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Literacy is the foundation of lifelong learning and a crucial element in the universally recognised right to education. However, illiteracy continues to exist as a global challenge, and many individuals still lack the basic literacy skills that are needed to engage in further learning opportunities and for the economic and social development of their communities. In order to redress this persistent gender disparity, the need to empower women through the acquisition of literacy skills is gaining increasing recognition. A number of countries are already implementing effective literacy programmes that directly target women, including various E-9 countries (The E-9 is a forum of nine countries (Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria and Pakistan), LIFE (UNESCO launched the Literacy Initiative for Empowerment (LIFE, 2006-2015) as a collaborative effort to accelerate literacy action in thirty-six of the world's most challenged countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Benin, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Sudan, and Yemen) countries and countries in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). This publication offers a selection of women's literacy programmes that have been effectively implemented around the world. Each case study presents an example of a best practice in the field of literacy and basic skills, specifically demonstrating the importance of increasing literacy levels among women. The collection is meant to serve as a resource to inspire the implementation and continuation of literacy programmes for women, though this is only a small sample of many successful initiatives. The following case studies are included in this publication: Africa: (1) Ethiopia: Integrated Women's Empowerment Programme (IWEP); (2) Liberia: Economic Empowerment for Adolescent Girls (EPAG); (3) Mozambique: Promoting Women's Literacy in Angola and Mozambique; (4) Nigeria: Mother and Child Education Programme (MCEP); and (5) Senegal: The Tostan Community Empowerment Program. Arab States: (6) Morocco: Means of Socio-economic Empowerment and Integration for Women; (7) Palestine: The Early Childhood, Family and Community Education Programme; and (8) Yemen: Literacy Through Poetry (LTPP). Asia and the Pacific: (9) Cambodia: Community Self-prevention Against Trafficking of Women and Children (CSPATWC); (10) India: Khabar Lahariya (News Waves); (11) India: Sahajani Shiksha Kendra: Literacy and Education for Women's Empowerment; (12) India: Saakshar Bharat Mission; (13) Indonesia: Gender Justice Education for Marginalised Women; (14) Pakistan: Adult Female Functional Literacy Programme (AFFLP); (15) Pakistan: Mobile-Based Post Literacy Programme; (16) Philippines: Supporting Maternal and Child Health Improvement and Building Literate Environment (SMILE) Mindanao Project; and (17) Republic of Korea: Mothers' School. Latin America: (18) Bolivia: Bilingual Literacy and Reproductive Health; and (19) Mexico: Bilingual Literacy for Life. Europe: (20) Turkey: Family Literacy Programmes (FLPs); and (21) Turkey: Functional Adult Literacy and Women's Support Program. [Individual case studies contain references. This publication was edited with the help of Laura Fox and Justin P. Jimenez.]

This monograph presents 14 brief papers on special education in other countries or comparisons between countries. Papers have the following titles and authors: "Legal Foundations of Special Education: A Comparison of the United States Public Law 94-142 and the China Compulsory Education Law" (Hong Bo Wang et al.); "International Networks in Staff Development" (Tony Best); "Poverty and Handicap in the Republic of Yemen" (Azza Qirbi); "Hong Kong in 1997: Through Train or All Change?" (Nick Crawford); "Special Education Down Under" (David R. Mitchell); "Development of Special Education in the Republic of Korea" (Seung-Kook Kim); "Attitudes of High School and College Students toward Persons with Disabilities in the Republic of Korea" (Yong G. Hwang and Carmen Iannaccone); "Interviews with Mothers of Severely Handicapped Children: School Leavers in Japan" (Louise Fulton and Virginia Dixon); "Video Training Packages for Parent Education" (Roy McConkey); "Development of Special Education in Ghana" (Selete Kofi Avoke and Mawutor Kudzo Avoke); "Special Education in Japan" (Shigeru Narita); "Special Needs Education in Zambia" (Darlington Kalabula); "Inclusion and Integration in Europe: A Human Rights Issue" (Christine O'Hanlon); and "Towards the Comparative Study of Special Education" (Lesley Barcham and Graham Upton). Papers contain references. (DB)

