Columbia University Press

Focusing on the case of Russia during Putin's first two presidential terms, this book examines media manipulation strategies in electoral authoritarian regimes. Which instruments and approaches do incumbent elites employ to skew media coverage in favor of their preferred candidate in a presidential election? What effects do these strategies have on news content? Based on two case studies of the presidential election campaigns in Russia in 2000 and in 2008, this investigation identifies the critical internal mechanisms according to which these regimes work.

Looking at the same country while it transformed from a competitive into a hegemonic authoritarian regime, allows a diachronic comparison of these two regime types. The book explicates the subtle differences between competitive and hegemonic regimes, different types of media manipulation strategies, the diverging extent of media instrumentalization, various interactions among state actors, large business owners, the media, and journalists, the respective effects that all these factors and interactions have on media content, and the peculiar types of bias prevalent in each type of regime. This deep exploration of post-Soviet politics is based on extensive review of documents, interviews with media professionals, and quantitative as well as qualitative content analyses of news media during two Russian presidential election campaigns.

This truly unique collection is the essential guide to archival research on conservatism, the right wing, and the far right, offering a detailed overview of primary sources in all media. It details documents, film, video, sound recordings, microfilm and microfiche, cartoons, sheet music, newspaper art, and more housed in more than 4500 archives across twenty-two countries. Designed as an indispensable reference work for anyone researching in the field of right-wing politics, this astonishingly detailed account includes:

- collections of personal and institutional papers,
- archives of right-wing periodicals in the Japanese, Romanian, and Russian languages,
- collections of pamphlets, ephemera, vertical files, and press cuttings,
- oral histories,
- library-accessible commercial databases,
- digitized collections and exhibitions,
- archived web sites,
- microfilm and microfiche collections with right-wing material.

The description of each archive contains its physical address and other identifying information, a summary of its contents and highlights, lists of publications and web pages citing the archive, and links to online finding aids. This book will be a crucial guide for anyone conducting primary research in the field.

Translation studies have traditionally been known to be interdisciplinary. What better term to sum this up than boundaries? A term that means different things in different fields and can be applied to a multitude of topics. Political, personal, symbolic, or professional boundaries, boundaries of the mind as found in psychology, or boundaries in the sociological sense where they separate different fields of knowledge. From politics to geography, boundaries are everywhere. They need to be identified, drawn, or overcome—depending on circumstances and context. What are the boundaries translators and interpreters have to deal with? How do they relate to translation studies in general?

Boundaries and translation go hand in hand. As the discipline grows and ever more elements of interdisciplinarity come into play, the more the question of what the boundaries of translation are needs to be asked. Some of the research topics presented in this collection may well extend the boundaries of the discipline itself, while others may look at the constraints and limits under which translators and translations operate, or showcase the role translation and interpreting play in overcoming social or political boundaries.

It is with this in mind that the group of young researchers presented in this book has come together. The papers offer insights into the state of the discipline in various nations, often touching on underresearched topics such as the role of translation in the creation of national as well as individual identities or the translation of popular music. They look at the role of culture and, more specifically, sociocultural influences on translation. At the same time, non-linguistic, intra- and extratextual factors are taken into account with particular attention to multimodality. What unites the papers collected is the general tendency to see translation as a means of bringing people together and enabling dialogue, a means of overcoming ideological and social boundaries. By looking both to the past and the future of the discipline, the authors aim to (re)define the boundaries of translation studies.

Rolando Dromundo presents a political and historical analysis of the state-building processes in Ukraine, Moldova, and the unrecognized Republic of Pridnestrovia from the Soviet fall until 2015, starting with a sketch of the main geopolitical trend that surrounds these polities and its influences on them, and paying special attention to the vicissitudes of the Ukrainian political crisis of 2013–14 and its immediate consequences in Crimea and the Donbass.

This book is a must for scholars with an interest in the post-Soviet space and to anyone curious about an international conflict from a realist perspective. It offers an original insight on the understanding of the oligarchs’ role in Ukrainian political life and presents a different perspective on the unrecognized Republic of Pridnestrovia.

Dromundo is neither pro-Russian nor pro-Western. He sheds light on the problems from different angles and illustrates how the local inhabitants turned out to become the biggest losers in the game because they have fallen prey to local elites allied with different foreign powers disregarding local identities and needs. Altogether, the book helps to better understand the complexity of local state-building processes in a multiethnic society.

