How The West Was One

2006

Public Seminar, 2015

The Re-Ma,king of the West, 2002

this draft draws attention t o the historian to the fact that by studying European history by drawing a line along the Urals and the Caspian and ignoring anything that happened east of that imaginary line European history cannot be understood

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2020

The notion that the West is in decline is not new but remains topical. It is the backdrop of disappointment in the vaunted post-Cold War "Peace Dividend," the shock of 9/11, and the trajectories of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Western decline is also marked by the failure to absorb Russia in the Western-defined "international community" and the emergence of China as a fullthroated rival to liberal institutionalist teleology and Western economic superiority. Whistlers past the graveyard cobble together statistics and logic to defend what Thomas Kuhn 1 might identify as the normal science of the tattered Western-centered multiculturalist paradigm. Nevertheless, everything from Brexit to Trump, structural inequality and racism, and, of course, Covid-19 management problems raises the question as to whether the era of Western dominance and normative hegemony is done. Ben Ryan captures the story of norms and narratives behind the idea of the West and its laments, but his book does not tackle issues of power and exploitation. Ryan's analysis thus exhibits a limited understanding of the historical depth and implications of the diachronic tectonics of Western decline. Ryan notes that the West became "the West" in the nineteenth century (5) and cites the importance of that era's discipline of anthropology as helping to differentiate the supposedly enlightened European mind from "backwards or decadent alternatives." For Ryan, the "West" is a "purely intellectual construct" (3) or-in Benedict Anderson's famous phrase-an imagined community. He says it is defined by three connected ideas developed through a "distinctively Christian, Enlightenment, European intellectual prism." These encompass the dream of a moral endpoint and inevitable progress toward it, linked slogans of liberty, equality, and fraternity-which he calls the Republican (Ryan uses the upper case here) values of the Enlightenment, and Universalism, which he defines as the belief Western norms could be fostered in any part of the world (6-7). Ryan does well to capture the teleological bedrock of Western self-celebration, but he might have considered the overlapping programs for completing the Enlightenment offered by John Rawls (via law and legal institutions) and Jürgen Habermas (effective legal and affective engagement in the Agora)-Ryan does briefly cite Habermas on "constitutional patriotism" (244). After his conceptual introduction, Ryan identifies much of "what's been lost" in the West as involving faith and religion. He clearly feels strongly that the loss of faith and decline of Christian Democracy mark a real crisis of values. Given the stress he puts on this aspect of Western decline, it is surprising that his analysis of religiosity and secularity in the Western world does not appear to benefit from Charles Taylor's 2 much richer and historically anchored assessment of these issues. Taylor, like Habermas, merits only a passing mention in his book (256). Ryan also might have taken a look at James Turner's assessment of religious unbelief in America. 3 Ryan's focus on religiosity may be a reason he appears unaware of or uninterested in central, secular elements of Western-ness. First, the West is not just a set of republican and French revolutionary ideas. Not all the European powers then involved in developing the West were republics-and even the sortof constitutional monarchy of the United Kingdom had a fraught relationship with the Enlightenment as an idea or blueprint for governance and norm-based behavior. The anthropology Ryan cites helped rationalize what monarchical and republican Europeans believed was the superior development-or simply the superiority-of the Western subject compared to the not-Western other. This problem is deepened by Ryan's neglect of the distinction between the West as a whole and the various governments, intellectual constructs, security and economic policies, and imperial/postimperial programs of states falling under the term's conceptual umbrella.

International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews, 2023

Unlike other refugee novels, which usually thematize the perilous journeys across international borders undertaken by refugees to reach their destinations, Mohsin Hamid's Exit West is comparatively unconventional as it replaces the deadliest borders with magical doors through which people can move into other countries easily and instantly. By creating a world of magical realism, Hamid makes a critique of immigration issues and stringent border restrictions, which go against the standards of humanity. These doors represent hope, freedom, and the unification of the world by reducing it to a borderless place. Apart from magical doors, cell phones are regular motifs in the novel. These two elements work together leading to a time and space compression that makes physical labour seem less taxing. The doors, along with cell phones, remove the geopolitical barriers and literally enable people to live where they wish to. However, at the same time, it must be noted that the magical doors remove the threat of borders but not the xenophobic attitude of the host countries towards refugees. In fact, the novel is also a critique of nationalism, as, on the one hand, the citizens of host nations consider these refugees a threat to their normal lives and refer to the geographical areas occupied by them as "black holes in the fabric of the nation," and on the other hand, there are refugees who keep brooding about the nation they fled and are unable to mix up with or socialize with the people from other countries. In a broader sense, the novel questions the futility of borders and nationalism, which divide people and deprive them of the basic human rights.

