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This article investigates the complex relationship between digital media, religion, and politics in Egypt since the early 1990s. Charting the emergence of a new media landscape - one that is facilitated by technological innovations such as mobile telephony, high-speed Internet, and small digital cameras - this paper explores how a very strong Islamic revivalist trend is capitalizing on the power and reach of these new media practices in an effort to develop Islamically inflected models of citizenship. The paper argues that such a mediascape is contributing to the development of new models of nationalism and civic citizenship in Egypt - ones that are not orchestrated by the Egyptian State but are mediated through oppositional groups, mainly of the Islamist variety. The paper aims to chart a map of media practices in Egypt in the past two decades, and trace how these practices are informing the rise of new notions of citizenship, cultural policy, digital activism, and media consumption.

This empirical article is based on a study of stigmatization of girls formerly associated with armed forces and groups (AFG) in the eastern Congo, and presents a detailed description of how these girls are perceived when returning home. The study reveals that the society views with suspicion those who are or have been part of an armed force or group. People believe that girls having been with an armed group will attract male soldiers to their villages, they are perceived as violent, thieves, promiscuous, and carriers of transmittable diseases, and they are thought to have a bad influence on the behaviour of their peers. These fears and prejudices are translated into stigmatizing behaviour such as name-calling, rejection, social exclusion, and discriminating treatment. Women are identified as those most actively involved in the stigmatization. The stigmatization the girls formerly associated with AFG experience hampers their reintegration process, and can be likened to a second traumatisation. In its discussion the article identifies some important factors impacting on the degree of stigmatization, and distinguishes between two categories: (1) pre-return factors; and (2) post-return factors that may reinforce or reduce the stigmatization. The evidence in this study supports the view that stigmatization is prevalent and poses a major challenge to the reintegration process of girls formerly associated with AFG. The article concludes that the more empowered and financially independent these girls become the less problems and stigmatization they will face

This paper compares the response to the hijb in France, Quebec and the rest of Canada to explore the different political cultures of those three polities, the ideals behind them and the modes of repression and tolerance which give meaning to those cultures. More specifically, the paper compares the Stasi Commission in France with the Bouchard-Taylor Commission in Quebec in terms of both process and conclusions. What role do public commissions play in the education of the public against a background of educational institutions charged with that task? In asking that question, the paper explores the role of daily practices in realising that ideal.

Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo stands out among today's many talented and prominent African women writers for her widely acclaimed novels depicting the role of African women in a changing world. Like many people of her generation Aidoo witnessed Ghana's 1957 transition from British colony to independent state, as well as the conflicting interests and competing power bases that emerged in its post-independence years. Specifically, in the 1980s Ghana went through changes of governments, military coups, and economic downturns that affected not only the rural but also the urban populations. In an era of growing globalization and a new world order such turmoil brought about a new set of changes. This paper analyzes the various social, economic, and cultural conflicts and challenges Ama Ata Aidoo's female characters experience in her 1991 novel Changes: A Love Story, which takes place mainly in urban environments in West Africa and Europe in the 1980s. It has been praised by many literary critics for its thought-provoking portrayal of African women's redefined roles in their post-independence urban environment, and in 1993 it won the

Both of Chimananda Adichie's novels name their relation to Achebe's Things Fall Apart. More important, they form part of a longer tradition of writing by African women, while at the same time, they extend that tradition. Like novels by Nwapa, Emecheta, Bâ, and others, Adichie's novels represent a politics of the family while quietly but clearly telling stories of the nation; this is especially the case with her first novel, Purple Hibiscus. Adichie also tells more explicit tales of the Nigerian national imaginary, especially in her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. By appropriating some of the structural elements of Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, as she did of Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Adichie advances her storytelling in Purple Hibiscus by telling a domestic tale with yet stronger national overtones. By illustrating a crosscontinental set of inspirations and intertexts in Purple Hibiscus I reveal Adichie's exploration of the contemporary Nigerian political crisis.

Over the past decade, international development policy has paid increased attention to social reproduction. While this offers an improvement over past practices in which care work was all but ignored, these policy frameworks continue to fall short of feminist goals. One reason for this is the way that dominant economic representations of social reproduction continue to rest on a universalizing portrayal of the household economy and family life as mired in patriarchal tradition, which fails to capture the diversity of economic and affective arrangements in which reproductive labor takes place at the local level. In this paper, I develop an alternative conceptualization of economic and affective life that challenges dominant understandings of the distinctions between market and non-market activity, paid and unpaid labor, and work and intimacy to provide space for new feminist conceptualizations of economy and care that can capture the diversity of its sites and practices.

This article explores the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA) and its attempts to translate international women's rights norms into national law, examining the problematic geographies of women's networks from local to global levels and showing how Ethiopia remains on the periphery of global human rights networks. In their campaign for legal reform to protect women against violence, activists had to show how the proposed reforms were 'African', as invoking international human rights risked dismissal as evidence of 'Westernisation'. Activists face practical difficulties, including lack of funding and technology, limiting networking beyond the national level. The article shows how the state shapes local activists' ability to form global connections. Legislation banning civil society organisations such as EWLA from conducting work around rights threatens to marginalise Ethiopia further from global human rights networks and norms. Local connectivity to the global is only partial, mediated by the power relations in which activists and the state are embedded.

The present world population is 7.1 billions, which is growing at the rate of 97 millions people per year will touch 8.5 billion by the year 2025. About 95 per cent of the population growth will be in the developing countries.

