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Food security discussions often concentrate on large-, medium- and small-scale agriculture which are presumed to be male dominated. However, women’s contributions to food and nutritional security are grossly undermined in academic and policy debates, therefore they are largely deprived of support programs and provisions to uplift agriculture to mitigate hunger and malnutrition. In addition, social and cultural norms hamper active participation of women in agricultural sector and decision-making, further averting opportunities to voice their grievances and shape strategies to stimulate reforms that foster equitable distribution of resources and opportunities. Interestingly, women tend to have more autonomy and authority when it comes to managing their home gardens. Considering this premise, the chapter elaborates the vital role women play in enhancing household food and nutrition security through their home gardens in a variety of perverse situations by supplementing food availability, access and utilization. The analysis underlines the various socioeconomic and environmental benefits brought about by home gardening to the women’s family and the community. While highlighting experiences from developing countries around the world, the chapter also recognizes the barriers women face in improving the productivity, sustainability and development of their home gardens. Addressing these limitations can lead to significant advantages with respect to coping with food and nutritional insecurity and improving the standard of living of families.

This chapter explores the formation of social identity in post-communist societies through an explicit focus on women in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Certainly research has documented powerful commonalities among women in the former Soviet bloc: women throughout Eastern Europe have suffered disproportionately in the transition period. An increased feminization of unemployment a decline in family support and child care services and a decline in womens presence in politics seem to be occurring in all post-Soviet regimes. At the same time freedom to organize has helped precipitate independent womens movements distinct from statesponsored organizations. These commonalities invite some easy generalizations about the region; but such generalizations also obscure the very profound differences within Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Differences in culture religion language and social history all remind us that it is misleading to generalize about women and national identity in this region. Therefore the anaylsis in this chapter is focused on Russian women. (excerpt)

IntroductionAlmost since the inception of the Bond series, one of the most recognizable features of the films has been the opening sequences. From the now iconic images of a male figure (Bond) seen through the barrel of a gun to un- dulating female bodies, the pre-title/title se- quences mark the screen in ways that are both familiar and enticing to viewers. The pre-title sequence of the Cold War classic From Russia with Love (1963), for example, the second film in the James Bond series and the first to deploy the pre-title/title formula, opens with a shot of Bond seen through a gun barrel that then gives way to the figure of 007 walking guard- edly through a formal garden in the dead of night. A man sneaks up on Bond and strangles him to death with a thin wire. At this moment, exterior lights illuminate the garden to reveal a large mansion with many people standing around. The agent is congratulated for his rapid kill, and then a mask is peeled from the dead body to reveal that it is not Bond who has been slain-the exercise was simply a practice ses- sion for the agent. The scene then cuts to the title sequence, where credits are projected onto the shimmying bodies of women in belly dancer costumes.1 In almost every subsequent Bond film, the sequences function similarly, introduc- ing the film's hero and its broader gender poli- tics as well as the security threat that Bond will thwart. In each new installment of the series, these high-impact, fast-moving pre-title/title sequences refer back to previous Bond films, forging intertextual linkages. At the same time, the pre-title/title sequences serve both di- egetic and metonymic functions, re-presenting "real" international politics and global security threats within a normalizing male hegemony.Despite their obvious relevance to the Bond series viability, curiously little has been written on the pre-titles and titles.2 This article seeks to fill this gap, exploring the multiple functions of the sequences in three of the most recent Bond films, Die Another Day (2002), Casino Royale (2006), and Quantum of Solace (2008).3 These particular films are interesting because they mark the (at the time much-publicized) shift from Pierce Brosnan to Daniel Craig in the role of James Bond and because they also signal the changing risks presented by a turbulent international security situation. Taken together, these films not only provide a window into the ways in which pre-title/title sequences anchor the Bond series, they also offer a template for understanding the power of genre in structuring filmic articulations of contemporary geopolitics and gender politics and discourses. After a brief discussion of title and pre-title sequences and the role of genre in the Bond films, we turn to an examination of geopolitics and diegetic contemporaneity as found in Die Another Day, Casino Royale, and Quantum of Solace. We then look more particularly at the pre-title/title sequences and their generic, diegetic, and met- onymic functions, arguing that the sequences, like the films as a whole, telescope contempo- rary geopolitics and gender politics.Pre-Titles, Titles, and Generic ImaginingsIn "Reading the Title Sequence," Georg Stan- itzek points to the complexity and multiple functions of title sequences. These functions are economic and legal (i.e., production and distribution credits), aesthetic (49), and spa- tial, facilitating the transition from "outside" to "inside" and thus allowing viewers to engage the film. This opening then is both integral and "semi-autonomous" (45) because of its struc- ture and because of the extra-diegetic informa- tion that it provides. As Stanitzek writes, "the title sequences come into being as an eminent space of cinematic intermediality" (45). The title sequence of the first Bond film, Dr. No (1962), acts as Stanitzek's article suggests, al- lowing the audience to leave the mundane ev- eryday and enter the world of Bond. However, beginning with the second film in the series (From Russia with Love) the title sequence is preceded by an action sequence that is inte- gral not only to the "threshold" experience of viewing but also to establishing the diegesis. …

