Gay marriages should be made legal

Homosexuality has always been an easily misunderstood aspect of human's sexual life. People have diverse opinions but also very complex feelings over homosexuality. From the ancient years homosexuals were called â€Å"human garbage† and thought to be unclean by society. They were always isolated and rejected because of their sexual preferences, which were something different and unusual in comparison with the standards of society. However the way each of us deal with the fact of homosexuality depends on our own background, confusion, and personal experience with this issue. In the last years it has appeared the phenomenon of gay marriages, which actually worries society and raises many speculations about its probable legalization. Gay marriages happen more frequently in the recent years and they provoke disagreements and disputes among people. The moral issue that arises is whether gay marriages should be made legal or not. The majority of people are against legalization of this kind of marriages because they consider it as something abnormal and as a terrible sin against society, which unavoidably leads to disaster. According to the common belief gay marriages never existed in the past so there is no reason to change the already existing and well built foundations of this society. Whatever differs from the widely accepted establishment, is isolated and thrust aside. Consequently gay are not allowed to have a family and live their life as they dreamed it of. Furthermore, homosexuals are despised and rejected from the Christians and the religion in general. They are thought to be the â€Å"black ships† which do not deserve to be loved by God or by anyone else. According to our religion the two sexes have to married each other and anything else beside that is considered as blaspheme. They don't follow the â€Å"rules† of society and religion and they have to be punished. Consequently society, decides for the structure of the most appropriate kind of family and it actually excludes the minority of homosexuals by depriving them the right of getting married, creating a family and even have or adopt children. Additionally they are not suitable to bring up a child with the normal way because inevitably one of the two sexes is absent. According to Freud the lack of one of the two sexes in a marriage ends up to be disastrous for the personality of the child. This comes as a natural consequence because the child has only one sex model to imitate and learn from. Things become even more complicated when the child is of the opposite sex from the parents. On the other hand, according to homosexuals and their supporters same sex marriages should be legalized, because all people despite their sexual preferences must be able to get married with the person they love. Homosexuality is not something repulsive but just something different that heterosexuals are not used to. Gay support the opinion that sexual orientation is something, which seems to be â€Å"‘given† and it can't change. Homosexuals can't deny the truth about themselves and they get in a process of discovering and accepting themselves as they are. We must do the same thing and avoid criticizing them for their choices. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with morality. Homosexuals as well as heterosexuals can be involved in sexual sin, including promiscuity, infidelity and abuse. They are just like the rest of us, they have the same rights and they deserve the same opportunities in life. Consequently, they should be allowed to get married and create a family. They can be as good parents as the ordinary parents. They can offer love, tenderness and they can contribute to the formation of their children's personality. In conclusion homosexuality has many supporters but also many enemies. The problem that arises is whether it should be legalized or not. As we know from history all kind of discriminations led humanity straight to disaster in the past years. So as we accept every person with its benefits but also its disadvantages, we should also accept the homosexuals. Even if people cannot easily accept something new and different that inclines from what is considered as normal we must try to accept it and give homosexuals the chance to fulfil their dreams and live their lives without any unfair discriminations through legalization of gay marriages.

Music of the World Essay

1.What is popular music? Popular music is any music since industrialization in the mid-1800s that is in line with the tastes and preferences of the middle class. 2.What theme does pop music typically use in the lyrics? Describe one pop song that uses this theme. Why is this theme such a popular one? One theme of pop music typically used in the lyrics is dancing or movements. Almost all pop music has to do with love or dancing. Take the song â€Å"Sway With Me† by Michael Buble for an example. The theme is dancing. 3.What is disco? What are the characteristics of this music? Disco was one of the many musical genres developed in the 1970s. It mixes â€Å"soaring† vocals with a beat that encourages dancing, disco became the dance music of the decade. The music often had 100 to 130 beats per minute and a pulse of the rhythm was often emphasized. 4.What was the British invasion? Which famous group was a part of this movement? What impact did the group have on pop music? The British invasion was the connection of the British music culture and the American music culture. The Beatles was a famous group who was part of the movement. Their music had catchy lyrics and melodies which would be the centerpiece of pop music for the next several decades. 5.What is a boy band? What are some characteristics of a boy band? A boy band is a band that consists of between three and six young adult boys who used no instruments and just sang. Their image was one of the most important elements of the group, maybe even more then the music itself. All aspects of the music were carefully controlled from their dress to even the stereotypes that the group members fit into such as â€Å"bad boy† and the â€Å"baby†.