The rise of technology within educational settings has allowed for a substantial shift in the way in which educators teach learners of all ages. In order to implement these new learning tools, school administrators and teachers alike must seek new research outlining the latest innovations in the field. "Educational Technology Use and Design for Improved Learning Opportunities" presents broad coverage of topics pertaining to the development and use of technology both in and out of the classroom. Including research on technology integration in K-12, higher education, and adult learning, this publication is ideal for use by school administrators, academicians, and upper-level students seeking the most up-to-date tools and methodologies surrounding educational technology. Following a preface by the editor, the following chapters are contained in this book: (1) Implementing a Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure to Facilitate ICT in Education: Design and Evaluation (Yannis Siahos, Iasonas Papanagiotou, Alkis Georgopoulos, Fotis Tsamis, and Lefteris Nikoltsios); (2) FUDAOWANG: Implementing Advanced Education Concepts to Improve the Tutorial Intelligence of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (Wei Xu, Ke Zhao, Yatao Li, and Zhenzhen Yi ); (3) Policultura and Moodle: The Development of Different Talents in the Inclusion Perspective--A Case Study (Chiara Laici); (4) Pedagogical-Didactic Training for an Inclusive Didactics: The Precision Teaching for Strengthening of Basic and Integrating Skills in Intellectual Disabilities (Murdaca Anna Maria, Cuzzocrea Francesca, Oliva Patrizia, Larcan Rosalba); (5) New Technologies as Tools for Education to Cultural Heritage in the EU Agendas: Debates and Plans--The Special Case of Archaeology (Enrico Proietti); (6) Computer-Mediated Communication in Primary Education: An Overview and a Research Approach Example (Tharrenos Bratitsis, and Marina Kandroudi); (7) Conceptual Possibilities and Restraints in Educational Games (David Richard Moore and E-Ling Hsiao); (8) Bridging Research and Game Development: A Learning Games Design Model for Multi-Game Projects (Barbara Chamberlin, Jesús Trespalacios, and Rachel Gallagher); (9) Which Perspectives Can Drive the Analysis of Technology-Enhanced Learning Environments? (Rosa Maria Bottino); (10) Bridging the Concepts of Educational Software and Assistive Technology (Stefania Bocconi and Michela Ott); (11) Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Issues: A Survey of Secondary Students in Sana'a, Yemen (Mohammed Yousef Mai, Lilia Halim, Ruhizan Mohammed Yaseen, T. Subahan M. Meerah); (12) Policy Coherence for Development: A Case Study of Uganda's Primary Education Sub-Sector (Bruno Lule Yawe); (13) Virtual World Classrooms: Future Directions for Learning (Susan Martin Meggs, Sharon Kibbe, and Annette Greer); (14) The Extended Body in the Teaching-Learning Process (Stefano Di Tore, Paola Aiello, Pio Alfredo Di Tore, and Maurizio Sibilio); (15) Why Game-Based Learning Did Not Achieve What It Could Achieve: Challenges and Success Factors (Wee Hoe Tan, Sean Neill, and Sue Johnston-Wilder); (16) Adoption of B-Learning at Universities in Spain: The Influence of Environment and Personal Factors (Ramón Tirado-Morueta, J. Ignacio Aguaded-Gomez, and Ángel Hernando-Gómez); and (17) Moodle-Based Validators to Improve Teaching and Learning of Web Development (M. Antón-Rodríguez; M. A. Pérez-Juárez, F. J. Díaz-Pernas, M. Martínez-Zarzuela, and D. González-Ortega). A section about the contributors and an index are included.

