Elazar Barkan

Constantin Goschler

James E. Waller

This book brings together a diverse range of international voices from academia, policymaking and civil society to address the failure to connect historical dialogue with atrocity prevention discourse and provide insight into how conflict histories and historical memory act as dynamic forces, actively facilitating or deterring current and future conflict. Established on a variety of international case studies combining theoretical and practical points of view, the book envisions an integrated understanding of how historical dialogue can inform policy, education, and the practice of atrocity prevention. In doing so, it provides a vital basis for the development of preventive policies sensitive to the importance of conflict histories and for further academic study on the topic. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of history, psychology, peace studies, international relations and political science.

Historical Dialogue and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities

Karen Barkey

This anthology explores the dynamics of shared religious sites in Turkey, the Balkans, Palestine/Israel, Cyprus, and Algeria, indicating where local and national stakeholders maneuver between competition and cooperation, coexistence and conflict. Contributors probe the notion of coexistence and the logic that underlies centuries of "sharing," exploring when and why sharing gets interrupted—or not—by conflict, and the policy consequences. These essays map the choreographies of shared sacred spaces within the framework of state-society relations, juxtaposing a site's political and religious features and exploring whether sharing or contestation is primarily religious or politically motivated. Although religion and politics are intertwined phenomena, the contributors to this volume understand the category of "religion" and the "political" as devices meant to distinguish between the theological and confessional aspects of religion and the political goals of groups. Their comparative approach better represents the transition in some cases of sites into places of hatred and violence, while in other instances they remain noncontroversial. The essays clearly delineate the religious and political factors that contribute to the context and causality of conflict at these sites and draw on history and anthropology to shed light on the often rapid switch from relative tolerance to distress to peace and calm.

Religion, Politics, and Conflict Resolution

Choreographies of Shared Sacred Sites

The author takes a sweeping look at the idea of restitution and its impact on the concept of human rights and the practice of politics. She confronts the difficulties of determining victims and assigning blame.

Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices

The Guilt of Nations

Alexander Karn

This multi-disciplinary collection examines the recent wave of political apologies for acts of past injustice.

Apologies and Reconciliation

Taking Wrongs Seriously

Ronald Bush

Examining the emergence of modernism from the fin-de-siecle primitivist project this volume shows how ethnographic materials shaped a variety of high and low discourses (ethnology, social theory, gender construction, classical scholarship, as well as travel photography) at the turn of the century. Illustrated with 98 photographs and drawings."

The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism

Prehistories of the Future

These fourteen essays address controversies over a variety of cultural properties, exploring them from perspectives of law, archeology, physical anthropology, ethnobiology, ethnomusicology, history, and cultural and literary study. The book divides cultural property into three types: Tangible, unique property like the Parthenon marbles; intangible property such as folktales, music, and folk remedies; and communal "representations," which have lead groups to censor both outsiders and insiders as cultural traitors.

Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity

Claiming the Stones, Naming the Bones

This fascinating study documents the refutation of scientific foundations for racism in Britain and the United States between the two World Wars.

Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars

The Retreat of Scientific Racism

Howard Adelman

Refugee displacement is a global phenomenon, uprooting hundreds of millions of individuals over the last century. Yet until the 1980s, repatriation, or the right of return, was not a focus of refugee policy, and though it might enjoy a privileged position in today's debates, repatriation remains an elusive outcome for many victims of ethnic conflict. According to Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan, the roots of this disconnect lie in the modern transformation of repatriation into a universal right, which undermines political solutions to refugee crises. Surveying cases of ethnic displacement throughout the twentieth century, Adelman and Barkan juxtapose the empirical lack of repatriation against the belief in the right of return as it has evolved since the 1940s, revealing its distortion of international efforts at conflict resolution, as well as its prolonging of ethnic and national conflict and aggravation of the fate of the displaced. They find that repatriation only takes place when identity, defined by ethnicity or religion, is not at the core of the displacing conflict, and when refugees do not make up a minority in their original country. Rather than perpetuate a ritual belief concerned with national aspirations, Adelman and Barkan call for rehabilitation policies that treat the suffering of the displaced, and they share ideas for policy that respect the different displacements and tensions between refugees' conflicting rights.

Elazar Barkan

About

Books

Join the club