Results by title
9 books match the query '2003-'
A Horizon of (Im)possibilities
A Chronicle of Brazil’s Conservative TurnEdited by Katerina Hatzikidi and Eduardo Dullo
University of London Press, 2021
The first volume in English to analyze the impact of recent political phenomena in Brazil, from the rise of Bolsonaro to the climate crisis.
Since the shocking 2018 presidential election in Brazil, a growing body of scholarship has attempted to understand the country’s so-called “conservative turn.” A gripping in-depth account of politics and society in Brazil today, this new volume brings together a myriad of different perspectives to help us better understand the political events that have shaken the country in recent years.
Combining ethnographic insights with political science, history, sociology, and anthropology, the interdisciplinary analyses included in A Horizon of (Im)possibilities offer a panoramic view on social and political change in Brazil, spanning temporal and spatial dimensions. Starting with the 2018 presidential election, the contributors discuss the country’s recent—and more distant—past in relation to the present. Pointing to the continuities and disruptions during those years, this volume is an invaluable guide to understanding the limits of political democracy.
Since the shocking 2018 presidential election in Brazil, a growing body of scholarship has attempted to understand the country’s so-called “conservative turn.” A gripping in-depth account of politics and society in Brazil today, this new volume brings together a myriad of different perspectives to help us better understand the political events that have shaken the country in recent years.
Combining ethnographic insights with political science, history, sociology, and anthropology, the interdisciplinary analyses included in A Horizon of (Im)possibilities offer a panoramic view on social and political change in Brazil, spanning temporal and spatial dimensions. Starting with the 2018 presidential election, the contributors discuss the country’s recent—and more distant—past in relation to the present. Pointing to the continuities and disruptions during those years, this volume is an invaluable guide to understanding the limits of political democracy.
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Belonging, Identity, and Conflict in the Central African Republic
Gino Vlavonou
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
Political conflict in many parts of the world has been shaped by notions of who rightfully belongs to a place. The concept of autochthony—that a true, original people are born of a land and belong to it above all others—has animated struggles across postcolonial Africa. But is this sense of rootedness from time immemorial necessary to assertions of original being and thus political supremacy? Belonging, Identity, and Conflict in the Central African Republic examines how political conflict unfolds when the language of autochthony is detached from historical land claims.
Focusing on violent struggles in the Central African Republic between 2012 and 2019, Gino Vlavonou explores the social practices, discursive strategies, and government policies that emerged in the relentless project of African state building. Conflict pitted Christian-animist communities, loosely organized as vigilante groups under the name anti-Balaka, against Muslim rebels known as the Séléka. Fighters of the anti-Balaka claimed that they were autochthonous, the “true Central Africans,” reframing their Muslim neighbors as foreigners to be expelled. While the country had previously witnessed episodes of violence, both peoples had lived together relatively peacefully and intermarried. The speed and ferocity with which identity was weaponized puzzled many observers. To understand this phenomenon, Vlavonou probes autochthony as a category of identity that differs from ethnicity in important ways. He argues that elites and ordinary citizens alike mobilize the language of original belonging as “identity capital,” a resource to be deployed. The value of that capital is lodged in what people say and do every day to give meaning to their identity, and its content changes across time and space.
Focusing on violent struggles in the Central African Republic between 2012 and 2019, Gino Vlavonou explores the social practices, discursive strategies, and government policies that emerged in the relentless project of African state building. Conflict pitted Christian-animist communities, loosely organized as vigilante groups under the name anti-Balaka, against Muslim rebels known as the Séléka. Fighters of the anti-Balaka claimed that they were autochthonous, the “true Central Africans,” reframing their Muslim neighbors as foreigners to be expelled. While the country had previously witnessed episodes of violence, both peoples had lived together relatively peacefully and intermarried. The speed and ferocity with which identity was weaponized puzzled many observers. To understand this phenomenon, Vlavonou probes autochthony as a category of identity that differs from ethnicity in important ways. He argues that elites and ordinary citizens alike mobilize the language of original belonging as “identity capital,” a resource to be deployed. The value of that capital is lodged in what people say and do every day to give meaning to their identity, and its content changes across time and space.
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Bolsonarismo
The Global Origins and Future of Brazil’s Far RightFernando Brancoli
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Bolsonarismo: The Global Origins and Future of Brazil’s Far Right documents the rise of the far-right alliance that emerged in Brazil in 2020 around the figure of former president Jair Bolsonaro. Unlike a cohesive organization with uniform practices, Bolsonarismo is marked by fragmentation and a broad variety of ideologies. Fernando Brancoli delves deeply into how Bolsonarismo has developed a specific political orientation through its partnerships with other groups, practices, and subjectivities within Brazil, as well as internationally.
