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The chapter discusses contact-induced phenomena, the models used in linguistics to represent processes of diffusion, and the principles that govern them. It explains several cases of diffusion across language barriers, borrowing and substrate effects, dialect contact, and new-dialect formation.
Understanding and representing the transformation of agricultural production systems has attracted increasing interest due to its importance for identifying drivers of changes and coping mechanisms in response to global challenges. These challenges are all the most pressing in North African countries exposed to a dramatic reduction in rainfall and increasing temperatures that affect sustainability in more than half of this semi-arid territory. This paper describes an improved way to understand such transformations through a cross-cutting analysis of crop–livestock system indicators over a period of 10 years in one community in Southern Tunisia. Our methodology is divided into four steps: (i) systems identification, (ii) indicator-based assessment of system crop–livestock sustainability, (iii) hierarchical clustering to identify sustainable intensification (SI)-based farm types and, finally, (iv) analysis of trajectories of these farm types. Results showed that the sustainability of the systems studied increasingly depends on diversification rather than intensification, which dominated in the 2000s. However, diversification has not necessarily improved socio-economic viability. Over the 10-year period, results revealed a dramatic increase of almost 50% in the population of small-scale farms whose viability depends on a range of on- and off-farm activities to meet the short-term needs that correspond to a buffer strategy. Additionally, the dominant SI processes were shown to be mostly based on diversification to livestock activities with both milking and fattening. Our holistic and timeline approach to system transformation makes it possible to account for sustainability between (systems) generations, which will be highly needed in future discussions about sustainability.
Whose name is hidden behind the anonymity of the key publication on Mediterranean Lingua Franca? What linguistic reality does the label 'Lingua Franca' conceal? These and related questions are explored in this new book on an enduringly important topic. The book presents a typologically informed analysis of Mediterranean Lingua Franca, as documented in the Dictionnaire de la langue franque ou petit mauresque, which provides an important historical snapshot of contact-induced language change. Based on a close study of the Dictionnaire in its historical and linguistic context, the book proposes hypotheses concerning its models, authorship and publication history, and examines the place of the Dictionnaire's Lingua Franca in the structural typological space between Romance languages, on the one hand, and pidgins, on the other. It refines our understanding of the typology of contact outcomes while at the same time opening unexpected new avenues for both linguistic and historical research.
Ultimately, strategy is decided by the government, which might or might not accept the views of its military advisers. In Australia, during February 1941 there were a number of remarkable meetings of the Advisory War Council and of the War Cabinet that resulted in a change in attitude towards the threat from Japan, and soon after to a change in Australian strategy. This is not to suggest that the magnitude of the Japanese threat had not previously been realised. Indeed, in December 1940 the Australian Government had offered to send a brigade to Malaya, and Prime Minister Robert Menzies had decided to visit London to press for reinforcements for the Far East. But the meetings in February saw a heightening of the concern about Japan and, more particularly, revealed a greater role for the non-government members of the Advisory War Council. The council had been formed the previous year to involve members of the Opposition in the management of the Australian war effort.
The article analyses Russia's recent return to Africa. It attempts to answer the question to what extent Russia has abandoned its traditional tools of cooperation such as nuclear energy and military cooperation and engaged in new ‘smart’ ones as indicated by former Foreign Minister Ivanov in 2011. The paper builds on three case studies of African countries having the largest trade volume with Russia in 2018, i.e. Egypt, Algeria and Morocco, and analyses their changing relationship with Russia over the last decade. The results show that Russia has not abandoned its traditional tools but has intensified the use of new ones. The North African region as such has regained significance in Russia's foreign policy. Bilateral relations with all three North African countries have increased at both political and economic levels recently.
While captivity was the product of the violent confrontation between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, this essay uses Latin, Arabic, and Romance sources to argue that ransoming was also a phenomenon that intimately linked these communities. Grounded in a shared Roman inheritance, the tradition of ransoming brought Jews, Christians, and Muslims into a dialogic and reciprocal relationship with one another, one that depended on mutual understanding and expectations. It provided a channel to share ideas and institutions. Ransomers also helped pave the paths for commercial and diplomatic relations. Nevertheless, if ransoming drew these communities together, it also tore them apart. The physical and emotional cost of captivity, although shared, became the ground of separation.
