August 31st, 2020
This blog series, Putting the “Purdue” in Purdue University Press, is celebrating PUP’s 60th Anniversary by featuring the work our Press does in service to its parent institution. You can find the whole series here.
This post celebrates our work in supporting those who record and preserve Purdue’s distinguished history.
Purdue’s history is vast and distinguished, but preserving the stories of the thousands of students, faculty, and staff that make their way through campus each year ultimately falls to a small group of authors and archivists.
During last year’s celebration of Purdue’s 150 Years of Giant Leaps, Purdue University Press published two incredible new books, Purdue at 150: A Visual History of Student Life by David M. Hovde, Adriana Harmeyer, Neal Harmeyer, and Sammie L. Morris, and Ever True: 150 Years of Giant Leaps at Purdue University by John Norberg.
In Ever True, Norberg captures the essence of the university, delving into the stories of the faculty, alumni, and leaders who make up this institution’s past.
“Purdue is among the great universities of the world and it has an amazing history. It’s important to preserve the story of Purdue so people of today and tomorrow can understand it — the good and the bad. I learned from writing the most recent comprehensive history of Purdue, Ever True: 150 Years of Giant Leaps at Purdue University that the school has more history than can ever be put into one book. There’s a lot more work to be done.” said Norberg.
Carrying an encyclopedic knowledge of Purdue’s history and a zeal for all things Purdue, Norberg was the right man for the job. An accomplished writer, author, and journalist, he has frequently written books on Purdue and its alumni.
“In 1986 Purdue Bands wanted to celebrate its centennial with a book and I was hired to write it. I didn’t write anything technical involving music, orchestration, and marching — mainly because I didn’t know anything about that. Instead, I wrote about the people of Purdue bands, the people of 100 years ago and the people of today. I loved it. And people liked the book.” said Norberg. “In 1999 I suggested a book to Purdue about the role of its graduates in the story of aviation and space. It was approved and I’ve done a lot of writing about Purdue people in flight and space ever since. I grew up in the early days of the space race and I’ve always been fascinated by it. Purdue gave me the opportunity to write about that, including the stories of its 25 astronauts.”
The authors of Purdue at 150 take a different route to telling Purdue’s story, through rare images, artifacts, and words. Sammie Morris, one of the four authors, is the University Archivist and Head of the Archives and Special Collections Division of the Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies.
“Writing Purdue at 150 was an exciting challenge. I and my co-authors from Archives had to balance research and writing of the book— and digitization of materials— with finding content in the Archives that would offer new and different aspects of Purdue history than what had previously been published.” said Morris. “We were fortunate to have a team in the Archives that was knowledgeable about Purdue history and committed to sharing the treasures in the Archives with a wider audience. Every staff member and student employee in Archives contributed in some way to the book, and it was exciting to offer this research and scholarship experience to our student employees, who did excellent work processing collections, scanning photos, and conducting research on Purdue history.”
Many of our books on Purdue wouldn’t be possible without the Purdue University Archives and Special Collections. The research for many of our books starts there, including both sesquicentennial books, and two recent volumes on Purdue alumnus Neil Armstrong that utilize the some 75,000 letters of his correspondence stored there.
“Authors writing books about Purdue frequently use the collections of alumni, faculty and staff personal papers in the Archives to write books about people and events in Purdue history. University records are also frequently used by authors, from consulting historical course catalogs and annual reports to University photos, campus maps, and historical enrollment statistics. These records provide important information needed to understand the work, culture, and identity of Purdue throughout its history.”
Ever True and Purdue at 150 are the most comprehensive histories of Purdue to date, but its history is so much deeper than one book can convey. Our Founders Series is filled with valuable projects on Purdue’s schools, departments, and alumni, many of which are also available for free through Purdue e-Pubs. Additionally, our series Purdue Studies in Aeronautics and Astronautics has produced books on some of Purdue’s many astronauts, including Neil Armstrong, Jerry Ross, and Gus Grissom.
