December 2021 Monthly Digest

The Monthly Digest is a resource provided by Security in Context that provides a list of recent publications, calls, conferences and other items relevant to the critical global, security, and international political economy studies audience. In addition to new items, our digest may contain relatively recent entries, so please double check dates on any calls or conferences. All descriptions taken from their original sources unless otherwise indicated. If we’ve missed something, or you have items you’d like to contribute for future digests, please email us at: submissions@securityincontext.org

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Books

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Salinas: A History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City

Carol Lynn Mckibben

An ambitious history of a California city that epitomizes the history of race relations in modern America.

Although much has been written about the urban–rural divide in America, the city of Salinas, California, like so many other places in the state and nation whose economies are based on agriculture, is at once rural and urban. For generations, Salinas has been associated with migrant farmworkers from different racial and ethnic groups. This broad-ranging history of "the Salad Bowl of the World" tells a complex story of community-building in a multiracial, multiethnic city where diversity has been both a cornerstone of civic identity and, from the perspective of primarily white landowners and pragmatic agricultural industrialists, essential for maintaining the local workforce. 

Carol Lynn McKibben draws on extensive original research, including oral histories and never-before-seen archives of local business groups, tracing Salinas's ever-changing demographics and the challenges and triumphs of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican immigrants, as well as Depression-era Dust Bowl migrants and white ethnic Europeans. McKibben takes us from Salinas's nineteenth-century beginnings as the economic engine of California's Central Coast up through the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on communities of color today, especially farmworkers who already live on the margins.

Throughout the century-plus of Salinas history that McKibben explores, she shows how the political and economic stability of Salinas rested on the ability of nonwhite minorities to achieve a measure of middle-class success and inclusion in the cultural life of the city, without overturning a system based in white supremacy. This timely book deepens our understanding of race relations, economic development, and the impact of changing demographics on regional politics in urban California and in the United States as a whole.

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Bread and Freedom: Egypt's Revolutionary Situation

Mona El-Ghobashy

A multivocal account of why Egypt's defeated revolution remains a watershed in the country's political history.

Bread and Freedom offers a new account of Egypt's 2011 revolutionary mobilization, based on a documentary record hidden in plain sight—party manifestos, military communiqués, open letters, constitutional contentions, protest slogans, parliamentary debates, and court decisions. A rich trove of political arguments, the sources reveal a range of actors vying over the fundamental question in politics: who holds ultimate political authority. The revolution's tangled events engaged competing claims to sovereignty made by insurgent forces and entrenched interests alike, a vital contest that was terminated by the 2013 military coup and its aftermath.

Now a decade after the 2011 Arab uprisings, Mona El-Ghobashy rethinks how we study revolutions, looking past causes and consequences to train our sights on the collisions of revolutionary politics. She moves beyond the simple judgments that once celebrated Egypt's revolution as an awe-inspiring irruption of people power or now label it a tragic failure. Revisiting the revolutionary interregnum of 2011–2013, Bread and Freedom takes seriously the political conflicts that developed after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, an eventful thirty months when it was impossible to rule Egypt without the Egyptians.

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Bombay Brokers

Edited By Lisa Björkman

A political party worker who produces crowds for electoral rallies. A “prison specialist” who serves other people’s prison sentences in exchange for a large fee. An engineer who is able to secure otherwise impossible building permits. These and other dealmakers—whose behind-the-scenes expertise and labor are often invisible—have an intrinsic role in the city's functioning and can be indispensable for navigating everyday life in Bombay, one of the world’s most complex, dynamic, and populous cities. Bombay Brokers collects profiles of thirty-six such “brokers.” Written by anthropologists, artists, city planners, and activists, these character sketches bring into relief the paradox that these brokers’ knowledge and labor are simultaneously invisible yet essential for Bombay’s functioning. Their centrality reveals the global-scale paradoxes and gaps that these brokers mediate and bridge. In this way, Bombay Brokers prompts a reconsideration of what counts as legitimate and valuable knowledge and labor while offering insight into changing structures of power in Bombay and around the globe.