Review of Radical Political Economics, 2000

Central Department of English, 2019

This research paper attempts to project the failure of politico-cultural globalization due to the politics of Western affluent countries. The research examines how the promise of globalization-ruling the world through single governance-is no longer meaningful in the postmodern time. The issue of nationalism in contemporaryworld has been discussed openly and the world is divided into center periphery structures, which pushes the essence of globalization at bay. By taking the theoretical insights on globalization and anti globalization proposed by the theorists like ArjunAppadurai, Jacque Derrida, ShaoboXie and Timothy Brennan, the study reveals unpredictable sufferings of refugee and migrants, and reversing the idea of global village. The journey of Saeed and Nadia, refugee, towards Western hemispheres has been stocked with many obstacles. They could not feel oneness and friendship during their journey. Due to Westerners' imperial mindset the bank of justice is bankrupted and humanity is deserted all over the world. The diverse phenomenaof globalization; multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, multinational plurality and multilingual existence of individual as well as entire society are at threat. It shows the discourse of intergovernmentalism and multiple-citizenship turned into isolationist policy in the world and failure of Western grand narratives of globalization.

Migration literature is a literature genre which is written by migrants, or tells the stories of migrants or their migration. According to Rosemary Marangoly George, migrant literature is a contemporary literary writing in which the politics of location/ or delocation is central to the narrative.'Exit West', this year's Man Booker shortlist novel of Mohsin Hamid-a Pakistani british novelist and a prominent name in contemporary migrant literature-, is a novel in which the current global migrant crisis along with expatriation-immigration dichotomy is best dealt with an optimistic approach. It is an excellent tale with powerful dramatic visuals and stories we see in our daily newspapers and on the internet. As contemporary migrant literature is best read as a sub-genre within post-modern writing which depicts the theme of dislocation and homelessness, this article attempts to bring out the elements of forced migration and current refugee crisis in Mohsin Hamid's latest novel. Human migration has a long history of almost two million years. During the course of history, human population migrated for various reasons. Coming to the modern times, 20th century world wars had an enormous impact on migration. During the collapse of Ottoman empire following the first world war, muslims moved from the Balkans to Turky, while christians moved the other way. Hundreds of thousands became homeless and stateless refugees. Because of the antisemitic attitudes of the Europe, four hundred thousand jews had already moved to Palestine and numerous jews to America. The Russian civil war forced millions of Russians to migrate out of the new Soviet union. Decolonization efforts following the second world war also caused migration like what happened between India and Pakistan during Partition. The later decades of 20th century and the beginning of 21st watched a new phase of migration, mostly for economic and career reasons. People of the undeveloped or developing countries started to migrate to European, American or Gulf regions to enhance their economic opportunities. As a result, some countries had immigrants consist of over half of their population including many Middle Eastern countries. Migrants had a crucial role in the economic growth of many states and in the cultural exchange as well.

Musket, Map and Money: How Military Technology Shaped Geopolitics and Economics

The Rise of the West 161 Refer to Anderson and Marcouiller (2005) for a theoretical treatment. Refer to Abu-Lughod, J. L. (1989) and Findlay and O'Rourke (2007) on the impacts of the Mongolian Empire on global economic exchanges. 166 Refer to Huang (1974, 1981) for an in depth study of the stagnation and decline of Ming Dynasty. Wesson (1978, p. 198) comments: "...... Commerce brings hand and brain together, as noted by Needham (1953), who saw the weakness of the merchant class in imperial China as the chief cause of the inhibition of science......"

Commentaries 13. Iran's "Charm Offensive" | Stephenie Wright 21. A Very African Homosexuality | Zain Sardar 29. Malaysian Shadow Play | Merryl Wyn davieS Papers 35. Come together...for what? Creativity and Leadership in Postnormal Times | alfonSo Montuori and gabrielle donnelly 53. The Story of a Phenomenon: Vivekananda in Nirvana Land | vinay lal 69. The Pedagogical Subject of Neoliberal Development | alvin Cheng-hin liM 93. Science Fiction Futures and the Extended Present of 3D Printers | JoShua pryor 109. Muslim Superheroes | gino Zarrinfar 123. The Joys of Being Third Class | Shiv viSanathan Review 165. How the East was Won | Shanon Shah Report 165. Looking in All Directions | John a. SWeeney CONTENTS 2 East West Affairs a Quarterly journal of north-South relations in postnormal times E D I T O r S Ziauddin Sardar, Centre for policy and futures Studies, east-West university, Chicago, uSa Jerome r. ravetz, research Methods Consultancy, oxford, england D E P u T y E D I T O r S Zain Sardar, birkbeck College, university of london, england Gordon Blaine Steffey, department of religious Studies, randolph College, lynchburg, uSa John A. Sweeney, department of political Science, university of hawaii at Manoa, honolulu, uSa M A N A G I N G E D I T O r Zafar A. Malik, dean for development and university relations, east-West university, Chicago, uSa D E P u T y M A N A G I N G E D I T O r Joel Inwood, development and university relations, east-West university, Chicago, uSa A DV I S O ry B O A r D Tahir Abbas, department of Sociology, faculty of arts and Science, fatih university, istanbul, turkey Mert Bilgin, department of political Science and international relations, bahcesehir university,