Through interviews, archival research, and newly available public documents, this book presents a comprehensive and compelling portrait of the neo-evangelical pastors, military personnel, and meritocratic ideologues who are the actors behind the far-right movement. Adding to our understanding of Bolsonarismo's growth in Brazilian politics and the contributing factors behind it, the book also sheds light on the impact of Bolsonarismo on world politics. As a prominent leader of the far-right movement, Jair Bolsonaro's political views and policies have reverberated beyond Brazil's borders, influencing the discourse on issues such as climate change, democracy, and human rights around the world.
Through interviews, archival research, and newly available public documents, this book presents a comprehensive and compelling portrait of the neo-evangelical pastors, military personnel, and meritocratic ideologues who are the actors behind the far-right movement. Adding to our understanding of Bolsonarismo's growth in Brazilian politics and the contributing factors behind it, the book also sheds light on the impact of Bolsonarismo on world politics. As a prominent leader of the far-right movement, Jair Bolsonaro's political views and policies have reverberated beyond Brazil's borders, influencing the discourse on issues such as climate change, democracy, and human rights around the world.
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Branding Brazil
Transforming Citizenship on ScreenLeslie L. Marsh
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Branding Brazil examines a panorama of contemporary cultural productions including film, television, photography, and alternative media to explore the transformation of citizenship in Brazil from 2003 to 2014. A utopian impulse drove the reproduction of Brazilian cultural identity for local and global consumption; cultural production sought social and economic profits, especially greater inclusion of previously marginalized people and places. Marsh asserts that three communicative strategies from branding–promising progress, cultivating buy-in, and resolving contradictions–are the most salient and recurrent practices of nation branding during this historic period. More recent political crises can be understood partly in terms of backlash against marked social and political changes introduced during the branding period. Branding Brazil takes a multi-faceted approach, weaving media studies with politics and cinema studies to reveal that more than a marketing term or project emanating from the state, branding was a cultural phenomenon.
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Israel and the Clash of Civilisations
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle EastJonathan Cook
Pluto Press, 2008
Journalist Jonathan Cook explores Israel’s key role in persuading the Bush administration to invade Iraq, as part of a plan to remake the Middle East, and their joint determination to isolate Iran and prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons that might rival Israel’s own.
This concise and clearly argued book makes the case that Israel's desire to be the sole regional power in the Middle East neatly chimed with Bush’s objectives in the “war on terror”.
Examining a host of related issues, from the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to the role of Big Oil and the demonisation of the Arab world, Cook argues that the current chaos in the Middle East is the objective of the Bush administration – a policy that is equally beneficial to Israel.
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Memory’s Turn
Reckoning with Dictatorship in BrazilRebecca J. Atencio
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
After twenty-one years of military dictatorship, Brazil returned to democratic rule in 1985. Yet over the following two decades, the country largely ignored human rights crimes committed by state security agents, crimes that included the torture, murder, and disappearance of those who opposed the authoritarian regime.
In clear and engaging prose, Rebecca J. Atencio tells the story of the slow turn to memory in Brazil, a turn that has taken place in both politics and in cultural production. She shows how testimonial literature, telenovelas, literary novels, theatrical plays, and memorials have interacted with policies adopted by the Brazilian state, often in unexpected ways. Under the right circumstances, official and cultural forms of reckoning combine in Brazil to produce what Atencio calls cycles of cultural memory. Novel meanings of the past are forged, and new cultural works are inspired, thus creating the possibility for further turns in the cycle.
The first book to analyze Brazil’s reckoning with dictatorship through both institutional and cultural means, Memory’s Turn is a rich, informative exploration of the interplay between these different modes of memory reconstruction.
Winner, Alfred B. Thomas Award, Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies
Honorable Mention, Roberto Reis Book Prize, Brazilian Studies Association
In clear and engaging prose, Rebecca J. Atencio tells the story of the slow turn to memory in Brazil, a turn that has taken place in both politics and in cultural production. She shows how testimonial literature, telenovelas, literary novels, theatrical plays, and memorials have interacted with policies adopted by the Brazilian state, often in unexpected ways. Under the right circumstances, official and cultural forms of reckoning combine in Brazil to produce what Atencio calls cycles of cultural memory. Novel meanings of the past are forged, and new cultural works are inspired, thus creating the possibility for further turns in the cycle.
The first book to analyze Brazil’s reckoning with dictatorship through both institutional and cultural means, Memory’s Turn is a rich, informative exploration of the interplay between these different modes of memory reconstruction.
Winner, Alfred B. Thomas Award, Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies
Honorable Mention, Roberto Reis Book Prize, Brazilian Studies Association
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Negotiating in Civil Conflict
Constitutional Construction and Imperfect Bargaining in IraqHaider Ala Hamoudi
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In 2005, Iraq drafted its first constitution and held the country’s first democratic election in more than fifty years. Even under ideal conditions, drafting a constitution can be a prolonged process marked by contentious debate, and conditions in Iraq are far from ideal: Iraq has long been racked by ethnic and sectarian conflict, which intensified following the American invasion and continues today. This severe division, which often erupted into violence, would not seem to bode well for the fate of democracy. So how is it that Iraq was able to surmount its sectarianism to draft a constitution that speaks to the conflicting and largely incompatible ideological view of the Sunnis, Shi’ah, and Kurds?
