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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Yesterday, we announced that South Sudan is the 2011 Place of the Year. How much do you know about Sudan, South Sudan, and Darfur? Test your knowledge with this quiz by Andrew S. Natsios.
This Day in World History – On Sunday, November 2, 1930, thirty-eight-year old Ras (Prince) Tafari Makonnen was proclaimed emperor of Ethiopia, taking the name Haile Selassie I, which means “Power of the Trinity.” Though taking place in the twentieth century, the ceremony reached back thousands of years, as Ethiopia’s Menelik dynasty claimed descent from Solomon, ancient king of Israel, and the Queen of Sheba, one of his wives. To prepare for the coronation, seven groups of seven priests gathered in the seven corners of the national cathedral and chanted for seven days and seven nights psalms written by King David. The morning of the coronation, priests chanted and drummers drummed.
By Andrew S. Natsios
For more than two centuries, Sudan has attracted an unusual level of attention beyond its own borders. This international interest converged in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century as four independent forces met.
First, there is the rebellion in Darfur, which has generated greater international concern than any other recent humanitarian crisis. This long-neglected western region has been intermittently at war since the 1980s and claimed the lives of 300,000 Darfuris in its most recent phase. The rebellion beginning in 2002 led to an ongoing humanitarian emergency, costing Western governments
By Trevor Getz
Abina and the Important Men is an interpretation of the testimony of a young, enslaved woman who won her way to freedom in late nineteenth century West Africa and then prosecuted her former master for illegally enslaving her. October 21 marks the 155th anniversary of the date that she forced a British magistrate and a jury of eleven affluent and powerful men to hear the charges she was making against an influential male land-owner.
By Martin Evans
On 17 October 1961 at 5.30 am 30,000 unarmed Algerians converged on the centre of Paris in the light rain, flooding in from the surrounding shanty towns and poor suburbs – Nanterre, Colombe and Gennevilliers. Mostly made up of young men and women, but also a scattering of older people and some mothers with young children, the demonstration was organised by the National Liberation Front (FLN) which had been engaged in war for Algerian national independence against France since November 1954.
By Peter Gill
In the course of 17 minutes, Newsnight managed to review six years’ worth of all that had gone wrong in Ethiopia, from post-election violence in 2005, to the intensified anti-insurgency operations in Somali Region after 2007, to more recent opposition complaints that their supporters were being deprived of international development assistance. To emphasise the British aid connection, the film concluded: ‘The purpose of development aid is to help Ethiopia on to its feet, to establish democracy, justice and the rule of law. The evidence we’ve gathered suggests it is failing.’
A Merciless Place is a story lost to history for over two hundred years; a dirty secret of failure, fatal misjudgement and desperate measures which the British Empire chose to forget almost as soon as it was over.
By Peter Gill
International responsiveness to the food crisis in the Horn of Africa has relied again on the art of managing the headlines. Sophisticated early warning systems that foresee the onset of famine have been in place for years, but still the world waits until it is very nearly too late before taking real action – and then paying for it.
The conversation in the new and old media over the last several weeks has been dominated by reports about uprisings in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt and violent clashes in Bahrain, Yemen, the Ivory Coast, Iraq and elsewhere. In Libya, fighting currently is reported to take place close to strategic oil installations. Because of the scarcity of claims arising out of similar events in investor-state arbitration, political risk insurance claims determinations by the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) can play an important role to develop this area of law and fill these gaps in future investor-state arbitral arbitrations.
By Elvin Lim
The Obama administration is having a hard time responding to critics who disagree with its decision to intervene in Libya. Some on the Left do not want another war; while some on the Right don’t want a multilateral approach to war and one authorized by the UN. Both sides, of course, are using a “separation of powers” line, charging that the President failed to seek congressional approval, but the procedural objection disguises a substantive disagreement. The fact is
By Philip Howard
Political discontent has cascaded across North Africa and the Middle East. Entrenched dictators with decades of experience controlling political life have fallen or had to make major concessions. In the West, some observers discount the role of digital media in political change, others give it too much emphasis.
Digitally enabled protesters in Tunisia and Egypt tossed out their dictator. The protests in Libya have posed the first
In this, the 10th Oxford Comment, Lauren and Michelle investigate what makes a classic beauty icon, learn about appearance-based discrimination, talk body politics, and discover the threads that tie fashion to beauty.
By Andrew Robinson
Everyone knows that the ancient Egyptians were obsessed with death. The tombs in the Valley of the Kings are decorated with elaborate paintings and hieroglyphic writings about death and the afterlife. But what is not so familiar is that ancient Egypt was the first civilization to picture and put in writing an ethical connection between earthly behaviour and an individual’s existence after death—so crucial in the later development of Christianity.
Racial profiling and manipulation have existed for a long time. It has become an issue in modern politics, and over 2500 years ago the Greek historian Herodotos wrote that ethnicity was often turned to political ends. Cleopatra VII, the last queen of Egypt, is often a victim of racial profiling.
Harm de Blij is the John A. Hannah Professor of Geography at Michigan State University. The author of more than 30 books he is an honorary life member of the National Geographic Society and was for seven years the Geography Editor on ABC’s Good Morning America. His most recent book, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, he reveals the rugged contours of our world that keep all but 3% of “mobals” stationary in the country where they were born. He argues that where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming obstacles in our way. In the article below he looks at North Korea and China. Read his other OUPblog posts here.
Most of my knowledge on ancient Greece and Rome comes from watching the TV show ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’. Xena not only encounters Julius Caesar, Pompeius, and Octavian in her quests, but Marc Antony and Cleopatra as well. I was thus eager to learn more of the historical, ‘real-life’ Cleopatra.