Between Neutrality and Solidarity: Swiss Good Offices in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992

Between Neutrality and Solidarity: Swiss Good Offices in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992 PDF Author: Liliane Stadler
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004690662
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
After 1979, Switzerland became increasingly involved in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan as a provider of humanitarian aid and good offices. It delivered aid to the region, hosted Soviet prisoners of war and eventually mediated between the Afghan regime and the mujahideen. What is puzzling about this development is that initially, following the Soviet invasion, both government and parliament refused to become diplomatically involved in Afghanistan on account of Swiss neutrality. The present study investigates how and why this changed between 1979 and 1992. While the practical impact of Switzerland’s good offices was modest, the crisis revealed that Switzerland continued to struggle to balance the competing imperatives of permanent neutrality and international solidarity in an increasingly multilateral world.

Between Neutrality and Solidarity: Swiss Good Offices in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992

Between Neutrality and Solidarity: Swiss Good Offices in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992 PDF Author: Liliane Stadler
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004690662
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
After 1979, Switzerland became increasingly involved in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan as a provider of humanitarian aid and good offices. It delivered aid to the region, hosted Soviet prisoners of war and eventually mediated between the Afghan regime and the mujahideen. What is puzzling about this development is that initially, following the Soviet invasion, both government and parliament refused to become diplomatically involved in Afghanistan on account of Swiss neutrality. The present study investigates how and why this changed between 1979 and 1992. While the practical impact of Switzerland’s good offices was modest, the crisis revealed that Switzerland continued to struggle to balance the competing imperatives of permanent neutrality and international solidarity in an increasingly multilateral world.

Apartheid’s Black Soldiers

Apartheid’s Black Soldiers PDF Author: Lennart Bolliger
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821447416
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
New oral histories from Black Namibian and Angolan troops who fought in apartheid South Africa’s security forces reveal their involvement, and its impact on their lives, to be far more complicated than most historical scholarship has acknowledged. In anticolonial struggles across the African continent, tens of thousands of African soldiers served in the militaries of colonial and settler states. In southern Africa, they often made up the bulk of these militaries and, in some contexts, far outnumbered those who fought in the liberation movements’ armed wings. Despite these soldiers' significant impact on the region’s military and political history, this dimension of southern Africa’s anticolonial struggles has been almost entirely ignored in previous scholarship. Black troops from Namibia and Angola spearheaded apartheid South Africa’s military intervention in their countries’ respective anticolonial war and postindependence civil war. Drawing from oral history interviews and archival sources, Lennart Bolliger challenges the common framing of these wars as struggles of national liberation fought by and for Africans against White colonial and settler-state armies. Focusing on three case studies of predominantly Black units commanded by White officers, Bolliger investigates how and why these soldiers participated in South Africa’s security forces and considers the legacies of that involvement. In tackling these questions, he rejects the common tendency to categorize the soldiers as “collaborators” and “traitors” and reveals the un-national facets of anticolonial struggles. Finally, the book’s unique analysis of apartheid military culture shows how South Africa’s military units were far from monolithic and instead developed distinctive institutional practices, mythologies, and concepts of militarized masculinity.

Cold Wars

Cold Wars PDF Author: Lorenz M. Lüthi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108418333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 775

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Book Description
A new interpretation of the Cold War from the perspective of the smaller and middle powers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

The Non-Aligned Movement: Genesis, Organization and Politics (1927-1992)

The Non-Aligned Movement: Genesis, Organization and Politics (1927-1992) PDF Author: Jürgen Dinkel
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004336133
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
The Non-Aligned Movement had an important impact on the history of decolonization, South-South cooperation, the Global Cold War and the North-South conflict. During the 20th century nearly all Asian, African and Latin American countries joined the movement to make their voice heard in global politics. In The Non-Aligned Movement, Jürgen Dinkel examines for the first time the history of the NAM since the interwar period as a special reaction of the “Global South” to changing global orders. The study shows breaks and caesurae as well as continuities in the history of globalization and analyses the history of international relations from a non-western perspective. For this book, empirical research was undertaken in Germany, Great Britain, Indonesia, Russia, Serbia, and the United States.

Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights

Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights PDF Author: Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110849563X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Demonstrates how the Reagan administration and members of Congress shaped US human rights policy in the late Cold War.

