International Day of Peace

The 21st of September is the International Day of Peace, established by the United Nations in 1981. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the General Assembly adopting the Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace.

As the United Nations’ page describes it:

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption of the Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace. In that declaration, the United Nations’ most inclusive body recognized that peace “not only is the absence of conflict, but also requires a positive, dynamic participatory process where dialogue is encouraged and conflicts are solved in a spirit of mutual understanding and cooperation.”

In a world with rising geopolitical tensions and protracted conflicts, there has never been a better time to remember how the UN General Assembly came together in 1999 to lay out the values needed for a culture of peace. These include: respect for life, human rights and fundamental freedoms; the promotion of non-violence through education, dialogue and cooperation; commitment to peaceful settlement of conflicts; and adherence to freedom, justice, democracy, tolerance, solidarity, cooperation, pluralism, cultural diversity, dialogue and understanding at all levels of society and among nations. In follow-up resolutions, the General Assembly recognized further the importance of choosing negotiations over confrontation and of working together and not against each other.

The Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) starts with the notion that “wars begin in the minds of men so it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed”. It is this notion that framed the theme and logo of this year’s observance of the International Day of Peace. The ideas of peace, the culture of peace, need to be cultivated in the minds of children and communities through formal and informal education, across countries and generations.

The International Day of Peace has always been a time to lay down weapons and observe ceasefires. But it now must also be a time for people to see each other’s humanity. Our survival as a global community depends on that. The International Day of Peace was established in 1981 by the United Nations General Assembly. Two decades later, in 2001, the General Assembly unanimously voted to designate the Day as a period of non-violence and cease-fire.

Information taken from the UN’s page, for more details, please read more here.

In the spirit of this day, we have compiled some of our latest titles looking at peace studies below.

For more content, you can browse our Peace and Conflict Studies subject page here.


To be published December 2024

The Paris Peace Conference of 1919

The Challenge of a New World Order

Edited by Laurence Badel, Eckart Conze, and Axel Dröber

For more than a century, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 has remained an object of historical scrutiny. As an attempt to consolidate peace in the wake of World War I and to prevent future conflict, it was instrumental in shaping political and social dynamics both nationally and internationally. Yet, in spite of its implications for global conflict, little consideration has been given to the way the Paris Peace Conference constructed a new global order. In this illuminating and geographically wide-ranging reassessment, The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 reconsiders how this watershed event, its diplomatic negotiations and the peace treaties themselves gave rise to new dynamics of global power and politics. In doing so it highlights the way in which the forces of nationality and imperiality interacted with, and were reshaped by, the peace.

Paperback Available

Peace at All Costs

Catholic Intellectuals, Journalists, and Media in Postwar Polish–German Reconciliation

Annika Elisabet Frieberg

“This knowledgeably written study succeeds in exemplarily reopening a conceptual approach that is important for international relations on a hitherto rather neglected source basis and providing important insights for the understanding of both discourses of reconciliation in general and the history of German-Polish relations in particular.” • Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

Volume 23, Studies in Contemporary European History

Read Introduction

Paperback Available

In the Shadow of the Great War

Physical Violence in East-Central Europe, 1917–1923

Edited by Jochen Böhler, Ota Konrád, and Rudolf Kučera

“Overall, the volume offers a broad panorama of the history of violence in East Central Europe. The individual essays are thematically diverse and offer an excellent synthesis of multilingual sources of research literature and theory.” • H-Soz-Kult

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200 Years of Peace

New Perspectives on Modern Swedish Foreign Policy

Edited by Nevra Biltekin, Leos Müller and Magnus Petersson

“This generous collection of essays portrays salient aspects of Sweden’s policy of neutrality throughout the last 200 years. A truly stimulating read including splendid and sometimes thought-provoking interpretations. The book deserves international attention.” • Rasmus Mariager, University of Copenhagen

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Durable Solutions

Challenges with Implementing Global Norms for Internally Displaced Persons in Georgia

Carolin Funke

“I really enjoyed reading this monograph…. This book is much more than  area studies research on Georgia as this volume is likely to bear theoretical implications generalizable beyond the Georgian case study. Empirical data collected through ethnographic participant observation, elite interviews, and focus groups is rich and fascinating.” • Huseyn Aliyev, University of Glasgow