Spurred on by new discoveries and rapid technological advances, the capacity for life science research is expanding across the globe-and with it comes concerns about the unintended impacts of research on the physical and biological environment, human well-being, or the deliberate misuse of knowledge, tools, and techniques to cause harm. This report describes efforts to address dual use issues by developing institutes around the world that will help life sciences faculty learn to teach about the responsible conduct of science. Based on the successful National Academies Summer Institute for Undergraduate Biology Education and on previous NRC reports on effective methods for teaching about dual use issues, the report's authoring committee designed a general framework for the faculty institutes and chose the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region to test a prototype faculty institute. In September 2012, the first Institute was held in Aqaba, Jordan, bringing together 28 participants from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, and Yemen to engage with effective, evidence-based teaching methods, develop curricular materials for use in their own classrooms, and become community leaders on dual use and related topics. "Developing Capacities for Teaching Responsible Science in the MENA Region: Refashioning Scientific Dialogue" offers insights from the institute that will help in the design and implementation of future programs in the MENA region, and in other parts of the world. Seven appendices are included: (1) Recommendations from the Warsaw Workshop Report; (2) Background on The World Academy of Sciences and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina; (3) Details from the Results of the Planning Meeting; (4) Active Learning Toolkit and Images; (5) Biographies of Committee Members and Staff; (6) Institute Participants; and (7) Documents from the Institute. A glossary is also provided. [This content was written by the Committee on Developing a Framework for an International Faculty Development Project on Education About Research in the Life Sciences with Dual Use Potential; Board on Life Science; Division on Earth and Life Studies; National Research Council; The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS).]

The definition of "English language classroom" is changing. When students have the opportunity to learn content and language at the same time, disciplinary boundaries overlap. Teachers are rethinking how they design courses, plan lessons, assess students, and collaborate with colleagues to support student learning and facilitate their own professional growth. In this volume, contributors describe practical examples of integrating language and content in classrooms in Italy, the Netherlands, Yemen, Turkey, Taiwan, Russia, the United States, and South Africa. Teachers help students achieve their goals--learning English for specific purposes such as advertising, fashion design, and philosophy; teaching adult learners by integrating English skills with health literacy, conflict resolution, and social justice; serving emerging bilingual students in learning grade-level academic material or valuable job skills. Following the series' editors preface, and Chapter 1, At the Intersection of Language and Content (Jon Nordmeyer) the book is divided into four sections that help readers navigate the sometimes chaotic intersection of language and content: The first section, "Why Do Teachers Design Courses to Integrate Language and Content?", contains the following chapters; (2) Content for Change: Integrating Radical and Socially Relevant Content Into a Business English Curriculum (Sedia Dennis); (3) Danger Learning: Experiencing ESL Through Conflict Resolution Techniques (Christopher Stillwell); (4) A Pound of Prevention: Health Literacy for Beginning-Level Adult English Language Learners (Susan Dalmas and Judy Trupin); (5) Does Content and Language Integrated Learning Work With Young Learners? (Elena Pratissoli). The second section entitled, "How Do Teachers Integrate Language and Content?" contains the next five chapters: (6) Two Birds, One Stone: Using Academic Informant Projects as English for Academic Purposes Content (Shawna Shapiro); (7) A Short Course on the Miniskirt: Providing a Language Toolkit for University Instructors in Turkey (Steve Darn); (8) Opening the Door: Making Mathematics Accessible to English Language Learners (Anita Bright); (9) Links in a Food Chain: Guiding Inquiry in Science for English Language Learners (David T. Crowther, Lori Fulton, Joaquin S. Vila, and Eric Hoose); and (10) Building Bridges Between Language and Content in Religious Education (Rosie Tanner and Lorna Dunn). The third section, entitled, "How Do Teachers Evaluate Language and Content Learning?", contains these chapters: (11) Big Ideas in Little Pieces: Science Activities for Multilevel Classes (Ann K. Fathman and Patricia A. Nelson); (12) Exploration: One Journey of Integrating Content and Language Objectives (Kate Mastruserio Reynolds) (13) Blending Digital Media and Web 2.0 in an English Advertising Class (Aiden Yeh); and (14) Developing Language Skills While Studying Cultural Identity (Pavel V. Sysoyev and Stephanie R. Funderburg-Foreman). "How Do Teachers Collaborate to Integrate Language and Content?" is the final section and contains the following chapters: (15) What Counts as Good Math Instruction for English Language Learners (Kimberly Hunt and Linda Walsleben); (16) Sustained Content-Based Academic English Teaching Through Paired English and Philosophy Courses (Jerry Spring); and (17) Motivating Students to Develop Their English Literacy Skills Through Science (Eilidh Hamilton). References and an index are included

