Download or read book Empires of Mud written by Antonio Giustozzi and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Empires of Mud' analyses the dynamics of warlordism in Afghanistan. It analyses aspects of the Afghan environment that might have been conductive to the fragmentation of central authority and the emergence of warlords and then accounts for the emergence of warlordism in the 1980s.

Download or read book Empire of Mud written by J. D. Dickey and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Washington, DC, gleams with stately columns and neoclassical temples, a pulsing hub of political power and prowess. But for decades it was one of the worst excuses for a capital city the world had ever seen. Before America became a world power in the twentieth century, Washington City was an eyesore at best and a disgrace at worst. Unfilled swamps, filthy canals, and rutted horse trails littered its landscape. Political bosses hired hooligans and thugs to conduct the nation's affairs. Legendary madams entertained clients from all stations of society and politicians of every party. The police served and protected with the aid of bribes and protection money. Beneath pestilential air, the city’s muddy roads led to a stumpy, half-finished obelisk to Washington here, a domeless Capitol Building there. Lining the streets stood boarding houses, tanneries, and slums. Deadly horse races gouged dusty streets, and opposing factions of volunteer firefighters battled one another like violent gangs rather than life-saving heroes. The city’s turbulent history set a precedent for the dishonesty, corruption, and mismanagement that have led generations to look suspiciously on the various sin--both real and imagined--of Washington politicians. Empire of Mud unearths and untangles the roots of our capital’s story and explores how the city was tainted from the outset, nearly stifled from becoming the proud citadel of the republic that George Washington and Pierre L'Enfant envisioned more than two centuries ago.

Download or read book Dirt written by David R. Montgomery and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-05-14 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dirt, soil, call it what you want—it's everywhere we go. It is the root of our existence, supporting our feet, our farms, our cities. This fascinating yet disquieting book finds, however, that we are running out of dirt, and it's no laughing matter. An engaging natural and cultural history of soil that sweeps from ancient civilizations to modern times, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations explores the compelling idea that we are—and have long been—using up Earth's soil. Once bare of protective vegetation and exposed to wind and rain, cultivated soils erode bit by bit, slowly enough to be ignored in a single lifetime but fast enough over centuries to limit the lifespan of civilizations. A rich mix of history, archaeology and geology, Dirt traces the role of soil use and abuse in the history of Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, China, European colonialism, Central America, and the American push westward. We see how soil has shaped us and we have shaped soil—as society after society has risen, prospered, and plowed through a natural endowment of fertile dirt. David R. Montgomery sees in the recent rise of organic and no-till farming the hope for a new agricultural revolution that might help us avoid the fate of previous civilizations.

Download or read book Warlord Survival written by Romain Malejacq and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do warlords survive and even thrive in contexts that are explicitly set up to undermine them? How do they rise after each fall? Warlord Survival answers these questions. Drawing on hundreds of in-depth interviews in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2018, with ministers, governors, a former vice-president, warlords and their entourages, opposition leaders, diplomats, NGO workers, and local journalists and researchers, Romain Malejacq provides a full investigation of how warlords adapt and explains why weak states like Afghanistan allow it to happen. Malejacq follows the careers of four warlords in Herat, Sheberghan, and Panjshir—Ismail Khan, Abdul Rashid Dostum, Ahmad Shah Massoud, and Mohammad Qasim Fahim). He shows how they have successfully negotiated complicated political environments to survive ever since the beginning of the Soviet-Afghan war. The picture he paints in Warlord Survival is one of astute political entrepreneurs with a proven ability to organize violence. Warlords exert authority through a process in which they combine, instrumentalize, and convert different forms of power to prevent the emergence of a strong, centralized state. But, as Malejacq shows, the personal relationships and networks fundamental to the authority of Ismail Khan, Dostum, Massoud, and Fahim are not necessarily contrary to bureaucratic state authority. In fact, these four warlords, and others like them, offer durable and flexible forms of power in unstable, violent countries.