Volume 44, Forced Migration

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Reconciliation Road

Willy Brandt, Ostpolitik and the Quest for European Peace

Benedikt Schoenborn

Maybe the parties involved in negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine can revisit some of Brandt’s creative thinking and personal gestures as inspiring examples for the beginnings of a new reconciliation. They can use Benedikt Schoenborn’s excellent study of reconciliation and Ostpolitik as their guide.” • H Diplo

Volume 25, Studies in Contemporary European History

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On Mediation

Historical, Legal, Anthropological and International Perspectives

Edited by Karl Härter, Carolin Hillemanns and Günther Schlee

“A very nice compilation of interesting articles on mediation and related practices of third-party conflict regulation from various perspectives, including legal, anthropological, sociological, historical, psychological and philosophical perspective.” • Daniel Girsberger, University of Lucerne

Volume 22, Integration and Conflict Studies

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Paperback Available

Peaceful Selves

Personhood, Nationhood, and the Post-Conflict Moment in Rwanda

Laura Eramian

“This is richly detailed and an often startling ethnography with sharp insights and resonance for learning about post-conflict moments and the potential future for settings within, and far beyond, modern Rwanda.” • Conflict & Society

2019 CANADIAN ANTHROPOLOGY SOCIETY LABRECQUE-LEE BOOK PRIZE HONORABLE MENTION

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For more content, you can browse our Peace and Conflict subject page here.


National Cinema Day UK

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This Saturday 31st of August, cinemas across the UK will be offering largely discounted tickets in celebration of National Cinema Day, sharing the experience and enjoyment of the big screen with audiences.

In the spirit of this day, we have compiled our latest titles in cinema studies below.

For more content, you can browse our Film & Television subject page here.


Paperback Available

Hotbeds of Licentiousness

The British Glamour Film and the Permissive Society

Benjamin Halligan

“Halligan thrives when exploring a text’s cultural contradictions and the cracks in the philosophies underpinning the work. However, the book’s greatest asset is in taking these films (which rarely appear in most histories of British cinema) seriously.” • Choice

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Science on Screen and Paper

Media Cultures and Knowledge Production in Cold War Europe

Edited by Mariana Ivanova and Juliane Scholz

“With a focus on global scientific culture during the Cold War, this anthology incisively demonstrates how scientific media were never simply transparent tools for research or pedagogy, but also crucial components within powerful geopolitical institutions.” • Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, Seattle University.

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Documenting Socialism

East German Documentary Cinema

Edited by Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke

More than 30 years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, its cinema continues to attract scholarly attention. Documenting Socialism moves beyond the traditionally analyzed feature film production and places East Germany’s documentary cinema at the center of history behind the Iron Curtain. Covering questions of gender, race and sexuality and the complexities of diversity under the political and cultural environments of socialism, the specialist contributions in this volume cohere into an introductory milestone on documentary film production in the GDR.

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Open Access

Migration, Dislocation and Movement on Screen

Edited by Ruxandra Trandafoiu

Contemporary screen industries such as film and television have become primary sites for visualizing borders, migration, maps, and travel as processes of separation and dislocation, but also connection. Migration, Dislocation and Movement on Screen pulls case studies in film and television industries from throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia to interrogate the nature of movement via moving images. By combining theoretical, interdisciplinary engagements with empirical research, this volume offers a new way to look at screen media’s representations of our contemporary world’s transnational and cosmopolitan imaginaries.

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To be published October 2024

Kubrick’s Mitteleuropa

The Central European Imaginary in the Films of Stanley Kubrick

Edited by Nathan Abrams and Jeremi Szaniawski

“With some fascinating insights into an unusual topic new to Kubrick studies, this wide-ranging collection of essays firmly and persuasively situates Stanley Kubrick’s work in the art and culture of Central Europe.” • Robert Kolker, the University of Maryland, author of A Cinema of Loneliness, co-author of Kubrick: An Odyssey

Enchanted by Cinema

Wilhelm Thiele between Vienna, Berlin, and Hollywood

Edited by Jan-Christopher Horak and Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert

William Thiele is remembered today as the father of the sound film operetta with seminal classics such as Drei von der Tankstelle (1930). While often considered among the most accomplished directors of Late Weimar cinema, as an Austrian Jew he was vilified during the onset of the Nazi regime in 1933 and fled to the United States where he continued making films until the end of his career in 1960. Enchanted by Cinema closely examines the European musical film pioneer’s work and his cross-cultural perspective across forty years of filmography in Berlin and Hollywood to account for his popularity while discussing issues of ethnicity, exile, comedy, music, gender, and race.