Role of Operations Management

Role of Operations Management Operations management is the design operations and improvement of systems that create and deliver a company’s products and services. In other words, â€Å"is the process of taking input such as raw material and component and turning it in to out put by adding values† (Shaikh, 2010). Any activity that relates to the management of the entire business process that produces goods and services falls into the operations category. Competition among today’s organizations has become immense and is getting tougher and tougher day by day since more new companies are starting businesses in the same industry.Whether they are from the manufacturing sector or service sector, the need for cutting the unnecessary costs, achieving maximum efficiency, and implementing operations management strategies is increasing with the passage of time. Therefore, more focus is being laid on Supply Chain Management these days by the businesses in order to set up cer tain operations approaches, distribution systems, and capacity layouts that not only reduce redundant costs but also provide better quality goods and services to the customers.This paper will discuss two operations approaches for each of these sectors manufacturing and service and would relate those approaches to quality control and efficiency that can be achieved by the businesses. Operational Approaches for Manufacturing Organization There is no wonder to know that the manufacturing organizations deal with the inventory much more as compared to the service organization. The inventory includes raw materials, complementary parts, actual or finished products, and other packing materials therefore, the two most used operational approaches for by these organizations are Lean manufacturing approach and Outsourcing.Lean manufacturing is the approach that identifies and minimizes waste by adopting continuous improvement to satisfy the customer’s demands. It ensures maximum quality by examining each part of the good after its production to identify the flaws that might be there (Blacharski, 2010). Second approach is outsourcing where the organizations that are not efficient enough in producing a certain product or material, assigns that production task to some other company, entity, business, or vendor that actually possesses the skills, mastery, technology, and resources to produce and deliver it.Operational Approaches for Service Organizations Just-in-time approach and the Balance between Degree of labor and degree of customization are the two operational approaches that are often used by the service organizations. Just-in-time or JIT system is designed and implemented in order to produce or deliver services just as they are needed. In this approach the raw material or inventory (potatoes or chicken) is delivered to the service department or facility such as, Mc Donald’s restaurant just at the time when it is needed.And secondly service organizations often try to maintain the balance between the degree of labor employed for the provision of services and the degree of customization based on the needs and wants of the customers. Advantages and Disadvantages The advantages of Lean manufacturing include reduced set up times, less lead times, lower expenditure of materials, simplification of materials for easy identification, reducing wastes, standardizing operating procedures, sustaining better environment and results, good maintenance, and safe practices (Heizer & Render, 2010).Disadvantages can be excess time spent on cleaning and identification purposes, also with the use of resources and money. Advantages of outsourcing include reduction in inventory costs, reciprocity, preserve supplier commitment, better production results, and offsetting the lower technical expertise and capacity the company has. Disadvantages include increase in expenditure, high production costs, and the company might not obtain desired quality or core comp etence. Advantages of JIT include reduction in inventory costs, storage costs, handling costs, cutting costs of quality, and improving quality.There is one major disadvantage that can be the stoppage of production or delivery of services if inventory is not delivered at the right time. The degree of labor and customization provides better customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, increased ordered and sales, less wage costs, and service variety. Disadvantages might be the increased costs in setting up new technology or method for providing unique or customized service for different customers, their maintenance costs, technology costs, and increased layoffs.In conclusion, I think this will improve my approach as in one day starting my own business to understand how operations management can be beneficial to a wide variety of organizations, both big and small. Operations management plays a vital role in the daily functions of an organization whether the company has identified this or n ot. Every process that a company employs to meet its strategic goals is a result of operations management.Operations management aids a company in becoming well-organized, operating more efficiently and productively, staying competitive and improving customer relations. Nationwide Business Interview I expect to learn what is fundamental to achieving and more importantly sustaining a career and business success, particularly within a competitive sales and marketing environment. The most challenging task is to motivate and manage employees to get on the same page and get something planned and completed on time and within a budget.The most critical skill you need as a manager is to understand and manage through tough current economic conditions, such as planning and executing, cost-control, developing and motivating employees and communicating and managing change. To have great communication skills for sales, negotiaton and networking also leadership skills is essential in order to reac h your goals. . A big part of surviving in business is about solving problems fast and effectively. An manager needs good problem solving skills.The important trend I have experienced is and crucial is customer experiences scanning our consumer trends, you will be able to understand where your industry may be headed, or even better, shape its direction yourself, by introducing new products and services that catch the competition off guard. The steps I take to organize my task for today is to first make a list of all tasks that you have to do. At the start of the day I select my most important items and start working on them. If a new task comes up during the day, I keep working on the current task unless the new task is more important.When deciding which tasks take priority when completing a project is deciding what needs to be completed first and it depends what is critical to meet deadline. To be effective in a business crisis your communication plan must be and easy to reference document that contains decisions, action, resources and contacts you and your team will need to represent your organization in the high pressure of a crisis. Employees should always keep in mind the interests of the organization and realize the company standards are more important than the customer’s nterests to bend the rules.Bibliography 1. Blacharski. D. (2010). What is Lean Manufacturing. Retrieved on November 13, 2010. From http://www. wisegeek. com/what-is-lean-manufacturing. htm 2. Heizer. J & Render. B. (2010). Operations Management. Eighth edition. Pearson Education, Inc. Prentice Hall. Dorling Kindersley India Pvt. Ltd. 3. Shaikh. S (2010). Operational Approaches. Retrieved on November 8, 2010. From http://safeshaikh. com/business/supply-chain-management/operational-approaches/ Role of Operations Management This paper describes operations management and how it is applied in the banking field. Operations management is fundamental for any business seeking a competitive advantage in productivity. The role of operations management is to efficiently and effectively produce quality goods and services to create wealth. Bank operations management is the foundation of banking. Processing daily transactions, controlling and managing trades and sales and supporting front and back officers is part of the many functions of operations management. According to Chase, Jacobs, and Aquilano, 2006, operations management is defined as the design, operation, and improvement of the systems that create and deliver the firm’s primary products and services (p. 9). Bank operations are behind the scenes and commonly referred to back office operations because it does not handle front office sales. However a bank cannot move forward without operations management. Thus operations strategy is vital to banking to function at its optimal level. By definition â€Å"operations strategy is concerned with setting broad policies and plans for using the resources of a firm to best support its long-term competitive strategy† (Chase, Jacobs, & Aquilano, 2006, p. 24). Typically a strategy breaks down into three major components: operations effectiveness, customer management, and product innovation. It is important that a firm’s strategy aligns with its mission of serving the customer. JPMorgan Chase, the bank with which I am familiar, strategizes into three major components: operations effectiveness, customer management, and product innovation. A strategy must always align with a firm’s mission statement to make sure goals are attained by focusing on customer service. In the banking business some of the many competitive dimensions are the following: cost or price of service or product, quality, and speed. JPMorgan Chase bank is a recognized national bank that integrates competitive dimensions in business strategy. Some of the services offered are free checking accounts with fee waiver requirements. Read also Exam Operations Management The starting fees are $12 a month for some checking accounts but there are fee waivers that some customers qualify for to waive the monthly fees. One common fee waiver is a recurring direct deposit totaling $500 or more each month. Price is an important factor for some customers but quality is an even greater concern for others. Because Chase bank offers high technology banking through Quick Pay and Quick Deposit at no cost to all customers, a monthly service fee for a checking account may be less important for customers seeking convenience and quality products. The next dimension Chase focuses on is speed and delivery of online payments. Chase is dedicated to providing the best customer experience in all areas of banking, including online and mobile banking. Chase bank is mainly focused on customer service, which is the reason for business growth. There are three dimensions of value by which businesses differentiate themselves in the marketplace, according to Chase, Jacobs, & Aquilano, 2006. The three ways are through: product leadership, customer intimacy, and operational excellence. Chase strives to keep a proportionate balance of all values to maintain the good reputation and strong name. All the competitive dimensions mentioned above are controlled and managed by back office operations. Therefore operations management is the cohesiveness of the banking business as a whole. It interconnects all functions of banking to maximize productivity in the most effective and efficient manner, creating wealth. Without back office operations support, JPMorgan Chase bank would not have the ability to excel in the banking business.