This article investigates the challenges of interdisciplinary teaching that crosses the fields of postcolonial literary studies and international relations. Interdisciplinary courses demand that teachers be able to comprehend, translate, and represent different disciplines' theories and epistemologies, and their interactions, in a flexible and syncretic manner.

This article explores the challenges of grassroots peace-building and third-party interventions into protracted conflicts, through an examination of the European Union's (EU) Special Support Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Contributing over a1 billion through a unique, decentralized funding mechanism, the EU has complemented the efforts of the British, Irish, and American governments to end the ethno-national conflict by targeting its intervention at civil society. In doing so, the EU initiative reflects the approach of conflict resolution theorists such as Lederach and Saunders, who argue that in the long run, peace can be sustained only if the efforts of elite-level politicians and (para)military leaders are reinforced by the participation and integration of ordinary citizens in the reconciliation process. We describe how the decentralized structure of the EU Programme involves civil society in addressing the structural and social–psychological sources of the conflict, but it also raises questions about whether the Programme can help disrupt long-standing patterns of ethnic animosity at the grassroots, particularly in the absence of elite-level cooperation and ethnic power-sharing.

This paper examines the gendering of unionist national identity in Northern Ireland through an analysis of organizations that are central to unionist politics today. While the commonplace observation that unionist women are ‘tea-makers‘ conveys a critical dimension of the gender order within unionism, it does not fully capture the significance of women's contributions to the establishment or maintenance of unionism. The article analyzes how Stormont constituted an ethno-gender regime, examines unionist women's political engagement during the Stormont era and under direct rule, investigates how the peace process and Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement have affected the unionist ethno-gender order and the gender politics of unionism, and explores the possibilities for political transformation.

This article explores parades as central institutions in the construction and maintenance of unionist ethno-gender identities and a crucial part of politics in Northern Ireland. It presents a brief historical review of the origins of Protestant marches and the organizations which are key to sustaining this tradition. It then analyses the contemporary marches, including the highly contested Portadown parade and the tranquil all-Ireland demonstration,held in Rossnowlagh in the Republic. These overwhelmingly male events are important to the maintenance of the gender order of unionism. The parades reveal the subordinated feminity within unionism: women participate in small numbers by invitation only. At the same time, they reveal competing masculinities: traditional, 'respectable' unionist masculinity is challenged by the more virile loyalism of 'Billy boy' and 'kick the pope' bands and marchers. This analysis explains why these competing masculinities are central, not only to the maintenance of male hegemony...

Etude de l'organisation des femmes, incluant mais ne se limitant pas a l'organisation feministe, en ex-URSS et selon le principe de base que le genre a ete et continue de jouer un role crucial dans la dynamique sociale, politique et economique de la region. Soulignant les contextes historiques de ces organisations par l'Etat et par les femmes elles-memes, les AA. examinent la relation entre les buts de l'Etat et ceux des femmes a differents moments, les contradictions des femmes actives avec l'ideologie prevalente de la fonction sociale primaire de la femme en tant que mere, et les facteurs actuels affectant les reponses des femmes dans une situation de changement et de crise. Les AA. presentent les defis auxquels les feministes russes font face et leur croyance qu'un surplus de pouvoir depend de la participation active dans les projets economiques et sociaux qui permettra de contrer l'essentialisme politique puissant de l'Etat patriarcal russe

