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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2012Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation
Passengers, pilots, publicity
by Gordon Pirie, Andrew Thompson, John Mackenzie
The new activity of trans-continental civil flying in the 1930s is a useful vantage point for viewing the extension of British imperial attitudes and practices. Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation examines the experiences of those (mostly men) who flew solo or with a companion (racing or for leisure), who were airline passengers (doing colonial administration, business or research), or who flew as civilian air and ground crews. For airborne elites, flying was a modern and often enviable way of managing, using and experiencing empire. On the ground, aviation was a device for asserting old empire: adventure and modernity were accompanied by supremacism. At the time, however, British civil imperial flying was presented romantically in books, magazines and exhibitions. Eighty years on, imperial flying is still remembered, reproduced and re-enacted in caricature. ;
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Travel writingFebruary 2021Karachi Vice
Life and Death in a Contested City
by Samira Shackle
A fast-paced and revelatory journey through Karachi from an electrifying new voice in narrative non-fiction. Karachi. The capital of Pakistan is a sprawling mega-city of 20 million people. It is a place of political turbulence in which those who have power wield it with brutal and partisan force, a place in which it pays to have friends in the right places and to avoid making deadly enemies. It is a place where lavish wealth and absolute poverty live side by side, and where the lines between idealism and corruption can quickly blur. It takes an insider to know where is safe, who to trust and what makes Karachi tick, and in this powerful debut, Samira Shackle explores the city of her mother’s birth in the company of a handful of Karachiites. Among them is Safdar the ambulance driver, flinging himself into dangerous situations and keeping his ambulance spotlessly clean. There is Siraj the radical cartographer, mapping communities with the aim of proving to the government that they legally exist – and breaking the hold that the land and water mafias have on them. And there is Zille, the hardened journalist whose commitment to getting the best scoops puts him at increasing risk. As their individual experiences unfold, so Shackle tells the bigger story of Karachi over the past decade: a period in which the Taliban arrive in Pakistan, adding to the daily perils for its residents and pushing their city into the international spotlight.
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Peace studies & conflict resolutionOctober 2012Conflict Dynamics in Karachi
by Huma Yusuf
Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and financial capital, is also wracked by ethnopolitical, sectarian, militant, and criminal violence that has claimed more than 7,000 lives since 2008. The city’s precarious security situation has serious implications for the U.S.-Pakistan bilateral relationship owing to its growing role in national and regional terrorism. This report analyzes the city’s multiple and intersecting types of violence, identifies violent actors, highlights the systemic issues that drive violence, examines state initiatives to stem violence and reasons why these efforts failed, and calls for the government to tackle the violence’s underlying causes.
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Travel writingMay 2000Riding the Mountains Down
by Bettina Selby
Bettina Selby, mother of three grown-up children, decided at the age of 47 to undertake an adventurous project and cycle alone from Karachi to Khatmandu. The journey took five months and was full of hazards. Although she enjoyed much kindness and hospitality, the reaction of some local men to an unaccompanied Western woman on their roads was intensely curious, at times brusque, sometimes escalating to dangerous violence Bettina Selby also had to face the intense physical stresses of keeping going in broiling heat on dust blown and treacherous roads shared with ancient busses, speeding trucks driven by maniacs, farm carts and herds of quadrupeds. In the mountains the ride became even more dangerous (avalanches, floods, dacoits, stone throwing children), but Bettina survived it all, logging some 5000 miles in the process. She had no backup, and no possibility of being in touch with home for weeks at a time. This book is a remarkable account of her journey and gives a very different picture of the Indian sub-continent from what today’s tourist sees. A travel book of extraordinary fascination and charm. Richard West Sunday Telegraph
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Peace studies & conflict resolutionFebruary 2015
Conflict Dynamics in Sindh
by Huma Yusuf, Syed Shoaib Hasan
Pakistan’s southern province of Sindh has a reputation for stability, diversity, and tolerance. It is also at a tipping point—increasingly threatened by violent extremism, crime, political corruption, tribal feuds, and nationalist and separatist movements. If the province is not to become yet another base for militants, as areas to the north already are, the government needs to act promptly and decisively. Addressing the security situation in Sindh is also integral to stabilizing Karachi, which should be a top priority, given the economic ramifications of growing turbulence in the country’s financial capital.