Download or read book Networks of Rebellion written by Paul Staniland and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-18 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insurgent cohesion is central to explaining patterns of violence, the effectiveness of counterinsurgency, and civil war outcomes. Cohesive insurgent groups produce more effective war-fighting forces and are more credible negotiators; organizational cohesion shapes both the duration of wars and their ultimate resolution. In Networks of Rebellion, Paul Staniland explains why insurgent leaders differ so radically in their ability to build strong organizations and why the cohesion of armed groups changes over time during conflicts. He outlines a new way of thinking about the sources and structure of insurgent groups, distinguishing among integrated, vanguard, parochial, and fragmented groups. Staniland compares insurgent groups, their differing social bases, and how the nature of the coalitions and networks within which these armed groups were built has determined their discipline and internal control. He examines insurgent groups in Afghanistan, 1975 to the present day, Kashmir (1988–2003), Sri Lanka from the 1970s to the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009, and several communist uprisings in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. The initial organization of an insurgent group depends on the position of its leaders in prewar political networks. These social bases shape what leaders can and cannot do when they build a new insurgent group. Counterinsurgency, insurgent strategy, and international intervention can cause organizational change. During war, insurgent groups are embedded in social ties that determine they how they organize, fight, and negotiate; as these ties shift, organizational structure changes as well.

Download or read book Afghanistan written by Musa Khan Jalalzai and published by Vij Books India Pvt Ltd. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writers and analysts have uncovered the illegal role of private militias’ commanders in Afghanistan. These commanders and self-styled leaders were driven overwhelmingly by their personal power, and they were not only considered illegitimate on the domestic political scene, and viewed as irrelevant. The present Afghan government is a mix of all types of its efforts, including war criminals, and militia commanders who smuggle narcotics, drugs, arm, and kill women and children. War criminals and militias commanders have developed complex survival and legitimation strategies beyond their territorial realms. After years of its establishment, the Afghan local police (ALP) was undermined due to its failure to stabilize remote regions of the country. The US proxy militias are the source of consternation. The US Army established an incompetent intelligence agency (NDS) to serve its interest. The NDS established regional militias to support the CIA and Pentagon war mission against the people of the country. The NDS established Unit-01 for Central Region, Unit-02 for Eastern Region, Unit-03 for Southern Region, and Unit-04, as a Khost Protection Force (KPF), and committed war crimes in these regions with the support of the US Army and CIA. This book has documented the role of all internal and external actors, warlords and stakeholders.

Download or read book Empire s Tracks written by Manu Karuka and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empire’s Tracks boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, Manu Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Through an examination of legislative, military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains the imperial foundations of U.S. political economy. Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous and Asian American histories, this multisited interdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionary border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism. This highly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how the transcontinental railroad laid the tracks of the U.S. Empire.

Download or read book The Shadow of Ararat written by Thomas Harlan and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 820 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In what would be A.D. 600 in our history, the Roman Empire still stands, supported by the Legions and Thaumaturges of Rome. Now the Emperor of the West, the Augustus Galen Atreus, will come to the aid of the Emperor of the East, the Augustus Heraclius, to lift the siege of Constantinople and carry a great war to the very doorstep of the Shahanshah of Persia. It is a war that will be fought with armies both conventional and magical, with bright swords and the darkest necromancy. Against this richly detailed canvas of alternate history and military strategy, Thomas Harlan sets the intricate and moving stories of four people: Woven with rich detail youd expect from a first-rate historical novel, while through it runs yarns of magic and shimmering glamours that carry you deeply into your most fantastic dreams At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Download or read book Sharpening the Haze written by Giulia Carabelli and published by Ubiquity Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents ten visual essays that reflect on the historical, cultural and socio-political legacies of empires. Drawing on a variety of visual genres and forms, including photographs, illustrated advertisements, stills from site-specific art performances and films, and maps, the book illuminates the contours of empire’s social worlds and its political legacies through the visual essay. The guiding, titular metaphor, sharpening the haze, captures our commitment to frame empire from different vantage points, seeking focus within its plural modes of power. We contend that critical scholarship on empires would benefit from more creative attempts to reveal and confront empire. Broadly, the essays track a course from interrogations of imperial pasts to subversive reinscriptions of imperial images in the present, even as both projects inform each author’s intervention.

