A detailed analysis of the attempt by Britain and Spain since 1980 to solve their dispute over the future of Gibralter, the last-remaining colony in Europe. Using Spanish as well as British sources, the book examines the events which have taken place following the signing of the Lisbon Agreement.
This modern history of Gibraltar updates and enhances scholarship on the Rock's history by bringing together the author's extensive archival research and developments in the secondary literature surrounding British Gibraltar. Central to its narrative is an examination of the development of a Gibraltarian community amidst British imperial rise and decline and Anglo-Spanish diplomatic vicissitudes. Gibraltar: A Modern History, is the first twenty-first century treatment of the Rock's history and as such it augments and, in many ways, replaces older treatments of Gibraltar's History.
Details the history behind the countries that have laid claim to and currently control the Gibraltar peninsula that acts as a gateway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.
Racial experiences vary widely in everyday life and in different social contexts. They range from damaging to fulfilling, spanning discrimination, unquestioned assumptions, and political solidarity. Drawing on years of cross-cultural ethnographic research, Gabriel Alejandro Torres Colón develops an innovative theory to grasp racial experiences in their full sociocultural complexity, with vital implications for both social science and antiracist politics. This book demonstrates how people draw from their experiences to fashion “styles for flourishing”—embodied strategies for survival in racialized societies that can both reproduce and contest racial orders. In performing their styles, individuals embrace their racialized selves and communities, helping them flourish in broader social worlds. They are able to creatively reconfigure racialized existence into desires for recognition, expressions of resistance, and aspirations for alternative political orders. Torres Colón explores how styles develop within “racial niches” through nuanced considerations of a boxing gym in the U.S. Rust Belt, Afro–Puerto Rican community organizing in an ancestral mangrove forest, and Muslim political activism in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa. Each case highlights nuanced dimensions of racial experience to question how local efforts are seen in political ideologies and governance. Bringing together humanistic, social scientific, and biological approaches with compelling ethnographic detail, this interdisciplinary book provides generative theoretical insights regarding race and critical new perspective on racial inequality in liberal democracies.
This volume explores how Gibraltarian Britishness was constructed over the course of the twentieth century. Today most Gibraltarians are fiercely proud of their Britishness, sometimes even describing themselves as ‘more British than the British’ and Gibraltar’s Chief Minister in 2018 announced in a radio interview that “We see the world through British eyes.” Yet well beyond the mid-twentieth century the inhabitants of the Rock were overwhelmingly Spanish speaking, had a high rate of intermarriage with Spaniards, and had strong class links and shared interests with their neighbours across the border. At the same time, Gibraltarians had a very clear secondary status with respect to UK British people. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, Gibraltarians speak more English than Spanish (with increasing English monolingualism), have full British citizenship and are no longer discriminated against based on their ethnicity; they see themselves as profoundly different culturally to Spanish people across the border. Bordering on Britishness explores and interrogates these changes and examines in depth the evolving relationship Gibraltarians have with Britishness. It also reflects on the profound changes Gibraltar is likely to experience because of Brexit when its border with Spain becomes an external EU border and the relative political strengths of Spain and the UK shift accordingly. If Gibraltarian Britishness has evolved in the past it is certain to evolve in the future and this volume raises the question of how this might change if the UK’s political and economic strength – especially with respect to Gibraltar – begins to wane.
This book provides a detailed study of the attempts that have been made by Spain, to regain the sovereignty of 'the Rock', despite the wishes of the Gibraltarians.
Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders: Migrants, Transnational Encounters, and Identity in Spain offers a new approach to the cultural history of contemporary Spain, examining the ways in which Spain’s own self-conceptions are changing and multiplying in response to migrants from Latin America and Africa. In the last twenty-five years, Spain has gone from being a country of net emigration to one in which immigrants make up nearly 12 percent of the population. This rapid growth has made migrants increasingly visible in both mass media and in Spanish visual and literary culture. This book examines the origins of media discourses on immigration and takes the analysis of contemporary Spanish culture as its primary framework, while also drawing insights from sociology and history. Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders introduces readers to a wide range of recent films, journals, novels, photography, paintings, and music to reconsider contemporary Spain through its varied encounters with migrants. It follows the stages of the migrant’s own journey, beginning outside Spanish territory, continuing across the border (either at the barbed-wire fences of Ceuta and Melilla or the waters of the Atlantic or the Strait of Gibraltar), and then considers what happens to migrants after they arrive and settle in Spain. Each chapter analyzes one of these stages in order to illustrate the complexity of contemporary Spanish identity. This examination of Spanish culture shows how Spain is evolving into a new space of imagination, one that can no longer be defined without the migrant—a space in which there is no unified identity but rather a new self-understanding is being born. Vega-Durán both places Spain in a larger European context and draws attention to some of the features that, from a comparative perspective, make the Spanish case interesting and often unique. She argues that Spain cannot be understood today outside the Transatlantic and Mediterranean spaces (both real and imaginary) where Spaniards and migrants meet. Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders offers a timely study of present-day Spain, and makes an original contribution to the vibrant debates about multiculturalism and nation-formation that are taking
Ceuta and Melilla are two 'enclaves' on the northern coast of Africa that have been Spanish for centuries but that are claimed by the Kingdom of Morocco. As an integral part of Spain the towns have also been part of the territory of the European Union since 1986. Their unique situation has created considerable tension in the relationship (both political and economic) between Spain and Morocco. As well as looking at this relationship, the book explains how the anomalous situation of the enclaves impinges on issues such as immigration from North and sub-Saharan Africa into the EU, defence, trade and the Spanish political scene in general.
This book focuses on the activities of the scientific staff of the British National Institute of Oceanography during the Cold War. Revealing how issues such as intelligence gathering, environmental surveillance, the identification of ‘enemy science’, along with administrative practice informed and influenced the Institute’s Cold War program. In turn, this program helped shape decisions taken by Government, military and the civil service towards science in post-war Britain. This was not simply a case of government ministers choosing to patronize particular scientists, but a relationship between politics and science that profoundly impacted on the future of ocean science in Britain.