University of Warwick Press: Journals
Not a member yet
1080 research outputs found
Sort by
Amid Rebellion, Invasion and Revolution: Ottoman Centralisation in Lebanon, 1861–1915
No full textTimes of strife dominate discussion on Lebanon, with the 2019 ‘revolution’ the latest to headline after the civil wars of 1860 and 1975–90. The reorganisation period after 1860, known as the mutasarrifiyya, was, however, remarkably peaceful under the Ottomans – although now mainly a forgotten time with scholars neglecting the sources and perspective of the Sultan’s reformers. Instead, nationalist historians used local chronicles and European records to present the mutasarrifiyya as nurturing a Lebanese nation. Likewise, later Western accounts, utilising similar material, argued that European contact prepared the Lebanese for independence. Therefore, the existing historiography follows a teleological bent in unearthing supposed signs for the eventual end of Ottoman hegemony.
To counter this approach, I conducted research in the National Archives, supplemented with Ottoman sources referenced in secondary works and guided by theories on colonial centralisation to combat Orientalist narratives. I also looked for evidence of the antagonistic factors of foreign interference, nationalism and internal divides. As a result, I opine that Istanbul’s centralisation was effective to a great extent in precluding European influence and rendering Lebanon’s secession by no means certain. This paper should help reshape our understanding of Lebanese history by accentuating longer peaceful periods over sectarianism and foreign collusion
Always, There Is The Night and Other Poems
No full textAlways, There Is the Night is certainly the one of my poems most closely-related to Crosses to Cullens. It deals with the reinvention of ideas and themes across time through the lens of the vampire. However, where the article functions to explore the ideas of sexuality and romance in relation to the vampire, Always is much more a commentary on capitalism, avarice and the physical and spiritual fallout of their running loose. In this, I see it as one in a long line of such comparisons, leading all the way back to Marx’s description of capital as ‘dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour’ (Marx, 1887: 163).
The Run, by contrast, is less closely-connected. Instead of giving light to a facet of the vampire that I could not include in the paper, it represents my attempt to capture a sense of the sublime awe of nature on which Romantic literature (and the Gothic which grew out of it) was founded. The poem describes a natural force which the people contrasted against it cannot overcome, then ‘pans up’ to a greater force only a few metres away.
Finally, Amphora is a direct way of addressing the sexual elements of the vampire mythos. Though it does not deal directly with vampires, and owes much more to Greek myth and its reinventions, the poem is an attempt to grasp the kind of ‘feverish’ desire for another that often characterises both vampires’ frequent attitudes towards their prey, and the allure of the creatures themselves towards others. However, I alloyed sexual desire with a more emotional sense of intimacy
Small-scale Gold Mining, Mercury Exposure and the Struggle for the Right to Water in the Peruvian Amazon
Get PDFMining, right, to water, struggle, Amazon, Peru Since the 2008 financial crisis, increase in global demand and the price of gold have led to an expansion of industrial and artisanal gold mining (Swenson et al., 2011; World Gold Council, 2010). Worldwide, Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining (ASGM) is carried out by an estimated number of 15 million miners in more than 70 countries (UNEP, 2015; Diringer et al., 2014) and accounts for 15 percent of the world gold production (Telmer, 2011). In Peru – which is currently the sixth largest gold producer in the world and the first in Latin America (Mujica, 2014) –, 70 percent of national artisanal gold production is mined in the department of Madre de Dios, located in the southwestern Amazon basin (Brooks et al., 2007). Since the 2000s commodities boom, Madre de Dios, considered one of the most biological places on the planet, has indeed experienced a rapid development of ASGM operations which have transformed large expanses of rainforests into denuded and mercury-poisoned wastelands (Asner et al., 2013; Elmes et al., 2014; Román et al., 2015). It is estimated that as many as 30.000 miners are working in this region (Fraser, 2009) and are using mercury to recover gold from the river sediments or solids extracted. Numerous studies show that mercury levels found in fishes and inhabitants of Madre de Dios are above the maximum levels recommended by the WHO (Damonte et al., 2015; Diringer et al., 2014; Ashe, 2012), therefore due to ASGM, artisanal miners as well as local population are exposed to dangerous levels of mercury contamination
Lake Atitlán, Guatemala: "The Possibility of a Shared World”
Get PDFConflicts around development issues are increasingly focused on water. These conflicts tend to intertwine a struggle over whether water should be treated as a commodity with struggles over how its management should be configured, and by whom (Castro 2008). Latin America has emerged as a particularly relevant region for these debates (Ávila-Garcia 2016). This article presents the case of Lake Atitlán, in the Sololá department of Guatemala, where long-standing conflicts and divergent imaginaries have made it difficult to create consensus about how to solve an ecological problem. The article is based on four months (April to July 2016) of ethnographic fieldwork, in three towns and one village on the shores of the lake. Many names and other identifying details are left out, due to safety concerns
Security and Safety in the Glyphosate Debate: A Chemical Cocktail for Discussion
