan- or-tribal Pashtun social identity and economic compulsions relative to the other Afghan ethno-linguistic communities. How does one disaggregate the force of ethnic solidarity (even if it is only a necessary condition, rather than a cause) from economic calculus in explaining the rise of the Taliban proto-state? The second issue in this juxtaposition is that when we compare a suc- cessful Islamist movement against socially limited ethnocentric rivals, we discount the other Islamist movements that failed. Explanations for those Islamists that failed to create a proto-state along the lines of the ICU or the Taliban, such as al-Ittihad al-Islamiyya (Somalia) or Gulbuddin Hekmat- yar’s Hezb-e Islami (Afghanistan), needed to be more robustly taken into account and integrated into the substantiation of Ahmad’s thesis. Even in the section on ISIS, it would have been helpful to integrate the case of Jabhat al-Nusra’s (an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria) inability to create a proto-state to rival ISIS. We must ask, why do some Jihadi Islamist movements prevail against each other and why do others fail? Perhaps some of these Islamist movements appear too early to scale up their operation (i.e., they precede Ahmad’s ‘critical juncture’), or they were too embroiled and too partisan in the illicit trade network to fully leverage their Islamist universalism to create the trust and bonds that are the first part of Ahmad’s two-stage dy- namic. Possible answers would need to complement Ahmad’s excellent po- litical ethnography with deeper quantitative dives to identify the statistical variations of these critical junctures: when does the cost of warlords and mafias’ domination outweigh the cost of Islamist-Jihadi movements’ social- ly repressive but economically liberating regimes? At which point in the social evolution of society during an unending civil war do identities forged by the bonds of blood give way to those imagined through bonds of faith? These two critical suggestions do not diminish Ahmad’s highly teach- able work. This book should be read by all concerned policy makers, schol- ars in the social sciences and humanities, and anyone who wants to go be- yond ‘culture talk’ historical causation by ideas and identity and uncover structuralist explanations for the rise of Jihadi Islamist success in civil wars across the Muslim world. It is especially recommended for adoption in cog- nate courses at the undergraduate level, for its combination of erudition and readability. Maheen ZamanAssistant ProfessorDepartment of HistoryAugsburg University

In this critically insightful and highly readable book of political ethnogra- phy, Aisha Ahmad, a political scientist at University of Toronto, seeks to explain how and why Islamist movements continue to militarily prevail and politically succeed in forming proto-states, over clan, ethnic, and/or tribal based competitions, amidst the chaos and disorder of civil wars across the contemporary Muslim world, from Mali to Mindanao. To this end, Ahmad seeks to go beyond the usual expositions that center the explanatory power of Islamist ideologies and identities, which dominate the scholarly fields of political science, international relations, security studies as well as the global public discourse shaped by journalists, politicians, and the punditry of shouting heads everywhere. Through a deep, immersive study of power in Afghanistan and Soma- lia, Ahmad demonstrates the profoundly symbiotic relationship between Islamists and the local business class. While recognizing the interconnec- tions between violent conflict and illicit trade is nothing new, Ahmad’s explication of the economic logics of Islamist proto-states furnishes a nov- el two-stage dynamic to explain the indispensability and ubiquity of this Islamist-business alliance in conflict zones. The first is the gradual social process of conversion of the business class’ worldview and practice to align them with Islamist identity formations, which is “aimed at mitigating un- certainty and improving access to markets” (xvii). Alongside this long-term socialization is a second, short-term political-economic dynamic of rapid shift in the business class’s collective patronage of a new Islamist faction, based on the assumption that it will lower the cost of business. The for- midable alliance between business class interests and Islamist institutions brings forth the new Islamist proto-state. Chapter one of the book adum- brates this two-stage argument and offers justifications for the two case studies, namely the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia. The second chapter unpacks the two-stage dynamic in detail. We learn that in modern civil wars across the Muslim world, business communi- ties intentionally adopt ardent Islamist identities as a practical means to- ward building trust and lowering cost. Islamist factions, aspiring toward hegemony, offer the possibility of economic relationships that transcend the ethnic boundaries which limit rival factions rooted in clan, tribal, or ethno-linguistic social formations. This leads to the second, faster conver- gence of business-Islamist interests, wherein the Islamist groups leverage their broader social identity and economic market to offer stronger secu- rity at a lower cost. This development of an economy of scale leads the local business elites to throw their financial support behind the Islamists at a critical juncture of militant competition. Once this threshold is met, Islamist factions rapidly conquer and consolidate territories from their rel- atively socially constrained rivals to form a new proto-state, like the Taliban regime and the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). When we look at the timeline of their development (the Taliban in 1994 and the ICU in 2006), we notice a similar length of gestation, about 15 years of war. This similarity may be coincidental, but the political-military threshold is the same. Both societ- ies, ravaged by civil war, reached a stalemate. At this critical juncture the positional properties of Islamist formations in the field of civil war factions gives the Islamists a decided economic (cost analysis) and social (trust building across clan/tribal identities) advantage. Chapters three to six examine each of the two processes for the se- lected sites of inquiry. Thus chapters three and five, respectively, explore the long-term Islamist identity construction within the smuggling industry in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderland, and the Somali business elites’ gradual convergence with Islamists. In chapter four, Ahmad explores the second dynamic in the context of rising security costs during the Afghan civil war. Mullah Omar’s Taliban provided the order and security across the borderland that had previously eluded the variety of industries. This allowed the Taliban to expand on the backs of voluntary donations, rather than extortions like their rival tribal warlords, which in turn allowed them to recruit and retain more disciplined fighters (81). The source of these donations was the business class, especially those involved in the highly lucrative transit trade, which, before the rise of Taliban, paid immense op- portunity cost at the hands of rapacious local and tribal warlord fiefdoms and bandits. Instead of the multitude of checkpoints crisscrossing south- ern Afghanistan and the borderlands, the Taliban presented a simplified administration. While the rest of the world took notice of their repressive measures against women’s mobility, education, and cultural expression, the men of the bazaar appreciated the newly acquired public safety to ply their trade and the lowered cost of doing business. Chapter six, “The Price of Protection: The Rise of the Islamic Courts Union,” demonstrates a similar mutually beneficial Islamist-business relationship emerging out of the incessant clan-based militia conflicts that had especially plagued southern Somalia since the fall of the last national government in 1991. Businesspeople, whether they were tycoons or small business owners, had to pay two types of tax. First was what was owed to the local racket or warlord, and the second was to the ever-fragmenting sub-clan militias and their checkpoints on the intercity highways. Unlike their rival, the Transitional Federal Government (TGF), ICU forged their supra-clan institutional identity through a universalist legal discourse and practice rooted in Islamic law and ethics. They united the courts and their associated clan-based militias, including al-Shabaab. Ahmad demonstrates, through a synthesis of secondary literature and original political ethnogra- phy, the economic logics of ICU’s ability to overcome the threshold of ma- terial and social support needed to establish the rule of law and a far-reach- ing functioning government. If the Taliban and the ICU had solved the riddle of creating order and security to create hegemonic proto-states, then what was their downfall? Chapter seven gives us an account of the international interventions that caused the collapse of the two proto-states. In the aftermath of their de- struction, the internationally supported regimes that replaced them, de- spite immense monetary and military aid, have failed to gain the same level of legitimacy across Afghanistan and Somalia. In chapter eight, Ahmad expands the scope of analysis to North/Western Africa (Al-Qaeda in the Is- lamic Maghrib: AQIM), Middle East (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: ISIS), and South Asia (Tahrik-i Taliban-i Pakistan: TTP). At the time of this book’s publication, these movements were not yet, as Ahmad posits, closed cases like the Taliban and the ICU. Thus, the data from this chapter’s comparative survey furnishes suggestive arguments for Ahmad’s larger thesis, namely that Islamist proto-states emerge out of a confluence of economic and security interests rather than mere ideological and identity politics. The epistemic humility of this chapter signals to this reader two lines of constructive criticism of some aspects of Ahmad’s sub- stantiation of this thesis. First, the juxtaposing of Islamist success against their clan-/tribal iden- tity-based rivals may be underestimating the element of ethnic solidarity in those very Islamists’ political success. The most glaring case is the Taliban, which in its original formation and in its post-American invasion frag- mentations, across the Durand Line, was more or less founded on a pan- or-tribal Pashtun social identity and economic compulsions relative to the other Afghan ethno-linguistic communities. How does one disaggregate the force of ethnic solidarity (even if it is only a necessary condition, rather than a cause) from economic calculus in explaining the rise of the Taliban proto-state? The second issue in this juxtaposition is that when we compare a suc- cessful Islamist movement against socially limited ethnocentric rivals, we discount the other Islamist movements that failed. Explanations for those Islamists that failed to create a proto-state along the lines of the ICU or the Taliban, such as al-Ittihad al-Islamiyya (Somalia) or Gulbuddin Hekmat- yar’s Hezb-e Islami (Afghanistan), needed to be more robustly taken into account and integrated into the substantiation of Ahmad’s thesis. Even in the section on ISIS, it would have been helpful to integrate the case of Jabhat al-Nusra’s (an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria) inability to create a proto-state to rival ISIS. We must ask, why do some Jihadi Islamist movements prevail against each other and why do others fail? Perhaps some of these Islamist movements appear too early to scale up their operation (i.e., they precede Ahmad’s ‘critical juncture’), or they were too embroiled and too partisan in the illicit trade network to fully leverage their Islamist universalism to create the trust and bonds that are the first part of Ahmad’s two-stage dy- namic. Possible answers would need to complement Ahmad’s excellent po- litical ethnography with deeper quantitative dives to identify the statistical variations of these critical junctures: when does the cost of warlords and mafias’ domination outweigh the cost of Islamist-Jihadi movements’ social- ly repressive but economically liberating regimes? At which point in the social evolution of society during an unending civil war do identities forged by the bonds of blood give way to those imagined through bonds of faith? These two critical suggestions do not diminish Ahmad’s highly teach- able work. This book should be read by all concerned policy makers, schol- ars in the social sciences and humanities, and anyone who wants to go be- yond ‘culture talk’ historical causation by ideas and identity and uncover structuralist explanations for the rise of Jihadi Islamist success in civil wars across the Muslim world. It is especially recommended for adoption in cog- nate courses at the undergraduate level, for its combination of erudition and readability. Maheen ZamanAssistant ProfessorDepartment of HistoryAugsburg University