Tree characteristics, microhabitat, and human presence were measured around nest trees (n = 92) and non-nest trees (n = 92) to identify the best predictors of the European Turtle-dove Streptopelia turtur nest occurrence in date palm plantations of the Biskra region (Algeria). Nest occurrence was (i) positively influenced by the height of trees and that of the herbaceous layer, and (ii) quadratically affected by diameter at breast height (DBH), the cover of trees, the cover of the herbaceous vegetation, and the distance to the edge of date palm plantation. Variation partitioning analysis revealed that the pure effect of tree physical characteristics (tree height and DBH) was robust in explaining the occurrence of Turtle Dove nests (adj. R2 = 0.52, P = 0.001). For an efficient management of this Saharan population, special attention should be paid in the short term to keeping high date palm trees while ensuring, in the medium and long term, the presence of different-sized palm tree classes at each exploitation. There is no doubt that date palm plantations of Biskra are of paramount importance because they offer good opportunities for consolidating and improving the knowledge on this threatened species and other species at the Sahara edge.
Phosphates mined in France’s North African empire fed interwar Europe’s voracious appetite for chemical fertilizers. In critique of histories vesting commodities themselves with the agency to make the modern world, I trace not the substance but the value embedded within it. By following value, I argue that the ‘commodity’ is not a stable unit of analysis. Rather, commodities are multiform. They can acquire myriad properties when the value embedded within them changes across time and place. During the interwar period, phosphates’ character as a commodity transmuted in relation to flows of other goods, movements of labour, global financial exigencies and imperial considerations. As phosphates assumed new forms, the geographic scales over which they operated changed too. Through North African phosphates, I explore value-making processes that perpetuated capital-intensive farming, allowing for a history not of the commodity-as-substance but of the commodity-as-historical-object whose analytical boundaries and forms shifted across contexts.
The revolutions that began to sweep across countries in North Africa and the Middle East in December 2010 – like other revolutions in diverse modern historical contexts – have often been articulated, internally and externally, in black and white terms of success or failure, liberation or constraint, for or against, friend or enemy. These internal and external clichés are perpetuated by what Jellel Gasteli has called 'icons of revolutionary exoticism'. Paying particular attention to works from the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, this book examines a diverse body of art including photography, sculpture, graffiti, performance, video and installation by over twenty-five artists. Examining how art can evoke the idea of revolution, Art and the Arab Spring reveals a new way of understanding these revolutions, their profound cultural impact, and of the meaning of the term 'revolution' itself.
Local Content and Sustainable Development in Global Energy Markets analyses the topical and contentious issue of the critical intersections between local content requirements (LCRs) and the implementation of sustainable development treaties in global energy markets including Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Latin America, South America, Australasia and the Middle East While LCRs generally aim to boost domestic value creation and economic growth, inappropriately designed LCRs could produce negative social, human rights and environmental outcomes, and a misalignment of a country's fiscal policies and global sustainable development goals. These unintended outcomes may ultimately serve as disincentive to foreign participation in a country's energy market. This book outlines the guiding principles of a sustainable and rights-based approach – focusing on transparency, accountability, gender justice and other human rights issues – to the design, application and implementation of LCRs in global energy markets to avoid misalignments.
