Indiana University Press blog

We Can Do More

The following is a guest post by Gary Dunham, Director of Indiana University Press.

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My goodness, University Press Week arrives once again, complete with the usual fanfare of irresistible slogans (#TurnItUp anyone?) and energized reminders of the many ways that We University Presses Are Awesome and Important. As a press director, I obviously have no argument with the basic intention and messaging of this week. I prefer, though, to use these five days less to celebrate whom we are at present than as an opportunity to reflect somberly and critically on how we could be even better. Let me rephrase that—given the challenging inequities that erupt, resurface, and fester during these times, we need to be even better as university presses.

Oh, how easier it would be if monographs were our sole mission and impact—but they never have been. University-based scholarly publishers do not reside in a well-mannered, ivory tower, blueprinted solely by the distinguished traditions and currents of scholarly disciplines. Far from it—the growing ugliness of the second decade of the twenty-first century creeps onto our campuses and seeps into our profession and days. Antisemitism explodes violently once again; racial and ethnic bigotry festers misunderstanding, intolerance, and murder. Somedays the tumult and sheer messiness of it all can be discouraging and exhausting, making us feel small and alone. It can be easy to lose sight of the opportunity and goodness that’s always connecting us with a larger world.

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"It can be easy to lose sight of the opportunity and goodness
that’s always connecting us with a larger world."

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But that’s just when we need to dig in our heels, recall the promise of our profession, and be even better at what we do.

In such times, university presses are right to point out that we make a difference through longstanding, peer-reviewed efforts to disseminate research based on real facts that educate us in depth about issues, our planet, and other lives, religions, and cultures. This vital information is there for all who want to read it. List by list, series by series, journal by journal, book by book we continue to light candles in the darkness.

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"List by list, series by series, journal by journal,
book by book we continue to light candles in the darkness."

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I am convinced we can do more. Sure, there’s a certain amount of comfort and certainty in pointing to one of our vital functions as conveyor belts of significant content from the academy. But that rightful acknowledgment crashes hard against the stark reality of the size of the audience who actually read our monographs. Let’s face it—in many if not most cases, it numbers in the hundreds for one monograph. Hundreds of readers in a nation of over 325 million people. And let’s also not forget two other unyielding realities: our scholarly books and journals tend to be very expensive and so many of them are not written accessibly. Ouch. Yeah, I know.

I am confronting these difficult questions about numbers, relevance, and mission as I revisit and prepare to update Indiana University Press’s long-term strategic plan. How, as proactive, engaged publishers, can we deepen and vivify our commitment to such topical parts of our list, and grow our readership as a result?

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"How, as proactive, engaged publishers, can we deepen
and vivify our commitment to such topical parts of our list,
and grow our readership as a result?"

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The answer can be found in detailed, strategic work that is not glamorous but very necessary. We need to roll up our sleeves, get deep under the hood of the long-term plans for our lists, and make careful, purposeful adjustments. Let me very briefly make three suggestions about how to rethink our approach to topical subject areas, all of which I am incorporating into our new strategic plan.

1. Transform a book publishing list into a collaborative, knowledge ecosystem. First and foremost, begin with institutional partnerships and not the number and types of books when articulating the Press’s plans for a topical subject area. Identify the key stakeholders involved in research and the production of content—museums, professional societies, institutes, etc.—and seek to build long-term, collaborative publishing partnerships with them. Those stakeholders often have built-in readerships through memberships and subscriptions, connecting the Press more effectively to highly interested readers and the current events that affect them. Taking into account not only annual acquisition and profitability goals for books, series, and journals but also coalitions and partnerships with key research and policy stakeholders provide a holistic and exciting picture of the breadth and depth of the Press’s engagement with and impact on a field. We need to brand those coalitions and partnerships strategically in our plans. How do all of us stakeholders together continue to find effective ways to sponsor and disseminate vital research in this area? 
2. Articulate and enforce writing standards to support the Press’s plans for a list. Very specialized, often jargonized, content from the gristmill of the academy end up in our inboxes all the time, and much of it understandably involves scholars writing for a very limited number of other scholars. But can such writing satisfy the greater list ambitions of the Press? We need to determine the types of writing and presentation needed to best support the Press’s long-term plans for reaching readers in a topical subject area and explicitly incorporate those standards into the strategic plan. We need to message those standards in communications with authors and work closely with the acquisition and operations teams to enforce them. Yes, I realize that writing standards take staff time to enforce, but I would rather publish fewer books that are well written, that more effectively reach the desired audience, and thus that are likely to enjoy healthy sales. 
3. Integrate Open Access fully into the strategic plan to expand a list’s readership and immediate relevance. Open Access is not the enemy; it’s not untested; it doesn’t destroy print sales; it shouldn’t be relegated to the hinterlands of a Press’s public face or strategic interests. It is in fact, a powerful, nimble promotional and educative tool. Indiana University Press’s controlled testing of OA for the past four years, along with our ongoing, in-depth collaboration with IU Libraries through the Office of Scholarly Publishing, has shown us its utility and advantage for building lists and attracting readers. Strategic plans for topical subject areas would benefit from being explicitly grounded in an orchestrated plan for open content. This could include opening up select editions and chapters to reach economically disadvantaged readers  (including students and transitional or part-time faculty, who might become part of the acquisition pipeline as future authors), to promote and showcase resonance with unfolding current events, and to encourage others to consider purchasing print editions.

In my opinion, thinking through and refining our approaches to topical subject areas is a productive response to the current challenges of this era. It’s detailed work, largely executed out of sight, but with far-reaching consequences that will make our content even more visible, accessible, and relevant to a world that needs us more than ever before.

That’s my two cents worth. So, fellow University Presses, what are your ideas for becoming even better at what we do in these trying times? During this namesake week of ours, we’re all listening.

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Gary Dunham, a leader and innovator in academic publishing for over two decades, is the Director of Indiana University Press and Digital Publishing. Connect with Gary on Twitter at @GaryDunhamIUP. 

Join the University Press Week conversation online using the hashtags #ReadUP and #TurnItUp. University Press Week is organized by the Association of University Presses and takes place annually, follow them on Twitter at @aupresses.

An Author Meets His Subject

Guest post by Jeffrey B. Lilley, author of Have the Mountains Fallen?.

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In September 2007, I met Chingiz Aitmatov, a man whose life and work I would spend the next 10 years studying and writing about. I couldn’t have expected then how much of my life he would become, so much that I resigned my job and worked 18 months without income to finish Have the Mountains Fallen?, a joint biography of Aitmatov and Kyrgyz journalist and exile Azamat Altay that was eventually published in early 2018 by Indiana University Press.

Aitmatov is one of the most famous writers Americans don’t know about—except perhaps those Americans who were reading IU Press’s publications in the 1980s, when they may have encountered a translation of Aitmatov’s most famous book, The Day Lasts Longer than a Century. In that book, Aitmatov, whose works were translated into 160 languages, popularized the term mankurt for a person who forgets where he is from, is ignorant of history and therefore becomes a tool in the hands of others—basically a slave.

Part Kyrgyz and part Tatar, born and raised in Soviet Kyrgyzia, a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, Aitmatov was keenly aware of where he was from. His life was a constant struggle to not become a tool of anyone or anything.

When I met the 79-year old Aitmatov in independent Kyrgyzstan in 2007, he was staying in a cottage at the government dacha compound on Lake Issyk Kul, a collection of Soviet-era rest houses connected by cement pathways and shaded by pine and birch trees. Though a bit worse for wear after years of use by Kyrgyzstan’s officialdom, the Soviet-era compound on the north shore of the lake was still a quiet hideaway. 

Across the way stood the cottage where Aitmatov had written The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. Down a pathway, the gentle roll of waves lapped against the shore, and the Tian Shan Mountains rose in the background. In his younger days, Aitmatov used to take nightly swims in the lake. His strokes would take him offshore into the black of night, out of sight of nervous family members who waited in silence on the shore. The swims afforded him time alone in his hectic life—a separate peace of sorts—and he would return full of energy and refreshed. But in the new millennium, those swims had become a thing of the past for the 78-year old Aitmatov.

On the phone earlier that week, Aitmatov had been welcoming, inviting me to spend time with him at the dacha compound, and he was solicitous in person, asking about my visit to his home village. “You are the first American journalist to visit Sheker, he remarked shortly after we shook hands. “Did they receive you well?” Then he settled into a chair. Despite this warm welcome, he seemed exhausted, and his heavily lidded eyes opened and shut during our hour-long talk. Suitcases were open around the cottage, indicating a temporary stay. A bottle of Lipitor nearby was a reminder of the writer’s health concerns, and during our conversation, he nodded off several times. The interview became more of a lopsided exchange between generations: the aging writer sharing his thoughts with a curious American shaped by the Cold War.

Aitmatov spoke of writing being his spiritual life, and of religious extremism gripping the world. Three years on, he was still troubled by the tragedy at Beslan in southern Russia in 2004 when Chechen terrorists seized an elementary school and took hundreds of young children hostage. Many inside the red-brick school building died during the ensuing shootout between the Chechens and Russian law enforcement. Pictures of bloody, half-clothed children being rescued from their smoldering school shocked the world in a way that has become too familiar of late.

In a deep, slow voice, Aitmatov spoke of his role in pushing forward perestroika in the Soviet Union as a top advisor to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. “I consider that fate put me in this position,” he said, by way of explanation. “I did as I could to answer to the contemporary challenges. I understood that the issue was how to get out of totalitarianism to democracy. And that’s a long process. We need another hundred years to travel this path, to comprehend. In this is the essence of human life and all history: there’s nothing simple to understand.”

Learn more about Jeffrey B. Lilley's latest book:

  

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About the Author

After witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union as a journalist in the 1990s, Jeffrey B. Lilley moved to Central Asia in 2004. During a three-year posting in Kyrgyzstan, he read the works of Chinghiz Aitmatov, slept in yurts, drank fermented mare’s milk, and hiked in the country’s beautiful mountains. Over the next ten years, he worked in the field of democracy and governance support in Washington, DC, and the Middle East, returning to Kyrgyzstan in 2016 to lead a British-funded parliamentary support program. Lilley is an author (with James R. Lilley) of China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage and Diplomacy and Have the Mountains Fallen? Two Journeys of Loss and Redemption in the Cold War.

 

Now Available! Get your copy of Jeffrey B. Lilley's latest book, Have the Mountains Fallen?

"It's My Job": Reflections on a Photojournalist’s Life

Guest post by Steve Raymer, author of Somewhere West of Lonely

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I never set out to be a photographer of conflict and tragedy—famines in Bangladesh and Ethiopia and wars on five continents at last count. In my early twenties, I saw enough blood, heard enough lies from military and civilian officials, and lost close friends while serving as an officer in the United States Army in Vietnam. Back home and finishing graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1971, I turned down a desk job in Saigon, capital of the former South Vietnam, as a picture editor with the Associated Press, the world’s largest news gathering agency. To my mind, if I was to ever again experience the constant fear of being killed, at least it would be looking through the lens of my Nikon cameras.

My work for National Geographic Magazine in places like Cambodia, where I was wounded in 1974, and in embattled corners from the world— the Middle East, Afghanistan, South Asia, Northern Ireland, and El Salvador—was often part of reporting larger global issues. For example, genocidal Khmer Rouge guerrillas fired rockets and mortars at innocent Cambodians receiving American food aid and I was in the middle of the mayhem, following a shipment of California rice for a story about the world hunger crisis. Fifty years on, we forget that Cambodia by 1974 was starving as the war in neighboring Vietnam spilled across its border, creating tens of thousands of refugees.

In another instance, I traveled the globe with the International Committee of the Red Cross, keepers of the Geneva Conventions, to document its humanitarian world in some 14 war zones. In El Salvador, about to return home after two weeks in the middle of the most violent conflict in the Western Hemisphere during the 1980s, the ICRC chief asked if I wanted to accompany doctors and nurses on a mission into the contested jungle to bring out a wounded Communist guerrilla fighter to a government hospital. She had a bullet in her brain. No one at National Geographic would have ever known if I had turned down this invitation of uncertain promise of more or better pictures. But it was my job. As it was, our convoy of Red Cross vehicles was fired upon by a Salvadorian or American helicopter, held up at rebel checkpoints, and twice forded a river seeded with mines.

That phrase—“it’s my job”—has been a constant beacon as I have looked at the dying in International Red Cross hospitals in Ethiopia in 1985 or at hundreds of children in Vietnam, born with heart-wrenching deformities as the result of residual dioxin in the environment—the active ingredient of the chemical defoliant Agent Orange that we Americans sprayed to deny Communist soldiers their jungle sanctuaries. In these and many other cases, it was my job, or calling, to take an unblinking look at the world’s heartaches. Or as I tell students, to be society’s professional eyewitness.

The author flying in a US Air Force F-16 fighter jet.

That drive to be a faithful eyewitness to some of the world’s headlines did not come naturally for a young man from a small town in Wisconsin. My first mentor, the late University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Wilmott Ragsdale—himself a former war correspondent—used to tell students, “Be bold and move toward the action.” In those days, the “action” was often violent anti-Vietnam War protests on the streets of Madison, but the lesson stuck. As I learned more about the great photojournalists of the twentieth century, another name stuck with me—Robert Capa. A Hungarian Jew born Endre Friedmann who took the nom de guerre Robert Capa, he moved from conflict to conflict—from Spain and China to North Africa and through Western Europe—until his beloved Paris was liberated from the Nazis. As I recount in Somewhere West of Lonely, Capa landed in the surf of Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, with the first assault troops of the US First and Twenty-Ninth Infantry Divisions, which would suffer nearly four thousand casualties that fateful morning. Capa’s name and reputation for courage live on, in part through his famous aphorism that I have silently repeated to myself in some of the most difficult situations of my professional life: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

I tell students that the best foreign correspondents have a low threshold for injustice. It has been my privilege to work with a few and meet many. In Vietnam, Gloria Emerson of the New York Times wrote with what her newspaper called an “angry dignity.” She once nailed a general who asked subordinates to write him up for awards of valor for a battle that never happened. The author Frances FitzGerald reported the war first-hand for The Atlantic and the New Republic, then wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Fire in the Lake, after researching modern Indochina in four languages. From both women, I learned to never, ever trust the government’s version of events without seeing things for yourself.

In my experience, it is not the pay or the awards that motivate war correspondents, but a sense of moral outrage at the obscenities of our times. I dedicated Somewhere West of Lonely to friends and colleagues to have been killed telling the stories of the world, including wars. These men and women accepted the risks “to help citizens be free and self-governing,” in the words of journalism textbook authors Tom Rosensteil and Bill Kovach. And to my mind, those few eloquent words summarize what our work should be about—to help citizens be free and self-governing.

 

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Steve Raymer is a former National Geographic photojournalist who has captured it all through the lens of his camera. The National Press Photographers Association and the University of Missouri named him Magazine Photographer of the Year—one of photojournalism’s most coveted awards—for his reporting on the global hunger crisis. He has also been honored by the Overseas Press Club of America for international reporting requiring exceptional courage and is the winner of numerous first-place awards from the National Press Photographers Association and the White House News Photographers Association. His books include Redeeming Calcutta: A Portrait of India’s Imperial Capital. His new book, Somewhere West of Lonely, will be available in April.

Interns In Their Own Words - Annette Cotant

Hey! I’m Annette Cotant and I’m a sophomore from Fort Wayne, Indiana, majoring in English with a concentration in Public and Professional Writing and a minor in Classics. I’m interning at IU Press in Acquisitions for both the spring and summer semesters of 2018. I have two other jobs, one at Sugar and Spice in the Indiana Memorial Union and another training to be a tutor at Writing Tutorial Services.

I love reading and writing, and I’m looking forward to entering the publishing field after college – unless I decide to continue my education in grad school and potentially become a professor. I collect leather-bound classic literature and my dream is to own a first edition. My favorite author is Edgar Allan Poe and I’m hoping to adopt my first pet cat in the summer (naturally, I will name him Poe). Other than my nerdy hobbies, I enjoy listening to punk rock music, watching YouTube videos, and sleeping.

Guest Post: Hometown Hollywood - The Traveling Directors Who Made Everyone a Star

The following is a guest post by Martin L. Johnson, author of Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States.

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hands out its golden statuettes this Sunday, television viewers and tweeters will be reminded once again that, for all of its global reach, Hollywood is still a small town, with just over 8,000 Academy members choosing which of their friends and neighbors will be lauded this year. Like other awards shows, the Academy Awards gives the movie industry a chance to put its best foot forward, which often means that it presents its latest stars, from Lady Bird’s Saoirse Ronan to Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya, as proof that Hollywood is a place where anyone can become a star.

But Hollywood wasn’t always Hollywood, and the people who appeared in movies weren’t always movie stars. One of the first things one learns in film history classes is that the American cinemagot its start in Thomas Edison’s studios in New Jersey, not on a lot in California. Early films traded on the strength of the production company’s brand, not the names of its actors.   The industry’s westward migration didn’t even start until the movies were a well-established popular amusement. As late as 1909, it was so unusual to see a moving picture camera on the streets of Los Angeles that a report of the production of a film made front page news. [1] In fact, when people did see a movie camera in town they didn’t assume someone was in from out of town to make a feature film. Instead, they thought it was just another local film, a common exhibitor stunt in which someone set up a camera outside their theater, filmed a few hundred feet, and then showed the results that night so the audience could “see yourself as others see you.”

Los Angeles Herald, March 13, 1909

As the Los Angeles Herald correctly prophesied, the local films made that March night were the first of many motion pictures to be made in the city. But even as the industry gathered strength in the 1910s and 1920s, with the major Hollywood studios producing 95 percent of all feature films in the United States by 1930, many small towns continued to be visited by traveling filmmakers who claimed they could bring a touch of Hollywood magic to one’s hometown. In my book, Main Street Movies: The History of the Local Film in the United States, I trace the long history of local film production in the United States. From town booster films in the 1910s to movies that imitate, mock, and celebrate Hollywood in the 1930s, these local films were rare opportunities for people to get in the movies even if they were thousands of miles away from Hollywood.

The Los Angeles Herald was just one of hundreds of newspapers that prophesized that their town would become attractive for moviemakers. Filmmakers told star-struck Chambers of Commerce that a film would help their town realize its full potential, attracting new residents and investors who had previously overlooked its charms.  Other filmmakers made their promises to would-be movie actors instead, holding contests in which the winners got to appear on screen, surely the first step to Hollywood. Some theater owners even got in the game, turning every house fire, military drill, and train accident into a central plot development in their next motion picture. Even if their hopes of fame were not realized, the people who appeared in local films relished the chance to dream as they saw themselves in their hometown theater. While there would be only one Hollywood, the people who thought their town’s film offered a chance to make them a star kept going to their local movie theater, secure knowing that they too once had their moment on the silver screen.

Buck County Independent, December 16, 1921

Martin L. Johnson is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Find him on Twitter @martinlj and online at http://martinljohnson.com.

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[1] “Moving Pictures Show Local Scenes,” Los Angeles Herald (March 13, 1909), 1.

The Craft of Publishing

The following is a guest post by Gary Dunham, Director of IU Press and Digital Publishing.

Let’s step back for a moment and consider not only what we do, but why we choose to do it. Why did we decide to work in non-profit, scholarly publishing? Of course, the specific reasons vary, but I bet there are common denominators to why we ended up in this profession. Those common denominators have much to do, I bet, with the uniqueness and power of our occupation.

For me, the road to university presses began long ago at a factory in rural Maine.

 When I was a young boy, I sometimes stood outside of a large wood mill in late afternoon, waiting for the workers to come out at the end of their shift. Most of the adults in my family and their friends worked there. Terribly demanding, dangerous jobs, invariably done all by rote. The same tasks mechanistically repeated, hour by hour, as machines screamed, sawblades whirled, and sawdust flew around them.

At the end of their workday, my father, uncles, aunts, and their friends would trudge out of the mill, mostly silent, some still with sawdust clinging to hair and clothes. This hushed, weary group was almost unrecognizable to me, as they were always so lively on weekends, working in the hay and corn fields, and at family reunions. They seemed…diminished, as if their work had taken everything from them over eight long hours. Oft times, my father would say only a few words after getting home from the mill. He vacillated between hating and being supremely indifferent to that job, as did everyone I knew, then. Certainly, no one admitted within earshot to liking it—they just did it. And yet, every morning those hard-working, proud people walked back into that mill to support their families. My respect for their grit and determination continues to this day.

By the time I was a teenager, however, it had become clear to me that a different path awaited. I needed to feel more closely connected to my work than most of my family and friends seemed to be. Of course, I knew I would always do whatever work was necessary to pay the bills, but at the end of the day, I wanted something more—a job as much about surprise as routine, a job where I could be creative and resourceful.

That, in a nutshell, is scholarly publishing. For me, publishing at a university press is more than a process of content dissemination, an assembly line of manuscripts, and an assortment of digital toolkits; it’s more than shelves full of specialized and popular books and journals. It’s a craft. A craft that at its core consists of orchestrated acts of creation that make something new and permanent out of ideas, visions, and gathered data. A craft grounded in and fueled by the special, creative partnership between authors and press, who together shape and build long-term vehicles for new content packages. A craft necessitating practitioners with specialized skills across a press to be working collectively and in perfect sync to create and build new books and journals successfully, again and again and again.

We publishers need to take time from the unending conveyor belts of manuscripts to step back and truly appreciate the uniqueness of what we do, the potency of our creative craft. To reduce publishing to workflows and process, to technology, to its shelved and consumed output, would be to reduce the potter’s craft to the wheel or to the finished bowl. We’re so much more than arrays of tools and products; the value of our work soars well beyond meeting deadlines, following a style guide, or fulfilling acquisitions and sales quotas. We’re shapers, builders, and creators, uniquely trained and positioned to help bring new points of view, voices, and information into the world.

It’s a deeply satisfying occupation, partnering with authors to give birth to the new. It keeps me coming back to the office in the morning, and it makes me smile at the end of the day. I truly like my job.

Guest Post: The Blue-eyed Jihad is Coming Home

The following is a guest post by Dr. Mark Silinsky, author of Jihad and the West: Black Flag over Babylon. Focusing on the relationship between ISIS and Western countries, Silinsky's work provides a detailed and chilling explanation of the appeal of the Islamic State and how those abroad become radicalized, while also analyzing the historical origins, inner workings, and horrific toll of the Caliphate. Here, he discusses a puzzling and troubling phenomenon: Westerners who leave their homes to join up with ISIS.

Message to Europe - The Blue-eyed Jihad is Coming Home

“The Revolution is like Saturn. It devours its own Children.” Georg Büchner, Danton’s Death, 1835

“My iPod is broken. I want to come back.”  A young French Jihadist’s tweet to his parents in France

As the Caliphate - also called the Islamic State, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and the Islamic State in Syria and the Sham - collapses, many of its surviving Western-born cadre, the Blue-eyed Jihad, are scrambling to leave. Not all European, American, Canadian and Australian Caliphate fighters want to leave. Some have built new lives and found important positions. Some Westerners have died, often in combat, and are buried in what became their homeland. But many have not found what they had hoped to find in the Caliphate and want to return to the West, after grim living. There are four groupings of reasons why they want to come home: survival, disappointment, fear, and that cruelty was not in their nature.

Reason One—Survival

Many Westerners are desperate to leave so that they can live. Their friends have died, and they know that they are on somebody’s death list. If they are not killed by assassination, they might succumb to disease or wither through privation. It might be a quick death or a long, agonizing death. But, they have had enough and don’t want to die. They want out.

Reason Two- Disappointment and Discomfort

“Syrian woman backbiting us [me and my Australian sister] while we’re sitting in front of her, thinking that I don’t speak Arabic.” - A British woman called Umm Rayyan

Many blue-eyed, suburban recruits did not find what they wanted. For some Westerners, there is a gap between what they expected in the Caliphate and what they found. Many did not find the enchanting village they were promised. The roasting temperatures and inadequate air conditioning are enervating. The stabbing heat provides the perfect climate for exotic bugs and diseases, including neglected tropical diseases that are mostly unknown in the West, to flourish. The searing temperatures, boutique diseases, and sand flies are not advertised in the Caliphate's recruitment brochures. Some have blogged that their assigned tasks are menial or unfulfilling. There are few luxury goods or cars left. Male fighters are offered beautiful and nubile brides as well as sex slaves, but many are not as eye-catching or sexually enthusiastic as promised.  Also, the days of abundant sex are gone.

Beyond the weather, diseases, and tedious lifestyle, many Westerners are also astonished by the hatred the locals show them. Most of the land ISIS held is gone and the long-time inhabitants are less fearful of telling the few remaining foreign fighters the truth about what they think of them. Westerners expect to be welcomed as liberators but are seen as occupiers and thieves. They have heard comments such as “You are here to sabotage my country; you are coming to force something on us.”  Increasingly they hear, “Soon you will die like the rest.”

Also, some of the few remaining Westerners are repulsed by the etiquette of their compatriots. They find the Middle Easterners, particularly the Arabs, to be vulgar and inconsiderate. One Briton blogged about the initial shock and then steady fatigue he experienced trying to grapple with the peevish behavior and brazen theft of personal property.   They miss European table manners.

Many Western women never fully adjust to Jihadi living. They do not like to share their husbands with other women. Young women in search of benevolent and “caring” mother figures may be similarly lured. Sometimes they find them. But cowives are not always friends; they compete against each other for their husband’s affections and lovemaking and for prestige and place in the household. Some of the household chores have a morbid twist; for example, the more talented seamstresses are impressed into sewing suicide vests.

Reason Three — Fear of the Caliphate

A third reason for Westerners wanting to leave the Caliphate is that they fear it. Some Western men and women live in constant fear. One young man wrote, “They want to send me to the front, but I don’t know how to fight.”  Westerners discover, often too late, that fellow Jihadis are killed for trivial offenses. Those who ask to return home are sometimes forced into suicide operations. The Islamic State kills anyone from their own cadre who tries to leave. It has executed hundreds of its own foreign fighters who tried to flee Raqqa. Some make it out of Syria, but some are stranded in Turkey, where they are hunted down by agents of the Caliphate.

Western fighters do not know whom to trust. One described the situation: “It [the Caliphate’s security and intelligence service(s)] is a highly organized body, with very strong discipline. Everybody spies on everybody else.” There is cybersecurity. In the shadowy world, the few remaining cybercafes are often the only means by which Westerners can communicate with their friends and family. For this reason, the Caliphate’s security operatives have installed software that records keystrokes.  But, as of this writing, few cybercafes still exist.

Most escapees need to reach Turkey, where there are consular offices that can help them. Defections began as a trickle and then poured by spring 2016 and, as of winter 2017, they keep coming. Defectors arrive in singles, doubles, or small groups, usually disheveled and desperate.  As one would-be defector explained, “We don’t know where to go. We want to go further away, but Europe is too expensive,” he said. “We know people are after us and want to kill us. We feel lost.”

Reason Four — Cruelty Was Not in Their Nature

The fourth reason Westerners want to come home is the realization that they are not emotionally suited for the cruelty of the State. Some Western Jihadis relish the brutality they inflict on their enemies. Sadists are comfortable in the Caliphate today. But many people cannot witness this cruelty without becoming traumatized. The reality of war is not what they expected.

The State requires recruits to prove allegiance by hurting people. Some eagerly do so. One Caliphate supporter prepared to kill humans by slitting the throats of rabbits. Later, he would stab to death a French police officer and his wife in Paris in summer 2016.   Many recruits realize that killing people would be too difficult. In the words of one recruit, “They told us, ‘When you capture someone, you will behead them.’ But as for me, I have never even beheaded a chicken. It is not easy . . . I can’t do that.” A New Yorker who joined and then left the State in 2016 warned his fellow Americans to “avoid the worst decision” he ever made. “I did see severed heads placed on spiked poles . . . I just blocked them out.”

Some Westerners break out of the Caliphate. One British escapee explained, from hiding in Turkey, that she feared for her life every day. She was convinced that the State is tracking her down as a traitor. “I am a young girl. I want to live my life. I want to travel, go to cafes, meet friends like any normal girl.” Another said, “This is not the 1001 Nights.” 

Summary

Most of the remaining Westerners in what is left of the Caliphate are desperate to get out. The State’s response it to kill all those they suspect of trying to leave. They try to stop the Western flight by burying defectors alive, burning them to death, shooting them, or being macabrely creative with their killing skills.  But, some Westerners are elated with their new lives in the Caliphate, finding the prestige, power, and comradery that eluded them in the West. Last year, in Raqqa, a young woman phoned her European mother, who was weeping at the other end of the line, and said that she had not traveled to Syria just to return to Europe. She was at home in the Caliphate, and she was there to stay. Today, she may be dead in an unmarked grave somewhere in what was the Caliphate. Her mother may not know and cries when she thinks about it.

This represents the opinions of Dr. Silinsky and not the views of the US Army or any agency of the US government.

Guest Post: Who Is Responsible for the Rise of ISIS?

The following is a guest post by Dr. Mark Silinsky, author of Jihad and the West: Black Flag over Babylon. Focusing on the relationship between ISIS and Western countries, Silinsky's work provides a detailed and chilling explanation of the appeal of the Islamic State and how those abroad become radicalized, while also analyzing the historical origins, inner workings, and horrific toll of the Caliphate. Here, he discusses the origins of ISIS and how it rose to power quickly.

Who is Responsible for the Rise of ISIS?

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) swept onto the international scene like a sandstorm in 2014. What the White House sniffed away as a “jayvee team” early that year, went varsity with full fury by August.[i]  Gone were the cavalier projections that ISIS and its testosterone-filled volunteers would quickly fade into obscurity. Rather, the reach of ISIS - also called the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or DAESH, the Caliphate, the Islamic State or the State- quickly grew to cover a territory the size of a country. Ruthless, determined, and emboldened by the speed and scope of their victories, ISIS cadre ensconced themselves in Raqqa, Syria and expanded their reach. For two years, ISIS controlled oil exports; operated a banking system, if primitive; and fielded formidable armed forces and intelligence and security services.[ii] They left vast slaughter in their wake. How did this all happen?

Three Sets of Opinions

There are three groupings of explanations for the rise of ISIS. Some blame the West; others credit ISIS’s leadership and tenacity; others offer uncommon explanations that cannot be proven by known evidence. These are not discrete groupings of opinions, and some overlap with each other.

Opinion Set One – Blame the West!

The first view faults the West for allowing ISIS to surge. Many in the universities, particularly those of the left, and in the media attribute failures of the Middle Eastern states and societies to Western imperialism, intervention, exploitation, or neglect.^[iii] As an example, Tariq Ali, longtime editor-at-large of the British New Left Review wrote, “. . . we have the American occupation, we have a Shia government, which they have effectively put into power, and we have the beginnings of an uprising in the early days of the occupation . . .”[iv] The United States “Balkanized” Iraq.[v]

Some think-tank intellectuals offer similar explanations. William McCants of the Brookings Institution derided, what he saw as, American cavalier and shambolic policies.  “The concept was that if you just leave the Islamic State alone, it would destroy itself, and so you didn’t need to do much.”[vi]  Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, too, charged the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 with destabilizing the country, which, in turn, allowed radical Islamic groups to fill the power vacuum. This, said Blair, promoted Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian street thug, to superstar status among radical Islamists. ^[vii] Blair and others faulted Western leaders for ignoring the budding capabilities of radical, militant Islamists.[viii] Current Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn claimed that the growth of ISIS was, in his words, “payback for Western  arrogance.”[ix] 

Opinion Set Two – ISIS Rose Because of its Strengths

Another view holds that ISIS's leadership should be credited for the group’s surge to power.  Competent, driven, organized, and ruthless, the group’s power nucleus seized and held territory where others failed to do so. This view argues that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group's current and reclusive leader, and other leaders were simply damn good insurgents. Some planned ISIS’s structure and agenda while they were incarcerated at the American prison in southern Iraq known as “the Academy” or the “Jihadi University.”[x] They waited for an opportunity, and then exploited it. ISIS’s Islamic messages resonated and drew angry Muslims to Mesopotamia. In this view, the Islamic State won the war for ideas among those whom it targeted as a recruitment base.

Opinion Set Three – Unconventional Explanations for the Rise of ISIS

There are other unconventional explanations for the State’s creation and power surge, including climate change and Zionism.^[xi] Some political figures and intellectuals have attributed the rise of the Caliphate, in part, to the degradation of natural resources in Mesopotamia. In this view, global warming led to crop failures, which led to unemployment; which led to increased poverty; which led to social unrest; which opened the door for ISIS. Secretary of State John Kerry linked the Caliphate’s success to global warming and to Israeli policy toward the Palestinians.^[xii]

Some left-oriented politicians and professors have blamed Israel. In Holland, a Ministry of Justice and Security official declared that the Islamic Caliphate is a “preconceived idea from Zionists deliberately to make Islam look bad.”^[xiii] Confusing many of her students, Oberlin professor Joy Karega claimed that the CIA and Mossad created ISIS to promote interests of “Israeli and Zionist Jews.”[xiv] Fidel Castro placed Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency behind the radical Islamic State.^[xv] Iran makes similar claims today.

This Author’s Opinions 

So, why did ISIS rise to power and hold it for so long? I hold with the second view, that ISIS was a highly motivated, disciplined, and well-led band of Islamists who took advantage of a power vacuum. They expanded their territorial reach because they attracted cadre and funding from all over the Sunni Islamic world. ISIS is dispersed but not destroyed. Where will the go and how shall the West meet the challenge? That is the topic for the next blog entry.

This blog entry represents only the views of Dr. Silinsky and not those of the US Army or any agency of the US government.

Guest Post: Welcome to Dystopia?

The following is a guest post by Edyta Materka, author of Dystopia's Provocateurs: Peasants, State, and Informality in the Polish-German Borderlands.

In the latest issue of Boston Review entitled "Global Dystopias" Junot Díaz writes, "Whether we're talking about our cannibal economics or the rising tide of xenophobia or the perennial threat of nuclear annihilation it seems that the future has already arrived. And that future is dystopian". He adds that it is "precisely in dark times that the dystopian--as a genre, as a narrative strategy--is most useful" and embraces Tom Moylan's formulation of "critical dystopias" to expose its causes, to "map, warn, and hope". Indeed, the hijacking of elections, rise of right-wing movements, proliferation of fake news, mass shootings by "lone wolves", near-daily occurrence of natural disasters, escalating nuclear tensions with rocket man, and unchecked corruption (not to mention nepotism) at the highest levels of government, all support this claim.

But do not be fooled. "Dystopia" is good for capitalism. Sales of The Handmaiden's Tale and 1984 have skyrocketed in America. Television shows like Stranger Things that portray monsters crawling out into our world from the "upside down" realm and Star Trek Discovery where mutineer heroes say Orwellian stuff like: "the real world doesn’t always adhere to logic. Sometimes down is up, sometimes up is down. Sometimes when you’re lost, you’re found," capitalize on Americans' need for catharsis in these uncertain times. Even the Boston Globe issue comes with a hefty price to view the contents within. 

And what does the rest of the world do? Yawn. The truth is, the rest of the globe, whether across the former Soviet bloc or in the everyday politics in the Global South, have had to live with and adapt their lives to poverty, unchecked systemic corruption, and ongoing environmental crisis for decades. Global dystopia has not just arrived; rather, if anything, some Americans are slowly waking up to what has been a global reality for a very long time.

[Still, it could be much, much worse. At the end of the day, the dollar is strong, most Americans can still find and buy food in grocery stores, see their families, own property, speak their minds, and defecate in a toilet. Let's not rush to use the word "dystopia" just yet.]

And yet Americans' awakening to the idea that dystopia is possible in their homeland presents a unique opportunity for subjects, anthropologists, and historians like myself of the former Soviet bloc. As the world becomes Putin's chessboard, and the East's meddling in the West dominates the news, 1984 can only do so much. We scholars can help translate the rules of the game and real strategies like kombinacja that ordinary people have developed to detect ("map, warn, and hope") and disrupt their lived dystopian realities behind the Iron Curtain and beyond. Polish kombinacja is the practice of manipulating legal, political, or cultural rules in order to access a resource like food, commodities, labor, information, or power. The key to kombinacja is that it is a magical trick, in that all traces of it must be erased or performed without detection.

Not only do oral histories of kombinacja help us understand how to put food on the table without the existence of currency or during extreme shortages, but also shed light on how dystopia magically grips a society and how to carve out spaces of agency under oppressive regimes. Moreover, they expose how we are all complicit in creating and perpetuating dystopia. Breaking the rules--whatever they may be in a given regime--becomes the key to everyday survival, but it comes at a price as our minds become increasingly corrupted and addicted to it. A true dystopia exists when we all become its provocateurs--first by choice, then by necessity, and finally by addiction. But is this a kind of Wild West that we Americans are ready to seriously navigate? Are we ready to dabble in the magical arts of kombinacja and its dire consequences?

Edyta Materka received her PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London.

Guest Post: Fast food and street vendors in Morocco

The following is a guest post by Rachel Newcomb, author of Everyday Life in Global Morocco.

"Globalization" is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot in the media and in academics, and most people understand that it has something to do with how people and countries have become highly connected to each other through processes like migration and technology. But how do people experience it in their everyday lives? In the United States, obvious examples might include ordering a product online and having it delivered within hours, or knowing someone whose job has been outsourced to another country. As an anthropologist who has been doing researching Morocco for my entire career, I have been interested in how Moroccans experience globalization in wasy that are both similar to and different from our experiences in the United Stats. In my new book Everyday Life in Global Morocco, I look at how processes that most people experience in their lives — work, marriage, reproduction, eating — are all affected by globalization.

Morocco is well known for its cuisine: the unique use of colorful spices, olive oil, homemade breads baked fresh each day in neighborhood ovens, and stews full of vegetables and meat, simmered over hot coals for hours. Each region has its specialties, and every household flavors its signature dishes slightly differently. The video clip here shows a street food called “caliente,” which is sold in the city of Tangier, whose windswept and often chilly location on the hills above the Mediterranean makes this savory and hot chickpea flan a welcome treat in the early evenings.

via GIPHY

Street food is just one part of a food culture that involves a lot of human interaction, and, in the case of street markets where people also sell fruit, vegetables, meat and fish, bartering and conversation. Preparing a Moroccan meal can be an all-day process, but traditionally much of it was social, involving families shopping together, cooking together, and eating together over a long lunch at home.

Sadly, as I discuss in my book, some of this Moroccan food culture is disappearing with the advent of supermarkets and fast food, with more and more people opting for a quick (and unhealthy) lunch at the office. You can't blame people for wanting convenience and food safety, but in many places, street produce markets are shutting down, while some complain they can't afford the higher prices at the supermarkets, or the transportation to get there. In terms of diet, too, Moroccans are struggling with health issues that come from the adoption of a Western diet. Obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are all dramatically on the rise. With increasingly busy lifestyles, many people, especially in urban areas, have abandoned traditional ways of eating in favor of diets higher in fats, carbohydrates, and refined sugars. (at the same time, in rural areas, some people still struggle with malnutrition, so not everyone has access to McWorld).

There isn’t yet a major movement to return to the old ways, but on a recent trip to Tangier this summer, I was encouraged to see so many people flocking around the caliente seller’s food cart. Hopefully people will recognize that a ten-cent snack of eggs and chickpea flour is lightyears better than a six-dollar Big Mac.

Rachel Newcomb is Professor of Anthropology at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. She is editor (with David Crawford) of Encountering Morocco: Fieldwork and Cultural Understanding.