Sir Martin Ewans, former Head of the British Chancery in Kabul, puts into an historical and contemporary context the series of tragic events that have impinged on Afghanistan in the past fifty years. The book examines the roots of these developments in Afghanistan's earlier history and external relationships, as well as their contemporary relevance, internally, regionally, and globally. The book also reviews in details the emergence of the Taliban, their ideology and their place within Islam, and examines Afghanistan's relevance in global issues, notably the nature of Islamic extremism, the international drugs trade and international terrorism. It ends with an analysis of the country post-Taliban.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Central Asia was the scene of periodic confrontations between Britain and Russia. Sir Martin Ewans provides a ‘history of thought' of this crucial period in Central Asia by examining of the strategic thinking and diplomatic discourse of the most intense decades of the confrontation.
There is a broad consensus among those who are concerned with Africa that the plight of the continent is approaching the catastrophic. Partly the roots of the problem are historical, stemming from the exploitation and colonisation of the continent by European powers. An appreciation of the history of the relationship between Europe and Africa, a major episode of which this book examines, is indispensable to an understanding of the continent's present predicament. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries King Leopold II of the Belgians established a colony in Africa, which, as the Congo Free State, became a byword for unremitting exploitation and widespread atrocities. This book describes the creation, the development and the collapse both of this regime and of the Belgian colony that replaced it. Conclusions are drawn about the nature of European colonialism in Africa and the consequences for Europe itself.
A fascinating chronicle of a nation's turbulent history. Reaching back to earliest times, Martin Ewans examines the historical evolution of one of today's most dangerous breeding grounds of global terrorism. After a succession of early dynasties and the emergence of an Afghan empire during the eighteenth century, the nineteenth and early twentieth century saw a fierce power struggle between Russia and Britain for supremacy in Afghanistan that was ended by the nation's proclamation of independence in 1919. A communist coup in the late 1970s overthrew the established regime and led to the invasion of Soviet troops in 1979. Roughly a decade later, the Soviet Union withdrew, condemning Afghanistan to a civil war that tore apart the nation's last remnants of religious, ethnic, and political unity. It was into this climate that the Taliban was born. Today, war-torn and economically destitute, Afghanistan faces unique challenges as it looks toward an uncertain future. Martin Ewans carefully weighs the lessons of history to provide a frank look at Afghanistan's prospects and the international resonances of the nation's immense task of total political and economic reconstruction.
This book deals with each of the five conflicts in which Afghanistan has been embroiled, namely the First, Second and Third Anglo-Afghan Wars, the Soviet invasion and the most recent American-led operations.
In the wake of the attacks of 11 September 2001, and during the ensuing invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, much has been heard of the concept of 'asymmetric warfare'. Broadly speaking, this describes a means of fighting through which a weaker power can offset or neutralize the strengths of a more powerful opponent by applying its own strengths to its opponent's weaknesses. Frequently, it is used to describe situations in which formal state power is confronted by non-state or guerrilla activity. Afghanistan features as the focus of this book's investigation since the country has recently been at the hub of confrontations which have borne immediately on current international concerns. It has also, for more than a century and a half, been the arena for a series of conflicts between imperial powers on the one hand and state and non-state power structures on the other. Afghans, moreover, have not changed their spots: they remain basically the same, in terms of personality and society, as they were when they were first described by a British envoy, Mountstewart Elphinstone, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since that time, the confrontations with which Afghanistan was involved have not only brought repeated misery upon its people, but have had ramifications of an international character. This book deals with each of the five conflicts in which Afghanistan has been embroiled during this time span, namely the First, Second and Third Anglo-Afghan Wars, the Soviet invasion and the most recent American-led operations.
Asymmetric warfare, involving conflicts where smaller powers apply their strengths against the weaknesses of a more powerful opponent, has become a key modern concern since the September 11th attacks. Conflict in Afghanistan tackles this issue by examining the five wars Afghanistan has waged against foreign powers over the past two centuries, all of which have involved forms of asymmetric warfare. Incorporating contemporary documents and material from Soviet archives, the text analyzes each war’s antecedents, conduct, and consequences. Important questions are asked about the role of religious beliefs, fanaticism, diplomacy, governmental decision-making and military competence, issues that have great contemporary relevance. The book provides an illuminating commentary of Afghanistan’s wars and examines the relevance of these conflicts to the modern-day challenge of counter-insurgency and asymmetric warfare.
Reviews the emergence and fall of the Taliban, their ideology and their place within Islam, and examines Afghanistan's relevance to issues relating to Islamic extremism, the international drugs trade and international terrorism.
The three decades between 1865 and 1895 marked a particularly contentious period in the relationship between Britain and Russia in Central Asia, which more than once brought them to the verge of war. Moderates tried to settle the problem by the negotiation of ‘neutral zones’, or firm boundaries, but the issue was complicated by misreading of intentions, much internal confusion and dispute, and considerable ignorance of the geographical and geopolitical factors involved. This careful and detailed analysis examines the strategic thinking and diplomatic discourse which underlay the whole period, and in particular of the succession of efforts to establish a frontier, which eventually brought the period to a close without a major confrontation being provoked. Based on relevant records in the PRO and the British Library, as well as private papers, press comment, parliamentary debates and other contemporary accounts, Sir Martin Ewans provides a ‘history of thought' of this crucial period in Central Asia. He provides an insight into the manner in which issues of war and peace were handled in the 19th Century and a fascinating case study of a great power relationship prior to the First World War. An important contribution to the study of Asian history, Tsarist Russia, imperial history and the history of British India, this book will also be of interest in India and Pakistan as a study of the events that led to the definition and consolidation of their northern frontiers.