Download or read book Militia Order in Afghanistan written by Matthew P. Dearing and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-18 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new insight into when and why paramilitary groups in Afghanistan engage in protective or predatory behavior against the civilians they purportedly defend. In Afghanistan’s counterinsurgency environment, America leaned on militias to provide order and stabilize communities cut off from weak central government institutions. However, the lucrative market of protection challenged militia loyalty, as many engaged in banditry, vendettas, and predation. This book examines the varying militia experiments in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2020 and their outcomes through three sub-national case studies. It argues that successful militia experiments in Afghanistan involved inclusion of local orders, where communities had well-established social structures and accountability mechanisms in place, and state patrons relied upon those structures as a restraint against militia behavior. Complementary management ensured patrons leaned on communities for strong accountability systems. But such environments were far from the norm. When patrons ignored community controls, militias preyed on civilians as they monopolized the market of protection. This book adds to the rich literature on the U.S. experience in Afghanistan, but differs by focusing on the interplay between states, communities, and militias. This book will be of much interest to students of military and strategic studies, Asian politics, security studies and International Relations.

Download or read book Empires Wars and Battles written by T. C. F. Hopkins and published by Forge Books. This book was released on 2008-07-08 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A modern Herodotus looks at war in the ancient Middle East, Empires, Wars, and Battles is a brilliantly readable popular history from T.C.F. Hopkins. As current events have made painfully obvious, the Middle East is a region long torn by strife and traditions of warfare. In this elegant, fast-paced, and well thought out cultural and military history, T. C. F. Hopkins, author of Confrontation at Lepanto, provides a remarkable glimpse into the origins of the conflicts that formed the ancient world as well as the world we have inherited. This book examines the development of the traditions and hostilities that have grown from millennia of conflict and looks at the precarious balance between the West and the Middle East. Focusing on complex rivalries, from the Ancient Egyptians and Hittites to the five-hundred-year conflict between the Ottoman and Byzantine Empires, this book seeks to shed light on the character of the region, and why it has borne and continues to bear a critical role in world affairs. Incorporating the most recent discoveries and scholarship, Empires, Wars, and Battles provides both an account of political and military events and a survey of the cultures and societies of the ancient Near East. The straightforward, accessible text is clear and credible to the well-read history buff, but understandable and fascinating to the reader who knows nothing about ancient or military history. There are few books that can claim to cover this complex, timely material in such a comprehensive and interesting fashion. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Download or read book Against Empire written by Michael Parenti and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richly informed and written in an engaging style, Against Empire exposes the ruthless agenda and hidden costs of the U.S. empire today. Documenting the pretexts and lies used to justify violent intervention and maldevelopment abroad, Parenti shows how the conversion to a global economy is a victory of finance capital over democracy. As much of the world suffers unspeakable misery and the Third-Worldization of the United States accelerates, civil society is impoverished by policies that benefit rich and powerful transnational corporations and the national security state. Hard-won gains made by ordinary people are swept away. “A valuable rebuttal to the drumbeat...from the right.” —New York Times Book Review “Entertainingly written.” —Publishers Weekly “Parenti writes clear, smooth, often provocative prose, has a way of cutting to the heart of complex issues and knows how to tell a story." —Allan Johnson, Author of Human Arrangements Michael Parenti, PhD Yale, is an internationally known author and lecturer. He is one of the nation's leading progressive political analysts. He is the author of over 275 published articles and twenty books. His writings are published in popular periodicals, scholarly journals, and his op-ed pieces have been in leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. His informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.

Download or read book Globalization and Human Rights written by Jesús Ballesteros and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-04-14 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globalisation turns out to be untenable because it does not guarantee minimum social equity, peace and respect for the environment, and therefore does not guarantee the effective accomplishment of human rights. This book analyzes this issue and raises proposals for a new perspective. The first part describes the soft threats to human rights, derived from the devaluation of the politics and the productive economy with regard to the finance. It entails the concealment of the reality in the shape of exploitation as the tax havens and in the shape of marginalization of the persons with different abilities. The second part include a study of hard threats to human rights and examines two cases of failed states: Afghanistan and Somalia, in which the violence has supplanted the politics and the economy. In view of these situations it is necessary to rethink the force of classic ius gentium and the humanitarian right. The third part presents the European Union as a legal and political space in which conditions of a worthy life are better defended by means of the Primacy of Practical Reason and Social State of Law, and by the requirement of peace as the main rule of international relations.