Get PDFThe WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) released on the 20th of March 2015 in Lyon (France) a controversial report stating that glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, is probably carcinogenic for humans. The use of the word “probably” is meant to clarify that although there is a positive correlation between exposure to the chemical agent and cancer, other explanations (such as chance, bias, or confounding) could not be fully ruled out (International Agency for Research on Cancer 2015). While the debate triggered by this report has revolved around the agricultural uses of glyphosate at the international level, in Colombia the debate has been associated with the use of glyphosate to eliminate one of the main financial sources of insurgent groups: cocaine crops. Moreover, while the use of glyphosate in Colombia was banned for the eradication of illegal crops shortly after the release of the WHO report, its use remains unproblematic as a strategy of crop management for legal agricultural crops. How can these different responses to the evidence presented in the WHO report on glyphosate be explained
¿Y si no en Habana? Landless science, peasant struggle, and capitalist development in Colombia
Get PDFOn November 30th 2016, the Colombian government and FARC signed a peace agreement despite its narrow rejection in a national plebiscite two months earlier. The Havana Accords promise to end five decades of civil war. Among the FARC’s central objectives in the negotiations was agrarian reform. This, in order to resolve the highest land inequity in the Western Hemisphere and the accumulated centuries of violent injustice onto the rural poor. About 80% of agricultural land in Colombia is concentrated among 14% of landowners (USAID 2010). Land is most often used for export production and extensive cattle production. From the Andean highlands to the Eastern Plains, cattle dominate the landscape, occupying 80% of agricultural land, often the most productive areas. Another 40% of Colombian territory is under contract with multinational productions for agriculture, forestry, or mining export (OXFAM 2013). Inequality of land access is also borne unequally across race and gender – Afro-Colombians and women facing the highest levels of internal displacement due to rural conflict and agri-business land accumulation (Gomez 2012)
Control, Utility and Formalization at the "Frontier": Contested Discourses on Agriculture in Eastern Colombia
Get PDFThis article explores the deep transformation of the Altillanura region in Colombia, where the expansion of the agricultural frontier has brought to light the dynamics of the ‘economies of dispossession and land appropriation’ (Jenss, 2017, this issue) that underpin the extractive model dominating Colombian development. Alke offers an overview of the principal mechanisms through which these dynamics are expressed, particularly the expansion of new ‘Economic Zones’ of production and the growth of large-scale plantations which are institutionalised through the pervasive development plans and legislation. The tensions around traditional forms of land tenure and the necessity to offer ‘clear’ property rights to encourage investments in the Altillanura region clearly demonstrate the key tensions in the region, where small farmers and indigenous communities’ clash with large transnational corporations over the expansion of the agricultural frontier
The Politics of Survival in Puerto Rico: The Balance of Forces in the Wake of Hurricane María
Get PDFPuerto Rico’s left-wing forces have long tried to unify, a goal that has proven difficult to reach and even harder to sustain. At its strongest, the Left has faced intense repression from both the United States and the island’s colonial government. Yet, activists and left-wing intellectuals agree that deeper differences account for the collective inability to build unity. Historically, left-wing forces in Puerto Rico have split over the national question. Pro-independence groups, arguably the largest sector, have prioritized decolonization while socialists, feminists, and environmentalists have proposed a broader anti-oppressive praxis centered on social and economic issues. Other groups, such as the Movimiento Socialista de Trabajadores, do not see these struggles as mutually exclusive, calling for the formation of a socialist republic in Puerto Rico. Today a new wave of Leftist organizing is emerging, one free from traditional Marxist or nationalist dogmas. This new Puerto Rican Left is organizing for economic justice and against colonialism while putting a greater emphasis on gender, sexuality, and race. It aims to foster young leadership, articulate new solidarities, and revive the practice of community organizing. It is learning from the errors of the past while picking up the sediments of previous struggles. Yet, if the Left wants to remain relevant, it must collaborate with the youth, student, community, feminist, farmer, and environmental justice groups that are bringing new energy to the island. This essay contextualizes the Puerto Rican Left in relation to the island’s political economy, identifies the forces in the Puerto Rican Left, reviews their differences and recent history, and presents a brief analysis of their political influence in Puerto Rican and US politics
Héctor Alimonda, the American task of political ecology
Get PDFThis text is an introduction of Alternautas’ mini-dossier in tribute to the work of Hector Alimonda (1947-2017). Here, Facundo Martín, Gabriela Merlinsky and Catalina Toro Pérez present Alimonda’s unique contribution to the field of political ecology in Latin America. It is followed by the newly translated “In the key of south: Latin American political ecology and critical thinking”, the introduction of Alimonda’s latest book, Ecología Política Latinoamericana - Volumen 1 (2017), co-edited by Facundo Martín and Catalina Toro Pérez. In the next weeks, we will also publish a translation of “The coloniality of nature”, an article that appeared originally in La naturaleza colonizada (2011)