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 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 JULIE MOSTOV In the midst of domestic arguments for fortifying the United States’ borders, I argue for soft borders and thin social bonds. I have been thinking about borders with respect to Southeastern Europe, but my arguments are meaningful in a larger context. While boundaries are regularly and easily traversed by capital, electronic information, [...]