Steps to Writing a Grant Proposal Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Steps to Writing a Grant Proposal - Assignment Example Part of the short-range objectives is to upgrade the existing training facilities of PEACE as well as improve the knowledge and skills of its professional trainers with regards to managing traumatic situations the victims and families of the victims are currently going through whereas the long-term objective is to expand the existing infrastructure of PEACE in order to support the increasing number of victims who will be needing the social support of the said organization. To improve the quality of PEACE’s social services, a budget of one million US dollars (US$1,000,000.00) is needed wherein one-eighth (1/8) of the total expected grant will be used to financially support the further education and trainings of its professional trainers and upgrade the existing training facilities such as the improvements in training area and the purchase of new computers, projectors, and LCDs. The remaining three-eighth (3/8) of the total grant will be used in expanding the existing infrastructure of PEACE. Over the past five years, the city of Portland is experiencing an increase in domestic and youth violence, spousal and child abuse, assault, and incidents of road rage. To provide assistance to the victims of violence, the mission of PEACE Domestic Violence Agency is to reduce victim trauma, empower survivors, and promote recovery to the victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. Social problems related to domestic violence can be solved by increasing the number of available service provision, education, and social awareness. By extending free educational training services, wellness support group, and shelter to the victims of domestic violence, PEACE will not only be able to promote the well-being of young men, women, and children whose lives have been affected by domestic violence but also improve the quality of life of families whose member or members are in prison. Educating the public on how to handle and protect themselves from becoming a victim

Exam Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

Exam - Assignment Example Another error parents make is they get mad at their children. Scaring the children by yelling them is the opposite of giving into their demands. This is coercive and worsen the children’s behavior because they will do the same annoying thing again when the yelling dad is not around. â€Å"Goodness of Fit† means being able to productively fit with the environment. A centered, well-adjusted person has the goodness of fit. Parents can have this skill by looking at their children and environment as they are and not as they want them to be. If they choose the latter, they will always be fighting with reality. They need to adjust according to the personality of their child. Parents can contribute in the same context by creating the good fit of environment for their child. If their child is interested in reading comics then encouragement from parents about comics will help boost the child’s self-esteem. But if they create an environment where the child finds it difficult to adjust with an adverse environment (different than his own personality), then it will create problems for the family. The early years of childhood are extremely important for children’s developmental trajectories. Parents can have several roles during this phase of their child’s development. As mentors the parents can teach their children the necessary skills of survival. They teach to stay away from fire and other harmful objects. As guardians, parents can give the sense of comfort and protection to children. And as playmates, parents can give their children the playful company they deserve. When these roles are played effectively it contributes in the healthy development of children. The focus is not only parent’s responsibility to play these roles. Parents also need to be psychologically healthy to have the positive impact on children’s developmental trajectories. If a parent is depressed, it will have a negative impact on the children. Each family

