Demonstrates how the transnational process of forging an industry designed to define a national culture proved particularly contentious and surprisingly contradictory in the heyday of racial nationali
When the Ottoman Empire collapsed following the First World War, the feudal system which had survived untouched in much of Anatolia began to change. Kemal Ataturk's task of building a nation 'from the
Surrounded by steep escarpments to the north, south and east, Ethiopia has always been geographically and culturally set apart. It has the longest archaeological record of any country in the world. In
There's a folk memory of China in which numberless yellow hordes pour out of the 'mysterious East' to overwhelm the vulnerable West, accompanied by a stereotype of the Chinese as cruel, cunning and de
While the image of bourgeois Victorian women as ‘angels in the house’ isolated from the world in private domesticity has long been dismissed as an unrealistic ideal, women have remained marginalised i
One in every six Israeli citizens is a Palestinian Arab. While much has been written about the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, the struggle for political rights by Palestinian citizens of Isra
The millennium has sharpened perspectives on the history of women in twentieth-century Britain. Many features of the contemporary gender order date only from the last decades of the century – the expe
Over ninety years since their absorption into the modern Iraqi state, the Kurdish people of Iraq still remain an apparent anomaly in the modern world - a nation without a state. In 'The Kurds of Iraq'
The Polar North is known to be home to large gas and oil reserves and its position holds significant trading and military advantages, yet the territorial boundaries of the region remain ill-defined. I
Central Europe is one of the key notions of classical geopolitics yet it has always been a somewhat elusive concept. Originally perceived as a plan for a German dominated political and economic union,
In recent years, the ways in which digital technologies have come to shape our experience of the world has been an immensely popular subject in the horror film genre. Contemporary horror cinema reflec
Tom Cruise is a Hollywood superstar like no other. World famous since his debut in the 1980s, he remains among the highest paid actors. Why has his persona resonated so powerfully with millions of vie
If participation has been an ideal in politics since ancient democracy, in art it became central only with the avant-gardes emerging from WWI and the Russian Revolution. Politics and aesthetics are st
It was long assumed that the Soviet Union dictated Warsaw Pact policy in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America (known as the 'Third World' during the Cold War). Although the post-1991 openin
Wahhabism is often described as one of the most conservative branches of Islam and its fundamentalist approach seen as fuelling jihadist extremism. But what is the theological basis of Wahhabism? How
US conservatives have repeatedly turned to classical Greece for inspiration and rhetorical power. In the 1950s they used Plato to defend moral absolutism; in the 1960s it was Aristotle as a means to d
'Play art' or interactive art is becoming a central concept in the contemporary art world, disrupting the traditional role of passive observance usually assumed by audiences, allowing them active part