Abstract Gentili’s conceptualization of war as a conflict between states attempted to limit the legitimacy of war to external wars only, thus precluding the legitimacy of civil wars. It reflected both the emergence of sovereign states and the vision of international law as a law among polities rather than individuals. The conceptualization of war as a dispute settlement mechanism among polities rather than a punishment for breach of the law of nations and the idea of the bilateral justice of war humanized the conduct of warfare and the content of peace treaties. The idea of perfect war excluded brigandage, piracy, and civil wars from its purview. Some scholars have suggested that perfect war had a dark side, legitimizing imperial expansion. Others have cautioned that Gentili explicitly opposed imperial expansion rather adopting anti-imperialist stances. This article suggests that these ambivalent readings of the Gentilian oeuvre reflect the ambivalence of the early modern law of nations. Under the early modern law of nations, aggression for the sake of empire was clearly unjust; nonetheless, imperial expansion took place. Whereas ‘a law which many transgress[ed] [wa]s nonetheless a law’, there was a wide divide between theory and practice.1

For the last three years, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman hasbeen telling Muslims all over the world: “You either have to have a war withinor a war with us.” Acall for Muslim “civil war” has become the battle cryof the neo-cons. Using these “civil wars,” Muslims killing Muslims in largenumbers, the neo-cons expect to accomplish three goals: (1) the re-creationof Muslim societies in the western image, with or without democratic institutions,(2) long-term control over oil and policies toward Israel, and (3) thereconstruction of Islam on the Biblical model, reformation included.A while back, the Rand Corporation, a semi-autonomous think tank,issued a report titled Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, andStrategies authored by Cheryl Benard (http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1716/MR1716.pdf). American Muslims must take note ofthis, because it is already being implemented in “letter and spirit” by variousagencies and even “private” groups.Though the author of this report claims: “The United States has threegoals in regard to politicized Islam. First, it wants to prevent the spread ofextremism and violence. Second, in doing so, it needs to avoid the impressionthat the United States is ‘opposed to Islam.’ And third, in the longerrun, it must find ways to help address the deeper economic, social, andpolitical causes feeding Islamic radicalism and to encourage a move towarddevelopment and democratization,” its actual aims are discernable from itspolicy recommendations, detailed below.Cheryl Bernard, the author of this report [and wife of Zalmay Khalizad,the American ambassador to Afghanistan], claims: “This approach seeks tostrengthen and foster the development of civil, democratic Islam and ofmodernization and development. It provides the necessary flexibility todeal with different settings appropriately, and it reduces the danger of unintendednegative effects. The following outline describes what such a strategymight look like: ...

Scholarship traditionally emphasises the destructive nature of wars on landscapes, with the impact of military activities on forests referred to most frequently. Modern weapons and, consequently, modern warfare have undoubtedly had a tremendous impact on landscapes. The American Civil War, the two World Wars and the Viet Nam War all fundamentally changed the landscape of the areas where they were fought. Two distinct problems regarding the impact of pre-modern warfare on forests are discussed in contemporary literature; the deliberate destruction of forests — that is scorched earth tactics — and the different war-related industries. The article approaches the second problem using the example of the western part of the Carpathian Basin in the early modern period. The area in question was affected by a period of war between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire (including the Kingdom of Hungary) that lasted approximately one and a half centuries. During this period (ca. 1540−1690), the Ottomans gradually expanded their power to part of this area. In order to secure the hinterlands on both sides, major fortification works began in the middle of the sixteenth century. According to the scholarship, this had a devastating impact on the forest resources in the area as most of the fortifications were built of wood. The article offers a methodology to study the impact of fortification works on forest resources, which, with some limitations, can be applied to other case study areas as well. The timber requirement of an individual earth and wood fortification can be estimated relatively easily, and by gathering a database on the fortifications in a certain area, drawn from existing scholarly opinion, the most important new sphere of timber consumption can be understood with at least a rough approximation. In this article, I will argue that the Habsburgs’ measures to protect the forests in the Kingdom was most probably not a sign of resource scarcity but in fact shows the beginning of conscious forest management.

Abstract This article examines how Wales and the Welsh were represented in the pamphlet literature of the civil war and early Interregnum. It considers the historical construction of the Welsh image in English minds, and traces how this image came to be politicized by Welsh support for Charles I during the sixteen-forties. An examination of the public controversies surrounding the state-sponsored evangelization programme in Wales during the early sixteen-fifties shows how the contested image of Wales in the public sphere interacted with high politics at the centre. This study contributes to our understanding of the interplay between ethnicity, identity and politics during the sixteen-forties and fifties, and demonstrates how imagery and representation informed political discourse in the mid seventeenth century.

As the Chronography of Theophanes the Confessor includes a lot of information about the foreign states and tribes which were connected with the Byzantine Empire. It is legitimate, in the Author’s view, to analyse the account concerning Islam and the Arabs by this Byzantine author. Theophanes possessed detailed knowledge of the Arabs, Islam and Umayyad caliphs. He used, although presumably indirectly, some Muslim sources in his work. The argument which strongly proves this hypothesis is his precise description of inner clashes between the members of the ruling house, as well as of Arab civil wars. The article discusses how Theophanes (and presumably his sources) depicted not only the Arabs as an entity, but also the prophet Muhammad and some of the Umayyad caliphs (Muawiya, Walid I, Umar II, Hisham, Marwan II).

Abstract Different disconnected stories have been associated with the origins of Islam in the Philippines, enforcing historical narratives that have avoid placing the lens on other facts. The story of Princess Urduja that Ibn Baṭṭūṭa included in his Riḥla, dominated the ethos of an Edenic past with Arabic connections. The Spanish concept of Reconquista and the articulation of the so-called ‘Moro Wars’ pervaded ad nauseam the Moro condition and the Philippine national construction. The presence of Alexander the Great in Philippine silsilas have certainly received unequal attention, without going further than folklore. This paper aims to clarify myth and history in narrating the origins of Islam in the Philippines. In doing so recent historiographical trends and insights on Islamic mission in early modern Philippines are examined.

