United States–Mexico: The Convergence of Public Policy Views in the Post‐9/11 World

This article explores the state of public policy preferences between the United States and Mexico in the realm of foreign policy in the context of the post‐9/11 world, democratic change within Mexico, and the immigration protests within the United States. Specifically, we will analyze the differences and possible convergence of public policy views on the issues of terrorism, immigration, free trade agreements, drug trafficking, and foreign policy. We find that although there are differences of opinion, particularly in the application of force in Iraq and on the benefits of free trade, there still remains a significant degree of positive convergence within the policy issues of terrorism, immigration, and drug trafficking. Although there are institutional impediments to progressive policy change, future relations between the United States and Mexico do not need to be contentious as long as the focus is on the similarities, rather than the differences, in public preferences between the populations of the two states.     

The Heartbreak of the Place: Space,Religion and Politics in Post‐9/11 Mosque Controversies

In recent years, there have been a series of public controversies related to construction of Islamic worship spaces in the U.S. One of these controversies, surrounding a proposal for an Islamic community center in New York City known as Park51, dominated media coverage for several weeks in the summer of 2010 and is one of several high‐profile mosque‐building debates in the U.S. Another contentious debate occurred in the community of Temecula, Calif. These controversies represent the still‐uncertain place Islam holds in the American public sphere. Using framing theory, this article considers the ways in which Islam is portrayed in news media content by political actors and the potential consequences of such framing.     

Post‐9/11 Masculinist Incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan: Women’s Bodies as Bullets in Imperialist Agendas

The gender question in the Middle East now serves ends beyond the local. It may be registered within a cluster of international patriarchal war‐promoting discourses that find tremendous benefit in the historical bulk of literature that demonizes the Middle Eastern male and victimizes the female. This article attempts to defend two related arguments, both of which are well served by Foucault’s Biopolitics (Foucault, The birth of biopolitics), in which he correlates between territorial control and the violence inherent to any hegemony’s preoccupation with the body (i.e., the Middle Eastern/Muslim woman’s body) and Achille Mbembe’s theory of Necroplotics and its designation of who “may live” and who “must die” (Mbembé, 2003:11–4). I argue that in the post‐9/11 era, the world has witnessed a globalist civilizational masculinist incursion on its demonized Middle Eastern/Islamic Other. The militaristic discourse at work seems to be self‐appropriating the Middle Eastern/Muslim woman’s body as a site of sexual oppression and (mis)using it to its own means. The impetus of the 9/11 necropolitics, aggressively transposes gender dialog/conflict in the Middle East/Muslim countries from a benign social and intellectual interface, where different alliances may be negotiated, to an aggressive militaristic zone, where the “bogeyman” must “die.”     

'United We Stand': American Attitudes toward (Muslim) Immigration Post-September 11th

Listen here, professor. You're the one that needs an American history lesson! You don't know nothing about Lady Liberty standing there in the harbor with her torch on high, saying 'Give me your poor, your dead-beats, your filthy.' -Archie Bunker All in the Family     

Continental Drift: Negotiating Male Performance in Canadian and American Cinema from the Late Sixties

Michel Brault's Entre la mer et l'eau douce (1967), one of the most accomplished feature films of the Quiet Revolution period, follows the journey of singer-songwriter Claude Fournier from the Charlevoix region to Montreal, where he drifts through a series of marginal jobs and love relationships before returning, disappointed, to his rural village. A portrait of “in-betweenness” in terms of identity, space and time, Brault's film tells the story of Quebec's increasing urbanization and of a people's collective entry into modernity, yet has received much less critical attention than other Quiet Revolution classics such as [Agrave] tout prendre and Le chat dans le sac. This article proposes a reading of this film that recognizes its importance as a key cinematic stepping stone in the Quebec national project, but also places it within a larger context of “coming-to-the-city” narratives. How does comparing Entre la mer et l'eau douce to English-Canadian and American classics which tackle similar themes (i.e., Goin' Down the Road, 1970; Midnight Cowboy, 1969) enable a larger discussion of the representation and appropriation of space, place and movement in the North America imaginary and Quebec's place therein?     

