Post-War Reconstruction

The so-called Green Revolution established seeds and their qualities as a main focal point for the development of agricultural production. Subsequently, many countries were covered by networks of agricultural research stations, agricultural extensions, and seed banks, whose function was to develop and distribute new varieties promising higher yields and better resilience. In the Nuba Mountains, this process took place mostly from the 1960s to the 1980s. But economic deterioration of the 1980s, 20 years of civil war, and the dismantling of previous institutional structures after a military coup in 1989 left this development to decay, and large-scale rehabilitation was initiated by the government only in 2008.
This paper follows processes of seed distribution and risk management in the aftermath of large-scale violence since 2002 from the perspective of small-scale farmers. Centralized governmental research institutions had no longer feedback from a tight network of experimental farms and agricultural extensions, leading to a distorted mechanism of seed distribution intended for social security, but empowering mostly commercial seed companies, whose products do not necessarily fit local soils. In consequence, farmers are left to decide each season between a conservative approach to seed selection and the readiness to take the risk of new varieties, knowing that they cannot compensate a failed harvest.
INGOs had begun during the war to fill these gaps of governmental engagement, and found themselves stuck now in the attempt to transform their intervention from relief to rehabilitation. But new programmes of seed credits caused confusion, because the principle of returning the ‘gift’ looked like misplaced balanced reciprocity in an obviously asymmetric economic relationship.
Through the case of a seed distribution programme in the central Nuba Mountains the paper discusses the criteria of individual choice in a situation, where governmental and non-governmental institutions divert risks to actors, who depend both on subsidies and secure results in a sector of production with very limited predictability.

Chapter four turns from students and observers of medicine to medical practitioners. I juxtapose texts by two writing practitioners, William Wells Brown and Edward H. Dixon and the ways they relate blood with and medical practice. Above, we already read from Brown’s collection The Anti-Slavery Harp, but most scholars focus on his 1853 novel Clotel, which builds on the Jefferson-Hemings rumors and follows the fates of this imagined daughter’s children in the antebellum nation.
Brown was born a slave and despite learning to read and write only after his escape in 1834, became a popular lecturer and abolitionist speaker and author. He was also a masterful observer of social dynamics, and in Clotel presents a complicated antebellum critique of identities under slavery, as Paul Gilmore explains, as well as the minstrel critique of racism that itself replicates racist stereotypes (Genuine 65-7).
Recently, literary critics have turned their attention to Brown. Ann DuCille, and Ivy Wilson have further developed theories of Brown’s complex plays with characters and his dazzling wealth of allusions. Robert S. Levine recently read Brown’s temperance as a means of simultaneous individual and social reform for all victims of white supremacy, expressing a far-reaching social ideal of moderation (“Temperance and Race” 107-8). Beyond editing Clotel and Other Writings, Ezra Greenspan just published a new biography, which explores many areas of Brown’s life that biographers have thus far left unexplored, even correcting Brown’s actual place of birth (Life 26-7).
Yet with all this current attention, Brown’s 1874 The Rising Son has escaped any serious attention save Carole Lynn Stewart’s contribution. Drawing on Levine, she reads Brown’s life-long work in the temperance movement as structuring The Rising Son. Stewart points out that if we read Brown’s counter-history of African civilization as a narrative of the civilizing process, then the convalescence-through-habitus of psyche, body, and society propagated by temperance societies gives his work a far sharper critical edge than if we dismiss his engagement as opposition to alcohol (5).
Drawing on this recent surge in scholarship, “Blood of a Nation” argues that Brown always considers practice and theory in conjunction, and especially so in medicine. Greenspan mentions what many Brown scholars disregard and what I emphasize: Brown received medical training and assisted in medical practice while still enslaved and was a practicing physician from his return from 1860 until his death (Life 34, 51). Brown’s own experiences as both formerly enslaved person and a black practitioner show that the bodily fluid in medical practice was never free of racial connotations.
Brown’s many careers make him more qualified than any of his contemporaries to help us understand the cultural, social, and political dimensions of medical practice. I argue that he sees medical practice not as an a-political, so-called objective act, but a social transaction, a performance of class and race. Typical for his love for multiple editions, Clotel and his last finished text, My Southern Home (1880) echo the same scene in which an enslaved black doctor’s apprentice treats other slaves with the painful so-called heroic therapies of orthodox medicine. In the minstrel performance of this scene describing the black enslaved practitioner, Brown especially criticizes the shedding of blood during phlebotomy. The scarce material on his practice indicates that Brown’s own therapeutics were in contrast rather bloodless; relying on the latest eclectic medical technology, he especially spared his patients phlebotomy.
Beyond that, in 1873 he even manages to avoid bloodshed in an escape from the Ku Klux Klan by hiding his medical intervention in a minstrel performance of conjuring. In a complicated play with social dynamics and identities, Brown the practitioner dissembles medical expertise to be able to alleviate pain and save his own life. He complicates the notion of avoiding blood in the nation by pointing out that shedding blood, even in medical practice, may be racist violence. His interest in new, progressive medical therapeutic technologies mirrors Brown’s antebellum minstrel critique of bloodletting while his post-bellum semi-factual encounter with the Ku Klux Klan shows the logic of minstrelsy still at play, now helping him dissemble his bloodless therapy.
Chapter four pairs Brown’s texts with writings about medical practice, medical theory, and a novella written by Edward H. Dixon, the New York orthodox physician, editor, publisher, reformer of medical education and anti-masturbation crusader we already encountered above. Dixon’s medical narratives in his periodical The Scalpel show us a practitioner whose medical and social theory almost compulsively return to blood. Among writing practitioners Dixon stands out for the plethora of medical writings he left behind. As scholarship on Dixon is scant, I rely on his publications to place him in the medical history detailed above, especially drawing on Michael Sappol’s delineation of the medical case narrative as a prose genre (“Knowlton” 468-71).
Nineteenth-century medical practitioners communicated through prose narratives, and my reading of blood between the case narrative and the novella demonstrates the importance of the genre. In his medical narratives, Dixon by way of practice negotiates social identities by way of medical theory. The case narrative begins by observing patients and their symptoms and so Dixon often writes about physical blood. He also communicates his observations and findings about blood to the fraternity of practitioners. Beyond that, though, he constructs a universal medial theory that divorces blood from its context and abstracts it, thereby providing his own lens through which he then reads the next patient’s symptoms in a circular confirmation of social bias. This process of negotiating blood in the case narrative is possible because of the semantic slipperiness of blood.
The discontinuities and paradoxes between medical practice and theory visible in Dixon’s texts help us analyze the relation between blood, race, and medicine in the national frame. Blood is both material and metaphor, and Dixon’s texts oscillate between these two senses of “blood.” The semantic slipperiness makes possible the transposition of blood from a threatening return of sovereign violence to a moment of diagnosis, a case to be narrated, and a puzzle for the physician to solve. This puzzle, however, ultimately turns out to be a justification for social interventions by way of physiological theory.
Dixon also stands out because his only non-medical text is a gory sensational novella about the KKK, the 1872 The Terrible Mysteries of the Ku-Klux Klan, in which individuality, language, and reality dissolve into an occult blood, the mysterious, unknowable and unspeakable essence of race. Dixon’s sensational novella silences the practitioner’s authority to develop the occult blood free of all cultural associations in a new, race-based ideology of blood.