"Without doubt since the 1990s inroads have been made in the development of international law in the sphere of sexual violence and armed conflict. Due to the progress made in international law itself and the tribunals of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, international law can now be seen to have an array of tools with which to combat and prosecute perpetrators of sexual violence. These tools include humanitarian law, the Genocide Convention, crimes against humanity, customary international law, in particular the rules of jus cogens and the Rome Statute. An analysis will be made in this article of the effectiveness of these tools and how they can be utilised in order to prevent the on-going onslaught on women's bodies. It will be seen that the gradual acknowledgement of rape and sexual violence as an international crime has the potential of empowering women and can give them the ability to use international law as a powerful tool to redress violence perpetrated against them in armed conflict. This article will then examine whether this potential is in fact a reality for women who have suffered sexual abuse in armed conflict or have the developments merely paid lip service to these crimes and not been as progressive as was first hoped."

The discipline of anthropology has been wracked with controversy since the 2007 establishment of a new program within the United States military, which officially employs anthropologists and other social scientists to collect "ethnographic intelligence" on local populations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The program, the Human Terrain System (HTS), was created to help U.S. military personnel better understand local cultural contexts. As part of this program, experts throughout the academy are being contacted by State Department officials to provide information on topics of interest to those in the Pentagon. The politicization of ethnographic fieldwork has posed a series of moral dilemmas for anthropologists, particularly feminist anthropologists who work with already vulnerable populations. This article proposes to examine the question of collaboration with reference to the HTS and recent debates raging among anthropologists about whether or not to cooperate with the U.S. government or any foreign government. Drawing on the author's own experiences conducting fieldwork among Slavic Muslims in Bulgaria, during which she was "invited" to share her findings with both the Bulgarian and American governments, the goal of the article is to openly discuss these dilemmas and offer some brief suggestions about how to navigate the murky waters of doing research in an increasingly fraught global context.

This article probes a set of problems in the theory and practice of the postcolonial archive that has emerged as the author and her Indigenous and non-Indigenous colleagues have struggled to create a new media archive in rural northwest Australia. This archive does not as yet exist. If it existed as it is currently conceived, it would organize mixed (augmented) reality media on the basis of social media and operate it on smart phones. The smart phones would contain a small segment of the archive, which would be geotagged so that it could not run unless the phone was proximate to the site to which the information referred. This article argues that if "archive" is the name we give to the power to make and command what took place here or there, in this or that place, and thus what has an authoritative place in the contemporary organization of social life, the postcolonial new media archive cannot be merely a collection of digital artifacts reflecting a different, subjugated history. Instead, the postcolonial archive must directly address the problem of the endurance of the otherwise within-or distinct from-this form of power.

This article draws on research at an eco/feminist peace camp set up to facilitate blockades against clear-cut logging in coastal temperate rainforest in Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in Canada in the early 1990s. The camp was said to be based on feminist principles and sometimes these were even articulated as eco/feminist principles. The slippage between these terms provides a focus for my discussion. Specifically the article explores the apparent paradox of the sheer vitality of this eco/feminist activism, and in particular its insistence on international connections, in contrast to the widely circulating accounts of the end of feminism, and especially the end of global sisterhood, which emerged in the early 1990s. Thus this article is also necessarily about how recent histories of eco/feminism, including tensions between theory and activism, are narrated. I take as a departure point references to the work of Vandana Shiva and the Chipko movement which circulated in accounts of the camp, and explore ways in which eco/feminists might read such utterances as more than evidence of a naive and problematic universalism. I situate eco/feminism's internationalism genealogically in feminism and eco/feminism and read this as a counter-narrative to the ending of global sisterhood. Through paying attention to various movements, back and forth, between Clayoquot and Chipko, Canada and India, and drawing on Anna Tsing's notion of 'friction', I offer an account of what has been at stake in disavowals of the possibility of reading Chipko as eco/feminist, and suggest the importance of a more generous reading of eco/feminists' attention to the Chipko movement.

This article considers the academic writings and activism of the major Continental feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti against the background of the growing religiously and racially biased anti-immigration sentiment in Europe. Special attention is paid to Braidotti's recent response to the post-secular turn in feminism. The article contends that Braidotti's work highlights and embraces the destabilising structural effects the intensified migration flows have on European identity. It argues that Braidotti charts new models of European subjectivity that would facilitate mutually affirmative and trans-formative relationships between those (self-)perceived as Western feminists and those positioned as immigrant women.

This paper examines a convergence between Heidegger's reconceptualization of subjectivity and intersubjectivity and some recent work in feminist philosophy on relational autonomy. Both view the concept of autonomy to be misguided, given that our capacity to be self-directed is dependent upon our ability to enter into and sustain meaningful relationships. Both attempt to overturn the notion of a subject as an isolated, atomistic individual and to show that selfhood requires, and is based upon, one's relation to and dependence upon others. The paper argues that Heidegger's notion of authentic Mitsein (being-with) rejects traditional notions of autonomy and subjectivity in favor of a relational model of selfhood. Ultimately, it provides a new point of entry into contemporary debates within feminist philosophy on Heidegger's thinking and defends Heidegger from certain feminist critiques.

"This article examines news reports of the second-wave feminist movement during its most active political period (1968-82) in British and American newspapers, and specifically focuses on the ways postfeminist discourses were constructed and deployed. While most accounts of postfeminism relate to American cultural texts from the 1990s to the present day, they ignore (or are unaware of) the ways such discourses were constructed before this, or in different cultural contexts. In this article, I argue that postfeminist discourses are evident throughout the 1970s, during the height of the second-wave feminist movement, and that many of these discourses differed between the countries as a result of unique socio-cultural contexts, and the ways the women's movements evolved. That postfeminist discourses emerged early on indicates the extent to which patriarchal and capitalist ideologies contested feminist critiques from an early stage, demonstrating that notions of feminism's eventual illegitimacy and hence its redundancy were not constructed overnight, but took years to achieve hegemony."