Islamic Morality in Late Ottoman “SECULAR” Schools

Recent scholarship has taken great strides toward integrating the history of the late Ottoman Empire into world history. By moving beyond the view that the West was the prime agent for change in the East, historians have shed new light on indigenous efforts aimed at repositioning the state, reconceptualizing knowledge, and restructuring “society.”1 A comparative perspective has helped students of the period recognize that the late Ottoman Empire shared and took action against many of the same problems confronting its contemporaries, East and West. The assertion of Ottoman agency has been critical to finishing off the stereotype of the “sick man of Europe,” but the persistent legacies of modernization theory and nationalist historiography continue to obscure our view of the period.</jats:p

Every Story Has a Beginning, Middle, and an End (But Not Always in That Order): Predicting Duration Dynamics in a Unified Framework

There are three fundamental duration dynamics of civil conflicts: time until conflict onset, conflict duration, and time until conflict recurrence. Theoretical and empirical models of war usually focus on one or at most two aspects of these three important duration dynamics. We present a new split-population seemingly unrelated duration estimator that treats pre-conflict duration, conflict duration, and post-conflict duration as interdependent processes thus permitting improved predictions about the onset, duration, and recurrence of civil conflict. Our findings provide support for the more fundamental idea that prediction is dependent on a good approximation of the theoretically implied underlying data-generating process. In addition, we account for the fact that some countries might never experience these duration dynamics or become immune after experiencing them in the past

Do Terrorists Win? Rebels' Use of Terrorism and Civil War Outcomes

Streaming video requires RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, or Flash Player to view.During her presentation, Fortna will examine the question, "How effective is terrorism?" This question has generated lively scholarly debate and is of obvious importance to policy makers. Most existing studies of terrorism are not well-equipped to answer this question as they lack an appropriate comparison. Fortna's paper compares the outcomes of civil wars to assess whether rebel groups that use terrorism fare better than those who eschew this tactic. She finds that while civil wars involving terrorism are harder to end than other wars, in those that do end, terrorist rebel groups fare no better, indeed they fare worse than non-terrorist groups. Terrorists do not win.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web page, streaming video, event photo

The Fort McKay Métis Nation

This is the definitive history of the Fort McKay Métis Nation. It traces the evolution of the community from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, paying special attention to genealogy, land-use, land-tenure, and responses to mass oil sands development. The Fort McKay Métis Nation carefully considers the community’s unique historical context, drawing on a broad range of sources including archival research, oral histories, grey literature, and community literature. It examines the complex interrelations between the Fort McKay Metis Nation and their neighbors, the Fort McKay First Nation, and their ways they have connected with each other. Completed in partnership with the community, The Fort McKay Métis Nation provides perspectives which have never before been shared. It is an important, unique history of a community in the heart of the oil sands

Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and After

This title, in its entirety, is available online in Open Access. This volume explores the ways childhood was experienced, lived and remembered in the late Ottoman Empire and its successor states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when rapid change placed unprecedented demands on the young

Choosing Terror: Rebels' Use of Terrorism in Civil Wars

The Ohio State University Mershon Center for International Security StudiesPage Fortna is professor of political science at Columbia University and a member of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. Her research focuses on the durability of peace in the aftermath of both civil and interstate wars, war termination, and terrorism.Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web Page, Streaming Video, Event Photo

Do Child Soldiers Influence UN Peacekeeping?

The use of child soldiers in conflicts has received increasing academic attention in recent years. This article examines post-conflict periods to see whether the use of child soldiers mobilizes United Nations peacekeeping operations (UN PKO) in the aftermath of a conflict. Taking into consideration how child soldiers affect conflict and how important their reintegration is to sustainable peace and post-conflict development, we analyse whether the presence of child soldiers in a civil war increases the likelihood of the presence of a PKO. We argue that the UN deems a conflict with child soldiers as a difficult case for conflict resolution, necessitating a response from the international community. This is in line with our empirical results confirming that the use of child soldiers significantly increases the likelihood of peacekeeping

Peacekeeping as Conflict Containment

A rich literature has developed focusing on the efficacy of peacekeeping operations (PKOs) in a temporal sense - asking whether the periods following a deployment are more peaceful or not. We know less about the efficacy of PKOs in a spatial sense. Can peacekeeping shape the geographic dispersion of particular episodes of violence? We posit that PKOs can contain conflict by decreasing the tactical advantage of mobility for the rebels, by obstructing the movement of armed actors, and by altering the ability for governments to seek and confront rebel actors. We investigate the observable implications using georeferenced conflict polygons from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program's (UCDP) Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED). Our findings confirm that PKOs tend to decrease movement in the conflict polygons, especially when robust forces are deployed and when rebel groups have strong ethnic ties. Our findings, on the one hand, imply that PKOs reduce the geographic scope of violence. On the other hand, PKOs may allow nonstate actors to gain strength and legitimacy and thus constitute an even greater future threat to the state whether some form of accord is not reached

Remembering Our Relations

Wood Buffalo National Park is located in the heart of Dénesųłıuné homelands, where Dene people have lived from time immemorial. Central to the creation, expansion, and management of this park, Canada 's largest at nearly 45, 000 square kilometers, was the eviction of Dénesųłıuné people from their home, the forced separation of Dene families, and restriction of their Treaty rights. Remembering Our Relations tells the history of Wood Buffalo National Park from a Dene perspective and within the context of Treaty 8. Oral history and testimony from Dene Elders, knowledge-holders, leaders, and community members place Dénesųłıuné voices first. With supporting archival research, this book demonstrates how the founding, expansion, and management of Wood Buffalo National Park fits into a wider pattern of promises broken by settler colonial governments managing land use throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By prioritizing Dénesųłıuné histories Remembering Our Relations deliberately challenges how Dene experiences have been erased, and how this erasure has been used to justify violence against Dénesųłıuné homelands and people. Amplifying the voices and lives of the past, present, and future, Remembering Our Relations is a crucial step in the journey for healing and justice Dénesųłıuné peoples have been pursuing for over a century

Family Size Evolution in Drosophila Chemosensory Gene Families: A Comparative Analysis with a Critical Appraisal of Methods

Gene turnover rates and the evolution of gene family sizes are important aspects of genome evolution. Here, we use curated sequence data of the major chemosensory gene families from Drosophila-the gustatory receptor, odorant receptor, ionotropic receptor, and odorant-binding protein families-to conduct a comparative analysis among families, exploring different methods to estimate gene birth and death rates, including an ad hoc simulation study. Remarkably, we found that the state-of-the-art methods may produce very different rate estimates, which may lead to disparate conclusions regarding the evolution of chemosensory gene family sizes in Drosophila. Among biological factors, we found that a peculiarity of D. sechellia's gene turnover rates was a major source of bias in global estimates, whereas gene conversion had negligible effects for the families analyzed herein. Turnover rates vary considerably among families, subfamilies, and ortholog groups although all analyzed families were quite dynamic in terms of gene turnover. Computer simulations showed that the methods that use ortholog group information appear to be the most accurate for the Drosophila chemosensory families. Most importantly, these results reveal the potential of rate heterogeneity among lineages to severely bias some turnover rate estimation methods and the need of further evaluating the performance of these methods in a more diverse sampling of gene families and phylogenetic contexts. Using branch-specific codon substitution models, we find further evidence of positive selection in recently duplicated genes, which attests to a nonneutral aspect of the gene birth-and-death process