Mothers/Fighters/Citizens: Violence and Disillusionment in Post‐War El Salvador

This article explores post‐war El Salvador as characterised by disillusionment in the nation's neoliberal rebuilding project. A key part of my argument is that this disillusion‐ment is gendered. Specifically, I focus on a spectrum of gendered experiences and responses to social and inter‐personal violence in El Salvador's recent history. Is there a relationship between wartime political violence, continued processes of exclusion (i.e. education, healthcare, housing), and post‐war waves of domestic violence, youth violence and ‘random’ violence? While some scholars posit questions regarding Salvadoran toler‐ance to violence through time, I tackle this question by focusing on emerging criticisms of El Salvador's post‐war reconciliation. I privilege a focus on the everyday and people's ambiguities as they deal with political change and a neoliberal economy that marginalises the rural sector. In particular, I argue for placing many rural women's stories of gender‐based violence, their assertions of an embodied vulnerability and daily insecurity, within a political economic understanding of the contradictions of El Salvador's peace and nation‐building project. Through a series of ethnographic examples based on seventeen months of research in a former warzone, I suggest that a daily and gendered violence is rendered invisible. My aim is to theorise a range of women's and men's losses and to impart the urgency of their narratives that problematise assumptions of what constitutes pain, sorrow and the challenges of war‐torn life. This is an attempt to write outside privileged texts that ask subaltern women to speak in a collective voice and articulate their past loss and future hopes. In doing so, I discuss methodology and historicise my own fraught positioning as an international witness/researcher at a very particular moment of El Salvador's transition to democracy.     

9/11 and the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy

Does the national security strategy of the Bush administration constitute a radical new departure or does it possess clear links to past American policies? Is the Bush strategy motivated by the perception of threat, the pursuit of power, or the quest for hegemony? This article argues that the policies of the Bush administration are more textured and more conflicted than either its friends or its foes believe. They are also less bold and less likely to offer enduring solutions. In fact, they constitute a surprising departure from the ways most former US administrations have dealt with ‘existential’ threats in the twentieth century. By championing a ‘balance of power favouring freedom’ and by eschewing the ‘community of power’ approach propounded by Woodrow Wilson, Bush and his advisers are charting a unilateralist course for times of crisis, a course neither so popular nor so efficacious as its proponents think. But the unilateralism is prompted by fears and threats that must not be dismissed or trivialized by critics of the administration.     

Irruptions of the Dreamings in Post‐Colonial Australia

This essay is written round four ‘funny stories’ from Northern Australia. Metamorphosis instigated by a Dreaming is central to all four stories and this is why the stories are counted as ‘funny,’ and received with glee. The analysis illuminates a topic that has been attracting attention in recent contributions to Aboriginal ethnography: how Dreamings irrupt into contemporary histories and act in ways that have political significance, contesting whitefella paradigms and re‐asserting the world‐view of the original Australians.     

Gender and Welfare Reform in Post‐ Revolutionary Mexico

This article discusses the impact a gender and woman's history conference had on the development of my own research and writing. ‘Las Olvidadas’ was a conference held at Yale in the Spring of 2001, and was the first in a series of Mexican women's and gender history conferences organised. My own research, on the gendered nature of the welfare state in Mexico, explores how class and race intersected with gender to produce a welfare system that, while particular to Mexico, also nevertheless had much in common with other Latin American countries. These conferences shaped both my views of gender, but also the importance of the transnational to historical research.     

Orphans’ Land Rights in Post‐War Rwanda: The Problem of Guardianship

In 1994, the Rwandan civil war and genocide produced thousands of orphans. Alongside the war, the growing HIV/AIDS crisis in Rwanda has produced a current population of about 300,000 orphans — many of whom are compelled to head households. These orphans urgently require land use rights, but many find that their rights to their deceased parents’ customary land holdings are denied or restricted by their guardians and others. Despite the legal protections for children that are guaranteed within Rwanda's laws, the reality is that many guardians do not respect orphans’ land rights and few orphans have sufficient access to administrative and legal forums to assert and defend these rights. In contrast to most accounts in the literature that discuss more generally the issue of African orphans’ land rights in the context of adults’ land rights, this article focuses on specific cases in which Rwandan orphans independently pursued their land rights. Ultimately, the article concludes that in Rwanda — and elsewhere in Africa — government officials should re‐examine their ideas about guardianship and grant orphans urgent attention as individuals and as a special interest group.     

Rentier Statebuilding in a Post‐Conflict Economy: The Case of Kosovo

Kosovo has been under various forms of international administration since 1999. Although the political dimension of this international experience has been widely studied by scholars — especially those associated with the critical theory of liberal peacebuilding — the economic dimension of international rule has received less attention. This article explores the economic dimension by linking insights from rentier theory with critical approaches to liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding. The postulate informing this article is that the sources of a state's income have an impact on its institutional development. The article discusses liberal peacebuilding through the lens of rentier theory, it analyses the economic management in the early years of the international administration of Kosovo, and describes and explores some of the unintended consequences of this massive international presence in Kosovo for the local economy.     

Maori Tribalism and Post‐settler Nationhood in New Zealand

In this article I begin by sketching the main events in a recent dispute over the allocation of fishing quota among Maori. I seek to shed some light on the ideological grounding of this dispute in the simultaneous individualisation and tribalisation of Maori society since the late 19th century. Because the New Zealand nation is now imagined as an essentially binary one (bicultural, or treaty‐based) there is no secure place for urban indigeneity which constitutes a third voice. The inability of urban Maori Authorities to gain a share of the fishing quota is a reflection of this binarism.