Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

A. Shah (2018). Nightmarch. Among India’s revolutionary guerrillas. Londres: Hurst. 256 pp.

The Palestinian women’s movement emerged early in the 20th century and from its beginnings it was associated with the national liberation movement. Its nationalistic rhetoric made the protection of women’s honor the ultimate milestone of the national trauma: the loss of the homeland. Taking the land-honor dyad as a starting point, this paper addresses the unique situation of Palestinian women. While Arab women in neighboring countries freed themselves from the European colonial yoke, in Palestine they suffered the tragedy of losing their land to the Jewish national project. We will introduce the main historical, social, and political characteristics that shaped women’s participation in each case: in the trenches, in the refugee camps, under military occupation, in prisons, in exile, as well as the strategies that they developed over time. This paper presents an overview of the Palestinian women’s movement from an historical perspective, ranging from women’s associations to the armed wing of the most relevant political movements, from their experience as political prisoners to the work committees in the Occupied Territories.

This article aims to contribute to the knowledge of the critical situation facing Yemen since the 2014 war, to the point of becoming the most severe humanitarian crisis in the world, even worse than in Syria. Mass media and researchers have focused on the nature of the war and its development, but they have omitted to make a critical analysis of the different actors in the conflict. One of them is the Houthi movement (also called Ansar Allah). This key player in the current war is deeply rooted in the country’s history, yet much remains unknown about it. This text tries to fill this information gap through an overview of its history and its relationship with Yemen; its religious, tribal, and political dimensions; and describing the movement by reviewing important historical events such as the Saʿdah Wars (2004-2010), its role in the 2011 uprisings, and finally the great impact and power it has shown since the war in 2014.

The most recent translations of the Ṛg-Veda consider this text as an exemplary liturgical poem or religious literature. However, it does not clearly discuss the parameters with which it is classified as being religious. This raises an important question once again: Is the Ṛg-Veda a religious text? Is it connected to some kind of religion? This paper researches the issue of the last reference as expressed in the Ṛg-Veda, referring to the existence of homogenously distributed passages both of textual determination and indetermination. Therefore, given the impossibility of a rigorous discussion of complete determination and indetermination, the final reference described is not defined. For that reason, I consider that the most ancient Vedic thought—as confirmed in the Ṛg-Veda—differs from both religious and philosophical thought, as these remain defined by the concepts of “God” and “principle”. In contrast, the author proposes an approach to the most ancient Vedic thought as a model of initiatory poetry.

The myth of Sīyāvuš is one of the oldest and most important in the Iranian world and many rituals are related to it. Sīyāvuš is a deity of plants whose death and annual resurrection guarantees nature’s rebirth after cold seasons. To this day, it remains a powerful influence in Iran and Central Asia thanks to the legends that have sprung up from it. This paper describes some of these legends, collected during a fieldwork trip in 2018, and reinterprets them in reference to this myth.

T. Miller (2017). China’s Asian dream. Londres: Zed Books. 292 pp.

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The Chinese university system has experienced significant growth in recent years. The government has allocated resources to boost research and increase the presence of Chinese universities on the world university map. Nine of these universities constitute the C9 League. In this paper, we analyze the evolution of positions in the Shanghai ranking of C9 League universities. We also compare these results with two other international classifications, the QS World University Rankings and Times Higher Education.

A round of negotiations between Mercosur and India was recently launched to deepen the agreement in force. These negotiations will face the difficulties inherent with two actors who apply highly protectionist policies and have negotiated few trade agreements. As part of these negotiations, Uruguay has the potential to expand trade in processed foods, which currently face high tariff levels and non-tariff barriers. On the other hand, India enjoys advantages in industrial goods, many of which are not manufactured within Uruguay but by its main partners in Mercosur. This reality implies that negotiations between the two actors will not be without difficulties.

The segmentary analysis—alliances and rivalries among tribal factions—starts with Ibn Khaldun and his vision of North African tribes in the 14th century, but gains particular momentum following the studies of W. Robertson Smith and E. E. Evans-Pritchard at the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. These theories have been discredited to a certain extent during the decolonization period. This article examines the period from 1894 to 1927 in Morocco, relating to the Sultans Abdelaziz, Hafid and Youssef, re-examining the segmentary thesis, but now applied not only to the tribal system, but to the Makhzen itself, and especially to the contemporary European politics of the time in relation to the Sherifian kingdom. In this way, the segmentary hypotheses are recovered, extracting them from the previously narrow framework.