Women's birth experiences in Pakistan: the importance of the Dai

Aim: The aim of this paper is to present findings from a research study undertaken to explore women's life and birth experiences in Pakistan. Method: The design was ethnographic (Denzin, 1978) with an anthropological slant. Participant observation was undertaken in a maternity hospital in Pakistan and an over-50s luncheon club in the UK. Following two focus groups, in-depth interviews were undertaken with 16 women. Data were collected from observation, experience gained during nine field trips to Pakistan and the use of a reflective research diary. Findings/results: The main theme that emerged was the importance of the Dai (untrained traditional birth attendant) in women's accounts of their experiences. This theme included her influence on the women's birth experience and her work in the context of relatives and other health professionals. Other sub-themes not covered in this paper were boy preference, the omnipresent medical model, birth systems, the powerful symbolism of blood, purity shame and honour, and specifically from the women interviewed in the UK – coming to England and modernisation. Implications: The Dai was considered essential for the birth and currently 80% of all rural births are attended by Dai. However the medical professionals and policy-makers in Pakistan consider Dai practice to be dangerous and aim to establish systems for supervising and supporting skilled birth attendants, including the development of emergency referral services and a community midwife programme. Further research on women's experiences of birth in the home and hospital in Pakistan are necessary to inform government policy

Beyond the Battlefield, Beyond Al Qaeda: The Destabilizing Legal Architecture of Counterterrorism

By the end of the first post-9/11 decade, the legal architecture associated with the U.S. government’s use of military detention and lethal force in the counterterrorism setting had come to seem relatively stable, supported by a remarkable degree of cross-branch and cross-party consensus (manifested by legislation, judicial decisions, and consistency of policy across two very different presidential administrations). That stability is certain to collapse during the second post-9/11 decade, however, thanks to the rapid erosion of two factors that have played a critical role in generating the recent appearance of consensus: the existence of an undisputed armed conflict in Afghanistan, as to which the law of armed conflict clearly applies, and the existence of a relatively identifiable enemy in the form of the original al Qaeda organization. Several long-term trends contribute to the erosion of these stabilizing factors. Most obviously, the overt phase of the war in Afghanistan is ending. At the same time, the U.S. government for a host of reasons places ever more emphasis on what we might call the “shadow war” model (i.e., the use of low-visibility or even deniable means to capture, disrupt, or kill terrorism-related targets in an array of locations around the world). The original al Qaeda organization, meanwhile, is undergoing an extraordinary process of simultaneous decimation, diffusion, and fragmentation; one upshot of this transformation has been the proliferation of loosely related regional groups that have varying degrees of connection to the remaining core al Qaeda leadership. These shifts in the strategic posture of both the United States and al Qaeda profoundly disrupt the stability of the current legal architecture on which military detention and lethal force rest. Specifically, these developments make it far more difficult (though not impossible) to establish the relevance of the law of armed conflict to U.S. counterterrorism activities, and they raise exceedingly difficult questions regarding whom these activities lawfully may be directed against. Critically, they also all but guarantee that there will be a new wave of judicial intervention to consider those very questions. Bearing that in mind, I conclude this Article by outlining steps that could be taken now to better align the legal architecture with the trends described above

Civil Liberties and the Terrorism Prevention Paradigm: The Guilt by Association Critique

Faysal Galab is a twenty-seven-year-old American citizen of Yemeni descent who was born and raised in Buffalo, New York. He is married, has three children, and used to run a gas station in the Buffalo suburb of Lackawanna. Perhaps you have heard of him; he will be spending some or all of the next ten years in federal prison because in spring of 2001 he and six other Lackawanna residents traveled to Afghanistan and trained with Al Qaeda