The eminent scholar of nationalism, Anthony Smith, begins one of his major works on national identity (1991a) with a discussion of Oedipus the King.2 Sophocles’ tale of Oedipus is pre-national, yet, as Smith and other scholars have noted, it remains one of the most profound myths on the problem of identity and therefore a compelling narrative for thinking about the complexity of national identity. The words, “That is my blood, my nature-I will never betray it, never fail to search and learn my birth!” speak to us not only of the agony and hope of identity not yet discovered but also of the power of ancestry and social ties to determine that iden-tity. In the process of Oedipus’ search, he (and we) learn that identity is multiple and socially constructed, and that often its sources are unknown by the individual. Despite its premodern origins, the myth of Oedipus reflects what for many scholars is at the core of modern national identity, the myth of blood and belonging.3 From Oedipus’ promise to discover the murderer who brought plague upon Thebes to his self-inflicted blinding and exile, the play is a search for identity, a search that makes Oedipus, like all of us, human. Oedipus begins with a clear and coherent identity: Greek, conqueror-king, hero, husband, father. The plea of the Thebans to help end the crisis besieging their cityand the subsequent challenge from Tiresias to find the true murderer of Laius leads Oedipus on an exploration of his own identity and to the discovery that he is not who he thought he was. Tiresias’ words echo with foreboding:A stranger you may think, who lives among you, he soon will be revealed a native Theban but he will take no joy in the revelation. Blind who now has eyes, beggar who is now rich, he will grope his way toward a foreign soil, a stick tapping before him step by step. Revealed at last, brother and father both to the children he embraces, to his mother son and husband both-he sowed the loins his father sowed, he spilled his father’s blood!4

This chapter responds to the invitation in this volume to explore new approaches to the study of multilateralism. We centre on the dynamics of an emerging social movement within a particular locale, the women’s movement in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia in the early 1990s. We have chosen to examine this movement because it represents a burgeoning social force that has become increasingly important to multilateralism, as indicated by the International Decade for Women, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and other state-based international institutions’ activities. At the same time, the women’s movements illustrate the power of the ‘new multilateralism’ as non-governmental and grassroots organizations from a wide range of countries interact to improve women’s position both within the state and internationally. Finally, a study of the women’s movement in Russia helps us better appreciate the challenges and opportunities facing emerging social forces in formerly communist party-led states. In this chapter, we explore how the Russian women’s movement is affected by the changing political-economic environment and by international contacts and resources. To comprehend that movement, we draw from a rich body of social movement theory which we believe can help scholars of multilateralism understand the social forces now influencing ‘the evolving global power structure’ (Schechter, introduction to this volume). Out of our analysis of this important case of women’s activism, we suggest ways that our understanding of social movements and the complexity of the ‘new multilateralism’ might be deepened.

This book seeks to understand the evolution of Soviet policy towards the countries of South Asia, the regional constraints and policy opportunities which influenced the policy process in Moscow, and the relationship between Soviet perceptions and policy objectives. The author divides Soviet foreign policy into three aspects: a perceptual aspect in which assessment of the regional and international environment occurs; a formulative aspect in which aims and strategies are developed; and an implementation aspect. The book analyses Soviet policy objectives and instruments in distinct historical phases: 1970–1978, which covers the Indo-Pakistani War and bilateral relations; 1979–1985, which covers the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and and its impact on regional politics; and 1985 to the present which examines the Gorbachev era and the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

In 1998 the Good Friday Agreement promised an end to the protracted conflict in Northern Ireland through the establishment of new political structures to ensure eth nic power sharing.' Much has been written about the politics of the peace process, the challenges of demilitarization, and the suspension of the power-sharing assembly. Less attention has been paid to the agreement's explicit commitment that the signa tories "pursue broad policies" of social inclusion through measures to support com munity development and "the advancement of women in public life." Since the 2003 assembly elections have reinvigorated the radical wings of the Unionist and Nationalist camps, through the successes of the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein, Northern Ireland's new political institutions may be vulnerable. So, too, are the broad policies of social inclusion that the Good Friday Agreement promulgated. An examination of Northern Ireland offers an opportunity to explore a political context, protracted ethnonational conflict that has been undertheorized in studies of gender and democratic transitions. Feminist scholarship has provided a wealth of knowledge about women's inclusion in transitions from authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, especially in Latin America, eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.2 In particular, it has identified three factors that are crucial to women's ability to spring from civic activism to formal politics: the structure of political opportunities and availability of resources; the responsiveness of political parties to the inclusion agenda; and the extent of women's activism in civil society and women's ability to transfer their human and organizational resources to formal politics. Investigation of Northern Ireland can help to clarify whether processes of conflict resolution, like transitions from authoritarian rule, open opportunities for women to take advantage of their positions in civil society, mobilize on behalf of women's interests, and even spring into politics, or whether the politics of ethnonationalism undermine gender activism. Hence Northern Ireland may provide insight into a range of cases of pro tracted ethnonational conflict (such as the Basque Country, Cyprus, Israel, and Sri Lanka) where limited democratic traditions have combined with acute national con flict and may enrich analyses of the gender politics of transitions more broadly. Building on feminist and mainstream scholarship from the fields of ethnic con flict, nationalism, and democratization, this article explores the gendering of formal