The rugged highlands of southern Yemen are one of the less archaeologically explored regions of the Near East. This final report of survey and excavations by the Roots of Agriculture in Southern Arabia (RASA) Project addresses the development of food production and human landscapes, topics of enduring interest as scholarly conceptualizations of the Anthropocene take shape. Along with data from Manayzah, site of the earliest dated remains of clearly domesticated animals in Arabia, the volume also documents some of the earliest water management technologies in Arabia, thereby anchoring regional dates for the beginnings of pastoralism and of potential farming. The authors argue that the initial Holocene inhabitants of Wadi Sana were Arabian hunters who adopted limited pastoral stock in small social groups, then expanded their social collectives through sacrifice and feasts in a sustained pastoral landscape. This volume will be of interest to a wide audience of archaeologists including not only those working in Arabia, but more broadly those interested in the ancient Near East, Africa, South Asia, and in Holocene landscape histories generally.Series: Monumenta Archaeologica 43

The involvement of the United Nations (UN) in Somalia was a product of the new international climate created by the end of the Cold War and by the dramatic success of Operation Desert Storm, and its aftermath in 1991. For the UN, the Somali operation, which at its height employed a force of 28,000 at an estimated cost of US $1.5 billion, broke new ground in two ways. Under Resolution 794 of 3 December 1992, the Security Council invoked Chapter VII of the Charter to authorise the establishment of an Unified Task Force (UNITAF), under US command and control, ‘in order to establish a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations in Somalia’. This was the first time that an unambiguously internal and humanitarian crisis had been designated as a threat to international peace and security, thus justifying peace-enforcement measures. Second, with this and subsequent resolutions, the UN dropped the pretence that its involvement in Somalia arose out of an invitation from the government – although the Council continued to refer to ‘urgent calls from Somalia … to ensure the delivery of humanitarian assistance’ – since no government existed with the authority to issue such an invitation. For the first time, statelessness was acknowledged to be a threat to an international society composed of sovereign states. The UN did not extend its prerogatives in these ways either willingly or as the result of a deliberate and carefully worked out international strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction In 2000, the World Bank and IMF, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the United Nations published a jointly prepared document titled A Better World for All. In it, the world's two most important international financial institutions guaranteed that, in partnership with others, they would make substantial progress in reducing world poverty by 2015. The report proposes measuring poverty reduction in seven areas: world poverty (the percentage of people living on the equivalent of 1 US dollar or less per day), gender gaps in school enrollment, primary school enrollment, infant mortality and maternal mortality (Sadasivam 1997), access to health services, and sustainable development. Among other specific goals mentioned in the report, the promises include decreasing rates of infant mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-fourths, providing access to all that need health services, and ensuring that all children are enrolled in primary school. Taken together, the goals in the report are commonly referred to as the “Millennium Development Goals.” This report and these promises made in it were necessary because there is a growing consensus that most of the countries we usually refer to as “developing economies” are not developing at all or are not developing as quickly as had been hoped. Jeffrey Sachs, an economist who directs the Millennium Development Project, notes that, according to World Bank estimates, 1.1 billion people or about one-sixth of the world's population live in extreme poverty (Sachs 2005). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld helped invent the concept of armed peacekeeping in 1956 and set out the guiding principles that to this day remain the touchstone of debate about the nature of the enterprise. In 1963 U Thant sent a team of observers to Yemen when civil war broke out – implicitly suggesting that the situation was not purely internal and therefore that UN action would conform to Article 2(7) of the Charter. In 1991 Javier Pérez de Cuéllar stated that Security Council resolution 688 (1991) on the Iraqi repression of Kurd and Shiite populations was “not put in the framework of Chapter VII” and so no UN military or police presence could be deployed there without the consent of the government. In his 1996 Agenda for Democratization, Boutros Boutros-Ghali wrote that the work of the United Nations in promoting democracy was consistent with the Charter because the document roots the “sovereign authority of the Member States, and thus the legitimacy of the Organization … in the will of their peoples.” These are all cases of norm entrepreneurship, a function no Secretary-General has been more conscious of than Kofi Annan. In early 1999 he stated “the end of the Cold War transformed the moral promise of the role of the Secretary-General. It allowed him to place the UN at the service of the universal values of the Charter, without constraints of ideology or particular interests.