“The truth is the whole!” wrote Hegel. The reprint of V. N. Dadrian's article on the so-called Andonian “documents” steers clear of many pertinent facts related to Armenian-Turkish relations and falls short of Hegel's maxim. Dadrian reduces the topic to a one-sided indoctrination, limiting his references to selected narratives and omitting all evidence that contradicts mainstream Armenian views. His article bypasses the initial Armenian massacre of Muslim Anatolians, the Armenian-led revolt in the Ottoman province of Van, and Armenian shedding of blood in about a dozen wars or armed clashes. He attacks the Turks presented with the posture of a prosecuting attorney in tones so biased that today's social scientists would define them as racist.

This article argues that the Aden Protectorate constituted one of the westernmost parts of India in terms of its political–legal identity and its place in the cultural project of imperial India. Although the port of Aden was governed as part of the Bombay Presidency until 1937, the tribes of the Aden Protectorate were treated as independent native states similar to the princely states of India. Using the sultanate of Lahj as a case study, the article shows the extent to which the colonial state used the Indian model to elaborate a history of the sultanate as an independent political entity, a status that was then institutionalized in historical texts, ethnographic knowledge, and state rituals. The article concludes with an analysis of the protectorate's participation in the 1903 Coronation Durbar in Delhi as a means of demonstrating its place in the British imagination of a socially and politically fragmented India that extended beyond geographical South Asia.

This essay analyzes three problems with the landmark Arab Human Development Report 2005 on women as a means of reflecting on some consequences of the transnational currency of a particular “dialect” of women's rights. Given the current geopolitical context, it first asks how the report's attribution of “unique” shortcomings in the Arab world to cultural and religious factors might make it vulnerable to appropriation for dangerous arguments about “the clash of civilizations.” Second, it asks how the urban, middle-class, cosmopolitan perspective on women's lives, aspirations, and everyday conditions colors the report's analyses of education, employment, and the role of family, eliding critical aspects of political economy and ignoring alternative values. Finally, it considers how the report's reliance on the dominant secular, liberal political paradigms that this “dialect” of women's empowerment indexes—modernization, human development, and (neo)liberalism—both narrows its recommendations and limits its potential appeal, given the Islamic revival and economic problems in the Arab world.

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This article analyzes the Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World. I argue that the Arab Human Development Report 2005 works within a United Nations development framework that strengthens states and elites in relation to their populations. This strategy reinforces the logic of national, transnational, and feminist governmentalities. Little attention is given to oppositional movements as sources of development. The authors of the report are often caught in the contradictions of using it to make radical critiques of undemocratic Arab state regimes and repressive Western state policies. International measures such as the human development index and the “global women's rights” discourse used by the United Nations Development Programme and other organizations selectively authorize subjectivities, freedoms, and transformations and help to normalize and constitute a range of inequalities among women.

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This article explores the creation and elaboration of certain ceremonials and court rituals in the Sultanate of Oman after the accession of Sultan Qaboos in 1970. It investigates the relationship between the development of these ceremonials and the perception of leadership and authority in the person of the sultan, as well as the development of a sentiment of common nationality. Its ethnographic underpinning is the most remote and marginal of Oman's people, the nomadic pastoral Harasiis tribe of central Oman. Whereas the creation of royal rituals was important for building a sense of national belonging even among this most cut off and distant of communities, these same ceremonies and created traditions developed lives of their own. Over time these rituals ossified sultanic courtly behavior, contributing little to the organic sense of Omani citizenship and eventually disillusioning some marginal groups.

The Arab Human Development Report 2005, the fourth in a series that has received much acclaim and stirred much controversy, takes up the issue of women's development in the Arab world. Through a careful reading and analysis of sections of the report that address education and economic participation, this paper offers a critique of the human capabilities framework that frames this report. I highlight critical tensions between the claim that providing education is an essential element of expanding choices and the assumptions embedded in discussions about women and education regarding which choices are acceptable and/or desirable. These tensions point to the persistence of values derived from the mandates of global capital, albeit in the new language of neoliberal choice, revealing that ‘human development’ does not represent a significant departure from earlier conceptualizations of development. I draw on my ethnographic research in Jordan as one example to interrogate such assumptions and to shed light on the ambiguities built into the educational project for young women today.

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