While Kazakhstan is not a country with frequent or dramatic government crackdowns on freedoms and human rights, when it comes to exercising fundamental rights such as worship, press freedom, and assembly, Kazakhstan's people live in an atmosphere that is far more circumscribed and fearful than one would expect of a country that will soon take on the leadership of an organization grounded in human rights principles. This report documents human rights violations in these three areas. It analyzes overly restrictive measures, and draft laws that fail to correct them. It describes the often subtle but effective methods the government uses to prevent people from fully exercising these rights. Kazakhstan should implement, soon, consistently, and meaningfully the human rights reforms it has promised the OSCE and which are required of it as an OSCE participating state. In so doing, Kazakhstan would provide an important positive example to other countries of Central Asia.
Twenty-third century Earth, ravaged by climate change, looks backwards to the holy ideal of a pre-industrial Eden. Political power has been grabbed by a few powerful families and their green saints. Millions of people are imprisoned in teeming cities; millions more labour on Pharaonic projects to rebuild ruined ecosystems. On the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the Outers, descendants of refugees from Earth's repressive regimes, have constructed a wild variety of self-sufficient cities and settlements: scientific utopias crammed with exuberant creations of the genetic arts; the last outposts of every kind of democratic tradition. The fragile detente between the Outer cities and the dynasties of Earth is threatened by the ambitions of the rising generation of Outers, who want to break free of their cosy, inward-looking pocket paradises, colonise the rest of the Solar System, and drive human evolution in a hundred new directions. On Earth, many demand pre-emptive action against the Outers before it's too late; others want to exploit the talents of their scientists and gene wizards. Amid campaigns for peace and reconciliation, political machinations, crude displays of military might, and espionage by cunningly wrought agents, the two branches of humanity edge towards war...
From Czarism and Bolshevism to the current post-communist era, the media in Central Asia has been tightly constrained. Though the governments in the region assert that a free press is permitted to operate, research has shown this to be untrue. In all five former Soviet republics of Central Asia, the media has been controlled, suppressed, punished, and often outlawed. This enlightening collection of essays investigates the reasons why these countries have failed to develop independent and sustainable press systems. It documents the complex relationship between the press and governance, nation-building, national identity, and public policy. In this book, scholars explore the numerous and broad-reaching implications of media control in a variety of contexts, touching on topics such as Internet regulation and censorship, press rights abuses, professional journalism standards and self-censorship, media ownership, ethnic newspapers, blogging, Western broadcasting into the region, and coverage of terrorism.
Since 1995, the Nations in Transit series has monitored the status of democratic change from Central Europe to Eurasia and pinpointed for policymakers, researchers, journalists, and democracy advocates alike the greatest reform challenges and reform opportunities facing the countries and territories that make up this vast geographic space. Covering 29 countries and administrative areas, Nations in Transit 2010 provides comparative ratings and in-depth analysis of electoral processes, civil society, independent media, national democratic governance, local democratic governance, judicial framework & independence, and corruption. Freedom House--which for more than a quarter century has rated global political rights and civil liberties in its benchmark Freedom in the World surveys--has developed a ratings system that allows for comparative analysis of reforms. Nations in Transit findings have drawn important linkages between democratic accountability, good governance, and the rule of law. In doing so it has made clear the essential nature of all these elements to the development of stable, free, and prosperous societies. The results are incisive, authoritative, and comprehensive.
During the last two decades, Central Asian states have witnessed an intense revival of Islamic faith. Along with its moderate and traditional forms, radical and militant Islam has infiltrated communities of Muslims in Central Asia. Alarmed by the border incursions, sporadic terrorist violence and religious anti-governmental campaigns, the leadership of all Central Asian states adopted extensive measures against radical Islam and intensified counterterrorism policies. This book examines the dangerous tendency of counterterrorism policies of the Central Asian states to grow more alike amid propensities for divergence and attributes this trend to the impact of the social context in which these states operate. It underscores the importance of international setting that shapes governments’ perceptions of terrorism and their counterterrorism policies. Applying a comprehensive theoretical framework, which integrates different mechanisms of international influences on state behaviour, the author explains the Central Asian states’ perceptions of terrorist threat and their counterterrorism responses. The book analyses the counterterrorism policies of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the two Central Asian states that have been least affected by terrorist violence and Islamism but chose to combat those threats vigorously. Using materials derived from a wide range of sources, including legal documents, officials’ memoirs and fieldwork, this research will contribute to studies in Asian politics and national security, and international relations.