The Claims of Kinfolk

The Claims of Kinfolk PDF Author: Dylan C. Penningroth
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807862134
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In The Claims of Kinfolk, Dylan Penningroth uncovers an extensive informal economy of property ownership among slaves and sheds new light on African American family and community life from the heyday of plantation slavery to the "freedom generation" of the 1870s. By focusing on relationships among blacks, as well as on the more familiar struggles between the races, Penningroth exposes a dynamic process of community and family definition. He also includes a comparative analysis of slavery and slave property ownership along the Gold Coast in West Africa, revealing significant differences between the African and American contexts. Property ownership was widespread among slaves across the antebellum South, as slaves seized the small opportunities for ownership permitted by their masters. While there was no legal framework to protect or even recognize slaves' property rights, an informal system of acknowledgment recognized by both blacks and whites enabled slaves to mark the boundaries of possession. In turn, property ownership--and the negotiations it entailed--influenced and shaped kinship and community ties. Enriching common notions of slave life, Penningroth reveals how property ownership engendered conflict as well as solidarity within black families and communities. Moreover, he demonstrates that property had less to do with individual legal rights than with constantly negotiated, extralegal social ties.

National Bolshevism

National Bolshevism PDF Author: David Brandenberger
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674009066
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
During the 1930s, Stalin and his entourage rehabilitated famous names from the Russian national past in a propaganda campaign designed to mobilize Soviet society for the coming war. In a provocative study, David Brandenberger traces this populist "national Bolshevism" into the 1950s, highlighting the catalytic effect that it had on Russian national identity formation.

Democracy in Exile

Democracy in Exile PDF Author: Daniel Bessner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501712039
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
Anyone interested in the history of U.S. foreign relations, Cold War history, and twentieth century intellectual history will find this impressive biography of Hans Speier, one of the most influential figures in American defense circles of the twentieth century, a must-read. In Democracy in Exile, Daniel Bessner shows how the experience of the Weimar Republic’s collapse and the rise of Nazism informed Hans Speier’s work as an American policymaker and institution builder. Bessner delves into Speier’s intellectual development, illuminating the ideological origins of the expert-centered approach to foreign policymaking and revealing the European roots of Cold War liberalism. Democracy in Exile places Speier at the center of the influential and fascinating transatlantic network of policymakers, many of them German émigrés, who struggled with the tension between elite expertise and democratic politics. Speier was one of the most prominent intellectuals among this cohort, and Bessner traces his career, in which he advanced from university intellectual to state expert, holding a key position at the RAND Corporation and serving as a powerful consultant to the State Department and Ford Foundation, across the mid-twentieth century. Bessner depicts the critical role Speier played in the shift in American intellectual history in which hundreds of social scientists left their universities and contributed to the creation of an expert-based approach to U.S. foreign relations, in the process establishing close connections between governmental and nongovernmental organizations. As Bessner writes: to understand the rise of the defense intellectual, we must understand Hans Speier.

Watergate

Watergate PDF Author: Keith W. Olson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
"The 1972 break-in at Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel - by five men acting under the direction of a Republican president's closest aides and his staff - created a constitutional crisis second only to the Civil War and ultimately toppled the Nixon presidency. With its sordid trail of illegal wiretapping, illicit fund-raising, orchestrated cover-up, and destruction of evidence, it was the scandal that made every subsequent national political scandal a "gate" as well." "A disturbing tale made famous by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in All the President's Men, the Watergate scandal has been extensively dissected and vigorously debated. Keith Olson, however, offers for the first time a "layman's guide" to Watergate, a concise and readable one-volume history that highlights the key actors, events, and implications in this dark drama. John Dean, John Ehrlichman, H. R. Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, John Mitchell, Judge John Sirica, Senator Sam Ervin, Archibald Cox, and the ghostly "Deep Throat" reappear here, in a volume designed especially for a new generation of readers who know of Watergate only by name and for teachers looking for a straightforward summary for the classroom."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Al-Qaeda's Revenge

Al-Qaeda's Revenge PDF Author: Fernando Reinares
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231801408
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
In Al-Qaeda's Revenge: The 2004 Madrid Train Bombings, Fernando Reinares tells the story of "3/11" - the March 11, 2004, bombings of commuter trains in Madrid, which killed 192 people and injured more than 1,800. He examines the development of an al-Qaeda conspiracy in Spain from the 1990s through the formation of the 3/11 bombing network beginning in March 2002, and discusses the preparations for and fallout from the attacks. Reinares draws on judicial, police, and intelligence documents to which he had privileged access, as well as on personal interviews with officials in Spain and elsewhere. His full analysis links the Madrid bombings to al-Qaeda's senior leadership and unveils connections between 3/11 and 9/11. Al-Qaeda's Revenge, Spain's counterpart to The 9/11 Commission Report, was a bestseller in Spain.