Volume 05, Issue 2, Summer 2014

Rémy M. Mauduit
 
Half of humanity suffers from discrimination and violence everywhere in the world. Women in developing countries are hampered by many of the same concerns that affect females in other nations, but they face numerous other challenges to their physical and economic security, their rights, and their dignity. These barriers include poverty; illiteracy; a lack of rights; sociocultural and religious factors that legitimize and condone everyday violence; discrimination; and marginalization in the family, community, and public sphere.

Cheryl Van Den Handel, PhD
Jennifer Edwards, PhD
Jacqueline Watson
 
At present, some African countries are struggling with social and political disruptions that threaten to bring down governments. This article asks if women can effectively act as agents of information diffusion about women's issues throughout the Middle East and Africa to mobilize for peace and gain political voice. Secondly, it compares the efficacy of women in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with that of women in sub-Saharan Africa. We find that as women's social networks establish themselves in one country, they diffuse regionally as proponents of conflict resolution and state rebuilding, resulting in growing civil society on the African continent.

Adam Sneyd, PhD
 
This article explores the prospects for bolstering analyses of capitalism in Africa through engaging with an analytical supplier whose outputs have simply not yet penetrated the market for knowledge on African political economies. It asks what the writings of John Kenneth Galbraith can bring to analytical tool kits already populated with the intellectual legacies of social scientists such as Max Weber. In doing so, it argues that various approaches, concepts, and insights that Galbraith developed or popularized can enhance our understanding of dynamics associated with capitalism in Africa.

Andrej Zwitter, PhD
 
Prof. Jack Kalpakian argues in this article that disputes over the Ethiopian Blue Nile dams are a result of identity construction and nationalism in the Nile basin, especially in Egypt. Normally, pressures produced by droughts and climate change would lead to cooperative behavior because upstream dams represent a premium for everyone. Egypt, however, has consistently rejected win-win approaches to integrated water management in the basin because it views itself as the owner of the Nile, a perspective rejected by nearly all other riparians, including Sudan. At present, the shifting of the balance of power in the Nile basin away from Egypt and towards Ethiopia has led to a change in Sudanese policy out of sheer necessity. Professor Kalpakian concludes with a discussion and reflections about risks facing citizens in the region, particularly the religious minorities in Egypt and Ethiopia.

Aron Shai, PhD
 
When Israeli leaders arrived in the People's Republic of China (PRC) in recent years, they found an ancient country with a new outlook. Indeed, over the previous years, China had reached a decision not to content itself any longer with foreign expressions of admiration for its unprecedented building boom or impressive production and trade figures, praise that inevitably smacked of paternalism and even condescension by the developed world toward a backward country. Instead, China, which is rising geopolitically (no longer only economically) and is a nuclear weapons state that arouses major anxiety among many policy makers in the United States, is now in the midst of a distinct transformation.