- Erin Braatz (Suffolk University Law School) recently reviewed Rabiat Akande‘s (University of Toronto) Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge University Press). The book “confronts a paradox: the state insisted on its separation from religion even as it governed its multireligious population through what remained of the precolonial caliphate. Entangled Domains grapple with this history to offer a provocative account of secularism as a contested yet contingent mode of governing religion and religious difference.”
- Mahmut Polat (University of Minnesota) recently reviewed İlkay Yılmaz‘s (Freie Universität Berlin) Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908 (Syracuse University Press). The book “reconsiders the history of two political issues, the Armenian and Macedonian questions, approaching both through the lens of mobility restrictions during the late Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1908. Yılmaz investigates how Ottoman security perceptions and travel regulations were directly linked to transnational security regimes battling against anarchism. The Hamidian government targeted “internal threats” to the regime with security policies that created new categories of suspects benefiting from the concepts of vagrant, conspirator, and anarchist. Yılmaz explores how mobility restrictions and the use of passports became critical to targeting groups including Armenians, Bulgarians, seasonal and foreign workers, and revolutionaries.”
- In “Iran: It’s the Constitution!” (Small Wars Journal), Thomas J. Ward (HJ International Graduate School) observes that “should military action succeed in significantly degrading Iran’s defenses and a naval blockade further constrain its economic and industrial capacity, Iran – with a talented and highly educated population and an abundance of oil, natural gas, and mineral resources – can be expected to re-emerge as a regional power in the not-so-distant future following the conclusion of any conflict. While the United States and Israel have their thumbs on the scale in the kinetic dimension of the conflict, there is another dimension of this conflict that supersedes psychological profiling the actors seated in the musical chairs of Iranian leadership: the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”