Haider Ala Hamoudi served in 2009 as an adviser to Iraq’s Constitutional Review Committee, and he argues here that the terms of the Iraqi Constitution are sufficiently capacious to be interpreted in a variety of ways, allowing it to appeal to the country’s three main sects despite their deep disagreements. While some say that this ambiguity avoids the challenging compromises that ultimately must be made if the state is to survive, Hamoudi maintains that to force these compromises on issues of central importance to ethnic and sectarian identity would almost certainly result in the imposition of one group’s views on the others. Drawing on the original negotiating documents, he shows that this feature of the Constitution was not an act of evasion, as is sometimes thought, but a mark of its drafters’ awareness in recognizing the need to permit the groups the time necessary to develop their own methods of working with one another over time.
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Precarious Democracy
Ethnographies of Hope, Despair, and Resistance in BrazilBenjamin Junge
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Brazil changed drastically in the 21st century’s second decade. In 2010, the country’s outgoing president Lula left office with almost 90% approval. As the presidency passed to his Workers' Party successor, Dilma Rousseff, many across the world hailed Brazil as a model of progressive governance in the Global South. Yet, by 2019, those progressive gains were being dismantled as the far right-wing politician Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency of a bitterly divided country. Digging beneath this pendulum swing of policy and politics, and drawing on rich ethnographic portraits, Precarious Democracy shows how these transformations were made and experienced by Brazilians far from the halls of power. Bringing together powerful and intimate stories and portraits from Brazil's megacities to rural Amazonia, this volume demonstrates the necessity of ethnography for understanding social and political change, and provides crucial insights on one of the most epochal periods of change in Brazilian history.
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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq WarAshley Gilbertson
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Arriving in Iraq on the eve of the U.S. invasion, unaffiliated with any newspaper and hoping to pick up assignments along the way, Ashley Gilbertson was one of the first photojournalists to cover the disintegration of America’s military triumph as looting and score settling convulsed Iraqi cities. Just twenty-five years old at the time, Gilbertson soon landed a contract with the New York Times, and his extraordinary images of life in occupied Iraq and of American troops in action began appearing in the paper regularly. Throughout his work, Gilbertson took great risks to document the risks taken by others, whether dodging sniper fire with American infantry, photographing an Iraqi bomb squad as they diffused IEDs, or following marines into the cauldron of urban combat.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot gathers the best of Gilbertson’s photographs, chronicling America’s early battles in Iraq, the initial occupation of Baghdad, the insurgency that erupted shortly afterward, the dramatic battle to overtake Falluja, and ultimately, the country’s first national elections. No Western photojournalist has done as much sustained work in occupied Iraq as Gilbertson, and this wide-ranging treatment of the war from the viewpoint of a photographer is the first of its kind. Accompanying each section of the book is a personal account of Gilbertson’s experiences covering the conflict. Throughout, he conveys the exhilaration and terror of photographing war, as well as the challenges of photojournalism in our age of embedded reporting. But ultimately, and just as importantly, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot tells the story of Gilbertson’s own journey from hard-drinking bravado to the grave realism of a scarred survivor. Here he struggles with guilt over the death of a marine escort, tells candidly of his own experience with post-traumatic stress, and grapples with the reality that Iraq—despite the sacrifice in Iraqi and American lives—has descended into a civil war with no end in sight.
A searing account of the American experience in Iraq, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is sure to become one of the classic war photography books of our time.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot gathers the best of Gilbertson’s photographs, chronicling America’s early battles in Iraq, the initial occupation of Baghdad, the insurgency that erupted shortly afterward, the dramatic battle to overtake Falluja, and ultimately, the country’s first national elections. No Western photojournalist has done as much sustained work in occupied Iraq as Gilbertson, and this wide-ranging treatment of the war from the viewpoint of a photographer is the first of its kind. Accompanying each section of the book is a personal account of Gilbertson’s experiences covering the conflict. Throughout, he conveys the exhilaration and terror of photographing war, as well as the challenges of photojournalism in our age of embedded reporting. But ultimately, and just as importantly, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot tells the story of Gilbertson’s own journey from hard-drinking bravado to the grave realism of a scarred survivor. Here he struggles with guilt over the death of a marine escort, tells candidly of his own experience with post-traumatic stress, and grapples with the reality that Iraq—despite the sacrifice in Iraqi and American lives—has descended into a civil war with no end in sight.
A searing account of the American experience in Iraq, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is sure to become one of the classic war photography books of our time.
[more]