Considers how people have confronted, challenged, and resisted remote warfare

Drone warfare is now a routine, if not predominant, aspect of military engagement. Although this method of delivering violence at a distance has been a part of military arsenals for two decades, scholarly debate on remote warfare writ large has remained stuck in tired debates about practicality, efficacy, and ethics. Remote Warfare broadens the conversation, interrogating the cultural and political dimensions of distant warfare and examining how various stakeholders have responded to the reality of state-sponsored remote violence.

The essays here represent a panoply of viewpoints, revealing overlooked histories of remoteness, novel methodologies, and new intellectual challenges. From the story arc of Homeland to redefining the idea of a “warrior,” these thirteen pieces consider the new nature of surveillance, similarities between killing with drones and gaming, literature written by veterans, and much more. Timely and provocative, Remote Warfare makes significant and lasting contributions to our understanding of drones and the cultural forces that shape and sustain them.

Contributors: Syed Irfan Ashraf, U of Peshawar, Pakistan; Jens Borrebye Bjering, U of Southern Denmark; Annika Brunck, U of Tübingen; David A. Buchanan, U.S. Air Force Academy; Owen Coggins, Open U; Andreas Immanuel Graae, U of Southern Denmark; Brittany Hirth, Dickinson State U; Tim Jelfs, U of Groningen; Ann-Katrine S. Nielsen, Aarhus U; Nike Nivar Ortiz, U of Southern California; Michael Richardson, U of New South Wales; Kristin Shamas, U of Oklahoma; Sajdeep Soomal; Michael Zeitlin, U of British Columbia. 

With this edition Swallow Press presents two of Anna Akhmatova’s best-known works that represent the poet at full maturity, and that most trenchantly process the trauma she and others experienced living under Stalin’s regime.

Akhmatova began the three-decade process of writing “Requiem” in 1935 after the arrests of her son, Lev Gumilev, and her third husband. The autobiographical fifteen-poem cycle primarily chronicles a mother’s wait—lining up outside Leningrad Prison every day for seventeen months—for news of her son’s fate. But from this limbo, Akhmatova expresses and elevates the collective grief for all the thousands vanished under the regime, and for those left behind to speculate about their loved ones’ fates. Similarly, Akhmatova wrote “Poem without a Hero” over a long period. It takes as its focus the transformation of Akhmatova’s beloved city of St. Petersburg—historically a seat of art and culture—into Leningrad. Taken together, these works plumb the foremost themes for which Akhmatova is known and revered. When Ohio University Press published D. M. Thomas’s translations in 1976, it was the first time they had appeared in English. Under Thomas’s stewardship, Akhmatova’s words ring clear as a bell.

The 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity Report (EEO)—also known as the Coleman Report—is one of the most important education studies of the twentieth century. Commissioned by Congress as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the report revealed pervasive school segregation by race, among other inequalities, and began a national dialogue on educational opportunity for minority children. On the fiftieth anniversary of the EEO report, leading scholars revisit its legacy in this special issue of RSF, edited by Karl Alexander and Stephen Morgan. The contributors examine the report’s methods and conclusions through the lens of social science advances over the past half century, and analyze issues such as school reform, persistent racial segregation, and changing educational standards to provide a thoughtful analysis of barriers to educational opportunity today.
 
The issue begins with a reassessment of the EEO’s major findings. Karl Alexander analyzes the report’s conclusion that families exert greater influence on children’s school performance than the schools themselves. He finds that family, school, and neighborhood all interact to shape children’s academic development in ways that are not always separable. Other contributors investigate how racial achievement gaps have changed since the report’s release. Sean Reardon finds that disparities in average school poverty rates between white and black students’ schools are the most powerful correlate of achievement gaps. Barbara Schneider and Guan Saw show that while blacks aspire to attend college at greater rates than whites, fewer blacks than whites now attend four-year colleges in part due to lesser access to college preparation activities, such as advanced-level academic courses.
 
Contributors also evaluate and update the EEO’s proposals to reduce longstanding socioeconomic and racial achievement gaps. Prudence L. Carter argues that effective policies for ending racial disparities must account for inequalities within schools as well as between them. Brian Jacob and coauthors explore whether technological advances since the EEO, including online courses, have the potential to reduce some of the educational inequalities associated with residential segregation.  Ruth Turley shows how renewed partnerships between education researchers and policymakers at the local, regional, and national levels can improve disadvantaged students’ educational outcomes and increase racial and economic integration. By looking forward as well as back, this issue of RSF documents what educators and scholars have learned from fifty years of social science research on educational opportunity.
 

The Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte redefined the way we think about art. Famous for his men in bowler hats, he inspired generations of later artists from Andy Warhol to Jasper Johns with his witty and provocative work. In this illuminating new biography, Patricia Allmer radically repositions Magritte’s work in relation to its historical and cultural circumstances. Allmer explores the significant influence of events and experiences in Magritte’s early childhood and youth that are recorded in his letters and essays, including his memories of visiting fairs and circuses, of magical shows and performances, of the cinema, and, in particular, of his first encounter with his future partner, Georgette, on a carousel.

Allmer’s analyses of these events and their influence on both well-known and less familiar images give new insights into Magritte’s art. The book will appeal to those who wish to know more about Magritte’s life and work, as well as to the wide audience for surrealism.

With the publication of “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Noam Chomsky burst onto the US political scene as a leading critic of the war in Vietnam. Privilege, he argues, brings with it the responsibility to tell the truth and expose lies, but our intellectual culture only pays lip service to this ideal. The essay has been described as the “single most influential piece of anti-war literature” of the Vietnam war period. Since then, Chomsky has continued to equip a growing international audience with the facts and arguments needed to understand—and change—our world. According to the New York Times, Chomsky “may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet today.”

This book revisits “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” half a century later. It includes six new essays written to celebrate Chomsky’s famous intervention and explore its relevance in today’s world. Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight, Milan Rai, and Neil Smith have studied and written about Chomsky’s thought for many years, while Craig Murray and Jackie Walker describe the personal price they have paid for speaking out. The book concludes with Chomsky’s recollections of the background to the original publication of his essay, followed by extensive commentary from him on its fiftieth anniversary.
 

This book investigates the long-term continuity of large-scale states and empires, and its effect on the Near East’s social fabric, including the fundamental changes that occurred to major social institutions. Its geographical coverage spans, from east to west, modern-day Libya and Egypt to Central Asia, and from north to south, Anatolia to southern Arabia, incorporating modern-day Oman and Yemen. Its temporal coverage spans from the late eighth century BCE to the seventh century CE during the rise of Islam and collapse of the Sasanian Empire.

The authors argue that the persistence of large states and empires starting in the eighth/seventh centuries BCE, which continued for many centuries, led to new sociopolitical structures and institutions emerging in the Near East. The primary processes that enabled this emergence were large-scale and long-distance movements, or population migrations. These patterns of social developments are analyzed under different aspects: settlement patterns, urban structure, material culture, trade, governance, language spread, and religion, all pointing at movement as the main catalyst for social change. This book’s argument is framed within a larger theoretical framework termed as "universalism," a theory that explains many of the social transformations that happened to societies in the Near East, starting from the Neo-Assyrian period and continuing for centuries. Among other influences, the effects of these transformations are today manifested in modern languages, concepts of government, universal religions and monetized and globalized economies.

This book offers a comprehensive account of Russia’s architectural production from the late nineteenth century to the present, explaining how its architecture was both shaped by and came to embody Russia’s rapid cultural, economic, and social revolutions over the past century.
           
Richard Anderson looks at Russia’s complex relationship to global architectural culture, exploring the country’s central presence in the Rationalism and Constructivism movements of the 1920s, as well as its role as a key protagonist during the Cold War. Looking deeply at Soviet Russia, he brings the relationship between architecture and socialism into focus through detailed case studies that situate buildings and architectural concepts within the socialist milieu of Soviet society. He tracks the way Russian architectural institutions departed from the course of modernism being developed in capitalist countries, and he reappraises the architecture of the Stalin era and the final decades of the USSR. Finally, he traces the influence of Soviet conventions on contemporary Russian architecture—which is now a more heterogeneous mix of approaches and styles— and how it made a lasting and little-known impact on territories extending from the Middle East, to Central Asia, and into China.
           
A bold new assessment of Russia’s architectural legacy and contemporary contributions, this book is a fascinating exploration of a tumultuous place—and the creativity that has come from it. 

In bringing together a geographically and temporally broad range of interdisciplinary historical scholarship, this issue of Radical History Review offers an expansive examination of gender, violence, and the state. Through analyses of New York penitentiaries, anarchists in early twentieth-century Japan, and militarism in the 1990s, contributors reconsider how historical conceptions of masculinity and femininity inform the persistence of and punishments for gendered violence. The contributors to a section on violence and activism challenge the efficacy of state solutions to gendered violence in a contemporary U.S. context, highlighting alternatives posited by radical feminist and queer activists. In five case studies drawn from South Africa, India, Ireland, East Asia, and Nigeria, contributors analyze the archive's role in shaping current attitudes toward gender, violence, and the state, as well as its lasting imprint on future quests for restitution or reconciliation. This issue also features a visual essay on the "false positives" killings in Colombia and an exploration of Zanale Muholi’s postapartheid activist photography.

