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The Syrian war has been an example of the abuse and insufficient delivery of humanitarian assistance. According to international practice, humanitarian aid should be channelled through a state government that bears a particular responsibility for its population. Yet in Syria, the bulk of relief went through Damascus while the regime caused the vast majority of civilian deaths. Should the UN have severed its cooperation with the government and neglected its humanitarian duty to help all people in need? Decision-makers face these tough policy dilemmas, and often the “neutrality trap” snaps shut. This book discusses the political and moral considerations of how to respond to a brutal and complex crisis while adhering to international law and practice. The author, a scholar and senior diplomat involved in the UN peace talks in Geneva, draws from first-hand diplomatic, practitioner and UN sources. He sheds light on the UN's credibility crisis and the wider implications for the development of international humanitarian and human rights law. This includes covering the key questions asked by Western diplomats, NGOs and international organizations, such as: Why did the UN not confront the Syrian government more boldly? Was it not only legally correct but also morally justifiable to deliver humanitarian aid to regime areas where rockets were launched and warplanes started? Why was it so difficult to render cross-border aid possible where it was badly needed? The meticulous account of current international practice is both insightful and disturbing. It tackles the painful lessons learnt and provides recommendations for future challenges where politics fails and humanitarians fill the moral void.
From neighborhood coalitions organizing against the building of a sport facility for professional sports teams subsidized by public funds, to global campaigns for equity for women in sport, to worldwide bans of apartheid regimes, sites and levels of protest, resistance and activism have been present throughout the history of sport. Contentious forms of collective actions are now ever more present in various forms at the local, the national and the global levels. Sport and Social Movements: From the Local to the Global is the first book-length treatment of the way social movements have intersected and continue to intersect with sport. It traces the history of various social movements associated with labour, women, peace, the environment and rights (civil, racial, disability and sexual), and their relationship to sport and sports mega-events such as the Olympic Games. Based on research conducted by a multinational team of authors that draws on theories of social movements and new social movements, the book includes a valuable chronology of social movements, illustrations of key episodes in the development of the relationships between sport and different social movements and an agenda for future research and scholarship. Written in a clear and comprehensive style it is suitable for all levels of higher education, researchers and the general reader who want to know more about the role that sport has played in the development of social movements and campaigns for social justice.
Syria has long been one of the most trouble-prone and politically volatile regions of the Near and Middle Eastern world. This book looks back beyond the troubles of the present to tell the 3000-year story of what happened many centuries before. Trevor Bryce reveals the peoples, cities, and kingdoms that arose, flourished, declined, and disappeared in the lands that now constitute Syria, from the time of it's earliest written records in the third millennium BC until the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian at the turn of the 3-4th century AD. Across the centuries, from the Bronze Age to the Rome Era, we encounter a vast array of characters and civilizations, enlivening, enriching, and besmirching the annals of Syrian history: Hittite and Assyrian Great Kings; Egyptian pharaohs; Amorite robber-barons; the biblically notorious Nebuchadnezzar; Persia's Cyrus the Great and Macedon's Alexander the Great; the rulers of the Seleucid empire; and an assortment of Rome's most distinguished and most infamous emperors. All swept across the plains of Syria at some point in her long history. All contributed, in one way or another, to Syria's special, distinctive character, as they imposed themselves upon it, fought one another within it, or pillaged their way through it. But this is not just a history of invasion and oppression. Syria had great rulers of her own, native-born Syrian luminaries, sometimes appearing as local champions who sought to liberate their lands from foreign despots, sometimes as cunning, self-seeking manipulators of squabbles between their overlords. They culminate with Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, whose life provides a fitting grand finale to the first three millennia of Syria's recorded history. The conclusion looks forward to the Muslim conquest in the 7th century AD: in many ways the opening chapter in the equally complex and often troubled history of modern Syria.
Studying a rural village in northern Syria during a period of tremendous social and political change (1940s to 1970s), this book offers a unique perspective on how agrarian transformations in land distribution and its use deeply affected social and political relations among a rural community. Embedding the personal with the local and the global, this work traces the seeds of social, political and economic struggles that are still important and unfolding in Syria forty years on: changes in social relations brought about by land policy and technological modernization, divisions and connections between urban and rural locations, shifts in education and immigration. Thematically, the study is divided into two parts: the first concerns the historical, socio-economic and political changes occurring in Syria from the beginning of the twentieth century, and the second concerns the life histories of particular actors and their perspectives on social changes. This book is the edited and updated version of Khalaf's original work, including an 'updating chapter' which brings invaluable insight about the village and its people at the aftermath of ISIS and the destruction of the war in Syria. Focusing on the village community of Hawi Al-Hawa, this intensely knowledgeable and personal account - a rare combination - brings village life in Syria strikingly close. The volume is an important contribution to the fields of anthropology, social sciences, Syrian and Middle East studies.