In Statu Nascendi is a new peer-reviewed journal that aspires to be a world-class scholarly platform encompassing original academic research dedicated to the circle of political philosophy, cultural studies, theory of international relations, foreign policy, and the political decision-making process. The journal investigates specific issues through a sociocultural, philosophical, and anthropological approach to raise a new type of civic awareness about the complexity of contemporary crisis, instability, and warfare situations, where the “stage-of-becoming” plays a vital role.

Issue 2018:1 comprises, among others, the following articles:
- Corporate Instrumentalization of Deliberative Democracy in Global Governance
-Being Transgender and Transgender Being
-A Comparative Study Between Levinas and Kierkegaard on Subjectivity and the Self
-The Kremlin’s Reaction to the St. Petersburg Metro Attacks Seen Through the Prism of Russian Intervention in Syria
- Donald Trump's Visit to Saudi Arabia, Saudi-Iranian Relations, and the Future of the Iranian Nuclear Deal
- The United Kingdom on the Verge of a “Constitutional Crisis”: Between the Possibility of a Second Referendum on the Membership in the European Union and a Potential Second Vote on Scottish Independence

In the early twentieth century, a teenage Greek girl in Constantinople loses both her parents and, together with her younger sister, gets thrown into a massive population exchange between Greece and Turkey. She ends up in a refugee camp in northern Greece. With determination she creates a life in her new country, becoming a teacher in a small mountain town near Greece’s northwestern borders with Albania and Yugoslavia. She meets and marries a young lawyer from a historic and tragic Macedonian family.

Her story extends through a century of war and peace and is peppered with likable characters, horrific events, and a love story. Among the protagonists are two strong women, a charming and indomitable man, and a smart but sickly kid. Now and again her drive, perseverance, and common sense will save the day and reward her with happiness, which nevertheless will come and go like interludes of sunshine in otherwise endlessly stormy weather.

The reader will also get candid and authentic glimpses on poorly known historical conflicts such as the Balkan Wars, the world’s greatest ethnic cleansing, the occupation loan that the Nazis exacted from Greece, the Greek Civil War, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, and the dispute over the use of the name Macedonia.

In our time of well-publicized health care travails, in the U.S. and the UK and elsewhere, matters of financing too often subsume the dimension of patient care. In his latest book, Alexander L. Gungov studies a vital but neglected aspect of patient safety. Of the thousands of medical errors committed on a daily basis, in the bulk of unfortunate clinical decisions, a significant share pertains to various logical flows and epistemological fallacies. By focusing on the logical dimensions of clinical medicine, Gungov promotes awareness of the logical and epistemological traps that lie in the day-to-day care of patients.

Such a focus not only allows us to avoid falling into them, but demonstrates the practical value of looking at medicine from a new philosophical perspective. That perspective involves a broad and unusual collection of philosophers. The discussion takes its starting point from J. S. Mill’s inductive methods and Giambattista Vico’s verum-factum principle, but then sets out a unique combination of Charles Sanders Peirce’s abductive reasoning, Immanuel Kant’s reflective judgment, as well as G. W. F. Hegel’s and D. P. Verene’s speculative thinking, all marshalled to present a novel philosophical account of clinical diagnostics. Interpretation of practical examples elucidate the logical aspect of medical errors and suggests strategies of overcoming them. The book as a whole demonstrates the value of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical insights into the enigmatic character of health.

This much-needed book will be of interest to medical practitioners, health policy makers, patients and their families, and advanced students and scholars in medicine, the medical humanities, medical epistemology, and the philosophy of medicine in general.

Igor Torbakov explores the nexus between various forms of Russian political imagination and the apparently cyclic process of the decline and fall of Russia’s imperial polity over the last hundred years. While Russia’s historical process is by no means unique, two features of its historical development stand out. First, the country’s history is characterized by dramatic political discontinuity. In the past century, Russia changed its “historical skin” three times: following the disintegration of the Tsarist Empire accompanied by violent civil war, it was reconstituted as the communist USSR, whose breakup a quarter century ago led to the emergence of the present-day Russian Federation. Each of the dramatic transformations in the twentieth century powerfully affected the notion of what “Russia” is and what it means to be Russian. Second, alongside Russia’s political instability, there is, paradoxically, a striking picture of geopolitical stability and of remarkable longevity as an imperial entity. At least since the beginning of the eighteenth century, “Russia” has been a permanent geopolitical fixture on Europe’s northeastern margins with its persistent pretense to the status of a great power.

