The Logic of Irregular War: Asymmetry and America’s Adversaries
Author: Ilan Berman File Type: pdf For the United States, asymmetric warfare has emerged as the new normal. The large-scale conventional campaigns that typified U.S. military engagements for much of the 20th Century are increasingly things of the past. Instead, the quarter-century since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the U.S.-Soviet balance of power has seen irregular war truly come of age, with more and more hostile nations pursuing asymmetric means in order to secure the strategic advantage vis-a-vis the United States. In this volume, a group of leading national security practitioners and subject matter experts comes together to analyze the asymmetric strategies being pursued today by Americas main state-based adversariesRussia, China, Iran and North Koreaand to explore how U.S. policymakers can respond more effectively to them. **
Author: Maria Heim
File Type: pdf
What would a Buddhist theory of texts look like through the lens of the 5th-century thinker Buddhaghosa? In Voice of the Buddha, Maria Heim reads from the principal commentator, editor, and translator of the Theravada intellectual tradition, yielding fresh insight into all three collections of the early Pali texts Vinaya, the Suttas, and the Abhidhamma. Buddhaghosa considered the Buddha to be omniscient, the Buddhas words to be oceanic. Every word, passage, book--indeed the corpus as a whole--is taken to be endless and immeasurable in Buddhaghosas view. Commentarial practice thus requires disciplined methods of expansion, drawing out the endless possibilities for meaning and application. Heim considers Buddhaghosas theories of texts, and follows his practices of exegesis to discover how he explored scriptures infinity. By examining the significance of the immeasurability of scripture in commentarial practice and as a general principle, this book offers new tools to understand the huge scriptural and commentarial literature of the Pali tradition. And by taking seriously a traditional commentators theory of texts, it beckons us to learn from commentaries themselves how we might read and interpret them and the texts on which they comment. **
Author: Gordon A. Tapper
File Type: pdf
Examining how Cranes corporeal aesthetic informs poems written across the span of his career, The Machine That Sings focuses on four texts in which Cranes preoccupation with the body reaches its apoge. Tapper treats Voyages, The Wine Merchant, and Possessions as a triptych of erotic poems in which Crane plays out alternative resolutions to the dialectic between purity and defilement, a conceptual dynamic which Tapper argues is central to both Cranes poetics of difficulty and his representations of homosexual desire. Tapper concentrates on the three sections of The Bridge, most concerned with recuperating animality National Winter Garden, The Dance, and Cape Hatteras.
Author: Ron Silliman
File Type: pdf
Between the Age of Innocence and the Age of Experience comes The Age of Huts. This book brings together for the first time all of the poems in Ron Sillimans Age of Huts cycle, including Ketjak, Sunset * Debris, The Chinese Notebook, and 2197, as well as two key satellite texts, Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps, and BART. Each poem offers a radically different approach toward using language to explore the world. One of the founding works of Language Poetry, *The Age of Huts is about everything, more or less literally, as each sentence, even each phrase, embarks on its own narrative, linking together to form a large polyphonic investigation of contemporary life. From Ketjak, one of the first poems to employ the new sentence, to 2197, a serial work that scrambles the vocabulary and grammar of its sentences, The * Age of Huts *questions everything we have known about poetry in order to see the world anew.**
Author: Keith Hart
File Type: pdf
The global financial crisis has renewed concern about whether capitalist markets are the best way of organizing economic life. Would it not be better if we were to treat the economy as something made and remade by people themselves, rather than as an impersonal machine? The object of a human economy is the reproduction of human beings and of whatever sustains life in general. Such an economy would express human variety in its local particulars as well as the interests of all humanity.The editors have assembled here a citizens guide to building a human economy. This project is not a dream but is part of a collective effort that began a decade ago at the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and has gathered pace ever since. Over thirty original essays address topics that range from globalization, community participation and microcredit to corporate social responsibility and alternative energy. Each offers a critical guide to further reading. The Human Economy builds on decades of engaged research to bring a new economic vision to general readers and a comprehensive guide for all students of the contemporary world.ReviewHere, in thirty-two short chapters by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars and activists, one can learn the basics of microcredit, feminist economics, corporate social responsibility, community participation, alternative energy, and digital commons (among others).