{"title":"Book Review: Thomas A. Schwartz, Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography, New York: Hill and Wang, 2020.","authors":"Ahmet Yavuz Gürler","doi":"10.24819/netsol2022.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24819/netsol2022.11","url":null,"abstract":"Henry Kissinger has been an active politician and diplomat in the international politics of Cold War with demonstrated success in theory and practice. He is one of the rare politicians with a quite a few biography books. In this latest biography of Kissinger, Thomas Schwartz from Vanderbilt University reveals a unique perspective on Kissinger’s life and work. Learning about Kissinger's life and his decision-making process is as crucial as the most fundamental question of the book: Who is Kissinger? What would or could Kissinger do? Beyond Kissinger, the book entails information about the politicians Kissinger interacted across the world on various political disputes. Schwartz’s work objectively summarizes these disputes and Kissinger’s approach to each dispute gives reader a glimpse of his political personality.","PeriodicalId":368311,"journal":{"name":"NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131667147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Rachida Chih, Sufism in Ottoman Egypt: Circulation, Renewal and Authority in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century, London: Routledge 2020.","authors":"J. C. Curry","doi":"10.24819/netsol2022.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24819/netsol2022.10","url":null,"abstract":"The study of Ottoman Sufism has grown exponentially in recent years, but has tended to focus more on the Balkan or Anatolian contexts than those of the Arab provinces, leaving broad gaps in our understanding of the religious history of the Arab provinces after the sixteenth century. Rachida Chih’s study of the history of Sufism in Ottoman Egypt is, for this reason alone, a welcome intervention in the historiography of early modern Ottoman society and culture. However, it is also a critical intervention into a historiography that has often portrayed the Ottoman era as a period of religious sclerosis and decline for Egypt and the Maghreb. To replace this outdated trope, she uncovers a transformational shift in Egyptian Sufism that should be recognized as one of the most consequential since the foundation of its earliest Sufi movements in the medieval period of the twelfth and thirteenth century.","PeriodicalId":368311,"journal":{"name":"NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences","volume":"117 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124662703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Judith Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2019.","authors":"K. Ferreira‐Meyers","doi":"10.24819/netsol2022.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24819/netsol2022.12","url":null,"abstract":"Judith Surkis’ study on sex, law, and sovereignty in French Algeria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries starts with a list of illustrations, a section in which she acknowledges universities (Rutgers, Brown, Princeton, and Harvard) and people—family, friends, colleagues but also graduate students—who have helped her publish this book, a note on translation and transliteration and an all-important map of 1834 Alger. The note on translation and transliteration indicates that the current book is based on the colonial archive of French Algeria.","PeriodicalId":368311,"journal":{"name":"NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126951777","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Xin Fan, World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021.","authors":"Walter C. Clemens, Jr.","doi":"10.24819/netsol2022.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24819/netsol2022.9","url":null,"abstract":"Most Chinese officials and academics close to the government maintain that China is unique—indeed, superior to other civilizations. Therefore, the only history that counts is Chinese history. Yes, there have been recurring patterns in Chinese history, but they too are unique—not related to any global patterns, such as identified by British scholar Arnold Toynbee. Xin Fan, Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York at Fredonia, finds that national, Chinese history has gradually hijacked the dominant mode of thinking in Chinese historiography. This book examines how four generations of Chinese historians have tried to professionalize the practice of history in China. In the late Qing period, amateur historians working within the framework of neo-Confucianism explored Western ideas received mainly through Japan. Second, a generation of better trained historians in the 1920s and 1930s sought to temper Sino-centrism with greater objectivity, but the pressures resulting from the Japanese invasions pushed them away from objectivity.","PeriodicalId":368311,"journal":{"name":"NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126809074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review Essay: Enlightenment Lost?","authors":"Walter C. Clemens, Jr.","doi":"10.24819/netsol2021.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24819/netsol2021.10","url":null,"abstract":"Lost Enlightenment and Polymaths of Islam, each analyzing a different but linked period of Central Asian civilization, is each a masterwork of scholarship. Each author, now at a different stage in his academic career, has put to good use a bevy of languages to unveil the achievements of societies and ways of life smothered by the Sturm und Drang of life including great power aggressions. S. Frederick Starr has led Soviet as well as Central Asian research institutes based in Washington, D.C. He was the first director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and later the founding chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program, now affiliated with the American Foreign Policy Institute. James Pickett is Assistant Professor of Eurasian History at the University of Pittsburgh. Each author has done research in Russia and Central Asia.","PeriodicalId":368311,"journal":{"name":"NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133987112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, Second Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.","authors":"K. Ferreira‐Meyers","doi":"10.24819/netsol2021.