Many decades have passed since the Palestinian national movement began its political and military struggle. In that time, poignant memorials at massacre sites, a palimpsest of posters of young heroes and martyrs, sorrowful reminiscences about lost loved ones, and wistful images of young men and women who fought as guerrillas, have all flourished in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine tells the story of how dispossessed Palestinians have commemorated their past, and how through their dynamic everyday narrations, their nation has been made even without the institutional memory-making of a state. Bringing ethnography to political science, Khalili invites us to see Palestinian nationalism in its proper international context and traces its affinities with Third Worldist movements of its time, while tapping a rich and oft-ignored seam of Palestinian voices, histories, and memories.

Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine : The Politics of National Commemoration

France's war in Algeria from 1954–62 has prompted new historical research and political polemics since 1992. Especially controversial has been an acknowledgement that torture was practised systematically, and the fact that French governments refused until 1999 to admit that Algeria was a real war, not just ‘a law and order problem’. Access to French archives, along with publication of memoirs and collections of letters by conscript troops, has permitted fresh social, cultural and literary perspectives, and new insights about the memory of this war in France and Algeria. The war's strategies and military operations, however, have been neglected. Yet these aspects illuminate the nature of the armed challenges by nationalist insurgents in the era of Cold War and European decolonizations. Algeria reveals the operational success of the responses by the French military forces and psychological warfare service. The war's international diplomacy suggests that another ‘operational theatre’ – that of the United Nat...

France and the Algerian War: strategy, operations and diplomacy

Song, State, Sawa: Music and Political Radio between the US and Syria Beau Bothwell This dissertation is a study of popular music and state-controlled radio broadcasting in the Arabic-speaking world, focusing on Syria and the Syrian radioscape, and a set of American stations named Radio Sawa. I examine American and Syrian politically directed broadcasts as multifaceted objects around which broadcasters and listeners often differ not only in goals, operating assumptions, and political beliefs, but also in how they fundamentally conceptualize the practice of listening to the radio. Beginning with the history of international broadcasting in the Middle East, I analyze the institutional theories under which music is employed as a tool of American and Syrian policy, the imagined youths to whom the musical messages are addressed, and the actual sonic content tasked with political persuasion. At the reception side of the broadcaster-listener interaction, this dissertation addresses the auditory practices, histories of radio, and theories of music through which listeners in the sonic environment of Damascus, Syria create locally relevant meaning out of music and radio. Drawing on theories of listening and communication developed in historical musicology and ethnomusicology, science and technology studies, and recent transnational ethnographic and media studies, as well as on theories of listening developed in the Arabic public discourse about popular music, my dissertation outlines the intersection of the hypothetical listeners defined by the US and Syrian governments in their efforts to use music for political ends, and the actual people who turn on the radio to hear the music.

Song, State, Sawa: Music and Political Radio between the US and Syria

Jules Roy, pied-noir writer and veteran of the Second World War and Indochina, could have been speaking of Algeria when he claimed that: ‘It was hardly worth going to war against the Nazis only to become the Nazis of Indochina.’2
They had the taste for liberty, the sense of justice and the instinct for generosity. They wanted to create a multiracial, free, fraternal and prosperous society, to set an example for a world divided between rich and poor peoples. One word symbolised their ambition: ‘integration’! Opposite under the striking red and green banner of Islam, the enemy preached racial hatred and religious fanaticism, the arbitrary terrorism of a one-party dictatorship… To win the hearts of the population, they turned themselves into medical orderlies, administrators, water irrigation project managers, overseers of the rural economy… To protect them, they also became policemen, judges and executioners.3

The ‘War without a Name’, the French Army and the Algerians: Recovering Experiences, Images and Testimonies

Arab Media Systems

Little has been written about the role of radio within the Palestinian movement since the outbreak of the intifada, particularly those broadcasts emanating from the al-Quds Palestinian Arab radio station (hereafter referred to as "al-Quds") and the Voice of the PLO-Baghdad.1 Yet an examination of these broadcasts is important, first, because both stations are clearly heard and widely listened to in the occupied territories,2 and second, because they reflect the larger political conflict within the Palestinian community over strategy and means in pursuing the intifada.

Palestinian Radio and the Intifada

While Canada will end its combat mission in Afghanistan this year, Ottawa's commitment to provide military trainers, its continued development and humanitarian assistance programs as well as on-going support for its NATO allies means that formulating a long-term Afghan strategy remains paramount Given that Canada and its international partners support a regional approach to resolving the Afghan conflict, Kabul's neighbors – including Iran – will need to be involved in the process As such Ottawa will have to revisit its own often fraught relationship with Tehran Since 1996, Canadian foreign policy toward Iran has been framed by a strategy known as “Controlled Engagement” This policy limits the level of official contacts between the two states as well as the issues that Ottawa will put on the table for discussion One of the permissible topic areas is “Iran's role in the region” DFAIT has interpreted this phrase to include Afghanistan In other words, the Canadian Government would not have to alter its

Canada, Iran and “Controlled Engagement:” A new start with Afghanistan?

The Algerian War of Words: Broadcasting and Revolution, 1954-1962

This article examines the role of the Human Security Network (HSN) within the context of Canadian foreign policy. Launched as a bilateral Canadian–Norwegian initiative in 1998, the HSN now encompasses twelve like-minded middle and smaller powers from across the globe. While Canada's human security agenda and Ottawa's activism in other multilateral forums have been extensively treated in the Canadian foreign affairs literature, scant scholarly attention has been dedicated to the HSN generally or as an instrument of Canadian foreign policy specifically. The authors assert, based on interviews with Canadian and other HSN diplomats, that although human security remains an important policy concern for Ottawa, the HSN itself no longer serves as a major diplomatic reference point and that Canada may even withdraw from the very forum that it co-founded. This dramatic development has less to do with the 2006 government changeover and more with macro trends within the HSN itself.

Canada and the Human Security Network (1998–2010): RIP?

This study addresses the watershed case of the USA as large-scale international aid recipient following Hurricane Katrina, and its policy impact upon New Zealand's national disaster management planning in the same sphere. In both instances, countries more accustomed to playing the role of humanitarian benefactors were compelled to recognise a new global paradigm in which donor governments must also prepare for the contingency of being external aid beneficiaries. This paper further asserts that a binary approach of global donors and recipients is essentially irrelevant today and that all countries - wherever their position on the global wealth rankings - need to proactively develop sound legal and policy frameworks for incoming humanitarian assistance. To better appreciate this latter point, the study begins with a brief overview of contemporary global humanitarian assistance flows and motives for state aid offers and refusals.

Robert J. Bookmiller

Papers

Palestinian Radio and the Intifada

Canada, Iran and “Controlled Engagement:” A new start with Afghanistan?

The Algerian War of Words: Broadcasting and Revolution, 1954-1962

Canada and the Human Security Network (1998–2010): RIP?

Donor countries as aid recipients: the USA, New Zealand and the lessons of Hurricane Katrina