A sharp and arresting people's-eye view of real life in Afghanistan after the Taliban Soon after the bombing of Kabul ceased, award-winning journalist and women's rights activist Ann Jones set out for the shattered city, determined to bring help where her country had brought destruction. Here is her trenchant report from inside a city struggling to rise from the ruins. Working among the multitude of impoverished war widows, retraining Kabul's long-silenced English teachers, and investigating the city's prison for women, Jones enters a large community of female outcasts: runaway child brides, pariah prostitutes, cast-off wives, victims of rape. In the streets and markets, she hears the Afghan view of the supposed benefits brought by the fall of the Taliban, and learns that regarding women as less than human is the norm, not the aberration of one conspicuously repressive regime. Jones confronts the ways in which Afghan education, culture, and politics have repeatedly been hijacked—by Communists, Islamic fundamentalists, and the Western free marketeers—always with disastrous results. And she reveals, through small events, the big disjunctions: between U.S promises and performance, between the new "democracy" and the still-entrenched warlords, between what's boasted of and what is. At once angry, profound, and starkly beautiful, Kabul in Winter brings alive the people and day-to-day life of a place whose future depends so much upon our own.
Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees per capita worldwide and is central to European policies of outsourcing migration management. Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty is the first book to critically and comprehensively explore the parallels between the country’s engagement with the recent Syrian refugee influx and the more protracted Palestinian presence. Drawing on fieldwork, qualitative case-studies, and critical policy analysis, it questions the dominant idea that the haphazardness, inconsistency, and fragmentation of refugee governance are only the result of forced displacement or host state fragility and the related capacity problems. It demonstrates that the endemic ambiguity that determines refugee governance also results from a lack of political will to create coherent and comprehensive rules of engagement to address refugee ‘crises.’ Building on emerging literatures in the fields of critical refugee studies, hybrid governance, and ignorance studies, it proposes an innovative conceptual framework to capture the spatial, temporal, and procedural dimensions of the uncertainty that refugees face and to tease out the strategic components of the reproduction and extension of such informality, liminality, and exceptionalism. In developing the notion of a ‘politics of uncertainty,’ ambiguity is explored as a component of a governmentality that enables the control, exploitation, and expulsion of refugees. Introduction Chapter of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
This book sets out cutting-edge new research and examines future prospects on 360-degree video, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) in journalism, analyzing and discussing virtual world experiments from a range of perspectives. Featuring contributions from a diverse range of scholars, Immersive Journalism as Storytelling highlights both the opportunities and the challenges presented by this form of storytelling. The book discusses how immersive journalism has the potential to reach new audiences, change the way stories are told, and provide more interactivity within the news industry. Aside from generating deeper emotional reactions and global perspectives, the book demonstrates how it can also diversify and upskill the news industry. Further contributions address the challenges, examining how immersive storytelling calls for reassessing issues of journalism ethics and truthfulness, transparency, privacy, manipulation, and surveillance, and questioning what it means to cover reality when a story is told in virtual reality. Chapters are grounded in empirical data such as content analyses and expert interviews, alongside insightful case studies that discuss Euronews, Nonny de la Peña’s Project Syria, and The New York Times’ NYTVR application. This book is written for journalism teachers, educators, and students, as well as scholars, politicians, lawmakers, and citizens with an interest in emerging technologies for media practice. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780367713294, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license
In Killing Hope, William Blum, author of the bestselling Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, provides a devastating and comprehensive account of America's covert and overt military actions in the world, all the way from China in the 1940s to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and - in this updated edition - beyond. Is the United States, as it likes to claim, a global force for democracy? Killing Hope shows the answer to this question to be a resounding 'no'.
Local voices matter. World Vision offers this book, "Making Sense of Turbulent Contexts", to address a problematic gap within the field of conflict analysis: local knowledge. Analysing large-scale conflict in an inclusive, participatory way will increase the effectiveness of aid in turbulent settings. "Making Sense of Turbulent Contexts" identifies the current participation gap and presents the alternative concepts on which the participatory Making Sense of Turbulent Contexts (MSTC) framework is grounded. Included are concrete, step-by-step tools and seven case studies demonstrating specific MSTC results. The book concludes with a clear vision for the future of participatory macro-level conflict analysis.
International humanitarian law is the law that governs the conduct of participants during armed conflict. This branch of law aims to regulate the means and methods of warfare as well as to provide protections to those who do not, or who no longer, take part in the hostilities. It is one of the oldest branches of international law and one of enduring relevance today. The Oxford Guide to International Humanitarian Law provides a practical yet sophisticated overview of this important area of law. Written by a stellar line up of contributors, drawn from those who not only have extensive practical experience but who are also regarded as leading scholars of the subject, the text offers a comprehensive and authoritative exposition of the field. The Guide provides professionals and advanced students with information and analysis of sufficient depth to enable them to perform their tasks with understanding and confidence. Each chapter illuminates how the law applies in practice, but does not shy away from the important conceptual issues that underpin how the law has developed. It will serve as a first port of call and a regular reference work for those interested in international humanitarian law.