Contributors: Lisa Arellano, Erica L. Ball, Josh Cerretti, Jonathan Culleton, Amanda Frisken, Raphael Ginsberg, Deana Heath, Efeoghene Igor, Catherine Jacquet, Jessie Kindig, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Jen Manion, Xhercis Méndez, Luis Morán, Claudia Salamanca, Tomoko Seto, Carla Tsampiras, Jennifer Yeager

Winner of the 2001 Booker Worthen Literary Prize
Winner of the 2002 S. G. Ragsdale Award for Arkansas History

The Rumble of a Distant Drum opens in 1673 when Marquette and Jolliet sailed down the Mississippi River and found the Quapaw living in the area where the Arkansas River flowed into the Mississippi. In 1686 Henri de Tonti would found Arkansas Post in this same location. It was the first European settlement in this part of the country, established thirty years before New Orleans and eighty before St. Louis.

Morris S. Arnold draws on his many years of archival research and writing on colonial Arkansas to produce this elegant account of the cultural intersections of the French and Spanish with the native American peoples. He demonstrates that the Quapaws and Frenchmen created a highly symbiotic society in which the two disparate peoples became connected in complex and subtle ways—through intermarriage, trade, religious practice, and political/military alliances.

Dealing with algebraic ring theory, this book was written for mathematicians who are familiar with groups, rings, fields, and their properties. Concepts such as vector spaces, matrix representations, simple rings, and semisimple rings are considered.

Over the last fifty years, American women have made considerable social and economic gains. They now make up half of the workforce, enroll in college at higher rates than men, and hold a larger share of the most prestigious jobs and political offices than in the past. Yet, their collective progress has slowed or stalled in other ways, including an enduring gender wage gap and continued underrepresentation in STEM occupations and other fields. In this special issue of RSF, edited by Martha J. Bailey and Thomas A. DiPrete, a multidisciplinary group of social scientists explores half a century of women’s changing work and family roles and analyzes the implications of these shifts for gender equality.
 
The contributors examine trends in women’s participation in the labor market, focusing on how working both shapes and is shaped by women’s roles within their families. Tanya Byker investigates the so-called “opt-out revolution” and finds that, surpringly, the rate of “opting out” has been constant for the last twenty years even as women’s labor-force participation and pay has increased. Ipshita Pal and Jane Waldfogel show that the “motherhood penalty” is shrinking and may even reversing for mothers who are married, white, or highly educated. And while marriages in which women out-earned their husbands were once more susceptible to divorce, Christine Schwartz and Pilar Gonalons-Pons show that this relationship has essentially disappeared, suggesting that the growing economic advantage of a high-earning wife has facilitated a revolution in traditional gender roles. Despite these gains, Kim Weeden and co-authors show that the growth of jobs requiring more than 50 hours of work per week, which are disproportionately filled by men, has played an increasing role in perpetuating the gender pay gap. Similarly, Katherine Michelmore and Sharon Sassler find that within STEM fields, a gender pay gap persists partly because women are still more likely to work in lower-paid occupations.
 
The rapid advancement of women in education and the workforce was a distinguishing feature of the twentieth century, even though barriers to opportunities for women still exist. . Together, the articles in this issue of RSF provide insightful context for these achievements and describe women’s evolving status in society.
 

Two decades have now passed since the Horace H. Rackham funds were so generously given to the University of Michigan. In keeping with the vision and the wishes of the donors, the funds have been dedicated to significant cultural and humanitarian interests; to the aid of productive scholars and of selected students of high capacity; and to the research programs of the University centering in the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies. This book was specially prepared to tell the story of the Rackham funds, to set forth the specific accomplishments and results of the beneficence, and, as it were, to account for twenty years of responsible stewardship in discharging this trust. The University of Michigan is a stronger institution because of this support, and with these additional resources has been able to make a far richer contribution in the service of mankind than it could otherwise have done. —Harlan Hatcher, 1955

Exploring theater works created for, by, and with refugees, this hybrid collection of essays combines newly commissioned scholarly work with examples of writing by refugees themselves. These varied contributions illuminate performances that range from theater in Thai refugee camps to site-specific works staged in a run-down immigrant community in the United Kingdom. An exciting addition to the growing field of applied theater, Refugee Performance provides inspiring insight into the resilience and creativity of artists responding to one of the most critical issues of our time.

This special issue of Radical History Review aims to revitalize African diaspora studies by shifting current emphases within the field. The contributors rethink current understandings of African and diaspora as a dispersal of Africans from the African continent via the Atlantic slave trade and offer reconceptualizations of dominant paradigms, such as home, origins, migrations, politics, blackness, African, Africa, African-descended, and Americanness.