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his 1986 Cyril Foster Lecture at Oxford University, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar argued that in discharging his responsibilities the Secretary-General must be aware that the “idealism and hope of which the Charter is a luminous expression have to confront the narrow dictates of national policies”. The Secretary-General must walk a fine line between effective cooperation and apparent collusion with the Security Council in particular. Past incumbents have all learned – the hard way – when they have either crossed the limits of tolerance of one of the permanent members of the Council, or cleaved so close that they have sacrificed legitimacy in the eyes of their broader constituency among the member states. This requires the Secretary-General to come to terms with the geopolitical realities of the day – even as he or she attempts to reshape them. In the absence of such realism, the independent authority the Secretary-General wields may be perceived by member states as a threat, rather than as a resource, inevitably producing attacks, resistance, and even vilification – while putting at risk the effectiveness and credibility of the organization as a whole. The seeds of tension in relations between the Secretary-General and the Security Council lie in Articles 98 and 99 of the UN Charter. As other chapters explore in more detail, these Charter provisions establish an independent political role for the Secretary-General, alongside his or her role as chief administrative officer of the organization. Article 99 is particularly significant, giving the Secretary-General a right of notice that has been parlayed over the years into the basis for initiative independent of the Security Council. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there are some signs of change in the right direction, there is still a great need for the ICRC to “open the windows” … On the whole, the ICRC seems to have blurred the differences between the discretion which their work requires and an obsession with needless secrecy. The Cold War years presented various challenges to the ICRC. Under concerted criticism not only from communist but also from certain western democratic circles, the ICRC staved off unwanted changes in its composition and mandate mainly through its performance in various conflicts – in Palestine and Hungary, for example. It also played its traditional role in helping to further develop international humanitarian law. By the middle of the Cold War, the organization was engaged broadly in complex ways not only in the Global South but also in Europe – not only in “developing areas” but also in Greece and Northern Ireland. There was clearly a need for its traditional roles during the Cold War, even if the ICRC was slow to anticipate some needed changes at headquarters as well as in the field. Its controversial performance in the conflict in Nigeria during 1967–70 led to important changes in Geneva. There were other opportunities for striking change, as in response to the 1975 Tansley Report on the Re-appraisal of the Red Cross, or at the 1974–77 diplomatic conference that produced two protocols additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The goal of this statistical chapter is to summarily present reliable time series on production, volume of net exports and net imports, as well as selected information on prices from the beginning of the eighteenth century to 1960. The information provided here is part of a larger data set, abbreviated for publication. We sought to provide a relevant selection for those interested in the history of coffee-producing regions of the world, of the international coffee commodity chain, and of consumption trends. General readers may find the abridged tables helpful in terms of clarity, while specialists will perhaps appreciate the detailed annual data. We hope that these tables and the broader database from which they are derived will be improved on in the future through our collective efforts, as we continue to explore sources and share information. This endeavor has been a cooperative project at several levels. The initiative came out of the conference on “Coffee Production and Economic Development, ca. 1700–1960,” held at Oxford in 1998. The two coauthors subsequently undertook this task with the enthusiastic support of the editors, who generously contributed their own data and expertise. William G. Clarence-Smith supplied information on a number of African and Asian cases, and Steven Topik on Brazil; both offered relevant suggestions and valuable feedback. Several other researchers also provided data and source references for the historical cases with which they are familiar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success of New World coffee producers in the