Even still, our entire catalog doesn’t even begin to encapsulate all the stories worth telling. There are thousands more to be told about Purdue, and as long as we have hard-working, passionate authors and tremendous colleagues in the Archives, we’ll keep finding them.
Filed under: PurduePressAugust 24th, 2020
This post was written by the director of Purdue University Press, Justin Race. It is the first in a series celebrating PUP’s 60th Anniversary by featuring the work the Press does on and around campus. You can find the whole series, Putting the “Purdue” in Purdue University Press, here.
Though obvious, it bears stating: every university press belongs to a particular university. Though we publish authors who are located across the world and seek a global audience, it is Purdue that we serve first and foremost. In a broad sense, that means projecting the university brand to readers everywhere. In a more immediate sense, it means partnering with the Purdue community to produce and disseminate the worthwhile and impactful scholarship being done right in our backyard.
Each year we publish a volume with the Center for C-SPAN Scholarship and Engagement—books that are freely available open access through Purdue e-Pubs. In November we will publish our eightieth book in the Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures series through a decades-long partnership with the School of Languages and Cultures. Our New Directions in the Human-Animal Bond series showcases cutting-edge research on the interplay between people and animals. We handle the review, editing, and publication of all the reports of the Joint Transportation Research Program, including each year’s Road School proceedings. And just a month ago we announced a new partnership with the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence to launch a series on careers in higher education.
As the university is committed to student success, so is our press, offering two student-focused journals: the Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research and the Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement. Both are open access—in addition to eight other open access journals sponsored and edited by members of Purdue.
Last year we helped celebrate Purdue’s sesquicentennial with two definitive, beautiful histories about the university and student life: Ever True and Purdue at 150. Both are part of our Founders Series, which includes a multitude of works on the university and its impact. We have always published departmental histories, most recently A Passion for Excellence: The History of Aviation Education at Purdue University.
Here in the “cradle of astronauts,” we have a ranging list of titles on space, including two volumes of letters written to Neil Armstrong, capitalizing on the collection of his papers held by the university’s Archives and Special Collections.
This is hardly an exhaustive list, but rather a sampling of the value a press can provide to its parent institution, which we have been doing for sixty years and counting. From giving students their first publication credit to producing government reports to publishing specialized monographs to documenting the university’s history to hosting a wide array of book series and journals edited by our faculty: our press is active throughout our community, working toward student success, fulfilling our mission as a land-grant university, and bringing to the world the worthwhile scholarship done here. Purdue University Press truly belongs to all of us.
Filed under: PurduePressAugust 11th, 2020
Researchers at Purdue University have a new resource to help them imagine new digital scholarship projects. The Digital Humanities Toolbox is a central site to access and explore various tools and resources, many of which are newly available to scholars and students at Purdue. Through a partnership between the College of Liberal Arts and the Libraries and School of Information Studies, our project team compiled a list of tools for various methods prominent in digital scholarship, including text analysis, network analysis, content management, digital publishing, social media analysis, and more.
The project was launched by Dr. Matthew Hannah (LSIS) with generous funding from the Integrative Data Science Education Ecosystem and was managed by Brandon Kerns (CLA IT) and Ryan Martin (CLA IT) and built by Ben Lamb (CLA Marketing and Communications). The toolbox features a collection of internal resources hosted by CLA IT, including Omeka S, Mukurtu, Scalar, Lacuna Stories, Nvivo, and WordPress. These platforms are fantastic resources for scholars who want to build digital archives and publications, either as part of a research project or for an innovative class assignment. Because CLA IT has hosted these platforms on their servers, researchers have access to powerful resources for free without the need to host and manage the platforms.
But the toolbox also provides access to external resources too, software that is freely available for researchers online. Most of these resources include instructions for how to download or create a free account, but all of these tools are freely available for the general public. PULSIS hosts workshops on these tools periodically for scholars who want help, and many include online tutorials as well. Furthermore, we’ve curated some key resources for scholars who want to learn more about DH, including sites for tutorials and other resources.
