Why Yemen Now? Reassessing South Arabia's Recent Past

Streaming video requires RealPlayer to view.The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Isa Blumi is assistant professor of Middle East and East European history and Middle East studies at Georgia State University. His primary fields of research and publication are modern Balkan history including Kosova, Albania and identity politics; Islam in Europe and Southeast Asia; modern imperialism in the Ottoman, Italian, French and Austro-Hungarian Empires; the Middle East from 1800; and migration, comparative state systems and the dynamics of state/society interactions. Blumi is the author of Political Islam Among the Albanians: Are the Taliban Coming to the Balkans? (Kosovar Institute for Policy Research and Development, 2005), now in its second edition, and Rethinking the Late Ottoman Empire: A Comparative Social and Political History of Albania and Yemen, 1878-1918 (ISIS Press, 2003). He is also the author, editor, or co-editor of a number of edited volumes, chapters and journal articles. He is currently working on Chaos in Yemen: Societal Collapse and the New Authoritarianism (forthcoming from Routledge), which address current events in Yemen. Blumi’s research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, American Council of Learned Societies, American Research Institute of Turkey, Fulbright-Hayes, the Social Science Research Council, American Institute of Yemeni Studies, and Foreign Languages and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship. Before joining the faculty at Georgia State University, Blumi taught at Central European University in Tirana, Albania, Prishtina University in Kosovo, New York University, Yeshiva University, New School University, Trinity College, and American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. He received his Ph.D. in the joint program in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.The Ohio State University. Department of HistoryThe Ohio State University. Department of Near Eastern Languages and CulturesThe Ohio State University. Center for Slavic and East European StudiesOhio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web page, streaming video, event photo

Post‐socialist language ideologies in action: Linking interview context and language ideology through stance

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136334/1/josl12225_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136334/2/josl12225.pd

Negotiating Globalization: The Challenges of International Intervention Through the Eyes of Albanian Muslims, 1850-2003.

Since the attacks on New York and Washington DC in 2001, the US public has become actively engaged in what the White House has coined a 'war on terrorism.' While the adversaries are becoming increasingly clear to the larger public, regional experts have known for years that significant threats have been cultivated from countries like Saudi Arabia which has used religious intolerance and endless supplies of petrol dollars to indoctrinate impoverished and vulnerable populations throughout the world. Indeed, the identification of the Taliban in late 2001 as a central threat to US security has been looked upon by specialists with a sense of irony. After all, it was Saudi Arabia that was the primary source of both financial and ideological support for the Taliban movement. This paper studies another case of aggressive Saudi indoctrination. The war-torn region of Kosova has, since the end of war in mid-1999, been flooded by organizations linked to the same educational and humanitarian agencies that helped turn a portion of the Afghan refugee community in the 1980s into a factionalized and highly antagonistic population. There is a tragic irony in Western governments neglecting the rural poor in Kosova, ostensibly leaving this population at the mercy of Islamic organizations bent on homogenizing a traditionally tolerant and diverse community. In the past, other attempts to impose theological rigidities on society failed, cases that this paper highlights to emphasize that it is not inevitable that a segment of the Kosovar Albanian population become linked to Saudi Wahhabi doctrine. That said, as Western aid agencies and governments have neglected the communities most destroyed by war and thus most in need of assistance, the monopolization of that aid by Saudi organizations may result in exactly what post September 11th policy-makers want to avoid

Unique Authoritarianism: Shifting Fortunes and the Malleability of the Salih Regime in Yemen, 1990-Present

Ninth Mediterranean Research Meeting: Workshop 09Ever since the political elite of the two Yemeni states agreed to unify in 1989, the dynamics of the newly created country's sociopolitical development has been co-opted by a diverse group of local actors. In the process of forging this union, a shift took place that changed both the institutional and organizational capacities of the principal constituent groups involved in unification. As a result, the rival interests not only harnessed the coercive capacity of the state in a struggle for ascendancy, but the process ultimately created new channels of interaction for an even broader range of interests. This study recognizes that multiple, unconnected dynamics are at work within "Yemeni" society that serve as opportunities, as well as direct challenges, for the regime of 'Ali Abdullah Salih once it secures power in 1994. It is the nature of the regime's failure, for instance, to accommodate South Yemeni concerns over a more equitable share of political and economic power that resulted in further complicating the redistribution of state authority and ultimately the paradoxical diffusion of power throughout some sectors of unified Yemeni society. The nature of this shuffle counter-intuitively, however, strengthened the power of those around the Salih regime and in turn weakened his traditional rivals. This is a story, therefore, of how a new form of authoritarian rule evolved out of set of conditions that, at first glance, seemed to assure the opposite