Suchergebnisse

New critical discourse and applied methods based on the author's original research and interspecies art practice, Animal Lover. Each chapter narrates the creative processes of one project, including the worlds of canines, salmon, birds and forest communities, and how these encounters transformed her outlook on Earth and all life. 50 half-tones.

This is the first investigation into the little-known Bolshevik foreign ministry's strenuous efforts to win Lhasa over to the Soviet cause in the 1920s. Examining the history of relations between Russia (tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet) and Tibet from the 17th century to the 1990s, the author puts at the core of his narrative the previously unknown story of clandestine negotiations between the Soviet government and the 13th Dalai Lama, forming part of Moscow's bitter struggle against British imperialism in Asia. The book provides insight into Soviet secret diplomacy and draws important conclusions relating to the history of Anglo-Russian competition for Tibet and Tibet's status prior to 1951

Abstract
With the beginning of a partial modernisation in Afghanistan in the late 19th century there emerged a pattern of opposition to this process. Often described as traditionalism it aimed not only at the maintaining of the status quo but had a demodernising twist seeking the establishment of an alternative socio-political order pursuing demodernisation dressed in traditionalist Islamic or tribal rhetoric but undermining the traditional modus vivendi by introducing political tools and institutions specifically promoting demodernisation. There are three parallel tracks in the development of actors opposing modernisation, viz., the traditionalist ones (tribes and Islamic clerics), conscious demodernisers (Bachah-ye Saqao Emirate in 1929 and the Taliban), and forces of political Islam that fit the modernisation paradigm but deliver on the demodernisation agenda (Islamist political parties cum armed movements of the 1970–1980s). The background of these three modernisation-opposing forces and the time and place specific circumstances of their operational environment explain the particular ideological and political track they were taking. Their alternating use of opposing tribal and Islamic institutions in promoting their agendas adds to the understanding of their peculiarities. Counter-modernisation activities may derive from different premises, where deliberate demodernisation and that as a by-product of modernised political endeavours are of theoretical interest.

The Rawshani movement is the first well-documented example of supra-tribal unification and subsequent successful integration of the movement's leaders into the alien state structures. But by no means is it an isolated phenomenon in Pashtun history. Similar pattern of religion-motivated supra-tribal unification, which should be considered as a product of historical relationships of power, remerged inter alia during more recent crises in the Afghan history. Due to the volatile nature of the Afghan state fluctuating between tribalism and ethnic pluralistic participation, military and Islamic dimensions have always been of paramount importance for state-community relations where religion, tribalism and ethnicity were often the means of state's control of social resistance and its vehicles. In the time of crises, religion-inspired militia-type independent military formations were able to challenge the might of the state and occasionally even initiate the incipient state formation opposed to the communal institutions and those of the old regime. When this community-based military activity went beyond the scope of traditional annual cycle of violence it often acquired a supra-tribal or ethnic and regional dimension, which was legitimised by the Islamic ideology and institutions.
This article offers some directions towards making a calibration tool or even identifying a pattern that may be used as an epistemological paradigm that may provide a sense of orientation and bearing in the intricacies of a complex historical interaction between Pashtun Islam, tribes and state.