Contributors. Anjali Arondekar, Sarthak Bagchi, Tobias Baitsch, Sangeeta Banerji, Srimati Basu, Tarini Bedi, Amita Bhide, Lisa Björkman, Uday Chandra, Simon Chauchard, Ka-Kin Cheuk, Michael Collins, Daisy Deomampo, Maura Finkelstein, Ajay Gandhi, Rupali Gupte, Kathryn C. Hardy, Lalitha Kamath, Prasad Khanolkar, Bhushan Korgaonkar, Ratoola Kundu, Ken Kuroda, Annelies Kusters, Lisa Mitchell, Shailaja Paik, Gautam Pemmaraju, Lubaina Rangwala, Llerena Guiu Searle, Atreyee Sen, Prasad Shetty, Rohan Shivkumar, Edward Simpson, David Strohl, Rachel Sturman, R. Swaminathan, Aneri Taskar, Yaffa Truelove, Sahana Udupa, Lalit Vachani, Leilah Vevaina

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Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World

Jeremy Friedman

A historical account of ideology in the Global South as the postwar laboratory of socialism, its legacy following the Cold War, and the continuing influence of socialist ideas worldwide.

In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran.

These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to the Soviet bloc or the programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge new models of socialist development through their own trial and error, together with the help of existing socialist countries, demonstrating the flexibility and adaptability of socialism. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced Tanzania’s approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model.

Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history.

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Scholarships/Fellowships

Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

2022-2024 Postdoctoral Fellowship: The Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy at the the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs

The applicant is responsible for collecting all materials and submitting them before 23:59 EST on February 1st, 2022. Application materials should be submitted using the online application portal.‍

Incoming PhD students and postdoctoral fellows at Johns Hopkins SAIS will work closely with the faculty and affiliates of the Kissinger Center and have opportunities to participate in the Center’s activities and the broader intellectual communities of SAIS and Johns Hopkins University. The new scholars will also collaborate with faculty, affiliates, students, and fellows from the other institutes in the consortium, creating a multi-institutional, multinational intellectual community that spans the Atlantic, as well as have publishing opportunities through Engelsberg Ideas.

The program builds and expands upon the Kissinger Center and SAIS's strengths in diplomatic and military history, strategic studies, security studies, international relations, and economics and international political economy. SAIS is interdisciplinary and policy-engaged, and its location in Washington DC allows scholars easy access to major instruments of government, think tanks, and federally funded research and development centers, as well as important archives. SAIS also has campuses in Bologna (Italy) and Nanjing (China), providing additional opportunities to engage with the scholarly and policy communities in Europe and Asia. 

Up to three incoming PhD candidates will be awarded a generous four-year fellowship that includes tuition, health insurance, and a stipend competitive with the top programs in political science, international relations, and history.

Up to three Postdoctoral Fellows will be offered a generous two-year fellowship that includes health insurance, research funding, and a stipend competitive with the leading postdoctoral awards.

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Call for Papers: Gendering the Arab Archive Workshop‍

Deadline for applications: January 15, 2022

Since the archival turn in the social sciences and the humanities, archives have become sites of political and social contestation. In the work of cultural theorists, the archive is no longer just a place/an institution, virtual or physical, which curates documents, historical sources, people, and materials in diverse forms, but is a metaphor for the exercise of power in the production of knowledge. This confluence of knowledge and power in the Archive has meant that the feminist research agenda constitutes one of the most powerful political contestations of “The Archive”. In response to the challenging question “where are the women in history?” or “what are the reasons for the marginalization of women’s roles and contributions to societies?”, feminist scholars embarked on an excavation project in the archives searching for women’s stories and foregrounding their voices and contributions.

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Journal Articles

Revolutionary Afterlives, MERIP, Winter 2021

Issue Editors: Arang Keshavarzian, Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Atef Said and Pete Moore

2021 marks ten years since the start of the Arab uprisings. Instead of approaching it as an anniversary of failure or tragedy, Middle East Report’s winter issue reflects on the still unfolding set of political struggles that are necessarily incomplete and dynamic and which move across different scales—local, national, regional and global. "Revolutionary Afterlives" takes stock of lessons learned and unlearned, and charts hopes, dislocations and counterrevolutionary forces that speak as much to the power of revolutionary coalitions as to their shortfalls. Bringing together analysts, revolutionaries, activists and cultural producers, this issue reflects on how the protest movements and their opponents have had a lasting impact on the region and the possibilities for solidarity.

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Memory, Storytelling and Space, 23|2021

Editors: Mayada Madbouly et Aya Nassar

For decades, the twin issues of remembering and memorialising space on one hand, and forgetting and neglecting on the other hand, have been intertwined with attempts at carving spaces for memory. While many initiatives and actions have grappled with these questions, this special issue asks: What animates these endeavors? What does the act of remembering promise? How does forgetting operate as an ever-present looming threat? How are the stories of the past told? Where? By whom? Within which contexts? And to what effects? These concerns are by no means new. In asking these questions we acknowledge that spaces of memory are complex: actors include the state and its staging of its official story, different articulations of nationalism, various spaces of nostalgia, academics like us who are ever-so-fascinated by writing ourselves in the question of the past and its afterlives, as well as activists, practitioners, and social media users. The past, as many have noted, is not only contested, but it also haunts the present and provides certain promises for an imagined future. This issue responds to the increasing awareness of the fragmented and incomplete nature of storytelling, the lack of accessibility of archives, and the overwhelming dominance of specific regimes of memory. The contributors reflect on the fragmentary practices and articulations that compel various actors, or “memory agents”, to do memory work: political, academic, artistic, activist or otherwise.