late nineteenth century has spawned a large body of writings, whereas stagnation and decline in Asia and Africa have attracted few scholars. Statistics for the early nineteenth century are rare and unreliable, but they suggest that Asia and Africa's share of global coffee exports amounted to around a third in the 1830s. This proportion remained roughly the same in the 1860s and 1870s. However, it then rapidly dwindled to around a twentieth by 1913. Within this broad evolution, there was an additional contrast. Asia was subject to a particularly sharp fall, whereas Africa's small share of the world market remained fairly constant in relative terms. When the focus is further narrowed to particular countries or regions within large and diverse countries such as Indonesia and India, outcomes were even more diverse. This chapter explores both the reasons for the overall downward trend in Africa and Asia's share of world coffee exports and the causes of the extraordinarily uneven nature of that decline. The evolution of world production took place against a background of increasing volatility in the real price of coffee. The world price rose fairly steadily from the late 1840s to reach a peak in the first half of the 1870s, making coffee the “wonder crop” of tropical farmers around the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The southern end of the Red Sea was the cradle of coffee cultivation and consumption in the world. Wild coffee gathered in Ethiopia was already traded at the end of the fifteenth century, but progress was slow. In the second half of the sixteenth century, a true coffee economy emerged. Yemeni peasants began to cultivate coffee intensively on terraces, carved out of the steep mountains rising above the Tihama coastal plain. Effective marketing networks linked Yemeni ports to Jiddah and Cairo. By the seventeenth century, the coffee trade had superseded the declining spice trade. Fed by silver bullion originating in Spanish America, coffee played a major role in commerce between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. To be sure, the development of coffee estates in the Indian Ocean and the New World from the eighteenth century progressively diminished Yemen's share of world coffee output, but the Red Sea trading network remained in place until the end of the nineteenth century. The Origins of the Coffee Economy Ethiopian forests, especially to the west of the Great Rift Valley, abound in wild arabica coffee, but we know very little about the origins of consumption there. Coffee was probably long picked from the wild, and it was used to an increasing extent from the fourteenth century by the Islamized peoples of southeastern Ethiopia. The coffee habit diffused to the Rasulid sultanate in Yemen, which had strong commercial and cultural connections with Muslim kingdoms in Ethiopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of coffee too often reify the international market. It is seen as an exogenous force that imposes itself on local producers who are powerless to do anything but obey its dictates. The “law of supply and demand” is seen as a structural dictator. There has been a substantial debate on the extent to which changes have been occasioned by changes in production processes (the creation of surplus) or in demand induced by changing consumption patterns or caused by commercial intermediaries. Who in the commodity chain is in control of prices, and has this changed over the centuries? A second issue, which may appear only a technical subsidiary of the first two but is in fact central, is the creation of international standards and grades. How homogeneous is the commodity and how uniform internationally are the definitions? Do people mean the same thing when they say “coffee”? This chapter analyzes the transformation of coffee from Arab monopoly to European colonial product to the sustenance of Latin American national states to, finally, a globally produced multinational commodity by asking the following questions: (1) What was the relative importance of changing patterns of demand and production in transforming the market, or, to put it another way, what were the relative roles of culture and technology in driving change? (2) What were the relative roles of private and public actors in creating the market? (3) What forces drove standardization, grading, and other market conventions? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That cup of coffee you sip at your breakfast table, desk, or café comes from far away. It was grown in Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam, the Ivory Coast, or one of a hundred other coffee-producing lands on five continents. It is a palpable and long-standing manifestation of globalization. For 500 years coffee has been grown in tropical countries for consumption in temperate regions, linking peoples of different lands and continents by trade, investment, immigration, conquest, and cultural and religious diffusion. There is a world of history in your cup. An increasingly sophisticated study of world history is a means of understanding these processes. We have thus brought together scholars from nine countries, who cover coffee markets and societies over the last five centuries in fourteen countries on four continents and across the Indian and Pacific oceans, with a special emphasis on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We analyze a wide