Search results

The aim of this article is to provide an analysis of the features that have shaped the state's decision‐making process in the United Nations, with regard to the humanitarian intervention in Darfur from 2003 onwards.

The methodological approach to the study is a review of political statement papers grounded in the concept of “humanitarian imperialism” and a “responsibility to protect”.

It was found out that the decision‐making process, leading to humanitarian interventions in Darfur was shaped by a larger extent by the states' own national interests and to a smaller extent by humanitarian considerations.

The main implications of this paper are that the United Nations are not the right platform when it comes to humanitarian interventions that should be placed on humanitarian grounds. Therefore, nation states are strongly advised to accept their leading role in international politics and to realise their responsibility to protect foreign citizens in humanitarian catastrophes.

This paper will have an effect on the way humanitarian interventions and “humanitarian motives” can be seen in society and will suggest that in some situations it is advised to take a more realist approach towards humanitarian interventions.

This paper is valuable for further analysis of political decision‐making processes and learning processes within politics.

This essay focuses on the Chinese-Japanese Library of the Harvard-Yenching Institute and examines how the Library collected and transported Chinese rare books to the United States during the 1930 and 1940s. It considers Harvard's rationale for its collection of Chinese books and tensions between Chinese scholars and the Harvard-Yenching Institute leaders and librarians over the purchase and “export” of Chinese books.

This research is a historical study based on archival research at Harvard-Yenching Institute and the Harvard-Yenching Library, as well as careful readings of published primary and secondary sources.

By examining the debates that surrounded the ownership of Chinese books, and the historical circumstances that enabled or hindered the cross-national movement of books, this essay uncovers a complex and interwoven historical discourse of academic nationalism, internationalism and imperialism.

Drawing upon the unexamined primary sources and published second sources, this essay uncovers a complex and interwoven historical discourse of academic nationalism, internationalism and imperialism.

The traditional postcolonial focus on the modern and the European, and pre-modern and non-European empires has marginalized the study of empires like the Ottoman Empire whose temporal reign traversed the modern and pre-modern eras, and its geographical land mass covered parts of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa. Here, I first place the three postcolonial corollaries of the prioritization of contemporary inequality, the determination of its historical origins, and the target of its eventual elimination in conversation with the Ottoman Empire. I then discuss and articulate the two ensuing criticisms concerning the role of Islam and the fluidity of identities in states and societies. I argue that epistemologically, postcolonial studies criticize the European representations of Islam, but do not take the next step of generating alternate knowledge by engaging in empirical studies of Islamic empires like the Ottoman Empire. Ontologically, postcolonial studies draw strict official and unofficial lines between the European colonizer and the non-European colonized, yet such a clear-cut divide does not hold in the case of the Ottoman Empire where the lines were much more nuanced and identities much more fluid. Still, I argue that contemporary studies on the Ottoman Empire productively intersect with the postcolonial approach in three research areas: the exploration of the agency of imperial subjects; the deconstruction of the imperial center; and the articulation of bases of imperial domination other than the conventional European “rule of colonial difference” strictly predicated on race. I conclude with a call for an analysis of Ottoman postcoloniality in comparison to others such as the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Persian, Chinese, Mughal, and Japanese that negotiated modernity in a similar manner with the explicit intent to generate knowledge not influenced by the Western European historical experience.

The domain of study on mediated suffering is ensconced within an Orientalist paradigm which ideologically structures our visuality and gaze. The consignment of suffering through bodies of alterity and the geo-politics of the Global South encodes the coloniality of power as a dominant reading. It then naturalizes the West as the voyeur in its consumption of the abject bodies of the Global South. Creating a binary through this East-West polarization in the oeuvre of suffering as a realm of study, it creates the hegemony of the West as the moral guardian of suffering, imbuing it with the right to accord pity and compassion to the lesser Other. Beyond elongating the Orientalist trajectory which lodged the body politic of the Global South as a sustained ideological site of suffering, it hermeneutically seals the East as irredeemable, ordaining it through the gaze over the Other as a mode of coloniality. In countering this Eurocentric proposition, this chapter contends that this coloniality of gaze needs further rumination and new sensibilities in the study of mediated suffering, particularly following 9/11 and the shifting of the geo-politics of suffering in which the West is dispossessed through its own manufactured ideologies of the ‘War on Terror’ such that it is under constant threat of terrorist attacks and through the movement of the displaced Other into the Global North. Besieged and entrapped through its own pathologies of risks and threats, the West is projected through its own victimhood and the politics of the Anthropocene within which risks are seemingly democratized by environmental degradation as an overarching threat for all of humanity. Despite these shifts in the global politics, the scholarship of suffering is locked into this polarity. The chapter interrogates this innate crisis within this field of scholarship.