Download or read book Perspectives on the American Way of War written by Thomas A. Marks and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-29 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perspectives on the American Way of War examines salient cases of American experience in irregular warfare, focusing upon the post-World War II era. This book asks why recent misfires have emerged in irregular warfare from an institutional, professional, and academic context which regularly produces evidence that there is in fact no lack of understanding of both irregular challenges and correct responses. Expert contributors explore the reasoning behind the inability to achieve victory, however defined, and argue that what security professionals have failed to fully recognize, even today, is that what is at issue is not warfare suffused with politics but rather the very opposite, politics suffused with warfare. Perspectives on the American Way of War will be of great interest to scholars of war and conflict studies, strategic and military studies, insurgency and counterinsurgency, and terrorism and counterterrorism. The book was originally published as a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies.

Download or read book Under Osman s Tree written by Alan Mikhail and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-03-13 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early modern Middle East was a crucial zone of connection between Europe and the Mediterranean world, on the one hand, and South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and sub-Saharan Africa, on the other. Accordingly, global trade, climate, and disease both affected and were affected by what was happening in the Middle East s many environments. The trans-territorial and trans-temporal character of environmental history helps shed new light on the history of the region, and Alan Mikhail s latest tackles major topics in environmental history: natural resource management, climate, human and animal labor, water control, disease, and the politics of nature. It also reveals how one of the world s most important religious traditions, Islam, has related to the natural world. This is a model book that sets the course for Middle East environmental history."

Download or read book Empires of the Sky written by Alexander Rose and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Golden Age of Aviation is brought to life in this story of the giant Zeppelin airships that once roamed the sky—a story that ended with the fiery destruction of the Hindenburg. “Genius . . . a definitive tale of an incredible time when mere mortals learned to fly.”—Keith O’Brien, The New York Times At the dawn of the twentieth century, when human flight was still considered an impossibility, Germany’s Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin vied with the Wright Brothers to build the world’s first successful flying machine. As the Wrights labored to invent the airplane, Zeppelin fathered the remarkable airship, sparking a bitter rivalry between the two types of aircraft and their innovators that would last for decades, in the quest to control one of humanity’s most inspiring achievements. And it was the airship—not the airplane—that led the way. In the glittery 1920s, the count’s brilliant protégé, Hugo Eckener, achieved undreamed-of feats of daring and skill, including the extraordinary Round-the-World voyage of the Graf Zeppelin. At a time when America’s airplanes—rickety deathtraps held together by glue, screws, and luck—could barely make it from New York to Washington, D.C., Eckener’s airships serenely traversed oceans without a single crash, fatality, or injury. What Charles Lindbergh almost died doing—crossing the Atlantic in 1927—Eckener had effortlessly accomplished three years before the Spirit of St. Louis even took off. Even as the Nazis sought to exploit Zeppelins for their own nefarious purposes, Eckener built his masterwork, the behemoth Hindenburg—a marvel of design and engineering. Determined to forge an airline empire under the new flagship, Eckener met his match in Juan Trippe, the ruthlessly ambitious king of Pan American Airways, who believed his fleet of next-generation planes would vanquish Eckener’s coming airship armada. It was a fight only one man—and one technology—could win. Countering each other’s moves on the global chessboard, each seeking to wrest the advantage from his rival, the struggle for mastery of the air was a clash not only of technologies but of business, diplomacy, politics, personalities, and the two men’s vastly different dreams of the future. Empires of the Sky is the sweeping, untold tale of the duel that transfixed the world and helped create our modern age.

Download or read book Empires of Light written by Jill Jonnes and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2004-10-12 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gripping history of electricity and how the fateful collision of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America’s Gilded Age—Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse—battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires. At the heart of the story are Thomas Alva Edison, the nation’s most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the world’s first direct current electrical light networks; the Serbian wizard of invention Nikola Tesla, elegant, highly eccentric, a dreamer who revolutionized the generation and delivery of electricity; and the charismatic George Westinghouse, Pittsburgh inventor and tough corporate entrepreneur, an industrial idealist who in the era of gaslight imagined a world powered by cheap and plentiful electricity and worked heart and soul to create it. Edison struggled to introduce his radical new direct current (DC) technology into the hurly-burly of New York City as Tesla and Westinghouse challenged his dominance with their alternating current (AC), thus setting the stage for one of the eeriest feuds in American corporate history, the War of the Electric Currents. The battlegrounds: Wall Street, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamber—Jonnes takes us on the tense walk down a prison hallway and into the sunlit room where William Kemmler, convicted ax murderer, became the first man to die in the electric chair.