Against this backdrop, the book’s three sections investigate (a) the emergence and development of Eurasianism as a form of (post-)imperial ideology, (b) the crucial role Ukraine has historically played for the Russians’ self-understanding, and (c) contemporary Russian elites’ exercises in historical legitimation.

San Francisco in the early 1990s. Cab is on the deep end of a losing streak. After having been dumped yet again, he moves to Haight-Ashbury fresh out of college. It is the middle of a recession, before the dot-com boom, and AIDS is an immediate and untreatable reality. He finds himself working in a housing program for people with HIV/AIDS. The entire city is reeling. His clients are dying. Cab records their every word.

He starts drafting a narrative of every person with whom he’s slept: those who dropped him, those he adored, and those he let go of without a second thought, to reassess what he has left behind from the South of his childhood of dyslexia and infatuations, football and ecstasy, divorce and sex panics. In between girlfriends, acting up, attempts at romance, and trying to find his place in the greater San Francisco narrative, Cab is looking for something, tracing the interconnecting stories of the people he’s meeting, sleeping, and drinking with, as everyone tries to find a space in the city. As treatments emerge and the economy changes, a new story takes shape in Cab’s life and the city.

Alexander Dubček is well-known, so one might think; nothing new can be written about him. Is this true? Dubček is the symbol of the Czechoslovak attempt to reform communism that gained worldwide admiration in 1968. The invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in the night of August 21, 1968 set a brutal end to the Prague Spring.

Josette Baer’s new biography focuses on Dubček’s early years, his childhood in Soviet Kirghizia, his participation in the Slovak National Uprising in 1944 against Nazi Germany and the Slovak clerical-fascist government, and his career in the Slovak Communist Party in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It offers new insights into the political thought of the father of “Socialism with a Human Face,” based on archive material available to the Western reader for the first time. Who was Alexander Dubček—a naïve apparatchik, an independent thinker, a courageous liberator, or a political dreamer?

In the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Livingstone declaration, and the UN Social Protection Floor, this book deals jointly with multidimensional child poverty and social protection in Central and Western Africa. It focuses both on extent and types of social protection coverage and assesses various child poverty trends in the region. More importantly, it looks at social protection to prevent and address the consequences of child poverty.

Child poverty is distinct, conceptually, and different, quantitatively, from adult poverty. It requires its own independent measurement—otherwise half of the population in developing countries may be unaccounted for when assessing poverty reduction. This book posits that child poverty should be measured based on constitutive rights of poverty, using a multidimensional approach. The argument is supported by chapters actually applying and expanding this approach. In addition, the case is made that the underlying drivers of child poverty are inequality, lack of access to basic social services, and the presence of families without any type of social protection. As a result, the case for social protection in contributing to reduce and eliminate child protection and its consequences is made.

Poverty reduction has been high on the international agenda since the start of the millennium. First as part of the MDGs and now included in the SDGs. However, in spite of a decline in the incidence of child poverty, the number of poor children is harder to reduce due to population dynamics. As a result, concomitant problems such as the increasing number of child brides, unregulated/dangerous migration, unabated child trafficking, etc. remain intractable. Understanding the root causes of child poverty and its characteristics in Central and Western Africa is fundamental to designing innovative ways to address it. It is also important to map the interventions, describe the practices, appreciate the challenges, recognize the limitations, and highlight the contributions of social protection and its role in dealing with child poverty. No practical policy recommendations can be devised without this knowledge.

Conflict Resolution holds the promise of freeing approaches and policies with regard to politics of identity from the fatalistic grip of realism. While the conceptual literature on identity and conflicts has moved in this alternative direction, conflict resolution practice continues to rely on realist frames and acts as an unwanted auxiliary to traditional international relations. Perpetuation of conflict discourses, marginalization, and exclusion of affected populations are widespread. They are caused by the overreliance of conflict resolution practice on the binary frames of classic IR paradigms and also by the competitive and hierarchical relationships within the field.

Philip Gamaghelyan relies on participatory action research and collective autoethnography to expose patterns of exclusion and marginalization as well as the paradoxical reproduction of conflict-promoting frames in current conflict-resolution practice applied to the Nagorno-Karabakh and Syrian crises. He builds on the work of postmodernist scholars, on reflective practice, and on discourse analysis to explore alternative and inclusive strategies with a transformative potential.