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Cinematically Transmitted Disease

Eugenics and Film in Weimar and Nazi Germany

Barbara Hales

Propaganda played an essential role in influencing the attitudes and policies of German National Socialism on racial purity and euthanasia, but little has been said on the impact of medical hygiene films. Cinematically Transmitted Disease explores these films for the first time, from their inception during the Weimar era and throughout the years to come. In this innovative volume, author Barbara Hales demonstrates how medical films as well as feature films were circulated among the German people to embed and enforce notions of scientific legitimacy for racial superiority and genetically spread “incurable” diseases, creating and maintaining an instrumental fear of degradation in the German national population.

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Edges of Noir

Extreme Filmmaking in the 1960s

Michael Mirabile

Edges of Noir challenges the notion that noir film nearly vanished after 1958 until its subsequent “neo-noir” revival between 1973 and 1981. The 1960s, regardless of critical neglect, include some of the most provocative films of the post-World War II decades. Often formally disruptive and experimental, films including Shock Corridor (1963), Mirage (1965), The 3rd Voice (1960), and Point Blank (1967) evoke controversial issues of the era, deriving dynamic influences amongst exploitation cinema, sensationalistic American B movies, and the European New Wave movement. Whether the focus is on nuclear destruction, mind control, or surveillance, late noir films, above all else, vividly portray the collective fears from the time.

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Stories between Tears and Laughter

Popular Czech Cinema and Film Critics

Richard Vojvoda

While histories of Czech cinema often highlight the quality of Czechoslovak New Wave films made in the 1960s, post-socialist Czech cinema receives little attention. Through a methodology of historical reception, Stories between Tears and Laughter explores how attitudes towards post-socialist Czech cinema have shifted but still viewed it as popular cinema. By analysing publicity materials, reviews and articles, Richard Vojvoda offers a new perspective on the notions of cultural value and quality that have been shaping the history of post-socialist Czech cinema.

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Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe

From Communism to Capitalism

Edited by Masha Shpolberg and Lukas Brasiskis

“This collection provides a comprehensive analysis of Eastern European film culture and ecocinema, integrating them expertly to provide a deep historical and geocultural analysis of variations in ecocinematic representations and the ways these film cultures have been engaging with environmental matters. The contextualization of existing scholarship with the particularities of Eastern European political and cultural history is exciting and innovative.” • Pietari Kaapa, University of Warwick

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The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos

Vrasidas Karalis

“This illuminating book offers a powerful synthesizing account of the films of Theo Angelopoulos by framing them within a biographical context. By positioning Angelopoulos’ work within an array of philosophical, cinematic, and art-historical contexts, the author brings us closer to Angelopoulos’ existential, political, philosophical and aesthetic quests.” • Lydia Papadimitriou, Liverpool John Moores University

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For more content, you can browse our Film & Television subject page here.


Berghahn Journals

SCREEN BODIES
The Journal of Embodiment, Media Arts, and Technology

Editor: Andrew Ball, Emerson College

Current Issue: Volume 9, Issue 1 (June 2024)

Women’s Equality Day

Women’s Equality Day is celebrated each year on August 26th to commemorate the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote.

Today the observance of Women’s Equality Day has grown to mean much more than just sharing the right to the vote, but also calls attention to women’s continuing efforts toward full equality. Numerous International organisations continue to work to provide women across the globe with equal opportunities to education and employment, pushing against suppression and violence towards women and against the discrimination and stereotyping which still occur in every society. For more information on the history and for further resources please visit www.nwhp.org


To be published in November 2024

BECOMING GOOD WOMEN

Schooling, Aspirations and Imagining the Future Among Female Students in Sri Lanka

Laura Shamali Batatota

Volume 7, Lifeworlds: Knowledges, Politics, Histories

For female Sinhalese students attending a national school in the Central Province of Sri Lanka, the school serves as a significant base for cultural production, particularly in reproducing ethno-religious hegemony under the guise of ‘good’ Buddhist girls. It illustrates that tuition space acts as an important site for placemaking, where students play out their cosmopolitan aspirations whilst acquiring educational capital. Drawing on theories of social reproduction, the book examines young people’s aspirations of ‘figuring out’ their identity and visions of the future in the backdrop of nation-building processes within the school.