variety of issues, related to economic, political, and cultural development, to see how they have played out over the last centuries in different parts of the globe, under different political arrangements: the creation and function of commodity, labor, and financial markets; the role of race, ethnicity, gender, and class in the formation of coffee societies; the interaction between technology and ecology; and the impact of colonial powers, nationalist regimes, and the forces of the world economy in the forging of economic development and political democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Portuguese country traders' search for markets focused, in the late seventeenth century, on the few non-VOC-controlled markets in the South China Sea. Manila's market offered some opportunity but the Portuguese could not displace the Chinese junks. Portuguese trade on Timor in the early eighteenth century suffered from the over-cutting and depletion of sandalwood stocks, Chinese competition and the Batavia market becoming a centre for the sale of sandalwood to Chinese junks. Chinese maritime trading competition became more intense after 1684, which was related to the revival of, and stability provided by, the Ch'ing for seaborne trade in south China. BANJARMASIN Banjarmasin in the late seventeenth century temporarily offered some enterprising Portuguese Crown officials and country traders the opportunity to monopolise pepper supplies in quantities that were large enough to command significant portions of the market and compete against the European and Chinese suppliers of that spice in south China. The sultanate of Banjarmasin was located in the south-east of Borneo. Two main groups lived in the area claimed by the Sultan (or Panambahan) of Banjarmasin, the valley or lowland people, the Banjarese; and upland people, the Biajus or Njadjus. Banjarese society was part of the Malay world and they claimed to be the descendants of the original Javanese inhabitants and foreign immigrants on Borneo; Biajus were the aboriginal Dayak tribes of south-east Borneo whose mobile village life co-existed with the extension of Banjarese political control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern Egyptian courts would seem to be unattractive both to ruler and ruled. Yet since their establishment over a century ago, they have not only become important parts of the social and political landscape but have been imitated throughout the Arab world. Why did Egypt's political leaders construct and maintain a system that seems – at least at first glance – to restrict their own authority? Egypt may be the Arab country that has come closest to establishing the strong and autonomous legal institutions necessary for the rule of law. With courts that have freed political extremists and twice brought down the country's parliament, Egypt's judicial system is regarded as possessing remarkable independence and integrity (even while it is often perceived as a European imposition). Why does an autonomous and dilatory system recommend itself to Arab rulers outside Egypt? Far from filling Arab observers with dismay, Egyptian courts are a model throughout the region, emulated in varying degrees in political systems as diverse as those of Libya, Kuwait, Iraq, and Yemen. Egyptian legal models – along with many Egyptian judicial personnel – have been employed in much of the Arab world. Why do so many Egyptians choose to bring their disputes to court? The Egyptian legal system is widely held to be confusing, overburdened, and forbidding. Criticized as culturally inappropriate when founded a century ago, lampooned by Tawfiq al-Hakim as overworked and incomprehensible to Egyptians a half-century ago, and constantly described today as slow and strained to the breaking point, Egyptian courts not only survive but are increasingly sought out by Egyptians from all walks of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical tradition in the context of international relations is a poorly explored subject … Even so, it is not something intangible. On the contrary, one has to accept as ‘weighty’ those feelings – often noted in history – of traditional friendship and sympathy between countries which contribute to their mutual trust, understanding and cooperation. Ethiopia and the Soviet Union (formerly Russia) are bound by this kind of longstanding and deep-rooted friendship. Its origins go well beyond the Great October Revolution. The Horn of Africa is a metaphor rather than a political entity. It has no precise boundaries but is often thought to comprise Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti, the tiny, former French colony. These territories lie between the Middle East and black Africa, forming a bridge between the two. The geo-political significance of the area should not be understated. The Horn flanks the oil states of Arabia, controls the Bab el Mandeb Straits which are a busy international shipping lane, dominates part of the Gulf of Aden through which oil tankers pass, and overlooks the passages where the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean converge (see Map 1). A Russian interest in the Horn dates back to very early times. An awareness of Ethiopia began with the translation of certain Greek works such as Epiphanius's Periplus of the Erythrean Sea into Old Slavonic and the Caucasian languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]