The Congolese civil war is one of the oldest and most complex conflicts in African history. Independent Congo has undergone multiple phases of protracted conflict and hostility. While there are several scholarship studies on the causes of civil war, few analysts have examined why civil war persists Continue reading
Author Archives: readberead
Why the Law couldn’t keep its promises if it tried ? Exclusion and Inequality at the basis of Order
Despite its claims to universality, law creates boundaries between insiders and outsiders. The task of the legal anthropologist is to understand how these boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are drawn. Continue reading
How can growth reduce equality?
Inequality is neither intrinsically positive or detrimental. Its meaning has been distorted in our veneration of the free market, but some level of inequality is necessary. Continue reading
What is the meaning of European identity today ?
This powerful essay questions the very meaning and significance of European collective political identity’s emergence within the European integration project. Continue reading
The relationship between the political and religious right in Israel (1967-1981)
The relationship between the political and the religious right in Israel between 1967 and 1981 was a deep ideological relationship based on a renewal of both their conception of the Israeli national identity and understanding of Zionism. Continue reading
On Either Side of the Looking Glass: Anthropology and Double Consciousness
Double consciousness describes the ‘sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt or pity’ (Du Bois, 1994). It is the result of one’s acculturation into a dominant discourse that ‘yields not true self-consciousness’ and supplants it with ascribed inferiority. Continue reading
The Creation of an Invisible Front: The Role of Ethnicity in Pre-Colonial Africa and its Transformation in Early Colonial Times
The new arrivals to Africa, colonial authorities, managed to create a new front for warfare and violence – and whose influence was not felt in its devastating entirety until many, many years later. Continue reading
Why has NATO endured?
How to make sense of the unexpected survival of NATO after the end of the Cold War ? Understood as a military alliance created to counter the Soviet threat, a realist account would have predicted its disintegration as soon as this commonly perceived threat disappeared. This essay argues that NATO survived because it was identified by its members as the key representative of a self-defined security community of Western liberal-democratic states. Continue reading
Un outil du nationalisme religieux en Algérie : le journal Chihâb des Oulémas réformistes
Dans quelle mesure le discours de ces Oulémas réformistes est-il représentatif d’un nationalisme, inspiré des mouvements occidentaux, qui se construit en réaction à la domination coloniale ?