Open Access

BLACK SCHOOLGIRLS IN SPACE

Stories of Black Girlhoods Gathered on Educational Terrain

Edited by Esther O. Ohito and Lucía Mock Muñoz de Luna

Volume 7, Transnational Girlhoods

Locating Black girls’ desires, needs, knowledge bases, and lived experiences in relation to their social identities has become increasingly important in the study of transnational girlhoods. Black Schoolgirls in Space pushes this discourse even further by exploring how Black girls negotiate and navigate borders of blackness, gender, and girlhood in educational spaces. The contributors of this collected volume highlight Black girls as actors and agents of not only girlhood but also the larger, transnational educational worlds in which their girlhoods are contained.

Read Introduction

STATE INTIMACIES

Sterilization, Care and Reproductive Chronicity in Rural North India

Eva Fiks

Volume 4, Lifeworlds: Knowledges, Politics, Histories

“The book draws on detailed ethnographic research and is rich with empirical details that are framed within larger debates on women’s health, care, and state formation. The introduction immediately draws in the reader. It is a well-written and well-researched book.” • Lipika Kamra, Jindal Global University

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CONTESTED FEMININITIES

Representations of Modern Women in the German Illustrated Press, 1920-1960

Jennifer Lynn

In this comprehensive, long-view study on the concept of the Neue or Moderne Frau (New or Modern Woman) that spans the Weimar Republic, Third Reich, post-war period, and a divided Germany, Contested Femininities explores how different political and social groups constructed images of women to present competing visions of the future. It takes the highly contested representations of women presented in the illustrated press and examines how they emerged as crucial markers of modernity. In doing so it reveals the surprising continuity of these images across political periods and reflects on how debates over paid work, the gender division of labor in the household, the politics of the body, and consumption, played a central role in how different German regimes defined the Modern Woman.

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Open Access

INVISIBLE LABOURS

The Reproductive Politics of Second Trimester Pregnancy Loss in England

Aimee Louise Middlemiss

Volume 54, Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives

“In this original and conceptually sophisticated project Middlemiss handles incredibly difficult interview material with extraordinary sensitivity and care. She does not shy away from difficult details but makes these often very raw stories more understandable through serious analytic work.” • Linda L. Layne, University of Cambridge

Read Introduction

GIRLS IN GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT

Figurations of Gendered Power

Edited by Heather Switzer, Karishma Desai, and Emily Bent

Volume 6, Transnational Girlhoods

“This collection is a well-imagined, important, incisive contribution to the fields of girlhood studies, development studies, and gender studies that deftly exposes the contradictions, complications, and limits of the “Girls in Development” paradigm and the ways it shapes the current landscape of development and thus the lives of girls around the world.” • Jessica Taft, University of California Santa Cruz

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Gender in Germany and Beyond

GENDER IN GERMANY AND BEYOND
Exploring the Legacy of Jean Quataert
Edited by Jennifer V. Evans and Shelley E. Rose

“This is a collection of excellent scholarly historical essay honoring the late professor Jean H. Quataert. The articles by her colleagues and her former students further explore research themes (labor, law, and human rights) that were especially important features of Quataert’s own scholarly development” • Karen Offen, Stanford University

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Girl in the Pandemic

Open Access

THE GIRL IN THE PANDEMIC
Transnational Perspectives
Edited by Claudia Mitchell and Ann Smith

Volume 5, Transnational Girlhoods

The Girl in the Pandemic makes a unique and much-needed contribution to the scholarship on Girlhood Studies in times of crises in different global contexts and particularly including scholarship from the global south and north.” • Relebohile Moletsane, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Read Introduction

Cosmopolitan Refugees

COSMOPOLITAN REFUGEES
Somali Migrant Women in Nairobi and Johannesburg
Nereida Ripero-Muñiz

