Archivo de la categoría: Blogs reseñables

B61 nuclear bombs in Turkey

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B61 nuclear bombs in storage

Turkey’s Future (American) Nuclear Weapon

If everything goes to plan, Turkey will receive the United States’ newest nuclear weapon in 2019. Turkey currently hosts between 60 and 70 B61 gravity bombs at Incirlik air force base. During the Cold War, Turkish aircraft were on full nuclear alert status – meaning that Turkish aircraft were loaded with nuclear weapons and ready to take to the air in minutes, should NATO give the order. Now Turkish F-16 are only nuclear certified and would have to fly to Incirlik and pick up the bombs.

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Casta sin tributos

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Armadores Caricatura: Verba Volant: “Armadores: patriotas de agua dulce flotando en un mar de dinero sucio”

Casta sin tributos

Los armadores griegos mantienen sus históricos privilegios y apenas pagan impuestos

Andrés Mourenza (Atenas), El Periódico, 24 de marzo de 2013

«Los griegos somos los taxistas del mar, transportamos de todo, a cualquier parte y en cualquier momento. Somos los número 1 del transporte marítimo», exclama ufano el armador George Vernicos. No le falta razón: Grecia es un país con una tradición náutica de miles de años y sus armadores disponen de la flota mercante más grande del mundo. Es un sector con pingües beneficios y, además, apenas se pagan impuestos.

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‘Afghan Masculinities’: The Construction of the Taliban as Sexually Deviant

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‘Afghan Masculinities’: The Construction of the Taliban as Sexually Deviant

The Disorder of Things, April 19, 2013

The paper I presented earlier this month at the International Studies Annual Conference held in San Francisco looks at how Afghan masculinities have been represented in and by Anglo-American media. The words ‘Afghan man’ conjure up a certain image, a pathologised figure that is now associated with most males in Afghanistan. The paper analyses this figure of the ‘militant’ Afghan man, most strikingly captured by descriptions of the Taliban and juxtaposes it with the less popular, though still familiar trope of the ‘damned’ Afghan man, embodied in the figure of the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai. But here I focus on a particular construction of the Taliban as sexually deviant, (improperly) homosexual men.

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From the Ruins of Empire

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Book review: “From the Ruins of Empire. The intellectuals who remade Asia” by Pankaj Mishra

By Oliver Stuenkel – Post Western World

Japan’s military victory over Russia in 1905, the first time a non-Western army had beaten a traditional Western power, sent shock waves through the world and energized leading thinkers across Asia. Tagore, Sun Yat-sen, Gandhi, the 16-year old Nehru, the young soldier Mustafa Kemal (who would later become Atatürk) and a schoolboy called Mao Zedong were all ecstatic, dreaming of Asia’s rise. Newborn children were named Togo, in honor of the Japanese Admiral victorious in the Battle of Tsushima. White men, conquerors of the world, were no longer invincible.

This is the opening scene of a new book by Pankaj Mishra, author of Temptations of the West (reviewed here). In From the Ruins of Empire, he writes about how Asian intellectuals thought about the intrusion of the West, which pitted Western modernity against Asian traditions, in order to explain his claim that the central event of the last century was the intellectual and political awakening of Asia.

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Artemy Kalinovsky’s new research on Tajikistan during the Cold War

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Tajik_Opera Tajik Opera – Dushambe

“Developed Socialism” in the Periphery: Artemy Kalinovsky’s new research on Tajikistan during the Cold War period

Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Assistant Professor of East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam and author of A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, was kind enough to chat with me regarding his new research about Soviet Tajikistan and experiences working in the archives.  We decided to separate his tale into two posts, so check back in a week or so for part II: “The Party is Not Over: Archival Adventures in Tajikistan.”

“Basically, the idea is to look at how Tajik elites took Soviet ideas of modernization and implemented them locally.”  Kalinovsky’s continuing work in the Party Archives (as well as the State Archive of Tajikistan, the State Archive of the Russian Federation [GARF], and the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History [RGASPI]) is part of a broader research project provisionally titled “Modernization in a Forgotten Corner: The Politics of Development in Soviet Tajikistan,” which is supported by a Veni grant from the Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO).  If all goes according to plan, this research will culminate in a monograph several years from now; in the meantime, pieces of it will appear as articles, including one in Ab Imperio due out later this year.

Although a great deal has been written about the Sovietization of Central Asia (particularly Uzbekistan) in the 1920s and 1930s (e.g. Adeeb Khalid, Douglass Northrop, Shoshana Keller, Marianne Kamp, Adrienne Edgar), very little has been written about the period following it.  Kalinovsky intends to deal with the reception of Soviet modernity by Tajik elites, a topic which he will take on holistically – from physical industrialization projects like the Nurek Dam to cultural projects like the creation of Tajik opera.

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