For questions about the Digital Humanities Toolbox, please contact Dr. Matthew Hannah at hannah8@purdue.edu.
Filed under: generalAugust 10th, 2020
We talked to Therese Kaspersen Hadchity, the author of The Making of a Caribbean Avant-Garde: Postmodernism as Post-nationalism.
Focusing on the Anglophone Caribbean, The Making of a Caribbean Avant-Garde describes the rise and gradual consolidation of the visual arts avant-garde, which came to local and international attention in the 1990s. The book is centered on the critical and aesthetic strategies employed by this avant-garde to repudiate the previous generation’s commitment to modernism and anti-colonialism.
Q: What are some of your main goals in this project?
Therese Kaspersen Hadchity: Since the mid-1990s the ‘playbook’ for visual arts practices and criticism in the English-speaking Caribbean has changed quite profoundly. My aim is to describe the moment when the spirit of nation building, which surrounded cultural production in the aftermath of the Independence-era, first gave way to a ‘nation-critique’, and then a rejection (implicit or explicit) of the nation as political goal and analytical frame. I wanted to put a frame around this transition, point out its various – and sometimes contradictory – manifestations, and give it a name (i.e. a ‘post-nationalist postmodernism’). It may ultimately end up having a different name, but I wanted to start the process of portraying and assessing it (albeit at a time when the very desire to ‘map’ and ‘name’ things is regarded with some suspicion). Rather than a densely theoretical account of aesthetic and critical dynamics (which nevertheless does occupy the first section of the book), I have tried to show, at the level of lived experience, how a series of converging factors – critical realignments, institutional failures and external pressures – have produced a new ‘common sense’ in the aesthetic choices artists make, in the way they find exposure for their work and in the way Caribbean works are critically framed, when it goes abroad.
Q: What are some of those factors that motivated this rejection of “nation building”, and therefore the cultural production inspired by it?
Hadchity: Naturally, the decades leading up to and past Caribbean Independence (most territories in the Anglophone Caribbean became independent in the 1960s and 70s) were full of confidence and optimism about forging new nations built on principles of equality and cultural diversity and the lessons learnt from the region’s traumatic history. Sadly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, this initial excitement was soon curbed by a toxic combination of internal challenges and external pressures: the political establishment was accused of merely having stepped into the former colonizers’ shoes by way of perpetuating patriarchal authority, elitism, and indeed also racism (in the sense that light-skinned Creole people were given opportunities for social advancement, while darker people were left behind). Populations that were internally divided by the mechanics of colonialism itself, fell prey to an equally divisive political dynamic, where those in power simply took turns to ‘service’ their supporters. In some countries, political rivalries, sometimes with ethnic undercurrents, turned lethal. All of this was coupled with the introduction of neo-liberalism and a new era of foreign policy in the Reagan-Thatcher era, which led to local governments being reined in by Bretton-Woods ‘structural adjustment programmes’. Among much else, this meant that the cultural infrastructure envisioned by the anti-colonial movement never really got off the ground. In most territories, Caribbean artists (in particular those who do not merely cater to tourists and home decorators) have therefore had very little institutional support.
Needless to say, all of this has created an atmosphere of frustration and disillusionment not only with the political system in place, but with the very concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘governance’, which have come to be regarded as easily corruptible and inherently coercive. And with the coming of a new era, which to many is defined by tele-communication networks, globalization and new mobility, many artists have simply walked away from the idea of ‘nation-building’ and invested themselves in the notion of fluid and transnational communities, thus making the previous aspiration of improving and fine-tuning the nation-state seem increasingly redundant.
Q: In the preface and introduction of the book you touch on what motivated you to take this on, could you speak on that?
Hadchity: I had a small gallery in Barbados from 2000-2010, a period during which an older artistic generation was being forcibly retired by the critical establishment. As I said above, the backdrop for this transition was a widespread frustration with the region’s political and institutional failures, and a sense of being ‘left behind’ by the global art world – disappointments, for which the older generation was held partially responsible.
Meanwhile, the artistic and critical generation that emerged out of the 1990s found a way forward, partly in a critical alignment with postcolonial and diaspora theory, and partly, as I mentioned earlier, in the opportunities afforded by new networking technologies. As much as these choices have opened up new possibilities, I felt the need to question the premises and corollaries of these strategies, and this is where the book gets its polemic tone. There is no question that the vision of the ‘old avant-garde’ had stagnated, but my apprehension that the new critical hegemony seemed to satisfy a series of what one might have regarded as conflicting desires, left me in a state of perpetual consternation and propelled me into this study.
What I think went missing in this period was a direction, which might have combined the older generation’s simultaneous spirit of cultural resistance and affirmation with the sharper and more restless critical eye of the younger generation. In a way, my book expresses a yearning for ‘paths not taken’.
Q: Does this mean you believe that these “paths not taken” may have been found through more collaboration between the ways of the new and old generations, rather than the rejection of the old ways way of thought that we saw?
Hadchity: I am not suggesting that a series of very clear and straightforward options were neglected: by the 1990s, Caribbean artists found themselves in a very difficult spot: the visions they inherited from the ‘old avant-garde’ were often quite problematic in their practical applications. Because their conditions were poorly understood in the wider world, Caribbean artists were also stigmatized by a perceived ‘belatedness’ in an international context.
But rather than walking away from the nation-building project envisaged by the previous generation, I think the new generation might have found ways to critique and develop it, rather than embracing a transnational cosmopolitanism, which is equally problematic. In some ways contemporary artists have in fact found ways to improve their conditions – for example by creating their own cultural infrastructures in the form of ‘alternative spaces’ – but there is a risk of such gestures playing into the hands of the current establishment. Some of the aesthetic strategies Caribbean contemporary artists have embraced (i.e. their methods and themes) are, as I try to explain in the book, similarly ambiguous in their political inflection. What I am arguing is therefore that there are aspects of the contemporary movement, which could be considered remarkably convenient for a neo-liberal imaginary and for the global status quo, but I am not suggesting that the new avant-garde is a product of that imaginary.
Thank you to Therese! If you would like to know more about this book you can get your own copy or request it from your local library.
You can get 30% off The Making of a Caribbean Avant-Garde and any other Purdue University Press book by entering the code PURDUE30 when ordering from our website.
Filed under: PurduePressAugust 4th, 2020
Parrish Library’s Featured Database aims to give a very brief introduction to the basic features of one of the Purdue Libraries and the School of Information Studies (PULSIS) specialized subscription databases. This Featured Database highlights CountryWatch, brought to you by CountryWatch, Inc.
CountryWatch provides critical country-specific intelligence and data through key publications produced by CountryWatch. Publications include Country Reviews, an up-to-date series of publications for each country including demographic, political, economic, business, cultural and environmental information; and Country Wire, which provides daily news coverage for every country in the word and a significant news archive made up of the compendium of regional news carriers.
The List of Business Databases is the alphabetical list of the databases specially selected for those in a business program of study. Access the databases off-campus with your Purdue login and password.
Click Getting Started with CountryWatch to see the basics of using CountryWatch.
Our CountryWatch subscription also includes Elections Central which can be used to find current and past election data by country.
Some other resources you might want to explore, are:
You can find additional tutorials for a variety of our subscription resources on our YouTube channel.
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Featured Database comes to you from the Roland G. Parrish Library of Management & Economics. If you would like more information about this database, or if you would like a demonstration of it for a class, contact parrlib@purdue.edu. Also let us know if you know of a colleague who would benefit from this, or future Featured Databases.
Since usage statistics are an important barometer when databases are up for renewal, tell us your favorite database, and we will gladly promote it. Send an email to parrlib@purdue.edu.
Filed under: database, general, MGMTJuly 31st, 2020
Purdue University Press is pleased to announce the list of new books for our Fall/Winter 2020 season. This new season of books will cover subjects including Jewish studies, central european studies, aeronautics and astronautics, Indiana, politics, library sciences, and literature.
This season adds to our collection of Holocaust memoirs with Escaping Extermination: Hungarian Prodigy to American Musician, Feminist, and Activist by Agi Jambor. Written shortly after the close of World War II but unpublished until now, this memoir by acclaimed Jewish Hungarian concert pianist Agi Jambor describes how she and her husband escaped the extermination of Hungary’s Jews during the Holocaust.
The season also includes two new titles that serve as essential resources for those affected by Parkinson’s Disease, The Complete Guide for People with Parkinson’s Disease and Their Loved Ones and Everything You Need to Know About Caregiving for Parkinson’s Disease. Both books are written by Lianna Marie, a trained nurse who served as her mother’s caregiver and advocate for over twenty years through the many stages of Parkinson’s Disease.
A Round Indiana: Round Barns in the Hoosier State, Second Edition by John Hanou will add to our great collection of books on Purdue & Indiana. This book documents the 266 round barns identified in the history of Indiana, containing more than 300 modern and historical photographs alongside nearly 40 line drawings and plans.
To learn more about these books download the seasonal catalog or subscribe to our newsletter at www.press.purdue.edu/newsletter.
Filed under: PurduePress
July 15th, 2020
The stories of Holocaust survivors are as inspiring as they are haunting, but the common thread holding them together is persistence in the face of unthinkable devastation and suffering. Purdue University Press is proud of our part helping preserve their stories, several of which you can find below.
by Agi Jambor, Edited by Frances Pinter
Written shortly after the close of World War II, Escaping Extermination tells the poignant story of war, survival, and rebirth for a young, already acclaimed, Jewish Hungarian concert pianist, Agi Jambor. From the hell that was the siege of Budapest to a fresh start in America, the author describes how she and her husband escaped the extermination of Hungary’s Jews through a combination of luck and wit.
Unpublished until now but written in the immediacy of the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, Escaping Extermination is a story of hope, resilience, and even humor in the fight against evil.
by Tom Pfister, Kathy Pfister, and Peter Pfister
Eva and Otto is a true story about German opposition and resistance to Hitler as revealed through the early lives of Eva Lewinski Pfister and Otto Pfister, who worked with a little-known German political group that resisted and fought against Hitler in Germany before 1933 and then in exile in Paris before the German invasion of France in May 1940.
The book provides a sobering insight into the personal risks and costs of a commitment to the duty of helping others threatened by fascism. Their unusually beautiful writing—directed to each other in diaries and correspondence during two long periods of wartime separation—also reveals an unlikely and inspiring love story.
by Edith Mayer Cord
Finding Edith is the coming-of-age story of a young Jewish girl chased in Europe during World War II. Like a great adventure story, the book describes the childhood and adolescence of a Viennese girl growing up against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the religious persecution of Jews throughout Europe.
by Fred Behrend with Larry Hanover
Fred Behrend’s childhood came to a crashing end with Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) and his father’s harrowing internment at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. But he would not be defined by these harrowing circumstances. Behrend would go on to experience brushes with history involving the defeated Germans. By the age of twenty, he had run a POW camp full of Nazis, been an instructor in a program aimed at denazifying specially selected prisoners, and been assigned by the U.S. Army to watch over Wernher von Braun, the designer of the V-2 rocket that terrorized Europe and later chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that sent Americans to the moon. This book tells his story.
by Eva Mayer Schay
This fascinating autobiography is set against the backdrop of some of the most dramatic episodes of the twentieth century. It is the story of a stubborn struggle against unjust regimes, sustained by a deep belief in the strength of the human spirit and the transcendental power of music. It is also an account of a rich spiritual life, during which the author has built upon her Jewish roots through the study of Eastern philosophy and meditation.
You can get 30% off all Purdue University Press titles by entering the code PURDUE30 at checkout on our website.
Filed under: PurduePressJuly 14th, 2020
REDLANDS, Calif.—July 13, 2020—Esri, the global leader in location intelligence, presented Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies (LSIS) with Esri’s Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award on July 13, 2020, at the annual Esri User Conference, which moved to a completely virtual format this year. Selected from over 300,000 eligible candidates, LSIS received the award for its innovative application of mapping and analytics technology, as well as thought leadership in the field of GIS education.
The SAG Awards are meant to show appreciation for organizations using GIS to understand complex data and meet challenges around the world. Through their unique approaches to geospatial science, the users honored with awards are demonstrating groundbreaking possibilities of GIS software.
“Esri User Conference has always given our users an opportunity to share the ways they are implementing GIS and using it to improve their organizations and the world around them,” said Jack Dangermond, Esri founder and president. “I am inspired by the amazing work our users are doing, and I am honored to present these awards to all the organizations recognized for their commitment to technological leadership in government, business, and nonprofit work.”
LSIS supports GIS teaching and research efforts across Purdue’s West Lafayette campus. The LSIS GIS team works with all colleges and departments interested in GIS to coordinate teaching efforts, provide teaching resources, and collaborate on GIS education programming. Undergraduate and graduate students are then introduced to interdisciplinary concepts of geographic information and trained in spatial thinking, research and analytical skills through LSIS-driven GIS coursework. Through these courses, students develop skills beneficial to their disciplinary research, future careers and everyday lives. There are over 2,000 GIS users on Purdue’s West Lafayette campus and LSIS engages with this broad community through annual GIS Day outreach events. These include both a high school program and a single day university-wide conference. All 2020 GIS Day activities will be held virtually for the first time during the upcoming fall semester.
The LSIS GIS team is led by Dr. Nicole Kong, associate professor. Kong has dedicated her career to improving geospatial information literacy education and adapting GIS technology for innovative use across various disciplines. She has received two National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) grants to introduce GIS to humanities scholars and secondary school teachers. She is assisted by GIS Instruction Coordinator Yue (Shirley) Li. Li helps design and coordinate teaching activities through technology support, teaching material preparation, and research data management.
“It is a tremendous honor to be recognized by Esri for our contribution to GIS education,” said Beth McNeil, Esther Ellis Norton professor of library sciences and dean of libraries. “Dr. Kong and her team have built a thriving, interdisciplinary GIS program that benefits students, faculty, and staff across campus. With its broad applications in research and industry, GIS is a pillar of the growing information resource needs of the future. Purdue LSIS is proud to be an educational leader in this field.”
This year’s Esri User Conference was the world’s largest, virtual GIS event. Purdue University LSIS was one of over 180 organizations in areas such as commercial industry, defense, transportation, nonprofit work, telecommunications, and government to be honored {remove field if your organization referenced it above}. Recipients were recognized by Dangermond during the event.
Esri staff annually nominate hundreds of candidates from around the world for consideration, and Dangermond selects the finalists.
For more information on how Purdue University LSIS is innovating through the use of geospatial technology, visit https://www.lib.purdue.edu/gis.
Filed under: general, GISJuly 6th, 2020
We talked to Mate Nikola Tokić, the author of Croatian Radical Separatism and Diaspora Terrorism During the Cold War.
Croatian Radical Separatism and Diaspora Terrorism During the Cold War examines one of the most active but least remembered groups of terrorists of the Cold War: radical anti-Yugoslav Croatian separatists. At its core, this book is concerned with the discourses and practices of radicalization—the ways in which both individuals and groups who engage in terrorism construct a particular image of the world to justify their actions.
Q: What is the goal of your book? What motivated you to write it?
