August 2022

Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia

 
This wide-ranging, geographically ambitious book tells the story of the Arab diaspora within the context of British and Dutch colonialism, unpacking the community’s ambiguous embrace of European colonial authority in Southeast Asia. In Fluid Jurisdictions, Nurfadzilah Yahaya looks at colonial legal infrastructure and discusses how it impacted, and was impacted by, Islam and ethnicity. But more important, she follows the actors who used this framework to advance their particular interests.
 

Foreign Policy: "Germany Has Confronted Its Past. Now It Must Confront the Present" by Marci Shore

Russian President Vladimir Putin has sent the Russian army to reenact World War II in a grotesque, postmodern key. His “special operation” to “de-Nazify” Ukraine is an unprovoked attack on a sovereign democratic state and a campaign of mass slaughter. The Ukrainian military has been defending Ukraine much more skillfully than the Russian military has been attacking it. (Ukrainians know why they are fighting.) Nevertheless, the Kremlin has an enormous advantage in terms of its arsenal, the size of its economy, and comfortable indifference to lives lost.