Case Law Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Case Law - Essay Example The focus of this report will be to examine the two decisions to discover the inconsistencies and assess the reasons for them. The basic issue at stake in both the cases is that of defining the extent of individual liberty and freedoms that may be exercised under the constitutional amendments to the Constitution in the context of the wider moral framework of public morality and codes of behavior. The suit was brought by defendant Hardwick who was charged by the Georgia State Government for criminal violation of the state’s statute that criminalized sodomy. Hardwick challenged the constitutionality of his criminal conviction, since it violated his fundamental rights. The District Court supported the State’s position but the Court of Appeals reversed the decision. However, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Georgia statute. In connection with the issue of fundamental rights of the defendant, the Court stated: â€Å" None of the fundamental rights announced in this Courts prior cases involving family relationships, marriage, or procreation bear any resemblance to the right asserted in this case. And any claim that those cases stand for the proposition that any kind of private sexual conduct between consenting adults is constitutionally insulated from state proscription is unsupportable† [pp 190-191] The Supreme Court supported its position by quoting the case of Stanley v Georgia3:†Ã¢â‚¬ ¦..the fact that homosexual conduct occurs in the privacy of the home does not affect the result.† (pp 195-196). During the period when this case was prosecuted in the courts, most states had laws that criminalized homosexual behavior between two consenting adults even if it was carried on in the privacy of their bedrooms and the decision reflected the predominant view of the majority of Americans about the illegality of homosexual behavior. A 5-4 majority in the Supreme Court upheld Georgia laws on sodomy which criminalized the act on grounds of

How did the rise of the corporation affect the United States What Essay

How did the rise of the corporation affect the United States What factors helped corporations form, and - Essay Example The strategy gave rise to big businesses that led to fewer people controlling the market. The presence of machines for agriculture made the United States pioneer in productions of agricultural products. The rise of the corporations transformed the United States because its economy matured (Sauvant, Mendoza & Irmak, 2008). During this time, there was a rapid expansion of big business and the rise of national labor unions. Despite all positive effects, the rise of the corporations led to the rise of wars against Americans and the removal of indigenous people from their early homes. The rise of corporations led to the growth of the population in urban centers. It also enhanced the proportion of immigrants. The most affected individuals lived in the urban centers due to the need to expand agricultural fields (Sauvant, Mendoza & Irmak,

EFFECTS OF MEDIA ON SMOKING Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

EFFECTS OF MEDIA ON SMOKING - Essay Example Usage of tobacco in youth oriented films increased in the 1990’s and it is very common these days mainly in films which are famous with teenagers. However, is it totally a wrong thing to do to attract teenagers. The impact of smoking on the teenagers, shown in movies is mostly negative. The Office of National Drug Control Policy carried out a study in 1999 for 200 famous movies of 1996 & 1999 and found that more than 85% had usage of smoking in them. Dartmouth Medical School also carried out a study which stated that the percentage fluctuated amid 87 % to 91 % in the 25 super hit movies since 1995.1 As revealed that observed public standards and the main predictors for the usage of drugs and alcohol, it is mainly distressing that 74 % of the leading artists in the super hit movies in the year 1997 to 1998 used to smoke. Advertisements shown by the cigarette companies are appealing for teenagers. Promotions and publicity of tobacco usage by commercials and posters increases the likelihood of teenagers start smoking. Marketing is the use of the media to create clear connections or images of the products, advertisement basically is the mixture of activities designed to increase trade. There is indeed no consideration of the effect of tobacco marketing on citizens tasking up tobacco.2 Advertisers use various methods to create appeal which is socially unethical in my eye. Advertisements shown by tobacco companies encourage smoking which is wrong. Conversely, studies related to the non smoking people and their introduction to cigarette marketing discloses that nonsmoking teenagers who were aware of or receptive to cigarette advertisements had the very potential to turn into smokers later on. It has been revealed by the recent researches that cigarette manufacturing organizations are still endorsing ads that indeed have a great impact on the teenagers in comparison to ads relate to anti-smoking. People who smoke are shown as independent individuals who can take their decisions themselves. Federal Trade Commission stated that cigarette manufacturing organizations spend approximately $1.06 billion for the advertisement and promotion of their products. A big portion of this expenditure is spent at retail store level mainly aiming the youth. Teenagers who are aware of the ads associated to smoking be likely to connect smoking with recognition, relaxation and fame and such connections are powerful in contrast with any of the suspected risks and dangers gathered from anti-smoking advertisements. Tobacco manufacturing organizations mainly aim their product in a designed way making a character who smokes enormously popular and composed through the company’s campaigns.3 Cigarette ads attract the teenagers more than people who are above 30 years of age. Teenagers mainly fall upon ads of cigarettes in commercials, magazines, posters, artists smoking in movies and also by means of advertising events in restaurants and bars which make them the easy targets of the cigarette manufacturing companies. Studies have pointed out that cigarette ads attract the young adults and teenagers more as compared to persons above 30 years and peer-review studies reveal that tobacco ads affect the teenagers the most. The impact of anti-smoking and quit smoking ads has still been very less on the

