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Africa is a region of renewed interest for American foreign-policy elites, both in and out of government. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to explore American foreign-policy elites' assessments of Africa before and after 11 September 2001, and to analyze how these assessments have been translated into American foreign policy toward Africa. The analysis is based on a review of government, think-tank, and other publications and transcripts associated with American foreign-policy elites, including the journal Foreign Affairs. Special focus is given to the strategic ranking and assessment of foreign countries within a global geopolitical code, or mental map of priority areas for U. S. military, economic, and diplomatic resources and engagement. American foreign-policy elites' assessments of Africa have shifted substantially since the 1990s, when the continent was largely regarded as quite marginal to American interests. Since late 2001, concerns about failed and failing states have emerged as a central theme in American foreign-policy elites' assessment of Africa and other parts of the developing world. Concerns about the nexus of transnational Islamist terrorism and failing states have prompted many such elites to call for a grand American geopolitical program of nation-building and military decentralization. To date, the United States has taken only small steps to align its foreign policy toward Africa. Significant tensions and contradictions limiting the execution of a new grand strategy remain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Th is article examines debates over Turkish women's emancipation and women's independent organizing in Turkey during the 1930s. It traces the troubled history of Turkey's most prominent independent women's organization, the Turkish Women's Union (Türk Kadın Birliği), focusing especially on the Twelfth Congress of the International Alliance of Women (IAW) held in Istanbul in 1935. Despite the renown of the Women's Union, it was forced to disband shortly after the Istanbul Congress. Drawing upon popular press accounts, official records of the Istanbul Congress, and correspondence between the Women's Union and IAW members, this analysis underscores how deeply contested the question of women's emancipation was, not only within urban elite society, but also among those in municipal and state office. It also provides insights into how actively Turkish feminists engaged questions of peace, disarmament, and Turkey's role in geopolitics, challenging the view that women were best suited to contribute to social and family policies rather than foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how everyday theories of masculinity and vernacular discourses of 'masculinities in crisis' play crucial roles in misrecognizing, racializing, moralistically-depoliticizing, and class-displacing emergent social forces in the Middle East. Public discourses and hegemonic theories of male trouble render illegible the social realities of twenty-first-century multipolar geopolitics and the changing shapes of racialism, humanitarianism, nationalism, security governance, and social movement. In order to help generate new kinds of critical research on Middle East masculinities, this article creates a larger map of discourses and methods, drawing upon studies of coloniality and gender in and from the global South. This mapping puts masculinity studies into dialogue with critiques of liberalism and security governance and with work in postcolonial queer theory, public health studies, and feminist international relations theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]