The article investigates antinationalistic narratives on the postwar transformation of Sarajevo (BH). These stories about the death of Sarajevo as it once was are critical and painful. Many inhabitants of Sarajevo strive to revive the old city by means of memorial reconstructions. According to informants one of the most problematic elements of town's transformation is the religious revival and the penetration of religion in public and political domains. The advancement of religion, mostly Islam for many Sarajevans symbolises the gradual disappearance of the modern secular and urban society. Taking into consideration anthropological and sociological findings on the concept of home, the article demonstrates how location relates to identification process. It also highlights the dynamic between identity and nostalgia in postwar context.

This paper focuses on the consequences the reconstruction of Beirut has on the redevelopment and revival of the Martyrs’ Square to its pre-war grandeur. Taking into consideration its cultural and spatial character, its tremendous history and the ambiguous success of the reconstruction as architecture of peace, I ask: has the monumental space of the Martyrs’ Square become again the social and political center of the city? Based on Lefebvre’s production of space, I observe, examine and question the different actors and stakeholders in the square's development and usage. I argue that the new scheme for the Martyrs’ Square fails to revitalize the space, to develop a united shared place and to participate in resolving conflicts. While the physical division disappeared, the Martyrs’ Square plays a major role in a different type of division in social, political and spatial terms. 

Participation at the 'Self-Made City' weekend special (presentations and discussions) at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. 25-26th October, Venice, Italy.
Presentation focused on space production and reproduction of war (1992-1995) and post-war Sarajevo. I showed everyday “war urban conditions” in the Sarajevo during the war, extremely dangerous due to constant bombing, without public transport, electricity, water, and food. The city and living in it (surviving) create new urban elements: sniper protection walls, urban gardens, alternative walking paths, and introduced new life conditions in the citizens houses. The war urban elements are still present in the post-war city of Sarajevo such as ruins, damaged facades of the buildings, destroyed sport infrastructures dating from Winter Olympic Games from 1984, and are used by citizens in different ways than it was their original designed function.