Advertising Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 1

Advertising - Essay Example In excess, advertising helps in the branding of a product in that it identifies the distinct traits of the manufacturer of the product from the other manufacturers. In effect, it helps to emphasize the brand to which a consumer associates with the product (Trehan 67). It also serves as an informational tool as the price of the product may sometimes reflect in the advertisement. In other instances, an advertisement also serves as an assurance to employees and the company shareholders that the company is still operational. Usually, sponsors pay adverts to run on various media tools, which may be either audio or visual depending with the sponsor preference. They are mainly for commercial purposes as they seek to brand products and services through repetitive showing of an image or product name in their showing. Through the repetition, the consumer is able to familiarize him or herself with the qualities of a product or service through the advert. In contrast, some advertisements may be non-commercial in that their intention is not make any profit but just passing information. Mainly, political parties, faith based and non-governmental organizations explore these commercials by spending money to air them as a public service announcement. In essence, this paper will examine an advertisement placed on a popular magazine to bring out its effectiveness in achieving an anticipated wider market base. How the advertisement functions This product is new to the market. Therefore, this advertisement serves as an introductory approach to the consumer. It gives the product name and an appealing design that instantly attracts the eye. The colors used also reflect the sophistication in that the product is of high quality. Essential, an advertisement can appeal to a consumer in two ways. For one, the information given may have a rational appeal in that it reflects the quality of the product (Trehan 226). This may be in terms of its durability, great performance, and affordability of the product and its location. On the other hand, the product information given in the advert may have an emotional appeal in that it gives a sense of assurance, pride, customer satisfaction levels, and its recognizable ability in the market (Trehan 118). For instance, this advertisement gives the emotional appeal to the market as it portrays all the above-mentioned qualities. In addition, this advertisement has the fear appeal in that it portrays the consequences of not using this product, which would be to go to a dentist (Trehan133). This evokes fear to the readers, thus, they have no option but to buy the product. How the constitutive elements combine to try to sell the product There has been effective color use to try to draw the attention of the reader into taking notice of the advert. Essentially, when dull colors take centre stage the chances of the advert making impact are very low. In addition, the advert portrays the image of the product that is available for retail. T herefore, the reader is able to relate to the product’s appearance. This will be helpful when they go to buy the product, as they will be able to spot it in a store’s shelf. Additionally, the wording involved is one that cannot escape one’s eye, as they are readable and clear. They are visible enough from a distance thus a reader needs not strain to capture what the advert is trying to sell. Moreover, it is the giving of the location where the product is available at makes it easy for the intended consumer to know where to get it. As an additional element, the advert gives all the good attributes associated with the use of their product, which draws a