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24819/netsol2021.13","url":null,"abstract":"The second edition of Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (2019) updates the 1998 first edition. Routledge Publishers hailed the first edition as “a ground-breaking critical introduction to the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies”. John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University since 2014, Leela Gandhi has been researching the cultural history of the Indo-British colonial encounter. As a renowned scholar on transnational literatures, postcolonial theory and ethics, she is the founding co-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies and editorial board member of Postcolonial Text. Her position as director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women and her research on intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are part of her varied and important contributions.","PeriodicalId":368311,"journal":{"name":"NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123236053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Barry Cunliffe, The Scythians: Nomad Warriors of the Steppe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.","authors":"M. Gökçek","doi":"10.24819/netsol2021.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24819/netsol2021.15","url":null,"abstract":"The Scythians is an expansive study of a lost civilization with everlasting characteristics and a rich cultural and artistic heritage. It provides a sympathetic account of a nomadic civilization encompassing a wide variety of sources. Most significantly, it utilizes interdisciplinary methodology to exemplify a model of how to research a nomadic culture doing justice to its historical understanding. The book is arranged into twelve chapters, each focusing on a different aspect of the Scythians: its people, geography, culture, military, art, and history. Rather than following a chronological format, Cunliffe focuses on tracing the evidence in historical records as well as archeological findings in compiling a picture of the Scythians as complete as possible with available material. The book is rich with visual material: pictures, illustrations, maps, images of objects and crafts, as well as an addendum gallery with ten objects presented and interpreted in detail providing depictions of the Scythian life.","PeriodicalId":368311,"journal":{"name":"NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences","volume":"121 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114306563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary, The Wealth of Religions: The Political Economy of Believing and Belonging, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.","authors":"K. Ferreira‐Meyers","doi":"10.24819/netsol2021.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24819/netsol2021.14","url":null,"abstract":"A preface, eight chapters, notes, a bibliography, and an index are what constitute Barro and McCleary’s in-depth analysis of the “wealth” of religions. The book’s title is very attractive, and at the same time quite provocative, as politics, economics and religions are widely debated topics in most societies these days, but people remain reserved to tackle certain aspects, in particular the link between money, markets and religious beliefs and belonging. Bringing together the views of an economist, Barro, and a moral philosopher, McCleary, leads to an interesting approach to religion as different from a social construct, the main idea upon which reflecting and debating religion has been based upon for years, if not centuries.","PeriodicalId":368311,"journal":{"name":"NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128943298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ethno-Religious Conflict, Human Security and Peacebuilding in Contemporary Lagos","authors":"J. Adeyeri","doi":"10.24819/netsol2021.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24819/netsol2021.09","url":null,"abstract":"Lagos, the most populous city in Nigeria and economic hub of the country, is a mirror of complex ethnic and religious configuration of the Nigerian federation. This diverse ethnic and religious character, among other factors, makes Lagos a hotbed of violent ethnic conflicts. This condition is exacerbated by mutual fear and anxiety among various ethnic groups, particularly Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo, about domination, coupled with the pervasive feeling by some groups that other groups are the cause of their socio-economic and political misfortunes. In this setting, hopes and aspirations that antagonism and possible triumph may guarantee socio-economic benefits have often turned minor disagreements into violent conflicts, in which ordinary people are foot soldiers and greatest victims. The core problematic of this research is to investigate the fundamental causative factors and implications of ethno-religious conflict in modern Lagos, Southwest Nigeria. Thus, this paper is a historical inquiry into the basis and impact of Yoruba-Hausa inter-ethnic violence on human security in contemporary Lagos society. The study also explores the opportunities for the attainment of sustainable peace and security within Nigeria. This study posits that the ethno-religious emotion and conviction that continuous antagonism and ultimate triumph against a particular ethnic group(s) assures socio-economic progress is false. The paper concludes that the best recipe for sustainable human well-being, peace and security for Nigerians is to collectively launch a sustained legitimate advocacy against corruption and abuse of public office rather than wasting precious human and material resources on divisive and counter-productive violent ethno-religious conflicts. The study adopts the historical method of data collection and analysis.","PeriodicalId":368311,"journal":{"name":"NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117102580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Christine M. Philliou, Turkey: A Past Against History. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021.","authors":"Evren Altinkaş","doi":"10.24819/netsol2021.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24819/netsol2021.11","url":null,"abstract":"This book depicts transformation of the Ottoman and Turkish society between the Second Constitutional Monarchy (1908) of the late Ottoman Empire and the 1960s of modern Turkey with a focus on the life and works of Turkish journalist author Refik Halid Karay (1888-1965). Karay is known with his short stories and novels in Turkish literature. Using excerpts from Karay’s newspaper articles, stories, and novels, Philliou shows how an Ottoman liberal criticized the policies of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the nationalists in Ankara during the Turkish War of Independence and the subsequent regime in the early years of the Turkish Republic. Using the term muhalefet [opposition], Philliou focuses on the transition of Karay from a dissident figure into a discontent patriot. While doing this, Philliou skillfully draws the framework of Turkish modernity between 1908 and 1960.","PeriodicalId":368311,"journal":{"name":"NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences","volume":"75 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131240211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}