During the early years of the Civil Wars in England, from February 1642 to July 1643, Puritan parishioners in conjunction with the parliament in London set up approximately 150 divines as weekly preachers, or lecturers, in the city and the provinces. This was an exceptional activity surrounding lectureships including the high number of lecturer appointments made over the relatively brief space of time, especially considering the urgent necessity of making preparations for the looming war and fighting it as well. By examining a range of sources, this article seeks to demonstrate that the Puritan MPs and peers, in cooperation with their supporters from across the country, tactically employed the institutional device of weekly preaching, or lectureships, to neutralize the influence of Anglican clergymen perceived as royalists dissatisfied with the parliamentarian cause, and to bolster Puritan and pro-parliamentarian preaching during the critical years of 1642–1643. If successfully employed, the device of weekly lectureships would have significantly widened the base of support for the parliament during this crucial period when people began to take sides, prepared for war, and fought its first battles. Such a program of lectureships, no doubt, contributed to the increasing polarization of the religious and political climate of the country. More broadly, this study seeks to add to our understanding of an early phase of the conflict that eventually embroiled the entire British Isles in a decade of gruesome internecine warfare.

During the early years of the Civil Wars in England, from February 1642 to July 1643, Puritan parishioners in conjunction with the parliament in London set up approximately 150 divines as weekly preachers, or lecturers, in the city and the provinces. This was an exceptional activity surrounding lectureships including the high number of lecturer appointments made over the relatively brief space of time, especially considering the urgent necessity of making preparations for the looming war and fighting it as well. By examining a range of sources, this article seeks to demonstrate that the Puritan MPs and peers, in cooperation with their supporters from across the country, tactically employed the institutional device of weekly preaching, or lectureships, to neutralize the influence of Anglican clergymen perceived as royalists dissatisfied with the parliamentarian cause, and to bolster Puritan and pro-parliamentarian preaching during the critical years of 1642–1643. If successfully employed, the device of weekly lectureships would have significantly widened the base of support for the parliament during this crucial period when people began to take sides, prepared for war, and fought its first battles. Such a program of lectureships, no doubt, contributed to the increasing polarization of the religious and political climate of the country. More broadly, this study seeks to add to our understanding of an early phase of the conflict that eventually embroiled the entire British Isles in a decade of gruesome internecine warfare.

In the post—cold war period, civil wars are increasingly likely to end with peace settlements brokered by international actors who press for early elections. However, elections held soon after wars end, when political institutions remain weak, are associated with an increased likelihood of a return to violence. International actors have a double-edged influence over election timing and the risk of war, often promoting precarious military stalemates and early elections but sometimes also working to prevent a return to war through peacekeeping, institution building, and powersharing. In this article, we develop and test quantitatively a model of the causes of early elections as a building block in evaluating the larger effect of election timing on the return to war.

Abstract Level of education, amount of incentive and the level of competence of teachers/caretakers three significantly influenced by the status of civil servant teachers/PNS on the quality of children's ideal, the status of civil servants/PNS for early childhood education programs/PAUD should have the qualifications and competence yangt accordance with minimum service standards so that it has a higher chance to create quality children's ideal , Level of education, amount of incentive and the level of competence of teachers/caretakers three significantly influenced by the status of volunteer teachers to the quality of children's ideal, voluntary status for early childhood education programs/PAUD should have the qualifications and competence yangt accordance with minimum service standards so that it has a higher chance to create quality children's ideal , but almost all providers of early childhood education conducted by both the foundations and the community pay less attention to the qualifications and competence His nurse, so it looks only at who has the time to become caretakers. It has alarming effects, seen from the perspective of educational administration, the ideal child's success into question, and generation like what 20 years to come. There is some education that shall be given to early childhood include: grateful, tauhid (with mengadzankan), physical education (strong physical), health, and intelligence. Keywords: Analysis, Policy, Education, PAUDI.

The dynamics of conflict are shifting. In the 2011 World Development Report, the World Bank stated that conflicts are now increasingly cyclical and intractable events; 90 percent of the civil wars that occurred in the 2000s were fought within countries that had experienced a domestic conflict in the past 30 years (World Bank, 2011). Countries are more likely to experience cycles of violence due to the persistence of weak state structures that cannot extend their reach into peripheral regions, leading to local instability (Kingston, 2004). Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the international community observed several states – in which external actors provided 50 percent of those states’ overall revenues – relapse into civil war (Call, 2012). Given the significant investment by the international community in peacebuilding projects in post-conflict states – whether democratic reforms, economic reforms, capacity building, or sustainable development – there needs to be a significant increase in research focused on civil war recurrence, as the trajectory of post-conflict states cannot be guaranteed without sustainable peace.

Abstract This article explores the content of wartime sermons in eighteenth-century Russia, delivered by the Orthodox bishops during the pivotal military conflicts of early imperial period. Apart from communicating war aims and current events to the laity, these sermons also presented an image of the enemy to the masses. This imagery manifested bishops’ support for the Petrine and Catherinian cultural opening to the West, on the one hand, while promoting a myth of an existential antagonism against the Ottoman South, on the other. Unlike their seventeenth-century predecessors, eighteenth-century sermons avoided the stereotypes of heterodoxy or heresy when describing Russia’s Western enemies, preferring instead the language of just or unjust wars, protection of European neighbors or the metaphor of David facing titanic Goliaths. The non-sectarian imagery, however, did not extend to Islam. Sermons of the Russo-Ottoman wars presented the conflict as a purely religious and Russia’s involvement as a holy war.