Volume 44, Forced Migration

“This is a fine book that offers fascinating comparative material from two well-chosen locations to discuss the lives and identity of Somali women migrants in Kenya and South Africa. It is theoretically astute and contains much important ethnographic material. I can see it becoming a key reference for the study of Somali diaspora in particular, and diaspora and identity in general.”                 • Neil Carrier, University of Bristol

Read Introduction

Punching Back

PUNCHING BACK
Gender, Religion and Belonging in Women-Only Kickboxing
Jasmijn Rana

Volume 5, New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations

“Jasmijn Rana has written an engaging, well-crafted and long-anticipated ethnography of the intersectionally gendered and racialized experience of Muslim Dutch women, drawn from her own apprenticeship in women-only kickboxing venues in the southern neighbourhoods of The Hague.” • Paul Silverstein, Reed College

Read Introduction

Paperback Available

WAITHOOD
Gender, Education, and Global Delays in Marriage and Childbearing
Edited by Marcia C. Inhorn and Nancy J. Smith-Hefner

Volume 47, Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives

“Using a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methods with participants from multiple countries, contributing authors find that there are multiple ways to understand the liminality implied by “waithood.”…This book could be used in courses on political science, women’s studies, sociology, and ethnic studies…Recommended” • Choice

Read Introduction


To see more of our titles on Gender Studies, follow this link.


Berghahn Journals

Girlhood Studies
An Interdisciplinary Journal

Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is a peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for the critical discussion of girlhood from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and for the dissemination of current research and reflections on girls’ lives to a broad, cross-disciplinary audience of scholars, researchers, practitioners in the fields of education, social service and health care and policy makers.

Aspasia
The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 

Special Issue: A Hundred Years of International Women’s Day in CESEE

Aspasia is the international peer-reviewed annual of women’s and gender history of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE). It aims to transform European women’s and gender history by expanding comparative research on women and gender to all parts of Europe, creating a European history of women and gender that encompasses more than the traditional Western European perspective.


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Women’s Equality Day

Women’s Equality Day is celebrated each year on August 26th to commemorate the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote.

Today the observance of Women’s Equality Day has grown to mean much more than just sharing the right to the vote, but also calls attention to women’s continuing efforts toward full equality. Numerous International organisations continue to work to provide women across the globe with equal opportunities to education and employment, pushing against suppression and violence towards women and against the discrimination and stereotyping which still occur in every society. For more information on the history and for further resources please visit www.nwhp.org


Use code 19TH to explore a special issue of Aspasia devoted to women’s and gender history. Redemption details.

Continue reading “Women’s Equality Day”

Celebrating International Museum Day

On May 18th the worldwide museum community celebrates International Museum Day. This day is an occasion to raise public awareness on how important museums are in the enrichment of cultural exchange, development of society, and cooperation among people. For more information on the theme and calendar of events, visit the International Council of Museums webpage.
Continue reading “Celebrating International Museum Day”

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Theodoros Rakopoulos on From Clans to Co-ops.

To mark the the first publication in paperback of his acclaimed From Clans to Co-ops: Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily, Theodoros Rakopoulos kindly agreed to discuss his work, the fieldwork behind it, and how co-ops came to assume a role in the rejection of the mafia.

Read more: AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Theodoros Rakopoulos on From Clans to Co-ops.

THEODOROS RAKOPOULOS is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. He has most recently published on citizenship, property, statehood and conspiracy theory. His book Passport Island: The Market for EU Citizenship in Cyprus tackles citizenship by investment programmes and elite Russian migration to ‘Europe’ (Manchester University Press, 2023). He is editor of The Global Life of Austerity and co-editor of Towards an Anthropology of Wealth (with Knut Rio).

Continue reading “AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Theodoros Rakopoulos on From Clans to Co-ops.”

Talking Ritual with Robbie Davis-Floyd

Robbie Davis-Floyd is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University, and Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology. She is the author of many books including Ways of Knowing about Birth: Mothers, Midwives, Medicine, and Birth Activism (2018, Waveland) and Birth as an American Rite of Passage (1992,2003, 2022). Her new book, co-authored with Charles D. Laughlin, is Ritual: What It Is, How It Works, and Why.

Continue reading “Talking Ritual with Robbie Davis-Floyd”