Chinese Literature Essay Example for Free

Chinese Literature Essay 2000 by Andre Levy All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in. writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39. 48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levy, Andre, date [La litterature chinoise ancienne et classique. English] Chinese literature, ancient and classical / by Andre Levy ; translated by William H. Nienhauser, Jr. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-253-33656-2 (alk. paper) 1. Chinese literature—History and criticism. I. Nienhauser, William H. II. Title. PL2266. L48 2000 895. 109—dc21 99-34024 1 2 3 4 5 05 04 03 02 01 00. For my own early translators of French, Daniel and Susan Contents ix Preface 1 Introduction Chapter 1: Antiquity 5 I. Origins II. Let a hundred flowers bloom, Let a hundred schools of thought contend! 1. Mo zi and the Logicians 2. Legalism 3. The Fathers of Taoism III. The Confucian Classics 31 Chapter 2: Prose I. Narrative Art and Historical Records II. The Return of the Ancient Style III. The Golden Age of Trivial Literature IV. Literary Criticism Chapter 3: Poetry 61 I. The Two Sources of Ancient Poetry 1. The Songs of Chu 2. Poetry of the Han Court II. The Golden Age of Chinese Poetry 1. From Aesthetic Emotion to Metaphysical Flights 2. The Age of Maturity 3. The Late Tang III. The Triumph of Genres in Song Chapter 4: Literature of Entertainment: The Novel and Theater 105 I. Narrative Literature Written in Classical Chinese II. The Theater 1. The Opera-theater of the North 2. The Opera-theater of the South III. The Novel 1. Oral Literature 2. Stories and Novellas 3. The Long Novel or Saga Index 151 Translators Preface. I first became- interested in translating Andre Levys history of Chinese literature, La litterature chinoise ancienne et classique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991), in 1996, after finding it in a bookshop in Paris. I read sections and was intrigued by Professor Levys approach, which was modeled on literary genres rather than political eras. I immediately thought about translating parts of the book for my graduate History of Chinese Literature class at the University of Wisconsin, a class in which the importance of dynastic change was also downplayed. Like many plans, this one was set aside. Last spring, however, when the panel on our fields desiderata headed by David Rolston at the 1998 Association for Asian Studies Meeting pronounced that one of the major needs was for a concise history of Chinese literature in about 125 pages (the exact length of Professor Levys original text), I revived my interest in this translation. I proposed the book to John Gallman, Director of Indiana University Press, and John approved it almost immediately-but, not before warning me that this kind of project can take much more time than the translator originally envisions. Although I respect Johns experience and knowledge in publishing, I was sure I would prove the exception. After all, what kind of trouble could a little book of 125 pages cause? I soon found out. Professor Levy had originally written a much longer manuscript, which was to be published as a supplementary volume to Odile Kaltenmark-Ghequiers La Litterature chinoise (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948) in the Que sais-je? (What Do I Know? ) series. This concept, however, was soon abandoned, and it Several decades ago Anne-Marie Geoghegan translated this volume as Chinese Literature (New York: Walker, 1964). x Translators Preface was decided to publish the Levy appendix as a separate volume-in 125 pages. Professor Levy was then asked to cut his manuscript by one-third. As a result, he was sometimes forced to presume in his audience certain knowledge that some readers of this book-for example, undergraduate students or interested parties with little background in Chinese literature-may not have. For this reason, working carefully with Professor Levy, I have added (or revived) a number of contextual sentences with these readers in mind. More information on many of the authors and works discussed in this history can be found in the entries in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature (volumes 1 and 2; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986 and 1998). Detailed references to these entries and other relevant studies can be found in the Suggested Further Reading sections at the end of each chapter (where the abbreviated reference Indiana Companion refers to these two volumes). I also discovered that re-translating Professor Levys French translations of Chinese texts sometimes resulted in renditions that were too far from the original, even in this age of distance education. So I have translated almost all of the more than 120 excerpts of original works directly from the original Chinese, using Professor Levys French versions as a guide wherever possible. All this was done with the blessing and cooperation of the author. Indeed, among the many people who helped with this translation, I would like to especially thank Professor Andre Levy for his unflinching interest in and support of this translation. Professor Levy has read much of the English version, including all passages that I knew were problematic (there are no doubt others! ), and offered comments in a long series of letters over the past few months. Without his assistance the translation would never have been completed. Here in Madison, a trio of graduate students have helped me with questions Translators Preface xi about the Chinese texts: Mr. Cao Weiguo riftlal, Ms. Huang Shu—yuang MV and Mr. Shang Cheng I*. They saved me E, from innumerable errors and did their work with interest and high spirits. Mr. Cao also helped by pointing out problems in my interpretation of the original French. Mr. Scott W. Galer of Ricks College read the entire manuscript and offered a number of invaluable comments. My wife, Judith, was unrelenting in her demands on behalf of the general reader. The most careful reader was, however, Jane Lyle of Indiana University Press, who painstakingly copy-edited the text. If there is a literary style to this translation, it is due to her efforts. My thanks, too, to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation which supported me in Berlin through the summer of 1997 when I first read Professor Levys text, and especially to John Gallman, who stood behind this project from the beginning. Madison, Wisconsin, 16 February 1999 (Lunar New Years Day) Chinese Literature, Ancient and Classical Introduction Could one still write, as Odile Kaltenmark-Ghequier did in 1948 in the What Do I Know series Number 296, which preceded this book, that the study of Chinese literature, long neglected by the Occident, is still in its  infancy? Yes and no. There has been some spectacular progress and some foundering. At any rate, beginning at the start of the twentieth century, it was Westerners who were the first-followed by the Japanese, before the Chinese themselves-to produce histories of Chinese literature. Not that the Chinese tradition had not taken note of an evolution in literary genres, but the prestige of wen 5 signifying both literature and civilization, placed it above history-anthologies, compilations, and catalogues were preferred. Moreover, the popular side of literature-fiction, drama, and oral verse-because of its lack of seriousness or its vulgarity, was not judged dignified enough to be considered wen. Our goal is not to add a new work to an already lengthy list of histories of Chinese literature, nor to supplant the excellent summary by Odile Kaltenmark-Ghequier which had the impossible task of presenting a history of Chinese literature in about a hundred pages. Our desire would be rather to complement the list by presenting the reader with a different approach, one more concrete, less dependent on the dynastic chronology. Rather than a history, it is a picture-inevitably incompleteof Chinese literature of the past that this little book offers. Chinese high literature is based on a hard core of classical training consisting of the memorization of texts, nearly a half-million characters for every candidate who reaches the highest competitive examinations. We might see the classical art of writing as the arranging, in an appropriate and astute fashion, of lines recalled by memory, something ,Odile Kaltenmark-Ghequier, Introduction, La litterature chinoise (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), p. 5; Que sais—je, no. 296. 