The dominant historiographical trend in Puritan studies, started by Patrick Collinson, stresses the conservative nature of Puritanism. It notes Puritanism's strong opposition to the separatist impulses of some of the godly and the ways in which it was successfully integrated into the Church of England until the innovations of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Far from being revolutionary, Puritanism was able to contain the disruptive energies of the Reformation within a national church structure. This picture dovetails nicely with the revisionist portrayal of an early seventeenth-century “Unrevolutionary England,” but it sits uneasily with the fratricidal cacophony of 1640s Puritanism.The picture also sits uneasily with the Antinomian Controversy, the greatest internal dispute of pre-civil wars Puritanism. That controversy shook the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638. Accusations of false doctrine flew back and forth, the government went into tumult, and by the time the crisis had subsided, leading colonists had voluntarily departed or had been banished. In terms of its cultural impact in England, it was probably the single most important event in seventeenth-century American colonial history; publications generated by the controversy were reprinted in England into the nineteenth century.The Antinomian Controversy, evoking civil wars cacophony but occurring in the previous decade, offers a bridge across the current interpretive chasm between civil wars and pre-civil wars Puritanism. The crisis has generated a wide range of scholarly interpretations, but there is broad agreement that the Boston church, storm center of the crisis, was the source of its disruption.

An examination of the policies and actions of the city council of the Champagne town of Châlons-sur-Marne during the French Wars of Religion qualifies the view that the wars spelled the end of the bonne ville. In particular, this article examines Châlons' rivalries with the other towns of the region. The civil wars of the Catholic League in the late 1580s and early 1590s provided the opportunity to gain by military means what had previously been sought by bureaucratic. Yet at the same time that the city councillors were pursuing the traditional agenda of the bonne ville, they were also illustrating the dynamic of its demise, for the prizes over which these rivalries were fought were royal institutions. They were playing an old game for new stakes.

Scholarship on civil war is overwhelmingly preoccupied with armed activity. Data collection efforts on actors in civil wars tend to reflect this emphasis, with most studies focusing on the identities, attributes, and violent behavior of armed actors. Yet various actors also use nonviolent methods to shape the intensity and variation of violence as well as the duration of peace in the aftermath. Existing datasets on mobilization by non-state actors – such as the Armed Conflict Events and Location (ACLED), Integrated Conflict Early Warning System (ICEWS), and Social Conflict Analysis Database (SCAD) – tend to include data on manifest contentious acts, such as protests, strikes, and demonstrations, and exclude activities like organizing, planning, training, negotiations, communications, and capacity-building that may be critical to the actors’ ultimate success. To provide a more comprehensive and reliable view of the landscape of possible nonviolent behaviors involved in civil wars, we present the Nonviolent Action in Violent Contexts (NVAVC) dataset, which identifies 3,662 nonviolent actions during civil wars in Africa between 1990 and 2012, across 124 conflict-years in 17 countries. In this article, we describe the data collection process, discuss the information contained therein, and offer descriptive statistics and discuss spatial patterns. The framework we develop provides a powerful tool for future researchers to use to categorize various types of nonviolent action, and the data we collect provide important evidence that such efforts are worthwhile.

Aim. The paper analyses the Islamic revival in Russia in the late 20th century and early 21st. This was reflected in the registration of religious communities, the publication of periodicals on Muslim literature, and, in my opinion, most importantly - the construction of mosques and madrassas. It highlights the roles of mosques and madrassas built in the North Caucasus, which later became the theological centers for the spread of Islam and educated youngsters according to their propaganda. Methods. The study mainly uses an analysis method based on the study of historicism, documents and empirical material. The basis of the source are books, scientific articles, research works conducted by Russian and foreign experts. Results. The post-Soviet wars (1994-1996 and 1999-2000) in Chechnya contributed to the politicisation and realisation of Islam in this region. In 1996-1999 there were 26 Sharia courts, numerous Islamic parties, charitable foundations and organisations in the republic and, most importantly, structures of Wahhabi organisations (Akaev, n.d.). The process of politicisation gradually turned into organisational formations in Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Conclusion. The constructive transformation by reinforcing the modernist potentials of Islam has contributed to the real renewal of Russian Muslim societies, which led to the radicalisation of the whole region. The described events have shown that for the last 20 years, the revival of religious Islam was a revival of political organisations and activities, where religion is connected to politics and criminal activities. A small North Caucasian republic immediately turned up at the center of Russia's recent history. Key Words: Islam, politics, revival, radicalization, Russia, North Caucasus

Abstract Previous research has shown that the outcome of a civil war is related to conflict duration: military victory by either the government or the rebels occurs early if it occurs at all, and the longer a civil war lasts, the more likely it is to end in a negotiated settlement. The models of civil war duration and outcome that have produced these findings are built on characteristics of the civil war and less on attributes of the state itself, other than where the state lies on the Polity autocracy-democracy scale. We propose that how civil wars end varies not only between democracies and authoritarian regimes but among the different authoritarian regime types identified by Geddes, Wright, and Franz. The distinguishing attributes of these regime types—democracy, one-party, personalist, military, monarchical—should lead to different likelihood in defeating a rebel movement, being defeated by a rebel movement, and negotiating a peace agreement with a rebel movement. Results from a series of competing-risk models using the Uppsala–Peace Research Institute Oslo Armed Conflict Dataset demonstrate support for our claim that how civil wars end is partly a function of the characteristics of the regime.