The ‘North African novel in French’ is a difficult category to circumscribe and define. It immediately announces a tension, juxtaposing writing in the French language on the one hand with a ‘North African’ culture or identity on the other. This tension bears the trace, moreover, of the colonial past, of regimes established in the Maghrebian region which not only expropriated the land from local peoples and seized local resources but also attempted to impose the use of French language, culture, and ideology. Those novelists who wrote or continue to write in French necessarily record the heritage of France’s aggressive empire-building, even while, as ‘North Africans’, they also associate themselves with local, Arab or Berber cultures. The ‘North African novel in French’ is as a result a divided, alienated creature, disconsolately vilifying the culture in which it nonetheless on some level must participate. This chapter explores three key issues raised by these novels, those of ‘insurrection and revolt’, ‘history and fiction’, and ‘crossing borders’. These issues all reveal the multiple influences negotiated by the North African novel in French as well as signalling its unique contribution to the reinvention of the novel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
This essay argues that the usages of the divide between Berbers and Arabs by the Algerian government and Berber activists alike should be analyzed in light of the transformation of the Imazighen into a cultural minority by the nation-state. The nation-state's definition of the majority as Arab, as well as the very concept of a minority, has shaped both the status and the grammar of the Arab-Berber divide in ways that are irreducible to how this binary functioned under French colonialism. In order to understand the distinct modes by which these categories function in Algeria today, one needs to analyze how the language of the nation-state determines their grammar, namely how they are deployed within this political context. Hence, by focusing primarily on French colonial representations of race such as the Kabyle Myth and by asserting simplified colonial continuities, the literature fails to make sense of the political centrality of the nation-state in the construction of the Amazigh question.
The practice in provincial towns of raising statues to emperors is often interpreted as a mode of communication between emperors and subjects, whether as top-down distribution of imperial ideology or as from-below declarations of loyalty to the regime. This chapter explores ways in which imperial statues communicated vertically, on the initiative of locals and with local aims. Using inscribed statue bases from Roman North Africa, it describes how imperial honorific monuments were exploited for the career purposes of local elites, and accompanied significant advancements by both individuals and communities. Imperial monuments and priesthoods became indispensable tokens of local standing, displaying and confirming the local powers that be. They were consequently much desired, and access to them could be opened or closed as it suited the aims of the imperial administration. Both locals and emperors could thus exploit the imperial image – the one for their potency, the other for how demand for them fuelled local peer-to-peer competition – but without communicating directly through them.
A recent revival of interest in the empires of the medieval western Savannah and Sahel has generated new insights into slavery, ethnicity, race, and gender in precolonial West Africa. New histories of medieval West Africa also expand the spatial frame through which the relationship between the region's polities and the broader world can be understood. This essay offers a survey of that literature.
The Introduction lays out the analytical approach of the book, namely a focus on understanding jihadism at the meso level by examining the behaviors and perspectives of jihadist field commanders. This approach contrasts with macro-level approaches that foreground global doctrines and movements, and also contrasts with micro-level approaches that highlight issues of individual radicalization. The Introduction argues that at the meso level, politics and religion work differently for jihadists than at the macro level. At the meso level, politics is less about implementing one-size-fits-all ideologies and is more about building coalitions and managing relationships, while religion is less about one-size-fits-all theologies and more about generating narratives that explain and give meaning to fast-moving events and improvised decisions. It also provides context for understanding the local and regional dynamics of jihadism in the Sahel and North Africa.
The Conclusion draws out the analytical and policy implications of the book, concentrating on the ways that collective punishment by states allows jihadists to expand their ranks. The Conclusion also argues that the War on Terror needs to be fundamentally rethought, and that dialogue with jihadists might be viable.
Jihadist movements have claimed that they are merely vehicles for the application of God's word, distancing themselves from politics, which they call dirty and manmade. Yet on closer examination, jihadist movements are immersed in politics, negotiating political relationships not just with the forces surrounding them, but also within their own ranks. Drawing on case studies from North Africa and the Sahel - including Algeria, Libya, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania - this study examines jihadist movements from the inside, uncovering their activities and internal struggles over the past three decades. Highlighting the calculations that jihadist field commanders and clerics make, Alexander Thurston shows how leaders improvise, both politically and religiously, as they adjust to fast-moving conflicts. Featuring critical analysis of Arabic-language jihadist statements, this book offers unique insights into the inner workings of jihadist organisations and sheds new light on the phenomenon of mass-based jihadist movements and proto-states.