Memories of Nehemia

This article is both a biographical sketch of the career of Nehemia Levtzion and a reminiscence. Levtzion grew up in Israel during the period of its founding. He early chose to study Islamization in Africa and became the leading interpreter of the history of Islam in West Africa. Though often called on to assume administrative responsibilities in the Israeli educational system, he maintained a commitment to scholarship. The small conferences he held in Jerusalem over the years often involved a re-thinking of basic problems in the history of Islam in Africa and in the larger Muslim world. He was particularly interested in processes of conversion and the dynamics of change. Though he described many varieties of Islam and different levels of Islamization, he never accepted the notion of a distinctively Africa Islam. He saw instead processes that were similar throughout the Muslim world.     

Saline politics: Local participation and neoliberalism in Australian rural environments

Participatory approaches to sustainable development have become increasingly popular world‐wide. In Australia, participatory approaches such as landcare and regional catchment management form the basis of rural environmental policy and practice. At the same time, neoliberalist reforms such as market deregulation and withdrawal of state assistance from agriculture have been implemented. Various commentators have suggested that local participatory practices can enable neoliberal reforms by depoliticising rural environmental problems and fragmenting action. This paper explores the intersection of these participatory policy developments and neoliberal reforms through two case studies on the government of salinity in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales. From this work, it is apparent that neoliberal reforms result in competition for resources within the state, the projectisation of environmental action, and a hesistance of the state to allocate resources for broader environmental monitoring. This work demonstrates how the contradictions in these developments can create a chaotic and irrational environmental politics that can result in a repoliticisation of rural environments and opportunities for a more rational and democratic sustainable development practice.     

'Fortress Europe' and Third World immigration in the post-Cold War global context

This paper examines the conjuncture of economic and political developments in the world economy and demographic and environmental factors that, in the aftermath of the Cold War, have caused millions of immigrants and refugees to migrate worldwide, increasingly to the EU and North America where they are marginalised and have become, with greater frequency, victimised by right-wing political groups. Factors under study include the proliferation of civil wars and ethnic conflicts; the increase of inequalities and poverty on a world scale; the effects of neoliberal economic policies on Third World development; overpopulation, urbanisation and environmental degradation in peripheral sites of the world economy; and the impact of economic conditions in the EU on immigrant and native workers.