British-Jewish writers are increasingly addressing challenging questions about what it means to be both British and Jewish in the twenty-first century. Writing Jewish provides a lively and accessible introduction to the key issues in contemporary British-Jewish fiction, memoirs and journalism, and explores how Jewishness exists alongside a range of other different identities in Britain today. By interrogating myths and stereotypes and looking at themes of remembering and forgetting, belonging and alienation, location and dislocation, Ruth Gilbert examines how these writers identify the particularity of their difference – while acknowledging that this difference is neither fixed nor final, but always open to re-interpretation.
This book is aimed both at researchers and advanced students of Central Asia, the space of the former USSR, and the foreign policy of Russia and China. The authors adopt a sociological approach in understanding how power structures emerged in the wake of the Soviet collapse. The independencies in Central Asia did not happen as a consequence of a nationalist struggle, but because the USSR imploded. Thus, instead of the elites being replaced, the same Soviet elites who had competed for power in the previous system continued to do so in the new one, which they had to build, adapting themselves and the system to their needs. Additionally, unlike in the immense majority of the independent states that emerged from decolonization, the social movements and capacity to mobilize the people were very weak in the new Central Asian states. For this reason, the configuration of the new systems was the product of a competition for power between a very small number of elites who did not have to answer to the people and their demands. Thus, the new power regimes acquired a strong neopatrimonial component. Analyzing the structure of societies, economies and polities of post-socialist states, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Central Asia, to sociologists, and to scholars of China's rise.
Master's Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,7, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (DEL), course: British Studies, language: English, abstract: An analysis of genesis of Mendelson's writing with particular focus on her British-Jewish background. So far, the British-Jewish novelist Charlotte Mendelson has published four books, namely "Love in Idleness" (2001), "Daughters of Jerusalem" (2003), "When We Were Bad" (2007), and "Almost English" (2013), which could all be typified as intercultural coming-of-age novels. The main source of inspiration appears to be Mendelson’s own multi-ethnic background. – She was born in London in 1972 and grew up in St John’s College, Oxford, where her father taught public international law. But even though she is English-born and has a Cockney grandfather, Mendelson identifies herself as not in the least English since her paternal grandmother stemmed from “’Latvia and Poland’” (qtd. in Westbrook) and her maternal grandparents were “’Hungarian-speaking-Czech, Ruthenian for about 10 minutes [and also somewhat] Carpathian mountainy’” (qtd. in Edemariam) and came to England with “the last train out of Prague” (Mendelson) fleeing from the Nazis as Jewish refugees (cf. Mendelson). Especially her maternal grandparents are a lasting inspiration for Mendelson. Her “’Hungarian side is the side [she] like[s] showing off the most’” (qtd. in Westbrook) and is repeatedly referred to in interviews. Her hybrid background “has enabled [Mendelson] to become an essentially diasporic writer” (Cheyette, Diaspora and Multiculturalism 54) When reading Mendelson’s novels in chronological order, it seems as if her writing has undergone some development. Recurring topics and tropes, such as living in a supposedly “cryptic” family microcosm and the difficulties of finding one’s identity in circumstances that resemble “exile”, are condensed, deepened, and shaped into more complex versions. Hence, her work seems to display a form of literary genesis with the latest publication, the Booker-nominated AE, the climax of Mendelson’s oeuvre so far. True to the notion that a Jewish writer is not necessarily one who charters the word ‘Jew’ in his writings, but the one for whom the word ‘Jew’ is contained in all the words of the dictionary” (Jabés qtd. in Brauner 185), Mendelson repeatedly uses themes which are very characteristic in Jewish writing, including problems in identity formation, feeling left out and suffering from unspoken truths about the experiences of ancestors (related to the Holocaust).