After liberating itself from French colonial rule in one of the twentieth century's most brutal wars of independence, Algeria became a standard-bearer for the non-aligned movement. By the 1990s, however, its revolutionary political model had collapsed, degenerating into a savage conflict between the military and Islamist guerillas that killed some 200,000 citizens. In this lucid and gripping account, Martin Evans and John Phillips explore Algeria's recent and very bloody history, demonstrating how the high hopes of independence turned into anger as young Algerians grew increasingly alienated. Unemployed, frustrated by the corrupt military regime, and excluded by the West, the post-independence generation needed new heroes, and some found them in Osama bin Laden and the rising Islamist movement. Evans and Phillips trace the complex roots of this alienation, arguing that Algeria's predicament-political instability, pressing economic and social problems, bad governance, a disenfranchised youth-is emblematic of an arc of insecurity stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. Looking back at the pre-colonial and colonial periods, they place Algeria's complex present into historical context, demonstrating how successive governments have manipulated the past for their own ends. The result is a fractured society with a complicated and bitter relationship with the Western powers-and an increasing tendency to export terrorism to France, America, and beyond.
Taming the Imperial Imagination marks a novel intervention into the debate on empire and international relations, and offers a new perspective on nineteenth-century Anglo-Afghan relations. Martin J. Bayly shows how, throughout the nineteenth century, the British Empire in India sought to understand and control its peripheries through the use of colonial knowledge. Addressing the fundamental question of what Afghanistan itself meant to the British at the time, he draws on extensive archival research to show how knowledge of Afghanistan was built, refined and warped by an evolving colonial state. This knowledge informed policy choices and cast Afghanistan in a separate legal and normative universe. Beginning with the disorganised exploits of nineteenth-century explorers and ending with the cold strategic logic of the militarised 'scientific frontier', this book tracks the nineteenth-century origins of contemporary policy 'expertise' and the forms of knowledge that inform interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere today.
(Limelight). Martin provides a guide to opera that is sweeping in its scope, thorough in its detail, and authoritative in its commentary. He recalls a century of achievement in an art form that today enjoys unprecedented popularity and that has been generously enriched by challenging works in many cases yet to be fully recognized of the modern era.
Martin M. Winkler argues for a new approach to various creative affinities between ancient verbal and modern visual narratives. He examines screen adaptations of classical epic, tragedy, comedy, myth, and history, exploring, for example, how ancient rhetorical principles regarding the emotions apply to moving images and how Aristotle's perspective on thrilling plot-turns can recur on screen. He also interprets several popular films, such as 300 and Nero, and analyzes works by international directors, among them Pier Paolo Pasolini (Oedipus Rex, Medea), Jean Cocteau (The Testament of Orpheus), Mai Zetterling (The Girls), Lars von Trier (Medea), Arturo Ripstein (Such Is Life), John Ford (westerns), Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho), and Spike Lee (Chi-Raq). The book demonstrates the undiminished vitality of classical myth and literature in our visual media, as with screen portrayals of Helen of Troy. It is important for all classicists and scholars and students of film, literature, and history.
This is a pioneering, multi-empire account of the relationship between the politics of imperial repression and the economic structures of European colonies between the two World Wars. Ranging across colonial Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, Martin Thomas explores the structure of local police forces, their involvement in colonial labour control and the containment of uprisings and dissent. His work sheds new light on broader trends in the direction and intent of colonial state repression. It shows that the management of colonial economies, particularly in crisis conditions, took precedence over individual imperial powers' particular methods of rule in determining the forms and functions of colonial police actions. The politics of colonial labour thus became central to police work, with the depression years marking a watershed not only in local economic conditions but also in the breakdown of the European colonial order more generally.
The Afghan crisis has grabbed the attention of the entire world, and underlined the desperate need in the West for a better understanding of the region and its challenges in the face of increasingly militant interpretations of Islam. Carved up and fought over by the British and Tsarist Russia in the nineteenth century, and under Soviet domination for much of the twentieth, the lonely passes, deserts and peoples of the five Central Asian republics have remained shrouded in obscurity. Even Afghanistan, the site of almost constant conflict since the Soviet invasion of 1978, is little known beyond the media images of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban movement. Martin McCauley draws on his vast knowledge of the region and its history to provide a clear and highly readable account of Afghanistan and the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tasikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, from their medieval pasts to the unpredictable present. Illuminating languages and landscapes, cultures and society, he examines the rise of militant Islam and its impact on the region, the push and pull of global economics and politics, and possibilities for stability in an inherently unstable part of the world.
Examiningthe manifest and invisible dead, this book considers the nature, extent andlimitations of harmful interaction between the living and the dead in Greektragedy, concentrating on the abilities of the dead, the consequences of corpse exposure andmutilation, and the use of avenging agents by the dead.
The complete dramatic toolbox for the opera singer – a step-by-step guide detailing how to create character, from auditions through to rehearsal and performance and formulate a successful career. Drawing upon the innovative approach to the training of young opera singers developed by Martin Constantine, Co-Director of ENO Opera Works, The Opera Singer's Acting Toolkit leads the singer through the process of bringing the libretto and score to life in order to create character. It draws on the work of practitioners such as Stanislavski, Lecoq, Laban and Cicely Berry to introduce the singer to the tools needed to create an interior and physical life for character. The book draws on operatic repertoire from Handel through Mozart to Britten to present practical techniques and exercises to help the singer develop their own individual dramatic toolbox. The Opera Singer's Acting Toolkit features interviews with leading conductors, directors, singers and casting agents to offer invaluable insights into the professional operatic world, and advice on how to remain focused on the importance of the work itself.
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