2 Chinese Literature, Ancient and Classical that came almost automatically to traditional Chinese intellectuals. The goal of these writers was not solely literary. They hoped through their writings to earn a reputation that would help them find support for their efforts to pass the imperial civil-service examinations and thereby eventually win a position at court. Although there were earlier tests leading to political advancement, the system that existed nearly until the end of the imperial period in 1911 was known as the jinshi A ± or presented scholar examination (because successful candidates were presented to the emperor), and was developed during the late seventh and early eighth centuries A. D. It required the writing of poetry and essays on themes set by the examiners. Successful candidates were then given minor positions in the bureaucracy. Thus the memorization of a huge corpus of earlier literature and the ability to compose on the spot became the major qualifications for political office through most of the period from the eighth until the early twentieth centuries. These examinations, and literature in general, were composed in a classical, standard language comparable to Latin in the West. This classical language persisted by opposing writing to speech through a sort of partial bilingualism. The strict proscription of vulgarisms, of elements of the spoken language, from the examinations has helped to maintain the purity of classical Chinese. The spoken language, also labeled vulgar, has produced some literary monuments of its own, which were recognized as such and qualified as classics only a few decades ago. The unity of the two languages, classical and vernacular, which share the same fundamental structure, is undermined by grammars that are appreciably different, and by the fact that these languages hold to diametrically opposed stylistic ideals: lapidary concision on the one hand, and eloquent vigor on the other. We conclude by pointing out that educated Chinese add to their surnames, which are always given first, a great variety of personal names, which can be disconcerting at times. The standard given name (ming Introduction 3 is often avoided out of decorum; thus Tao Qian Miff is often referred to En We will retain only the by his zi (stylename) as Tao Yuanming best known of these names, avoiding hao at (literary name or nickname), bie hao ZIJM (special or particular literary name), and shi ming (residential name) whenever possible: When other names are used, the standard ming will be  given in parentheses. The goal here is to enable the reader to form an idea of traditional Chinese literature, not to establish a history of it, which might result in a lengthy catalogue of works largely unknown today. We are compelled to sacrifice quantity to present a limited number of literary stars, and to reduce the listing of their works to allow the citation of a number of previously unpublished translations, inevitably abridged but sufficient, we hope, to evoke the content of the original. The chronological approach will be handled somewhat roughly because of the need to follow the development of the great literary genres: after the presentation of antiquity, the period in which the common culture of the educated elite was established, comes an examination of the prose genres of high classical literature, then the description of the art most esteemed by the literati, poetry. The final section treats the literature of diversion, the most discredited but nonetheless highly prized, which brings together the novel and the theater. Chapter 1. Antiquity Ancient literature, recorded by the scribes of a rapidly evolving warlike and aristocratic society, has been carefully preserved since earliest times and has become the basis of Chinese lettered culture. It is with this in mind that one must approach the evolution of literature and its role over the course of the two-thousand-year-old imperial government, which collapsed in 1911, and attempt to understand the importance (albeit increasingly limited) that ancient literature retains today. The term antiquity applied to China posed no problems until certain Marxist historians went so far as to suggest that it ended only in 1919. The indigenous tradition had placed the break around 211 B. C. , when political unification brought about the establishment of a centralized but prefectural government under the Legalists, as well as the famous burning of books opposed to the Legalist state ideology. Yet to suggest that antiquity ended so early is to minimize the contribution of Buddhism and the transformation of thought that took place between the third and seventh centuries. The hypothesis that modernity began early, in the eleventh or perhaps twelfth century in China, was developed by Naito Konan NAM 1 (1866-1934). This idea has no want of critics or of supporters. It is opposed to the accepted idea in the West, conveyed by Marxism, that China, a living fossil, has neither entered modern times nor participated in the global civilization that started with the Opium War of 1840. Nor is there unanimity concerning the periodization proposed in historical linguistics, a periodization which distinguishes Archaic Chinese of High Antiquity (from the origins of language to the third century) from Ancient Chinese of Mid-Antiquity (sixth to twelfth centuries), then Middle Chinese of the Middle Ages (thirteenth-sixteenth centuries) from Modern Chinese (seventeenth-nineteenth centuries), and Recent Chinese (18401919) from Contemporary Chinese (1920 to the present). 6 Chinese Literature, Ancient and Classical. In the area of literature, the beginning of the end of antiquity could perhaps be placed in the second century A. D. Archaeology has elevated our knowledge of more ancient writings toward the beginning of the second millennium B. C. , but this archaic period, discovered recently, cannot be considered part of literary patrimony in the strictest sense. Accounts of this archaic period are traditionally divided into six eras,2 but to honor them would be to fall into the servitude of a purely chronological approach. I. Origins Since the last year of the last century, when Wang Yirong . 1. 6M (1845-1900) compiled the first collection of inscriptions written on bones and shells, the increasing number of archaeological discoveries has allowed the establishment of a corpus of nearly 50,000 inscriptions extending over the period from the fourteenth to the tenth centuries before our era. Dong Zuobin (1895-1963) proposed a periodization for them and distinguished within them the styles of different schools of scribes. Scholars have managed to decipher a third of the total of some 6,000 distinct signs, which are clearly related to the system of writing used by the Chinese today-these were certainly not primitive forms of characters. The oracular inscriptions are necessarily short-the longest known text, of a hundred or so characters, covers the scapula of an ox and extends even over the supporting bones; the shell of a southern species of the great tortoise, also used to record divination, did not offer a more extensive surface. Whether a literature existed at this ancient time seems rather doubtful, but this scriptural evidence causes one to consider whether eras are the early Chou dynasty (eleventh century-722 B. C. ), the Spring and Autumn era (722-481 B. C. ), the Warring States (481-256 B. C. ), the Chin dynasty (256-206 B. C. ), the Western or Early Han dynasty (206 B. C. -A. D. 6), and the Eastern or Latter Han dynasty (25-A. D. 220). 