An abbreviated English version of the review published originally in Polish by The Western Review [Przeglad Zachodni] a month earlier. Demshuk's study reveals not only true reasons why German expellees acquiesced to their loss, but also hints on the source of the surprising irrepressibility of anti-Polish prejudice among Germans of today.

This article explores the methodological and ethical challenges particular to the conduct and use of evaluations in conflict zones. It does this through examining the synergistic interaction of conflict dynamics and the four domains of evaluation — ethics, methodology, logistics, and politics. Drawing on evaluation theory and practice, as well as field experience, the article seeks to contribute to the building of a more methodologically self-conscious sub-field of evaluation in conflict zones— with implications not only for the field of evaluation, but also for researchers and practitioners in the fields of development, humanitarianism, peacebuilding, and private sector investment.

How do we know whether or not research contributes to peacebuilding? And, what kind of positive or negative impacts may research have?  These two questions are conspicuous by their absence despite the large number of peacebuilding-specific research institutes, academic programmes, publishers, and funders.  Some of the reasons for the current state of affairs are examined:  the ambiguous, elastic, and politicized nature of ‘peacebuilding’ as a concept and as a practice; the inappropriateness of current approaches to the evaluation of research impact; and, the disconnection between the world of evaluators and the world of peace researchers.  The current article addresses these questions through an exploration of the intersection of research, evaluation methodology, and politics. The article concludes with preliminary framework for teasing out the specific kinds of peacebuilding impacts catalyzed through research.

What is different about the conduct of evaluations in conflict zones compared to non conflict zones—and how do these differences affect (if at all) the ethical calculations and behaviour of evaluators? When are ethical issues too risky, or too uncertain, for evaluators to accept—or to continue—an evaluation? These are the core questions guiding this article. The first section considers how the particularities of conflict zones affect our ability to conduct evaluations. The second section undertakes a selective review of the literature to better understand how ethical issues have been addressed both in evaluation research and in evaluation manuals. The third section draws on a series of structured conversations with evaluators to probe more deeply into the ethical challenges
they face in conflict zones—with a particular interest in the ‘‘ethical tipping points’’ of evaluators. The fourth section considers ways evaluation actors can manage ethical challenges in conflict zones, concluding with a brief discussion of how these issues might be located more centrally in evaluation research and practice.
Keywords
complexity, conflict evaluation, ethics, politics, risk

The publication of the 'First Report of the National Advisory Council on Art Education' (1960), otherwise known as the first ‘Coldstream Report’, is a graspable moment of displacement in the British art world. It represents a shift between an educational system based on disciplined studies of techniques and crafts to one based on conceptual thinking and design. Its legacy is marked by trauma and confusion that deepened as the decade matured, spilling over into creative outbursts and political revolt. It has become a symbol of oppressive, narrowly defined rigour and prejudiced artistic values. As such, both the report and the painter and educator who leant it his name, William Coldstream, have been blamed and demonised. This paper approaches the report as an image, for it is not only invested with symbolic, representational meaning, but it also is among those victims of iconoclasm – works of art, signs, inscriptions or pictures – that act in the words of theorist Bruno Latour “as a mediation to access something else”. The Report is a window to a set of values for education, but also for the perception of the artist’s relationship to society. Half a century later, it is important to carefully weigh the document itself against the politics and motivations of the diverse committee members who authored it. Using ministerial archival records opened in the late 1990s, this paper reflects on how such a document presents a methodological conundrum in tracing intention and effect, as well as the dangers of conflating it with any one participant.

Billions of U.S. taxpayers’ dollars will be wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan if the host nation governments cannot take over the operation, maintenance, and security of efforts undertaken to reconstruct,
stabilize, and develop those countries.
Potential waste from unsustainable projects exceeds $11 billion for just one program in Afghanistan, facilities construction for the national security forces. The total risk from all contracts in both Iraq and Afghanistan could be much higher.
In many cases, the opportunity to avoid or mitigate waste from sustainment failure has already passed. In other cases, there is
still time to act. But time is growing short.
Without prompt and decisive action, the biggest waste in Iraq and Afghanistan may be yet to come.
We recommend:
1. Officials at the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the U.S. Agency for International Development examine both completed and current projects for risk of sustainment failure
and pursue all reasonable strategies to mitigate risks.
2. Officials ensure that any new requirements and acquisition strategies regarding contingency contracts for projects or services to be handed over to a host nation include a detailed assessment of
host nations’ ability and will to meet the out-year costs essential for long-term
success.
3. Officials take appropriate action to
cancel or redesign projects or programs
that have little or no realistic prospect for
achieving sustainability.