The IR discipline that has dominated policymaking is only one possible lens, and often a deficient one, for defining, preventing, or resolving contemporary conflicts wrapped in identity politics. Other conceptual frameworks can help to rethink our understanding of identity and conflicts and reconstruct them as performative and not static phenomena. These transformative frameworks are increasingly influential in the conflict resolution field and can be applied to policymaking.

David Weinberg argues that American experimental theater practice was a key factor in the development of the alternative theater movement in Britain during the period 1956–1980. He covers the activities of the experimental theater groups associated with Jim Haynes, Charles Marowitz, Nancy Meckler, and Ed Berman, four expatriate American theater practitioners living in Britain. In addition, he also examines important American-based groups—Living Theatre (1947), Open Theatre (1964), La MaMa (1960), and Bread and Puppet (1965)—which performed in Britain and which made an impact during the same period, as well as a wide range of indigenous British groups—Pip Simmons (1968), Foco Novo (1972–1989), Joint Stock (1974–1989), institutions—RSC (1961), Royal Court (1956)—and individuals such as Max Stafford-Clark, Thelma Holt, John Arden, Ann Jellicoe, and the Portable playwrights (1968–1972), which in one way or another were influenced by American exemplars. Weinberg's study is essential reading for everyone seeking a more comprehensive and dynamic understanding of the forces which shaped the alternative theatrer movement in Britain.

This volume compares different regional perspectives on the national and democracy-building aims of individual states. It confronts discourses about national states to regional perspectives on the past as well as the current political and social landscape. Why are we observing calls for national identity right now? What are the roots of this development? How can a Central European identity be shaped when national perspectives are prevalent?

The book's first part analyzes social and political processes that shaped nation-states in the Central European region and shows divergent trends of individual states when it comes to defining a regional approach of the Visegrád Group (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary = V4). The second part focuses on key personalities of the 20th century history of individual V4 countries in the light of their perception in the neighbouring states and how they shaped national states as well as identities after the end of World War II. Similar aims and approaches implemented by individual countries often led to anything but raising regional understanding. The book's third part reflects upon activities of various initiatives aiming to approach this challenge from the perspective of civil society, and Central Europe's young generation. The collection brings together leading historians of Central Europe from the V4 countries. It also offers external perspectives on historical developments in Central Europe from the perspective of the 21st century and on political cooperation as well as its roots. Lastly, it includes practitioners of Central European cooperation from both academia and civil society and their reflection on their countries' political cooperation after 1989.

Although the song is often the subject of monographs, one of its forms remains insufficiently researched: the vocalized song, communicated to the spectator through performance. The study of the song takes one back to the study of vocal practices, from aesthetic objects to forms and to plural styles. To conceive a song means approaching it in its different instances of creation as well as its linguistic diversity. Jean Nicolas De Surmont proposes ways of research and analysis useful to musicians, musicologists, and literary critics alike. He takes up the issue of vocal poetry in addition to examining the theoretic aspects of song objects. Rather than offering an autonomous model of analysis, De Surmont extends the research fields and suggests responses to debates that have involved everyone interested in vocal poetic forms.

Baer's biography of the former Czechoslovak foreign minister Vladimír Clementis (1902–1952) is the first historical study on the Communist politician who was executed with Rudolf Slánský and other top Communist Party members after the show trial of 1952. Born in Tisovec, Central Slovakia, Clementis studied law at Charles University in Prague in the 1920s and had his own law firm in Bratislava in the 1930s. After the Munich Agreement of 1938, he went into exile to France and Great Britain, where he worked at the Czechoslovak broadcast at the BBC for the exile government of Edvard Beneš. After the Second World War, Clementis' political career at the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry blossomed. In 1945, he became Assistant Secretary of State under Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk. After Masaryk's mysterious death in 1948, Clementis was appointed foreign minister. This biography offers an unprecedented insight into the mind of a Slovak leftist intellectual of the interwar generation who died at the command of the comrade he had admired since his youth: Generalissimus Stalin.

This groundbreaking collection from scholars and artists on the legacy of Beckett in contemporary art provides readers with a unique view of this important writer for page, stage, and screen. The volume argues that Beckett is more than an influence on contemporary art—he is, in fact, a contemporary artist, working alongside artists across disciplines in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.