The contributors draw on perspectives from political science, history, cultural studies, art history, anthropology, feminist theory, sexuality and queer studies, and Caribbean and African American studies. The collection addresses transnational discourses of race, gender, and sexuality in African diaspora politics, African diaspora experiences on the African continent, the politics of African-descended peoples in Europe, and creative uses of the discourses of memory and diaspora to support political organizing and local struggles. Essays on Venezuelans, Bolivians, and Mexicans address the status of race in the study of African-descended populations and cultures in Latin America. The issue also includes two essays that showcase African diasporic art and curatorial practices in the United States, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom.

Contributors: Erica Ball, Anthony Bogues, Lisa Brock, Sara Busdiecker, Prudence Cumberbatch,Jacqueline Francis, Anita González, Amoaba Gooden, Dayo Gore, Laura A. Harris, Christopher J. Lee, Kevin Mumford, Melina Pappademos, Cristóbal Valencia Ramírez, Rochelle Rowe, Theresa Runstedtler, Michelle Ann Stephens, Tyler Stovall, Deborah Thomas, Leon Wainwright, Cadence Wynter, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

Radicalization is a major challenge of contemporary global security. It conjures up images of violent ideologies, “homegrown” terrorists and jihad in both the academic sphere and among security and defense experts. While the first instances of religious radicalization were initially limited to second-generation Muslim immigrants, significant changes are currently impacting this phenomenon. Technology is said to amplify the dissemination of radicalism, though there remains uncertainty as to the exact weight of technology on radical behaviors. Moreover, far from being restricted to young men of Muslim heritage suffering from a feeling of social relegation, radicalism concerns a significant number of converted Muslims, women and more heterogeneous profiles (social, academic and geographic), as well as individuals that give the appearance of being fully integrated in the host society. These new and striking dynamics require innovative conceptual lenses. 

Radicalization in Theory and Practice identifies the mechanisms that explicitly link radical religious beliefs and radical actions. It describes its nature, singles out the mechanisms that enable radicalism to produce its effects, and develops a conceptual architecture to help scholars and policy-makers to address and evaluate radicalism—or what often passes as such. A variety of empirical chapters fed by first-hand data probe the relevance of theoretical perspectives that shape radicalization studies. By giving a prominent role to first-hand empirical investigations, the authors create a new framework of analysis from the ground up. This book enhances the quality of theorizing in this area, consolidates the quality of methodological enquiries, and articulates security studies insights with broader theoretical debates in different fields including sociology, social psychology, economics, and religious studies.

Site-based dance performance and sited movement explorations implicate dance makers, performers, and audience members in a number of dialogical processes between body, site, and environment. This book aims to articulate international approaches to the making, performing, and theorizing of site-based dance. Drawing on perspectives from three practitioner-academics based in three distinct world regions--Europe, North America, and Oceania--the authors explore a range of practices that engage with socio-cultural, political, ecological, and economic discourses, and demonstrate how these discourses both frame and inform processes of site dance making as well as shape the ways in which such interventions are conceived and evaluated. Intended for artists, scholars, and students, (Re)Positioning Site Dance is an important addition to the theoretical discourse on place and performance in an era of global socio-political and ecological transformation.

The 2008 financial crash and the ensuing Great Recession resulted from decades of unconstrained excess and failures of risk management on Wall Street and complacency in Washington. While the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act sought to curtail these abuses, more work remains to be done. This issue of RSF, edited by Michael S. Barr, sets out proposals for comprehensive financial reform. Contributors suggest how to improve financial regulation, make markets more resilient, and increase protections for consumers and investors in order to lower the likelihood of a future crisis.
 
Several contributors evaluate the Dodd-Frank bill which mandated greater federal oversight of banks, increased regulation of credit rating agencies, and established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), among other measures. Martin Baily and coauthors conclude that measures that require greater transparency and oversight in derivatives transactions have made financial institutions more resilient. Yet, the bill’s attempts to consolidate the fragmented financial regulatory system have not gone far enough.
 
Lauren Willis argues that instead of simply issuing disclosures, financial service providers should be required to meet more rigorous performance standards, such as proving through third-party testing that customers understand their fees and surcharges.  John Macey advocates reforms that would afford home mortgage borrowers the same protections as investors in the securities market, including regulations that prevent brokers from encouraging borrowers to refinance their mortgages to collect fees.
 
The issue also addresses global financial regulation. Viral Achara examines the financial sectors in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, and assesses their vulnerability to capital shortfalls in the event of a future crisis. Niamh Moloney finds that institutions established in the wake of the crash, such as the European Supervisory Authorities, have improved European-level prudential and consumer financial regulations and have the potential to increase the EU’s influence in international financial governance.
 
The effects of the financial crisis continue to reverberate around the world today. Together, the articles in this issue document the steps necessary for creating a more robust financial system that works better for all consumers, investors and the financial system itself.