The article reveals one of the controversial topics in the history of the early 20th century — the participation of foreign military units in the First World War and the Civil War in Russia. The authors revealed the main points of the creation of national formations as part of the Russian imperial army. Particular attention is paid to the problem of choosing by the command and personnel of these units of their “place” in the conditions of the civil confrontation caused by the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 in the expanses of the former Russian Empire. This choice was driven by a number of important factors. These are the features of the internal structure and management that had developed within the units and subunits by October 1917; it is also a factor of being in a certain territory by the time the Bolsheviks came to power; this is the desire of the opposing governments to use national units as their strike forces at the time of the formation of the white and red armies. A detailed study and analysis of these historical plots becomes relevant in the field of studying the problems of the development of national movements in the critical period of national history.

The U.S. military was the principal agent of American state development in the seven decades between 1791 and 1861. It fought wars, removed Native Americans, built internal improvements, expedited frontier settlement, deterred slave revolts, returned fugitive slaves, and protected existing property relations. These activities promoted state development along multiple axes, increasing the administrative capacities, institutional autonomy, political legitimacy, governing authority, and coercive powers of the American state. Unfortunately, the American political development literature has largely ignored the varied ways in which the presence of slavery influenced military deployments and, in turn, state development during the pre–Civil War period.

The prime objective of this research paper is to look at the realities and challenges confronting the Balkan states and societies in light of Syria’s civil war. By examining the mobilization process of Balkan militants who are joining Syria’s rebel cause, especially the Islamic radical groups linked to al-Qaeda, this paper proposes a model that explains why and how Balkan militants are joining the fight in Syria. Drawing upon reliable media reports, personal observations, academic accounts, and other consistent sources, this paper argues that Balkan militants are joining Syria’s rebel cause because foreign Islamic radical groups (that have been operating in the Balkans since the early 1990s) have successfully indoctrinated them. This paper challenges the argument that Islam in the Balkans is a threat to the region, and the claim that Balkan Islam and Muslims in the region are becoming an increasing threat to the West. The central findings of this paper exemplify that the future of Balkan militants is bleak and that they will be confronted with a massive modern and democratic resistance that offers them nothing but reintegration into Balkan Islam, their natural “religious nest.” Notwithstanding the trends related to Syria’s civil war, Balkan Muslims belong to the West, culturally and mentally.

This monograph challenges the notion that Islam is, at its core, an intolerantreligion. Through a careful reading of the Qur’an, the Hadith literature, andextra-canonical texts, as well as examples from history, Reza Shah-Kazemiargues that Islam is rooted in an inclusivist ethic that permeates the founda-tions of Islamic belief and practice. He provides numerous examples of howMuslims have behaved in accordance with the Islamic values of unity(tawḥīd), mercy (raḥmān), and compassion (raḥmah) elucidated in theQur’an and the Hadith, and illustrated in history from the early Islamic periodto recent centuries. This volume provides an academic and sophisticated readingof tolerance in Muslim history that is accessible to the scholar, student,and layperson interested in how Islam deals with religious minorities.The introduction begins with the proposal that Islam is, at its foundation,committed to the principle of religious pluralism. Backed by eminent thinkers,including Wilfred Cantwell Smith (d. 2000) and John Locke (d. 1704), Shah-Kazemi describes this principle in terms of the “inalienable dignity” of allhuman beings as cited in Q. 30:30 and Q. 17:70: “We have bestowed dignityon the progeny of Adam [and Eve]” (p. 12). Examples of this principle are seenin the behavior of the Prophet as well as in that of his cousin and son-in-lawAli ibn Abi Talib, individuals who, in the author’s perspective, communicatedthe rule of compassion (raḥmah) throughout their lives. At the conclusion ofthis chapter, the author suggests that this practice be revived, for it accords withwestern secular principles that are not “an expression of its own specificallyreligious traditions,” but rather a result of the intra-religious wars that accompaniedthe Reformation. Shah-Kazemi uses the rest of this volume to elucidatethis spirit, which is best expressed in Q. 49:13: “O humanity, We have createdyou male and female, and We have made you into tribes and nations in orderthat you might come to know one another” (p. 19) ...

The issue of international migration has been increasingly present, especially since the early 2010s, in the daily news. However, the media tends to focus on a small minority of these movements, those which arise from exoduses linked to international wars or to civil wars often fanned – voluntarily or involuntarily – by external powers, and those which take place in non-legal forms, the main cause of which is most often poor governance. Beyond that, it is important to take a complete and fair look at all international migration in daily life. However, this does not entail following sensationalist claims that depict a world entering a generalised migratory cycle. Finally, we should ask ourselves about the real changes undergone by international migration in the 21st century.

This research addresses the chronologically first episode among dynastic conflicts during the reign of Andronikos II Palaiologos (1282–1328), when the emperor’s younger brother Constantine Porphyrogennetos made a conspiracy. The scholarship has not developed a consensus as to the fairness of accusations against the latter. This article uses the analysis of written sources account to prove that there was a real conspiracy and to find out its content, circumstances, and consequences for the Byzantine state and society. The conclusion is that the conspiracy was uncovered at an early stage, so it did not take full shape. The initiator of the conflict was Constantine Palaiologos. The conspirators, the high-ranking Byzantine military commander representing a major noble family Michael Strategopoulos in particular, tried to lean on various social elements and even to use for their own advantage the controversies within the Byzantine Church, with their final goal to overthrow Andronikos II with the use of military force. Despite his exceptional position in the hierarchy of court titles, Constantine Palaiologos was actually deprived of power as public administrator, and therefore he tried to usurp the rights for which, in his view, he could claim due to uncertainty of his place in power relations in Byzantium of the late thirteenth century. By uncovering the conspiracy against him, Andronikos II strengthened his position on the throne and neutralized the immediate threat of destabilizing the state, preventing (or postponing?) the possible outbreak of civil war in the Empire.