*Journal of the Royal Anthropological InstituteWith its interdisciplinary and cosmopolitan approach, [The Human Economy] gives a unique introduction into alternative ways of thinking about our economy that are rarely mentioned in public debates...This book should be compulsory reading for social scientists,especially economists.Museum Anthropology Review*A fascinating and very useful read for those interested in how to change the present crisis-ridden economic system.Morning StarThis book is a treasure trove for everyone trying to bring the common good and democratic political agency back into economics. International in scope, imaginative in spirit, it brings together the diverse experiences and ideas that could make possible a transition to a social, ecological and democratic global economy. It is a rich resource for emancipatory politics.Hilary Wainwright, Fellow, Transnational Institute, Co-editor, *Red Pepper*For a nanosecond after the current financial collapse that threatens to engulf all, politicians, the media and decision-makers spoke of the need to build a new, humane, and needs-oriented economy. Quickly, analysis returned to how best to regulate capitalist profligacy, and restore old institutions, assuming this will return things to normal. This book, with its rich ideas and diverse examples, exposes the limitations of such thinking and traces the outlines of an alternative economic system with greater promise.Ash Amin, Durham UniversityFrom the Back CoverThe global financial crisis has renewed concern about whether capitalist markets are the best way of organizing economic life. Would it not be better if we were to treat the economy as something made and remade by people themselves, rather than as an impersonal machine? The object of a human economy is the reproduction of human beings and of whatever sustains life in general. Such an economy would express human variety in its local particulars as well as the interests of all humanity.The editors have assembled here a citizens guide to building a human economy. This project is not a dream but is part of a collective effort that began a decade ago at the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and has gathered pace ever since. Over thirty original essays address topics that range from globalization, community participation and microcredit to corporate social responsibility and alternative energy. Each offers a critical guide to further reading. The Human Economy builds on decades of engaged research to bring a new economic vision to general readers and a comprehensive guide for all students of the contemporary world.
Author: Tim Whitmarsh
File Type: pdf
The Second Sophistic traditionally refers to a period at the height of the Roman Empires power that witnessed a flourishing of Greek rhetoric and oratory, and since the 19th century it has often been viewed as a defense of Hellenic civilization against the domination of Rome. This book proposes a very different model. Covering popular fiction, poetry and Greco-Jewish material, it argues for a rich, dynamic, and diverse culture, which cannot be reduced to a simple model of continuity. Shining new light on a series of playful, imaginative texts that are left out of the traditional accounts of Greek literature, Whitmarsh models a more adventurous, exploratory approach to later Greek culture. Beyond the Second Sophistic offers not only a new way of looking at Greek literature from 300 BCE onwards, but also a challenge to the Eurocentric, aristocratic constructions placed on the Greek heritage. Accessible and lively, it will appeal to students and scholars of Greek literature and culture, Hellenistic Judaism, world literature, and cultural theory.**
Author: Chike Jeffers
File Type: pdf
Contemporary African philosophy in indigenous African languages and English translation. A groundbreaking contribution to the discipline of philosophy, this volume presents a collection of philosophical essays written in indigenous African languages by professional African philosophers with English translations on the facing pagesdemonstrating the linguistic and conceptual resources of African languages for a distinctly African philosophy. Hailing from five different countries and writing in six different languages, the seven authors featured include some of the most prominent African philosophers of our time. They address a range of topics, including the nature of truth, different ways of conceiving time, the linguistic status of proverbs, how naming practices work, gender equality and inequality in traditional society, the relationship between language and thought, and the extent to which morality is universal or culturally variable. Chike Jeffers has laid to rest the questions as to whether written modern philosophy is possible in African languages. from the Foreword by Ngugi wa Thiongo the essays raise many philosophical issues that are of interest to both African and non-African audiences. The translations will be especially useful for language learning instruction between English and the languages represented. Let us hope more like this will follow. It is a research program with many benefits. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews **