Dobbing, Mary

Dobbing, Mary

Mary Dobbing

1 December 2012Review

OUP Oxford, 2012; 320pp; £18.99

Polymath John Gittings – a Guardian journalist and associate editor of The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace, is a Sinologist, literary critic and classicist. He crams his considerable knowledge of history, art, literature, and languages into this personal review of peace through the ages, arguing for a ‘peace discourse’ to counter our current one obsessed with the glory of war and the culture of death.

Indeed, for Gittings ‘The study of peace can be as exciting as…

26 September 2012Review

Harvard University Press, 2012; 294pp; £19.95

Given the current debates about the legitimacy of the use of drone strikes to eliminate suspected 'terrorists' in Pakistan and 'insurgents' in Afghanistan, this timely book aims to illuminate the story of the land and the people subjected to these Western onslaughts.

However, despite its title, this is not a book about drone strikes or their effects, and its actual contents – a collection of scholarly essays concerning the history, ethnography and anthropology of the Afghanistan-…