The volume explores Beckett's formal experiments in drama, prose, and other media as contemporary, parallel revisions of modernism's theoretical presuppositions congruent with trends like minimalism and conceptual art. Containing interviews with and pieces by working artists, alongside contributions of scholars of literature and the visual arts, this collection offers an essential reassessment of Beckett's work. Perceiving Beckett's ongoing importance from the perspective of contemporary art practices, dominated by installation and conceptual strategies, it offers a completely new frame through which to read perennial Beckettian themes of impotence, failure, and penury. From Beckett's remains, as it were, contemporary artists find endless inspiration.

Combining phenomenological analysis with dance and performance analysis and affect theory, A Theatre of Affect: The Corporeal Turn in Samuel Beckett's Drama takes stock of the various ways in which the body in Samuel Beckett's drama participates in the affective ecology of performance. Affect is here located in the materiality of the body and discussed in relation to the symbolic significance of, for instance, the effort, direction, speed, or duration of a posture, movement, or gesture. Although the meaning of the body in Beckett's stage-images cannot be mapped onto conventional discursive meanings, the significance of the body's formal modulations is affective in the sense that the import of such changes is immediately recognized and felt as significant by spectators. Beckett's theater of affect therefore is predicated on the infinitesimal stirrings of subliminal meaning-making that continuously shape and create the world in experience.

Vasily Yan (Vassily Grigoryevich Yanchevetsky, 1874–1954) was a writer of historical novels whose popularity survives the test of time. He was widely read throughout the Soviet era and continues to be popular in the post-Soviet era. This book is not just a biographical sketch of an important Russian/Soviet writer basically unknown to the Western public. The focus on Yan and his work also demonstrates the role of ideology in a totalitarian society. Shlapentokh shows that ideology and cultural and intellectual life in totalitarian regimes are more complex than is often assumed. Intellectuals often engaged in stressful, but—in its literary outcome—captivating "cat and mouse" games with censors, the powerful, and the government.

What would you do if your brother turned out to be your enemy? Gate of Mercy takes its readers into the heart of the Israeli-Arab conflict, bringing the history of modern Israel to the very personal level of intertwined Israeli-Arab families. Told from the perspective of eight-year-old Avram, the compelling story unfolds over seven decades. Bit by bit, the long-held secrets of Avram's family are uncovered. A story of love and passion, of destiny and redemption—and of the bonds between different cultures that persist despite all conflicts.

Brussels's idea of a "wider Europe" implies that Europeanization is not limited to EU member states. The EU can, so it claims, also exert influence beyond its borders. One of the channels of external EU influence is cooperation between Europarties and parties outside the Union. Through mutual visits and joint activities, non-EU parties become internationally socialized, that is, exposed to the Europarties' norms as well as values, and experience the rules as well as practices that shape European party-building. What are the incentives for Europarties and non-EU parties to cooperate with each other? What kind of, and how much, impact did cooperation have on party development in post-Soviet Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine?

Based on eighty interviews with party officials, international donors and academics, Maria Shagina outlines the set of motivations that trigger cooperation between Europarties and non-EU parties, analyzes the impact of cooperation on party ideology, organizational structure, and interparty behavior in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, and explores the implications of this cooperation on the standardization, consolidation, and democratization of the non-EU party systems. Her findings shed light on how prestige and domestic factors impede the penetration of EU norms and values in the non-EU party structures, and point to the failures of Europarties to adequately address problems of party-development in Eastern Europe. The book reveals the ways in which cooperation with Europarties has paradoxically contributed to the ossification of the status quo and impaired the development as well as the consolidation of democracy in the three Eastern Partnership states.

This timely book examines far-right politics in Hungary—but its relevance points much beyond Hungary. With its two main players, the radical right Jobbik and populist right Fidesz, it is at the same time an Eastern European, European, and global phenomenon. Jobbik and Fidesz, political parties with a populist, nativist, authoritarian approach, Eastern and pro-Russian orientation, and strong anti-Western stance, are on the one hand products of the problematic transformation period that is typical for post-communist countries. But they are products of a "populist zeitgeist" in the West as well, with declining trust in representative democratic and supranational institutions, politicians, experts, and the mainstream media. The rise of politicians such as Nigel Farage in the U.K., Marine Le Pen in France, Norbert Hofer in Austria, and, most notably, Donald Trump in the U.S. are clear indications of this trend.

In this book, the story of Jobbik (and Fidesz), contemporary players of the Hungarian radical right scene, are not treated as separate case studies, but as representatives of broader international political trends. Far-right parties such as Jobbik (and increasingly Fidesz) are not pathologic and extraordinary, but exaggerated, seemingly pathological manifestations of normal, mainstream politics. The radical right is not the opposite and denial of the mainstream, but the sharp caricature of the changing national, and often international mainstream.

Anthony Barron explores the relationship between the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the forms and themes of Beckett's critical and creative writings. He shows that Beckett's aesthetic preoccupations are consonant with some of Schopenhauer's seminal arguments regarding the arational basis of artistic composition and appreciation and the impotence of reason in human affairs. While Beckett's critical writings are, in places, formidably opaque, this work examines the ways in which such texts can be elucidated when their intertextual affinities with Schopenhauer's arguments are revealed. Using Schopenhauer's thought as a presiding interpretative framework, Barron demonstrates how the widespread presence of philosophical and theological ideas in Beckett's creative texts signifies less about his personal convictions than it does about his authorial aims. He thereby highlights the ways in which discursive ideas were appropriated and manipulated by Beckett for purely literary ends.

A central contention of this book is that to judge the place of ideas within Beckett's art, we should ignore questions of their theoretical persuasiveness and consider their role as purely aesthetic devices, the value of which is revealed in terms of the existential impact they have upon his characters. In each of the chapters that deal with Beckett's fiction, Barron underscores the artistically energizing tensions that exist between the concepts that Beckett's characters invoke in their attempts to comprehend the import of their experiences and their conative and affective tribulations which invariably prove resistant to such analysis. Here the means by which such conceptual aporias engender semantic potentialities underpin an exploration of Beckett's creative assimilation of rational discourse. While the focus of this publication is upon Beckett's early and middle fiction, which was composed at a time when the relationship between the chaos of quotidian ordeals and the value of rational thought became most acutely relevant for him, numerous cross-references to his dramatic and poetical works are provided in order to highlight the overall significance of these issues within his oeuvre.

Much has been written on the 1917–1920 revolution in Ukraine, on the national movement, the Makhnovists and the Bolsheviks. Yet there were others with a mass following whose role has faded from history books. One such party was the Borot'bisty, the heirs of the mass Ukrainian Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries, an independent party seeking to achieve national liberation and social emancipation. Though widely known in revolutionary Europe in their day, the Borot'bisty were decimated during the Stalinist holocaust in Ukraine. Out of print for over half a century, this lost text by Ivan Maistrenko, the last survivor of the Borotbisty, provides a unique account on this party and its historical role. Part memoir and part history, this is a thought-provoking book which challenges previous approaches to the revolution and shows how events in Ukraine decided the fate not only of the Russian Revolution but the upheavals in Europe at the time.

A great wave of fundraising patriotic associations followed in the wake of Great Britain's declaration of war on Germany on 4 August 1914, at home but also right across the empire. The most successful public campaign of all was launched in London at the beginning of 1915. Known as the Imperial Aircraft Flotilla, the scheme aimed to attract contributions towards aircraft production costs from throughout the British Empire. Any country, locality, or community that provided sufficient funds for an entire aeroplane could have it named after them. It was promised that when the machine crashed or was shot down, the name would be transferred to a new one of the same type.

Margaret Hall examines the Imperial Aircraft Flotilla as a facet of imperial history. She analyzes the fundraising efforts in Canada and Newfoundland; the Zanzibar Protectorate; Fiji, Mauritius, and the Caribbean; Hong Kong; the Malay states and Straits Settlements; West Africa, especially Gold Coast; Southern Rhodesia; Basutoland; Swaziland and the Union of South Africa; the Indian empire and Burma; (British subjects in) independent Abyssinia and Siam; in the Shanghai International Settlement, and the British community of Argentina; Australia; and New Zealand. This remarkable and detailed book discusses the propaganda and counter-subversion usages of the Imperial Aircraft Flotilla—and what the support for the imperial war effort reveals about contemporary national and regional identities and aspirations.

Religion and magic have often played important roles in Baltic, Eastern European, and post-Soviet societies like those in Russia, Romania, Serbia, Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, and Estonia. Taken together, the studies presented in this collection suggest that the idea that religion and magic are connected to each other in some consistent, universal way may be nothing more than a remnant from nineteenth-century anthropology. Further, these studies challenge another part of anthropology's historical legacy: the idea that magic is something that modernity and modernization will transcend. Rather, these studies suggest instead that magic is a form of work that brings modernity into being and helps render it intelligible to those who find themselves engaged in its creation.

This volume brings together historical (pre- and post-1989), ethnographic, and area studies that look at the divergent roles of state, culture, society, tradition, and the individual in enactments of magic and religion. Assessing the role magic and religion have played in the countries of Eastern Europe and beyond before and after the Cold War, it is an absorbing read for scholars of anthropology and history as well as ethnology.

This volume retraces Carl Lutz's diplomatic wartime rescue efforts in Budapest, Hungary, through the lens of Jewish eyewitness testimonies. Together with his wife, Gertrud Lutz-Fankhauser, the director of the Palestine Office in Budapest, Moshe Krausz, fellow Swiss citizens Harald Feller, Ernst Vonrufs, Peter Zürcher, and the underground Zionist Youth Movement, Carl Lutz led an extensive rescue operation between March 1944 and February 1945. It is estimated that Lutz and his team of rescuers issued more than 50,000 lifesaving letters of protection (Schutzbriefe) and placed persecuted Jews in 76 safe houses—annexes of the Swiss Legation. Based on interviews with Holocaust survivors in Canada, Hungary, Israel, Switzerland, the UK, and the United States, this volume shines a light on the extraordinary scope and scale of Carl Lutz's humanitarian response.

Conceived as the answer to all of mankind's seemingly insoluble health and social problems, and promoted as a substitute for orthodox religious beliefs, the pseudoscience of eugenics recruited disciples in many countries during the latter years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries. Nowhere was this doctrine more enthusiastically endorsed than in Germany, where the application of eugenic theory received its most fervent support. A program born of what were often contradictory opinions began, under Nazi rule, with the compulsory sterilization of thousands of Germany's citizens before morphing into the mass murder of the most vulnerable of the state's own population under the guise of so-called "euthanasia,, before ultimately escalating into a continent-wide policy of extermination of those who did not fit the Nazi eugenic template.

The progress of this inexorable descent into barbarity was marked by successive stages of development. From the practical application of euthanasia through the organization dedicated to it—later on called Aktion T4—and the killing centers that this institution spawned, to the centrality of Aktion T4 to Aktion Reinhardt and the Holocaust, important elements of the historical record can be seen to emerge. How did it happen? What impact has it had on contemporary society? And what of the character and fate of the individuals involved in the gestation and implementation of this murderously inhumane quasi-religion? These deceptively simple questions require complex and often disturbing answers, as shown by Melvyn Conroy in this important work.

Dariusz Jeziorny explores British diplomatic relations in the years 1933–1935, illuminating London's attitude towards the Eastern Pact and highlighting British diplomacy's way of thinking and acting toward the European and even global situation. Was His Majesty's Government interested in the success of the initiative promoted by Moscow and Paris? Did they understand the motives of the promoters? How did they react to the resistance of countries unwilling to accept such an issue? Who were London's main partners to negotiate with? Could the Foreign Office be regarded competent in dealing with European problems, especially Eastern European ones? Were the former conclusions of the academic literature correct in assessing the particular powers' role in the failure of the concept of the Eastern Pact?

Jeziorny provides answers to these questions through detailed analysis of governmental materials available in the National Archives in London, particularly the general correspondence of the British Foreign Office. He provides a fascinating look behind the scenes of British diplomacy and its attitudes toward the French initiative.

In this fascinating book, Johanna Emeney examines the global proliferation of new poetry related to illness and medical treatment from the perspective of doctors, patients, and carers in light of the growing popularity of the medical humanities. She provides a close analysis of poetry from New Zealand, the U.S., and the U.K. that deals with sociological and philosophical aspects of sickness, ailment, medical treatment, care, and recuperation.

Beckett's Late Stage reexamines the Nobel laureate's postwar prose and drama in the light of contemporary trauma theory. Through a series of sustained close readings, the study demonstrates how the comings and goings of Beckett's prose unsettles the Western philosophical tradition; it reveals how Beckett's live theatrical productions are haunted by the rehearsal of traumatic repetition, and asks what his ghostly radio recordings might signal for twentieth-century modernity. Drawing from psychoanalytic and poststructuralist traditions, Beckett's Late Stage explores how the traumatic symptom allows us to rethink the relationship between language, meaning, and identity after 1945.