The term ‘fundamentalism’ has come of late into popular usage more than any other. It has been used for various Christian movements. During the twentieth century, the term came to be used in Christian–Protestant circles in an effort to define beliefs that are fundamental to Christian religion. The world that emerged after the Second World War saw the emergence of many former colonial and semi-colonial countries as independent nations. Their development caused ferment among the Muslim countries also. It took the form of a resurgence of fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism. During the last several decades, the Islamic revival that is sweeping from Morocco in the West to Mindanao in the Philippines is considered with some reason as a response to the predatory policies of Western imperialism. This was the reassertion and the response of the Muslims to the challenge of the West. This was the promise of the fundamentalist Muslims: self assertive Islamic nationalism and simplicity of argument in the hope of recapturing the pristine purity and political glory of Islam (Ahmad, 1991). The first Muslim to react against the alien accretions to Islamic society, not necessarily the result of external or foreign influence, was Shah Waliullah (1703–1762) who was almost a contemporary of Abdul Wahab (1703–1787) in Arabia. Both evolved from attempting to purge the Islamic society of foreign accretions to protesting oppression and corruption of Westernisation (Jansen, 1979). The fundamentalism today is different from that of the eighteenth century. It is not of much use to trace historical continuity in the fundamentalist ideology; although, this does not negate some linkages between Islam's past history and modern day fundamentalist movements (Ahmed, 1994).

Hofstede's theory may be problematic from both a methodological/theoretical and practical view when applied to the 80 per cent of the globe we term developing. It is necessary to break out of an epistemic paradigm and a “view from nowhere” in order to focus on multiple layers of cultural interfaces within power dynamics that influence the nature of hybrid organizations and individual cultural identity. The purpose of this paper therefore is to develop a theory of cross‐cultural interfaces.

Cross‐cultural values theory provides a blunt instrument in Africa, does not take into account global dependencies and is not able to analyse local perceptions of reality within a context of these dependencies. A theory of cultural interfaces is developed that incorporates an Aristotelian phronetic approach to social science.

This moves away from the universals of analytical rationality towards practical value‐rationality that considers culture from a context‐dependent viewpoint, provides a synthesis for cultural‐institutional approaches, and engages researchers beyond merely looking at differences in cultures and the consequences, and towards what should be done about issues that arise.

By providing an example of how cultural interfaces may be researched, and discussing the associated conceptual issues, it is hoped that this paper will help to move forward the debate about cross‐cultural management.

Research indicates a long historical connection between racism and nationalist ideologies. This connection has been highlighted in the resurgence of exclusionary nationalism in recent years, across many multicultural societies. This chapter discusses the notions of race, ethnicity and nation, and critically examines how racism shapes contemporary manifestations of nationalist discourse across the world. It explores the historical role of settler-colonialism, imperial expansions and the capitalist development in shaping the racial/ethnic aspect of nationalist development. Moreover, it provides an analysis of the interconnections between the racialisation of minorities, exclusionary ideologies and the consolidation of ethno-nationalist tropes. This chapter further considers the impact of demographic changes in reinforcing anti-migrant exclusionary sentiments. This is examined in connection with emerging nativist discourse, exploring how xenophobic racism has shaped and is shaped by nostalgic nationalism based on the sanitisation of the legacies of Empire and colonialism.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a series of articles which explore the theme of holistic care and integrated practice with BME individuals and communities who access health and social care services.

The purpose of this paper is to draw critical accounting research to ground the study of globalising of professional service firms (GPSFs) more firmly in the history and actuality of imperialism. In so doing, the paper also helps in forging a stronger connection between accounting scholarship and interdisciplinary GPSF-focused debates in the wider field of management and organisation studies (MOS).

This is a desk-based study, analysing the globalisation of professional service firms through the lens of imperialism via an exploration of relevant research on the accounting profession.

The analysis sheds light on the link between GPSFs and contemporary imperialism. In particular, it shows how the organisation of GPSFs (re)produces core-periphery relations in the modern world economy and how this is facilitated and reinforced by universalisation efforts on the part of the firms’ core offices. The paper also highlights the role of local professionals in both enabling and resisting GPSF domination.

One main implication of this paper is that the organisational nature and societal impact of GPSFs (and the professions more generally) are further illuminated. The paper deepens understanding of GPSFs’ role in (re)producing global inequalities and colonial-style power relations in a supposedly post-imperial world and calls for a reconceptualisation of these firms as agents of imperialism. In so doing, the paper also opens new avenues for future research on the organisation of GPSFs and on their impact on societies worldwide.

This is the first attempt to draw together critical accounting studies of globalisation with research GPSFs in the generalist field of MOS. In so doing, it contributes to a cross-fertilisation of the two fields and helps in making the former more central to ongoing debates in the latter. The paper also contributes to the emerging body of post-colonial theorising in MOS by shedding light on the crucial role of professional service firms in (re)producing imperialism in the modern world economy.