Promised Land: Settlement Schemes in Kenya, 1962 to 2016

Smallholder settlement schemes have played a prominent role in Kenya's contested history of state-building, land politics, and electoral mobilization. This paper presents the first georeferenced dataset documenting scheme location, boundaries, and attributes of Kenya's 533 official settlement schemes, as well as the first systematic data on scheme creation since 1980. The data show that almost half of all government schemes were created after 1980, as official rural development rationales for state-sponsored settlement gave way to more explicitly welfarist and electoralist objectives. Even so, logics of state territorialization to fix ethnicized, partisan constituencies to state-defined territorial units pervade the history of scheme creation over the entire 1962–2016 period, as theorized in classic political geography works on state territorialization. While these “geopolitics” of regime construction are fueled by patronage politics, they also sustain practices of land allocation that affirm the moral and political legitimacy of grievance-backed claims for land. This fuels on-going contestation around political representation and acute, if socially-fragmented, demands for state-recognition of land rights. Our findings are consistent with recent political geography and interdisciplinary work on rural peoples' demands for state recognition of land rights and access to natural resources. Kenya's history of settlement scheme creation shows that even in the country's core agricultural districts, where the reach of formal state authority is undisputed, the territorial politics of power-consolidation and resource allocation continues to be shaped by social demands and pressures from below.     

The Politics of Preaching the Promised Land for the Canaanites

Abstract

This paper explores issues around European Christian theological prejudice against Jews and Judaism and asks whether attempts to make amends for the wrongs done to one people have blunted the conscience of Christians to the sufferings of another. It is ironic that the division between those who attribute anti-Semitism to New Testament texts and those who blame the misuse of the texts mirrors division over colonialist ideologies in the Old Testament. Should we blame the text or its interpreters? There is irony in the fact that those who wrestle with anti-Judaic texts in the New Testament are seldom the same people who perceive problems with the land traditions in the Old—or indeed the other way round! Evangelical Christian Zionist insensitivity towards the Palestinians derives from biblical fundamentalism. Mainstream Christian Zionism derives partly from guilt over past Christian crimes against the Jews but it also reveals a residual fundamentalist underpinning.     

Memory,Identity and Aspiration: Early Modern Jewish Maps of the Promised Land

In the sixteenth century Jews began to produce maps showing the Exodus to the Promised Land. My aim in this article is to show that, through unique compositions of written biblical references and pictured symbolism (both Jewish and Christian), maps such as the Mantua map (1560s) and, a century later, the Amsterdam Haggadah [Passover] map (1695) were a means of constructing Jewish cultural memory and identity in the Diaspora and fostering aspiration for a second salvation through a return to Zion. I also explore the Jewish approach towards the biblical land as this was reflected in the maps.     

Signed,Sealed but Never Delivered: Why Israel did not Receive Nixon's Promised Nuclear Power Plants

ABSTRACT

In the early 1970s, Israel was on the cusp of launching an ambitious nuclear power programme. It had technical nuclear experience and a pressing need to limit its dependency on imported oil and coal, and interest in nuclear powered water desalination. This nuclear vision enjoyed the support of the Nixon administration, which proposed in June 1974 to export reactors to both Israel and Egypt. But by the end of the decade, under the Carter administration, the plan was all but gone. What was the original US and Israeli rationale behind the reactor deal? How did this initiative relate to other developments such as the Indian nuclear explosion, the Arab oil embargo and the peace talks with Egypt? How important was the Carter administration's policy shift in determining the outcome of the initiative? This paper will address these questions by analysing newly declassified documents from several US and Israeli archives.¹1. Archival research for this study was conducted at the Lindon B. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas, (LBJL), Richard M. Nixon Library, Yorba Linda, California (RNL), Gerald Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan (GFL), Jimmy Carter Library, Atlanta, Georgia, (JCL), National Archives and Records Administration, Maryland, (NARA), The British National Archives, Kew, UK, (TNA), The Israeli National Archive, Jerusalem, Israel (INA), the David Tuviyahu Archive, Be'er-Sheva, Israel (DTA), The Kibbutz Movement Yad-Tabenkin Archives, Ramat-Ef'al, Israel, The Knesset archive, Jerusalem, and several other archives.     