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Ethnographic Diaries

The Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) is pleased to be collaborating with Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal on this publication produced by the ACSS working group on “Ethnography and Knowledge in the Arab Region.”

ACSS working groups aim at bringing together Arab scholars from the region and the diaspora, across generations, disciplines, geographies, and methodologies to explore themes and topics that open up new research agendas that help us better understand the Arab region. The working groups also encourage the design of innovative and diverse outputs targeting different audiences within the region and beyond.

The Ethnography and Knowledge Working Group was launched in 2019 aiming towards understanding how ethnography can counter dominant regimes of knowledge about the Arab countries and produce a more nuanced understanding of the Arab region today.

The “Ethnographic Diaries” is a true embodiment of ACSS’s mission as an institution.  This collaborative work did not only allow the researchers to network effectively and share academic knowledge, skills and experience, but it also encouraged interdisciplinary research and built a community of 12 researchers. The space thus created proved to be therapeutic for those involved, a space to work on their writing and reflect during turbulent and highly charged times.

This project reflects the importance of ethnography in our times as a writing style and a methodology that allows us to better analyze the knowledge transformations and to foresee a better future, especially during crises and uncertainty. The collaboration with Rusted Radishes provides a link to an audience other than social scientists. The times we live in requires conversations and debates that break and cross boundaries. We hope that this publication provides a step in that direction. 

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Lectures & Webinars

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Ensure Data Privacy with a Secure Information and Cloud Security Platform

Wednesday, January 19th, 2022 11 AM PT / 2 PM ET | Zoom

Businesses must comply with GDPR, CPRA or other data privacy laws and regulations for safeguarding sensitive information against a myriad of threats.  A risk-aware privacy program must incorporate a comprehensive, people-centric DLP solution that is tailored to specific user behaviors.

Join Proofpoint experts for a 30-minute live demo to learn how the Proofpoint Information and Cloud Security Platform helps organizations achieve data protection and privacy best practices.  In this session, we'll show you how to:  

Use built-in detectors to automate regulated data classification across key channels of data loss  Build and enforce granular people-centric policies to automate data protection 

Leverage our unified alerts manager to accelerate incident response and investigation 

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Job Openings

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California State University - San Marcos, Political Science

Assistant Professor of International Relations

Review of applications will commence January 24, 2022; however, the position will remain open until filled. 

The Political Science Department at California State University San Marcos invites applications for a tenure-track position in International Relations, with a specialization in international environmental politics, at the Assistant Professor level beginning Fall 2022.

The University is particularly interested in applicants who have experience working with students from diverse backgrounds and a demonstrated commitment to improving access to higher education for under-represented groups.

CSUSM has been designated as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and was recently named one of the top 32 Colleges most friendly to junior faculty by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education. Visit Faculty Opportunities for more information.

California State University San Marcos is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer strongly committed to promoting diversity in all areas of the campus community.  We consider qualified applicants for employment without regard to age, physical or mental disability, gender or sex, genetic information, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, medical condition, nationality, race or ethnicity, religion or religious creed, sexual orientation and veteran or military status.

The person holding this position is considered a mandated reporter under the California Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Act and is required to comply with the requirements set forth in CSU Executive Order 1083 Revised December 22, 2020 as a condition of employment.

CSU requires faculty, staff, and students who are accessing campus facilities to be immunized against COVID-19 or declare a medical or religious exemption from doing so. Any candidates advanced in a currently open search process should be prepared to comply with this requirement. The systemwide policy, can be found at CSU Covid Policy. Questions should be sent to the Office of Human Resources at hr@csusm.edu. 

This position is subject to employment verification, education verification, reference checks and criminal record checks. An offer of appointment is contingent upon successful completion of a background check, including a criminal records check, and may be rescinded if the background check reveals disqualifying information and/or it is discovered that the candidate knowingly withheld or falsified information.  Failure to satisfactorily complete the background check may affect the continued employment of a current CSU employee who was conditionally offered the position.

The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act or Clery Act Notification can be found at Clery Act Notification.