Some of the most magnificent achievements of human culture, from the Parthenon to Paradise Lost, have been inspired by religion and some of the worst atrocities of human history have been committed to worship its commands. In consequence, whenever questions of religion become part of the political and legal agenda of a society one might be very insecure about the solution of the problem but can be absolutely confident that the stakes are high and the discussions intense. This general observation about religious issues has gained a special dimension due to the events of September 11, 2001, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since then the role of religions in general and of Islam in particular is at the very core of central debates of global civil society and of the deliberations and actions of policy makers.

This article explores an important but hitherto neglected factor that helps to account for the early divergence between Richard Baxter (1615–91) and John Owen (1616–83). Theological differences alone cannot account for that divergence, since in the early 1640s Baxter and Owen would have agreed on the issues that later separated them. Their starkly contrasting experiences of the First Civil War helped to set them apart. For Baxter, personally caught up in the upheaval, the war was a disaster that corrupted the Gospel. For Owen, untouched by the fighting, the war was a blessing from God that liberated the Gospel from Arminian captivity. All this helps to illuminate some of the ways in which the civil wars continued to shape religious developments and divisions long after the battles had ceased.

For just war doctrine to apply, the last resort requirement to exhaust all measures short-of-war must be fulfilled. Because of research and policy developments in the last fifteen years, the international community is now equipped with a richer understanding of how wars and atrocities evolve through time, improved precision about trigger points and risk factors that may accelerate that evolution, growing consensus on what prevention and mitigation steps to look for in that process, and new technologies for ascertaining these steps in order to intervene when mitigating action might deflect the escalation. It is thus argued that the responsibility of the international community to intervene in a timely and appropriate fashion has become increasingly clear and inescapable. It is further argued that the alert engagement of civil society in crafting this body of research and policy places a heavy public burden on government leaders to demonstrate that indeed all measures short-of-war have been exhausted. We now have at our collective disposal many more measures to deploy and many more witnesses to raise the alarm. Accordingly, the threshold for declaring that last resort has been reached has now become much higher.

The prophet of Islam, peace be upon him, has put and executed an integrated plan to defend the first Muslims and the Muslim society since the dawn of the Islam Call. The plan has taken different shapes and used several means to achieve its goal. In Makah the plan relied on the educational doctrines and urged for patience and self control refraining from using force as there was no permission for fighting. The invocation of God and the prayers were carried out secretly. Some of the early believers were directed to emigrate to safe lands to escape persecution and oppression. In later development and according to a protective treaty with the people of Yathrib, the prophet himself and all his companions emigrated to live there where the unique Islamic society was established. The means of protecting and defending it also developed considerably. Many treaties and safe –conducts to restore peace and stop aggressions and offensives were signed with the people of Yathrib and with the neighboring tribes. The prophet and his companions were forced to fight defensive and preventing wars to defend the Muslims’ society: but they were never aggressive or oppressive ones.

Abstract Thomas Watson’s critics have suggested that The Hekatompathia, Or Passionate Centurie of Love ambitiously aspired to be a pedagogical text, but if this work is designed to teach, then this essay suggests Watson’s manipulations of genre, style, and intertexts combine to offer a pedagogy for poets, a compilation of rhetorical postures one may employ to simultaneously deliver and disguise socio-political satire in Elizabethan England. This essay first discusses how Hekatompathia additionally signals its satirical aims by participating in the pasquinade tradition, and positioning a “pasquine piller” at the volta of this sequence of one hundred passions. Next, it shows how Watson’s “passions” intertextually recall Pierre de Ronsard’s Discours des Misères de ce Temps, a collection of lyrics satirizing the French factionalism that has led to civil war, as well as Thomas Jeney’s later English translation that turns a mirror to princes toward Queen Elizabeth. Upon recognizing the Ronsardian subtexts of courtly factionalism and civil unrest associated with Watson’s “passions,” one may see how they are compounded as the poet sets them forth in the “pathetical style” of Seneca and Lucan. The civil wars of ancient Rome and subsequent imperial tyranny are frequently held up as a cautionary tales for early modern English and European rulers, but Watson’s simultaneous translation of the French Wars of Religion relocates these civil broils in England, implicating Elizabethan court dissidence and hypocrisy.

Internal troubles afflicted the Islamic State for the first time in the late 650s and early 660s. Known in Islamic tradition as the firstfitnah, the troubles were described by early Western historians of Islam as what may be termed the 'standard account' of the first Arab civil war. Their account is founded upon the Islamic historical- biographical written tradition, whose corpus ofrecords on the firstfitnah is preserved in the early comprehensive collections of al-Tabari (d.923) and al-Mas'üdi (d.956). But these writers depended on earlier written compilations of oral accounts of the civil war (akhbär), whose authors are listed in al-Nadim's Fihrist, compiled about 987. They include Abü Mikhnaf (d.774), Sayf ibn 'Umar (d. 796), ibn al-Muthannä (d.823-6), al-Wäqidi (d. 823), al-Minqäri (d.827), al-Madä'ini (d.839), ibn Abi Shayba (d.849), and ibn Shabba (d.877). The compilations ofall these authors were grouped around the selected themes of 'Uthmän's murder, the battle of the Camel, and the battle of Siffin with the subsequent arbitration process. Four of the compilations survive.