Mate Nikola Tokić: Like many projects, my initial interest in exploring the history found in Croatian Radical Separatism and Diaspora Terrorism During the Cold War actually arose from something of a chance encounter. During archival research for my doctoral dissertation, I happened upon a quote from socialist Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz Tito where he stated that Croatian terrorism posed an existential threat to the country. The document I was reading had nothing to do with the subject, and the quote was actually a throw-away line, made to emphasize a quite different point. Nevertheless, I was struck by the observation. I had long been aware of the terror campaign Croat emigrants waged against socialist Yugoslavia during the Cold War, but had always seen the violence as more or less insignificant and little more than a nuisance to the Yugoslav regime. The comment by Tito, however, suggested a more complex story. Once I completed my doctoral thesis, I had the opportunity to follow up on the reference, and soon discovered an intricate and fascinating history that had hitherto been neglected in historiography. And the deeper I dug, the more intricate and fascinating the history became. First and foremost, my motivation for writing the book was bringing this history and its many entanglements to light.
Q: Why do you think this part of history was relatively overlooked?
Tokić: In many ways, it remains a surprise to me that this history has thus far been mostly ignored in academia. But I think there are some clear reasons for this. In terms of Yugoslav historiography, clearly the focus for many years has been on the country’s violent break-up. Scholars have had to struggle with contending why a country that so long was touted as a success story ultimately collapsed so acrimoniously. As interesting as the story I explore is, it is understandable that historians and others would focus on the causes and context of arguably Europe’s worst tragedy since World War II. In terms of the history of political violence and terrorism, in part the issue relates to the degree to which radical Croatian separatists were able to keep their cause in the spotlight. In short, they were unable to, or at least not to the degree better remembered groups of the era such as the RAF, Brigate Rosse, PLO, or ETA did. For numerous reasons, Croatian separatists rarely landed on the front page of newspapers the world over despite having been as active or even more so than these other groups. Over time, this has led them to fall into relative obscurity.
Q: You start the introduction of the book by acknowledging that many would like us to believe our current “age of terror” is unprecedented. How could your book help us understand modern terror more?
Tokić: In many ways, my desire to challenge prevailing claims about the unprecedented nature of contemporary terrorism has less to do with furthering our understanding of political violence itself and more to do with understanding how political violence and terrorism have been politicized in current politics and society. From its very inception, modern terrorism has been as much about labels and symbolic politics as it has been about social, political, economic, and cultural change. The rather hackneyed phrase “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”—to give just the most obvious example—puts this into sharp relief. A striking feature of both state and media responses to contemporary terrorism has been how ahistoricized their treatment of the phenomenon has been. The result of this, in my view, has been that our understanding of the genesis and aim of terrorism as political act in contemporary world politics lacks sufficient context. The point of the book is less that we learn from the past in order not to repeat it (to paraphrase George Santayana’s famous quote) and more simply to help create a more complete framework for how to think about pressing issues of the day, in this case the relationship between migration and radicalization. Despite its rather narrow empirical focus, ultimately the aim of the book is to provide new insights and perspectives on how to think about the link between population flows and political violence. From this, we can not only understand modern terrorism better, but more critically reflect upon how best to respond to that terrorism.
Q: Where there any particularly surprising or interesting things you found when researching?
Tokić: I’m not sure that I would say that it was particularly surprising, but one thing that definitely struck me was how little the state security services of various countries either knew about or understood radical Croatian separatist groups. There is, I believe, a general belief that intelligence agencies are generally efficient and effective, if not in fact omniscient. This notion has developed through both popular culture and state efforts to propagate the idea that their security services are resourceful and competent. From what I was able to see of classified and top-secret documents (which of course was limited) it is clear that not only did the intelligence agencies have little idea about the organization and activities of radical groups, what they did know they often misunderstood. This is not to say, of course, that security services were completely ignorant or blind to the threat posed by extremist organizations in their countries. Rather, like any governmental bureaucracy or agency they were hampered by a variety of ideological, partisan, financial, administrative, and even managerial limitations and shortcomings. The end result was an understanding of radical groups that was often at best imperfect, if not outright distorted.
You can get 30% off Croatian Radical Separatism and Diaspora Terrorism During the Cold War and any other Purdue University Press book by ordering from our website and using the code PURDUE30 at checkout.
June 23rd, 2020
The EBSCO Research Databases issue has been resolved. See https://status.ebsco.com for more information.
Filed under: Alerts: Expired