The Jesuits and Religious Intercultural Management in Early Modern Times

Human Capital, a Global Mindset, and Missionary Work in Japan and Peru during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Frank Jacob, Nord University, Norway

This book discusses the role of human capital and a global mindset for a successful intercultural management of the Society of Jesus in the geographical contexts of Japan and Peru during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Historical data for more than 200 Jesuits has been evaluated and analyzed according to modern management theory. The work is, therefore, an interdisciplinary study related to the history of religious orders, European expansion, and trans- or intercultural management and shows how the Jesuit missionaries in Japan and Peru were able to achieve and stimulate a successful expansion of their order’s influence in these regions of the world. While analyzing a historical topic, the book is also of interest to modern day managers and those who are interested in creating a successful strategy for intercultural management.

Lost Kingdom: Animal Death in the Anthropocene

Edited by Wendy A. Wiseman, University of California Santa Barbara and Burak Kesgin, Beykent University

The authors in ‘Lost Kingdom’ grapple with both the catastrophe of mass animal extinction, in which the panoply of earthly life is in the accelerating process of disappearing, and with the mass death of industrial animal agriculture. Both forms of anthropogenic violence against animals cast the Anthropocene as an era of criminality and loss driven by boundless human exceptionalism, forcing a reckoning with and an urgent reimagining of human-animal relations. Without the sleights of hand that would lump “humanity” into a singular Anthropos of the Anthropocene, the authors recognize the differential nature of human impacts on animal life and the biosphere as a whole, while affirming the complexity of animal worlds and their profound imbrications in human cultures, societies, and industries. Confronting the reality of the Sixth Mass Extinction and mass animal death requires forms of narrativity that draw on traditional genres and disciplines, while signaling a radical break with modern temporalities and norms. Chapters in this volume reflect this challenge, while embodying the interdisciplinary nature of inquiry into non-human animality at the edge of the abyss—historiography, cultural anthropology, post-colonial studies, literary criticism, critical animal studies, ethics, religious studies, Anthropocene studies, and extinction studies entwine to illuminate what is arguably the greatest crisis, for all creatures, in the past 65 million years.

The Holy Warrior: Osama Bin Laden and His Jihadi Journey in the Soviet-Afghan War

2nd Edition

Reagan Fancher, Texas Woman’s University

Fought between 1979 and 1989, the Soviet-Afghan War provided vital combat experience for Osama bin Laden and his senior lieutenants in al-Qaeda, allowing them to hone their newly acquired skills in guerrilla warfare to later support Islamist insurgencies worldwide. Yet the ruthless al-Qaeda chief’s success depended on the Soviet leadership’s reluctant prolonging of its military occupation out of fear of leaving Afghanistan in hostile hands. As relative latecomers to the ferocious Afghan frontlines, the inexperienced Arab fighters benefitted militarily from the combat training unwittingly provided by their Soviet foes. After skillfully obtaining this command and battle experience by working within the wartime atmosphere, bin Laden channeled al-Qaeda’s efforts in a global jihadi campaign targeting a second superpower and its allies. While allegations of U.S. support for the Arab jihadis have contributed to a popular image of bin Laden and al-Qaeda as C.I.A. creations, the historical facts appear to demonstrate that the combat opportunities provided by the Soviet occupation forces played a far larger role in transforming them into seasoned guerrilla fighters. In this second edition, Reagan Fancher updates and expands his monograph in an Afterword elaborating on the contemporary U.S.-U.K. perceptions of bin Laden's wartime actions and their results as he applied his battle-honed guerrilla tactics, judo skills, and recruitment capabilities in tactically helping Yemen's anti-communist Salafi guerrillas to emerge victoriously in their country's 1994 Civil War before concluding with an assessment of the founding al-Qaeda leader's impact on history. It offers an opportunity for today's decision-makers to learn from history and avoid creating new generations of Osama bin Ladens.

Women, Children, and the Collective Face of Conflict in Europe, 1900-1950

Edited by Nupur Chaudhuri, Texas Southern University and Sandra Trudgen Dawson, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians

Europe was in turmoil during the first half of the twentieth century. The political stability that emanated from nineteenth-century political liberalism began to break down, reaching climaxes in the Great War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War. Revolutions in Russia and Spain threatened parliamentary governments, and the Armenian genocide that began in 1915 foreshadowed the systematic destruction of European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. Dictators seized power and established authoritarian regimes that stymied democratic expression and censored the press. Much of the scholarship on each of the conflicts has tended to focus on the military (male) and the civilian (female) binary. Women and children experienced every conflict during this tumultuous period as civilians, consumers, victims, exiles, and combatants. As histories of women and war suggest, there are exciting new areas of research and scholarship that resist simplistic binaries. Women were not simply civilians or victims. They were actors in the minutiae of wars, revolutions, dictatorships, and genocides. Children were present in these conflicts and not invisible, as many histories suggest. They too were actors and often politicized by propagandist literature and sectarian education through their own experiences and the politics of their families. This collection seeks to complicate the child/ adult distinction and examine the experiences of women and children as lenses to view a more collective face of conflict. While the volume brings to attention conflicts in Europe, the editors acknowledge the global ramifications of the revolutions, wars, and genocides, as well as the multitude of individual experiences. This collection seeks to expand understanding of the personal as the political in European conflicts from 1900-1950. We believe the focus on women and children offers a diverse perspective on five tumultuous decades of European history.

Russian Nights Autocracy and Testimony: Life in Russia during the Soviet Period as Told by Those Who Lived it

Roberto Echavarren

The details of the Jewish Holocaust have become part of our history through the testimony of those who survived the death camps. The details of Lenin’s and Stalin’s reigns of terror are far less known because they took place behind a wall of secrecy, and survivors have been reluctant to speak about them for fear of retribution. This is an encompassing volume presenting an intense display, as complete as can be, of testimonies, gathered between 2001 and 2005 of actors implicated in different aspects of Russian life roughly through the period 1917-1956. They were people who had lived under the Soviet regime in times of peace and in times of war, from the Red Terror through the Great Terror. One must bear in mind the political and economic conditions in which those lives developed: the one-Party rule placed above both the government and the citizens, the abashment of the division of powers, the suppression of private property and private economic initiative, the political police, and the GULAG. Russian Nights offers a wide and detailed perspective of what we call “the Russian Century”: Lenin’s takeover, the all-powerful Party, the GULAG, and the Second World War.