This article examines Scottish commodity market integration from 1630 to 1815. The Scottish economy developed rapidly in this period, with expansion driven by specialisation in agricultural production and the development of markets. We test for price convergence and market efficiency using grain prices from Scotland's fiars courts records. Our results suggest that in the long run price convergence increased across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but experienced temporary declines in times of famine and war. The civil war and Cromwellian occupation of the Scottish Lowlands in the 1640s and 1650s, famine in the 1690s, the American War of Independence, and the Napoleonic Wars all caused declines in price convergence. Using a dynamic factor model, we find that market efficiency increased substantially in Scottish markets from the late seventeenth century. This analysis shows that price changes followed distinct regional trends in the east and west of the country in the late seventeenth century but had become strongly integrated at a national level by the eighteenth century.

The chief martyrology of the French Protestants or Huguenots, the Histoire des martyrs, was the work of a Walloon refugee in Geneva, Jean Crespin. The Histoire focuses on the martyrs of the French Reformation, but also describes the ordeals of those in Scodand, England, and Flanders, as well as of medieval precursors of Protestant ideas, such as Hus and Wyclif. Later versions of the text include the martyrs of the Early Church, whose faith the Huguenots claimed to be reviving and in whose sufferings they believed themselves to be sharing. The Histoire quickly became popular in the fledgeling Reformed churches of France, avidly read from the pulpit and in the home. The accounts of the courage of the martyrs no doubt reinforced the resolution of a group destined to remain a minority, and who became increasingly resigned to their fate. During the civil strife known as the French Wars of Religion, religious tensions were exacerbated by political and military conflict. However, the incident which provoked the outbreak of the wars in 1562 was the massacre of a Huguenot congregation at Vassy, in Champagne, and, indeed, the wars were to be particularly noted for their brutal sectarian violence.

After the World War II, the world remarks many changes in every aspect including culture, society, literature and so on. Writers around the world wrote about the effect of colonizer/colonized relationship. Edward Said is one of the pillars who deals with such discourse. Said believes that the legacy of the colonizer still exists in terms of civil wars, corruption and labor exploitation. In other word, Said means that the West creates a wrong image about the Orient and considers it as the “Other” in contrast to the ideal West. Said was the one who deconstructs the western’s thinking about the East. So his books : Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981) are appropriate to examine the idea of the ‘Other’ and to show how Said decipher the western wrong image about the East. Thus, this paper will emphasis on the concept of the Other according to Said.

In a recent article published in theJournal of Military History, Arthur Waldron noted that war in Chinese history has been ‘treated at best as a largely unexamined context’. One has only to look at the cursory treatment given by most textbooks to the incessant civil wars of China's ‘warlord’ period (usually dated from 1916 to 1926) to see the truth of this statement. In the above article, Waldron seeks to remedy some of this neglect by pointing out the important relationship in this period between war and the course of modern Chinese nationalism. Although less ambitious, this article also seeks to explore a more specific, yet also largely unexamined, aspect of this relationship, namely the emergence of anti-militarism, or more specifically anti-warlordism, as a defining theme in modern Chinese nationalism.

Abstract: For all those interested in the religious history of the Near and Middle East during Late Antiquity, the advent of Muḥammad in Arabia and the beginnings of Islam are exciting fields of research. The present study tries to put these subjects into perspective within the broad historical and spiritual context of the 6th and 7th centuries. It is based on a sort of syllogism: Muḥammad and his message belong to Jewish, Christian or Judeo-Christian monotheisms (as attested by the Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth); Muḥammad’s first messages seem to announce the imminent end of the world (as is evident from many Quranic passages and several very early ḥadīths); so Muḥammad cannot but announce the coming of the Messiah as the Savior of the End of the world. On this last point, the Qurʾān remains curiously silent, but according to a large number of ancient ḥadiths, Muḥammad actually announces the imminent coming of the Messiah and the latter is none other than Jesus. At the same time, for some followers of Muḥammad, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib seems to have been the second Jesus, Christ and Messiah of the apocalyptic times. After the death of Muḥammad and ʿAlī, the non-advent of the end of the world, the ridda wars, the Arab conquests and the establishment of the empire, events evolved into different directions than expected at the beginning.

AbstractMedical provision in Civil War armies has generally suffered a poor reputation. Medical matters have been excluded from assessments of how far Civil War armies confirm evidence of the so-called ‘Military Revolution’, whilst Harold Cook argued that it was not until after the Glorious Revolution that the medical infrastructure of the armed forces was brought in line with continental practices, particularly those of the Dutch army. Despite the recent rehabilitation of early modern practitioners elsewhere, frontline military practitioners continue to be dismissed as uneducated, unskilful and incompetent. This is largely due to the lack of a fresh perspective since C. H. Firth published Cromwell's Army in 1902. This article argues that the English were well aware of current medical practice in European armies and endeavoured to implement similar procedures during the Civil Wars. Indeed, almost all the developments identified by Cook for the later seventeenth century can be found in Civil War armies. Whilst failures may have occurred, most of these can be attributed to administrative and financial miscarriages, rather than ignorance of contemporary medical developments. Moreover, there is little to suggest that medics mobilized for Civil War armies were any less capable than those who practised civilian medicine in this period.