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FictionTwin Flame
by Nish Amarnath
TWIN FLAME is an inter-racial love story with literary overtones, multicultural stripes and strands of magical realism. A South Asian Math prodigy’s wish for a boy in a painting to come alive materializes in the form of an Austrian-Jewish writer. But a troubling secret wrenches them apart, forcing them to confront their worst fears, if life is to give them one final chance. Sherry Kasal, diagnosed with type-1 diabetes at the age of five, hopes to draw upon her passion for Math to discover a cure for conditions like her own. She stumbles upon a painting of a boy trapped in a snowstorm. She talks to the boy in this picture whenever she's sad, frustrated, angry and/or dejected. When writer Shaddy Haas enters her life, Sherry is motivated to resume work on a concentric model of electromagnetism that she had abandoned as a teen. Alas, circumstances wrench Sherry and Shaddy apart. Sherry, who reluctantly marries a lawyer, lands in Manhattan, where she scrambles to pick up the vestiges of her shelved research dream and realizes that she’s living a lie. Sherry must also unravel a flabbergasting secret that links Shaddy to the painting of the boy in the snowstorm as they try to find their way back to each other. Twin Flame, whose narrative is embedded with the alternating voices of its protagonists in both first-person and third-person points of view, combines the mystical ethos of Elif Shafak's 'Forty Rules of Love' with the futuristic cadence of Erich Segal's 'Prizes' and the exotic romanticism of Jan-Philipp Sendker's 'The Art of Hearing Heartbeats.'
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Historical fictionFebruary 2014The Doksany Legacy
by Quentin Cope
The Doksany Legacy It’s the winter of 1987. Mohsen Raza, merciless head of Iran’s feared Revolutionary Guard hunts millionaire oilman Declan Doyle, whose personal undertaking to deliver the Geneva Project … a vital offshore oilfield installation in the Persian Gulf, crucial to the survival of an Iranian economy, weakened by the war with Iraq … has proven worthless. Englishman Doyle, desperate to escape Raza’s retribution and save his company, makes a frantic last throw of a set of dice loaded heavily against him. Evading Raza’s forces he flees the tiny Arab state of Abu Nar, feverishly bent on seeking the truth in a dying man’s story of Nazi treasure, one great enough to finance and complete the Geneva Project, saving him from a possibly agonising end at Raza’s hands. With nail-biting action from the start, Doyle’s frantic escape from his Iranian hunters leads him through dangerous, unpredictable Mujahideen-controlled Pakistan, onward to Northern Europe and finally to the Arab enclave of Dhofar, a desolate place that holds the key to possibly saving his life … a life spent cheating and ruled by greed for which he knows, inevitably, a price must be paid. What Doyle cannot know is his chequered past and discovery of much sought after Nazi treasure, has set other hunters on his trail … and Mohsen Raza may not end up being the very worst of them. The Doksany Legacy … the much-anticipated sequel to Quentin Cope’s highly successful action and adventure novel The Geneveh Project, is an un-put-downable tale of stark terror and final retribution for a lone, desperate man fleeing some of the most feared adversaries in the world … until finally forced to face the ultimate legacy of his own past.
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December 2021New Asian Disorder
Rivalries Embroiling the Pacific Century
by Edited by Lowell Dittmer
In New Asian Disorder: Rivalries Embroiling the Pacific Century, Lowell Dittmer and his team explore the recent political disorder in East Asia resulting from growing Sino-American polarization. The rise of China in recent years is widely regarded as a momentous shift in the global balance of power. China is now extending sovereignty into the East China Sea and the South China Sea, constructing a new set of global financial institutions and replacing “universal values” with technologically enhanced nationalism. The country’s “Belt and Road Initiative” is also tainted by the vast ambition to realize the “China Dream” within the foreseeable future. In response to China’s challenge, the United States has abandoned its “constructive engagement” policy towards the rising power and engaged in a trade war. Sino-American relations have been at a historical trough since the normalization of their relationship in the late 1970s. This book sheds new light on the current political disorder in the East Asian international arena. The new Asian disorder is analyzed from three perspectives: the first focuses on identity, the second on political economy, and the third on the triangular dynamic. This collection of essays concludes that, unless and until consensus can be reached on a coherent new framework for cooperation and rule enforcement among different stakeholders in East Asia, the current disorder may be expected to persist.
