BY JOAN BRISTOL Mexico has multiple and contradictory identities in the imaginations of both Mexicans and foreigners. Ads and popular media romanticize Mexico as the land of mariachis, beaches, and picturesque ruins of ancient civilizations. Increasing instability, however, due to the drug trade and loss of governmental control in many areas has replaced romance with [...]
BY DEBRA LATTANZI SHUTIKA I began working with immigrant communities in 1995, focusing primary on new destinations. New destinations are those communities that are experiencing significant immigration, but have had little or no prior history of being locations of migration and settlement. I began my work in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, the “Mushroom Capital of the [...]
BY DORTHE POSSING A report, “Being a Muslim woman in Denmark,” published in March 2009 and commissioned by the former Danish Minister for Gender Equality, Karen Jespersen, concluded that the circulation of “Islamist” discourses on the Internet and Arabic satellite-TV put young Danish Muslim women’s notions of equality and citizenship at risk. The logic was [...]
BY PETER MANDAVILLE This is real life, engraved on my pages: families dying from starvation whilst the government’s worried about immigration. — Blind Alphabetz, ‘Concrete Landz’ Like everyone today, Young British Muslims are carrying around iPods full of the latest tunes. Despite the recent phenomenal popularity of a pop-oriented variant of nasheed devotional music—a key [...]
BY SOLON SIMMONS There is no part of the world more crucial to the strategic interests of the United States as is the Middle East. While the traditional problems of the regulation of international affairs are at play there, Arab language satellite channels have created a new force in the region, and Al Jazeera is [...]
BY LISA BREGLIA Across the frontlines of energy production in the Global South, an oil crisis is long simmering. This is not an oil crisis as we already know it: in other words, a crisis stimulated by market models of supply and demand, or a crisis abstractly negotiated by giddy futures speculators, or even a [...]
BY STEVEN A. BARNES In early March 2006, I visited a graveyard in the empty Central Asian steppe near Spassk, just south of the city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. This cemetery held the unmarked remains of prisoners of the former Soviet Union’s Gulag—the notorious system of forced labor concentration camps and internal exile—and the multi-national [...]
BY MARK N. KATZ Saparmurat Niyazov ruled Turkmenistan from its December 1991 independence that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union until his death in December 2006. Although Turkmenistan has enormous natural gas reserves, Niyazov—who styled himself “Turkmenbashi” (leader of the Turkmen)—kept most of his citizens impoverished, uneducated and in fear of his security [...]
BY REBECCA BRYANT By the time this article appears, the presidential election campaigns now in full swing in Cyprus should have resulted in a new president for the Republic. It is quite likely, according to many polls, that the new president will also be the old one. Tassos Papadopoulos, president since 2003, presided over an eventful [...]
BY JEREMY RINKER The tension and excitement were palpable. It was October 2, 2006 and thousands of disaffected youth wagged their fists towards the sky from atop the numerous light posts and vehicles that dotted the divided thoroughfare. Crowds of revelers packed the entrance to the giant stupa which marks the hallowed grounds where, in [...]