Searching for the Promised Land: Examining Dr Martin Luther King's Concept of the Beloved Community1

Abstract: 4 April 2008 marked the 40th anniversary of Dr King's assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Since his murder we have seen Dr King's message of social justice, the growing threat of militarism, the threat the USA's burgeoning empire posed, and his goal of ending injustice boiled down to a few words spoken in Washington DC when he declared his dream to see his children grow up in a society free of race prejudice. This paper engages with Dr King's work and presents a more geographically sophisticated understanding of King's legacy than the oft repeated Washington speech. Through an analysis of Dr King's concept of the Beloved Community, I argue that Dr King's work stems from the experiences of the Black Atlantic world. Consequently, we should see Dr King's social theory as part of a larger anti‐colonial struggle which sought to integrate African American and Western notions of community, which holds contemporary importance as a counterpoint to current neoliberal conceptions of community.     

A European Enlightenment in the Promised Land? The Jewish Kulturkampf at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the European Kulturkampf in the nineteenth century from the points of view of the Russian Hebrew writer Judah Leib Gordon and the founding father of the Zionist movement Theodor Herzl. Gordon’s literary outlook emphasizes the tension between the traditional Jewish religious leadership and the maskilim as an instance of the sweeping all-European Kulturkampf phenomenon, in which the problem of the rabbis was the last issue that had not yet been solved. He believed that the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel, without the elimination of the rabbis’ authority, carried serious dangers. In his dystopian feuilleton published in 1885 depicting the future Jewish state, he argued that the victory of liberalism was a historical necessity in order to avoid a radical orthodox and nationalistic hegemony. Like Gordon before him, Herzl feared that losing the basic humanistic principles of the Enlightenment the Jews had acquired in Europe would be one of the outcomes of their settling in the Land of Israel. In his 1902 utopian novel Altneuland he declared: “Stand by the principles that have made us great: Liberalism, Tolerance, Love of Mankind. Only then will Zion be truly Zion.” Gordon and Herzl both expressed their concerns in their fictional works, probably wishing that these would serve only as warning signs.     

Like Moses Who Led His People to the Promised Land: Nation‐ and State‐Building in Bougainville

This article focuses on indigenous religious beliefs and practices in relation to nationalism and state‐building in conflict and post‐conflict Bougainville. Since the early seventies, people of the island of Bougainville have sought to secede from Papua New Guinea and constitute a separate sovereign state. The almost ten year long secessionist struggle between the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) and the PNG Defence Force (PNGDF) that eventuated in 1988, destroyed nearly all infrastructure, socio‐economic services, and the functions of the PNG state on the island. At the same time, the crisis also brought about the establishment of new local governments, such as ‘The Bougainville Interim Government’, as well as a new Nation: the Independent Republic, later called the Kingdom of Me'ekamui, ruled by BRA leader Francis Ona. This article explores the creation of the Me'ekamui Nation and analyses the religious underpinnings of nation‐ and state‐building in Bougainville, focusing on the performances and normative frameworks used in the endeavor to become a sovereign state.     

The Promised Medicine: Fore Reflections on the Scientific Investigation of Kuru

This paper explores the oral narratives of five South Fore men who assisted with the scientific investigation of kuru. Drawing on the framework of the dramaturgic form of epidemics, the narratives start with childhood memories of the social crisis at the height of the kuru epidemic. With the arrival of the European scientists they build to a climax of optimism over the prospect of a cure for kuru and enhanced personal futures before descending into disillusionment over the scientists' departure and a return to traditional village life.     

The Cave Who Never Was: Outsider Archaeology and Failed Collaboration in the USA

Abstract

The alleged 1982 discovery of a phantasmagorical Late-Antique necropolis in southern Illinois has largely escaped the attention of professional archaeologists, despite thousands of artefacts having been sold to naive collectors and would-be revolutionary scholars for more than a quarter of a century. The site (named Burrows Cave after its notorious finder) is a staple of outsider archaeology, like 10,000-year-old pyramids and ancient astronauts. Burrows Cave flourishes in the extra-disciplinary realm of hyperdiffusionist archaeology, terra incognita outside the bounds of the traditional science and thus not considered worthy of examination by scholars. This essay explores the significance of US archaeologists’ failure to critically yet respectfully engage with a public who is extremely interested in archaeological discoveries but sceptical of scholarly elitism. Professionals’ disinterest has resulted in a dismissal of outsider archaeology en masse, leaving the worst abuses unchecked. This leaves the public with few clues to distinguish the impossible from the improbable, unorthodox, or iconoclastic. Audacious enterprises such as Burrows’ are left to flourish, driving wedges between archaeologists and the interested public, preventing effective collaboration and dialogue. Burrows Cave is a lesson for aspiring archaeologists: proof of what happens when professionals turn up their noses at opportunities for engagement with community interests.