Fabled for more than three thousand years as fierce warrior-nomads and cameleers dominating the western Trans-Saharan caravan trade, today the Sahrawi are admired as soldier-statesmen and refugee-diplomats. This is a proud nomadic people uniquely championing human rights and international law for self-determination of their ancient heartlands: the western Sahara Desert in North Africa. Konstantina Isidoros provides a rich ethnographic portrait of this unique desert society's life in one of Earth's most extreme ecosystems. Her extensive anthropological research, conducted over nine years, illuminates an Arab-Berber Muslim society in which men wear full face veils and are matrifocused toward women, who are the property-holders of tent households forming powerful matrilocal coalitions. Isidoros offers new analytical insights on gender relations, strategic tribe-to-state symbiosis and the tactical formation of 'tent-cities'. The book sheds light on the indigenous principles of social organisation - the centrality of women, male veiling and milk-kinship - bringing positive feminist perspectives on how the Sahrawi have innovatively reconfigured their tribal nomadic pastoral society into globalising citizen-nomads constructing their nascent nation-state. This is essential reading for those interested in anthropology, politics, war and nationalism, gender relations, postcolonialism, international development, humanitarian regimes, refugee studies and the experience of nomadic communities.

"Fabled for more than three thousand years as fierce warrior-nomads and cameleers dominating the western Trans-Saharan caravan trade, today the Sahrawi are admired as soldier-statesmen and refugee-diplomats. This is a proud nomadic people uniquely championing human rights and international law for self-determination of their ancient heartlands: the western Sahara Desert in North Africa. Konstantina Isidoros provides a rich ethnographic portrait of this unique desert society's life in one of Earth's most extreme ecosystems. Her extensive anthropological research, conducted over nine years, illuminates an Arab-Berber Muslim society in which men wear full face veils and are matrifocused toward women, who are the property-holders of tent households forming powerful matrilocal coalitions. Isidoros offers new analytical insights on gender relations, strategic tribe-to-state symbiosis and the tactical formation of 'tent-cities'. The book sheds light on the indigenous principles of social organisation - the centrality of women, male veiling and milk-kinship - bringing positive feminist perspectives on how the Sahrawi have innovatively reconfigured their tribal nomadic pastoral society into globalising citizen-nomads constructing their nascent nation-state. This is essential reading for those interested in anthropology, politics, war and nationalism, gender relations, postcolonialism, international development, humanitarian regimes, refugee studies and the experience of nomadic communities."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

The “meantime” represents the gap between what is past and the unknown future. When considered as waiting, the meantime is defined as a period of suspension to be endured. By contrast, the contributors of this volume understand it as a space of “the possible” where calculation coexists with uncertainty, promises with disappointment, and imminence with deferral. Attending to the temporalities of emerging rather than settled facts, they put the stress on the temporal tactics, social commitments, material connections, dispositional orientations, and affective circuits that emerge in the meantime even in the most desperate times.

Arab Masculinities provides a groundbreaking analysis of Arab men's lives in the precarious aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings. It challenges received wisdoms and entrenched stereotypes about Arab men, offering new understandings of rujula, or masculinity, across the Middle East and North Africa. The 10 individual chapters of the book foreground the voices and stories of Arab men as they face economic precarity, forced displacement, and new challenges to marriage and family life. Rich in ethnographic details, they illuminate how men develop alternative strategies of affective labor, how they attempt to care for themselves and their families within their local moral worlds, and what it means to be a good son, husband, father, and community member. Arab Masculinities sheds light on the most private spaces of Arab men's lives—offering stories that rarely enter the public realm. It is a pioneering volume that reflects the urgent need for new anthropological scholarship on men and masculinities in a changing Middle East.

This new handbook provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary overview of the theoretical and empirical aspects of state recognition in international politics. Although the recognition of states plays a central role in shaping global politics, it remains an under-researched and widely dispersed subject. Coherently and innovatively structured, the handbook brings together a group of international scholars who examine the most important theoretical and comparative perspectives on state recognition, including debates about pathways to secession and self-determination, the broad range of actors and strategies that shape the recognition of states and a significant number of contemporary case studies. The handbook is organised into four key sections: Theoretical and normative perspectives Pathways to independent statehood Actors, forms and the process of state recognition Case studies of contemporary state recognition This handbook will be of great interest to students of foreign policy, international relations, international law, comparative politics and area studies. Chapter 19 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Design Dispersed pursues the complex and heterogeneous connections between migration and design in the 20th and 21st centuries. The edited volume gathers contributions by international researchers and curators on the question of how design practices and (historical) objects articulate, respond to and critically reflect on migration, flight and displacement: Besides a collage which highlights the aesthetic effects resulting from the networking, overlapping and mixing of forms, another strand of the book looks at the political and social dimensions of design. How are design objects material modes of a critical inquiry on movements of people and things? What role do object trajectories play in the émigré movements of the 1930s and 1940s? Other texts follow the question of how migrants and refugees form their experience and political fight for acceptance into design and architectural productions. A final essay contributes to wordings and projections - what vocabulary do we need in order to adequately think and write about a design dispersed?

At a crucial crossroads between Africa and Europe, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and the "Arab World" and the West, Morocco has long had a special place in U.S. diplomacy and strategic planning. Since September 11, 2001, Morocco's importance to the United States has only increased, and the more recent uncertainties of the Arab Spring and Islamist extremism have further increased the value of the Moroccan-American alliance. Yet one of the pillars of the legitimacy of the Moroccan monarchy, its claim to the Western Sahara, remains a point of violent contention. Home to the largest functional military barrier in the world, the Western Sahara has a long history of colonial conquest and resistance, guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency, and evolving strategic thought, and its future may prove critical to U.S. interests in the region.

This collection of essays brings together international lawyers with their perspectives on how the international community has coped with contemporary cases of nationalist crisis and constitutional lawyers from states which are attempting to facilitate the political expression of national identity through developments in federalism, devolution, and the protection of minority rights. The aim is to explore to what extent existing legal mechanisms permit a flexible engagement with, and accommodation of, the aspirations of national and ethnic groups. It would appear that a heightened level of fluidity in the interaction and exchange of normative standards now exists in the relationship between international and domestic law as both types of system confront the challenge which national identity continues to constitute. As this process marks a renewed preparedness on the part of legal systems to expand imaginatively to meet current problems it is hoped that this collection will highlight opportunities for an ongoing process of development in this complex and troubled area.

This book gives a comprehensive background to the long running conflict on the status of Western Sahara and particularly highlights the question of the territory’s natural resources, such as fish, oil and phosphates. The book analyzes why this territory, (mainly covered by desert and only sparsely populated), has since 1976 when the former colonial power Spain left the territory, engaged governments and people, both regionally and internationally, and the implications of its natural resources. The book includes: - a summary of the Western Saharan conflict, by Pedro Pinte Leite, specialist in international law in the Netherlands; - an up-to-date picture of the situation in Western Sahara with regard to natural resources, and the way in which exploitation is taking place, by Toby Shelley, a British journalist; - the UN’s legal opinion from 2002 on exploitation of the natural resources of a Non-Self-Governing Territory written by Hans Corell, former UN Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs, the Legal Counsel. Two political views of the conflict are also included. Magnus Schöldtz and Pål Wrange from the Swedish Foreign Ministry elucidate the Swedish Foreign Policy on the Western Sahara Conflict. A statement by Karin Scheele, MEP and President of the Intergroup on Western Sahara in the European Parliament focuses on the economic interests of the parties involved in the conflict. These contributions together with an extended chronology, by Claes Olsson, over the different phases of the conflict form a useful information source for policy-makers, researchers, students and activists interested in or dealing with issues related to the Maghreb framework and in particular the Western Saharan conflict. Contributors include: Hans Corell, is Ambassador and a Former UN Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs, the Legal Counsel Pedro Pinto Leite is a Portuguese international jurist based in Holland, secretary of the International Platform of Jurists for East Timor and coordinator of the Dutch section of the International Association of Jurists for Western Sahara. Claes Olsson has done further research after his degree in social sciences and is the author of several books and articles on the Western Saharan issue. Magnus Schöldtz, Deputy Director, Head of North Africa Section, Middle East and North Africa Department, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Stockholm. Pål Wrange is a principal legal advisor on public international law at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Stockholm. Toby Shelley is a journalist and writer. He is author of 'Endgame in the Western Sahara', published by Zed Books. He has visited the Western Sahara and the Sahrawi refugee camps on a number of occasions. Karin Scheele, Member of the European Parliament (MEP), is President of the Intergroup on Western Sahara in the European Parliament

Saharan trade has been much debated in modern times, but the main focus of interest remains the medieval and early modern periods, for which more abundant written sources survive. The pre-Islamic origins of Trans-Saharan trade have been hotly contested over the years, mainly due to a lack of evidence. Many of the key commodities of trade are largely invisible archaeologically, being either of high value like gold and ivory, or organic like slaves and textiles or consumable commodities like salt. However, new research on the Libyan people known as the Garamantes and on their trading partners in the Sudan and Mediterranean Africa requires us to revise our views substantially. In this volume experts re-assess the evidence for a range of goods, including beads, textiles, metalwork and glass, and use it to paint a much more dynamic picture, demonstrating that the pre-Islamic Sahara was a more connected region than previously thought.