2These Chapter 1. Antiquity 7 the Shu jing Efg (Classic of Documents), supposedly revised by Confucius but often criticized as a spurious text, was based in part on authentic texts. The presence of an early sign representing a bundle of slips of wood or bamboo confirms the existence of a primitive form of book in a very ancient era-texts were written on these slips, which were then bound together to form a fascicle. The purpose of these ancient archives, which record the motivation for the diviners speech, his identity, and sometimes the result, has been ignored. Of another nature are the inscriptions on bronze that appeared in about the eleventh century B. C. and went out of fashion in the second century B.C. They attracted the attention of amateur scholars from the eleventh century until modern times. Many collections of inscriptions on stone and bronze have been published in the intervening eras. The longest texts extend to as much as five-hundred signs, the forms of which often seem to be more archaic than those of the inscriptions on bones and shells. The most ancient inscriptions indicate nothing more than the person to whom the bronze was consecrated or a commemoration of the name of the sponsor. Toward the tenth century B. C. the texts evolved from several dozen to as many as a hundred signs and took on a commemorative character. The inspiration for these simple, solemn texts is not always easily discernible because of the obscurities of the archaisms in the language. An echo of certain pieces transmitted by the Confucian school can be seen in some texts, but their opacity has disheartened many generations of literati. II. Let a hundred flowers bloom, Let a hundred schools of thought contend! This statement by Mao Zedong, made to launch a liberalization movement that was cut short in 1957, was inspired by an exceptional period in Chinese cultural history (from the fifth to the third centuries 8 Chinese Literature, Ancient and Classical B. C. ) in which there was a proliferation of schools-the hundred schools. The various masters of these schools offered philosophical, often political, discussion. The growth of these schools paralleled the rise of rival states from the time of Confucius (the Latinized version of the Chinese original, Kong Fuzi TL-T- or Master Kong, ca. 551-479 B.C. ) to the end of the Warring States period (221 B. C. ). The hundred schools came to an end with the unification of China late in the third century B. C. under the Legalist rule of the Qin dynasty (221-206 B. C. ). This era of freedom of thought and intellectual exchange never completely ceased to offer a model, albeit an unattainable model, in the search for an alternative to the oppressive ideology imposed by the centralized state. Much of what has reached us from this lost world was saved in the wake of the reconstruction of Confucian writings (a subject to which we will turn shortly). The texts of the masters of the hundred schools, on the periphery of orthodox literati culture, are of uneven quality, regardless of the philosophy they offer. Even the best, however, have not come close to dethroning the Chinese Socrates, Confucius, the first of the great thinkers, in both chronology and importance. 1. Mo Zi and the Logicians. The work known as Mo Zi (Master Mo) is a collection of the writings of a sect founded by Mo Di g, an obscure personage whom scholars have wanted to make a contemporary of Confucius. It has been hypothesized that the name Mo, ink, referred to the tattooing of  a convict in antiquity, and the given name, Di, indicates the pheasant feathers that decorated the hats of the common people. Although we can only speculate about whether Mo Zi was a convict or a commoner, he argued for a kind of bellicose pacifism toward aggressors, doing his best to promote, through a utilitarian process of reasoning, the necessity of believing in the gods and of practicing universal love without discrimination. Condemning the extravagant expense of funerals as well as the uselessness of art and music, Mo Zi Chapter 1. Antiquity 9 wrote in a style of discouraging weight. The work that has come down to us under his name (which appears to be about two-thirds of the original text) represents a direction which Chinese civilization explored without ever prizing. Mo Zis mode of argument has influenced many generations of logicians and sophists, who are known to us only in fragments, the main contribution of which has been to demonstrate in their curious way of argumentation peculiar features of the Chinese language. Hui Shi Ea is known only by the thirty-some paradoxes which the incomparable Zhuang Zi cites, without attempting to solve, as in: There is nothing beyond the Great Infinity.. . and the Small Infinity is not inside. The antinomies of reason have nourished Taoist thought, if not the other way around, as Zhuang Zi attests after the death of his friend Hui Shi: Zhuang Zi was accompanying a funeral procession. When he passed by the grave of Master Hui he turned around to say to those who were following him: A fellow from Ying had spattered the tip of his nose with a bit of plaster, like the wing of a fly. He had it removed by [his crony] the carpenter Shi, who took his ax and twirled it around. He cut it off, then heard a wind: the plaster was entirely removed without scratching his nose. The man from Ying had remained standing, impassive. When he learned of this, Yuan, the sovereign of the country of Song, summoned the carpenter Shih and said to him, Try then to do it again for Us. The carpenter responded, Your servant is capable of doing it; however, the material that he made use of died long ago. After the death of the Master, I too no longer can find the material: I no longer have anyone to talk to. (Zhuang Zi 24) Sons of the logicians and the sophists, the rhetoricians shared with the Taoists a taste for apologues. They opposed the Taoist solution of a 10 Chinese Literature, Ancient and Classical detached non-action, involved as they were in diplomatic combat. Held in contempt by the Confucians for their Machiavellianism, the Zhanguo ce Vg (Intrigues of the Warring States) remains the most representative work of the genre. It was reconstructed several centuries later by Liu Xiang gj 1-(4] (77-6 B. C. ), but the authenticity of these reassembled materials seems to have been confirmed by the discovery of parallel texts in a tomb at Mawang Dui gUttg in 1973. A great variety animates these accounts, both speeches and chronicles; they are rich in dialogue, which cannot be represented by this single, although characteristic, anecdote—it is inserted without commentary into the intrigues (or slips) of the state of Chu: The King of Wei offered the King of Chu a beautiful girl who gave him great satisfaction. Knowing how much the new woman pleased him, his wife, the queen, showed her the most intense affection. She chose clothes and baubles which would please her and gave them to her; it was the same for her with rooms in the palace and bed clothes. In short, she gratified her with more attention than the king himself accorded her. He congratulated her for it: a woman serves her husband through her carnal appeal, and jealousy is her nature. Now, understanding how I love the new woman, my wife shows her more love than I—it is thus that the filial son serves his parents, that the loyal servant fulfills his duties toward his prince. As she knew that the king did not consider her jealous, the queen suggested to her rival: The king appreciates your beauty. However, he is not that fond of your nose. You would do better to hide it when he receives you. Therefore, the new one did so when she saw His Majesty. The king asked his wife why his favorite hid her nose in his presence. She responded, I know. Even if it is unpleasant, tell me! insisted the king. She does not like your odor. The brazen hussy! cried the sovereign. Her nose is to be cut off, and let no one question my order! Chapter 1. Antiquity 11 The Yan Zi chunqiu *T-*V( (Springs and Autumns of Master Yen) is another reconstruction by Liu Xiang, a collection of anecdotes about Yan Ying RV, a man of small stature but great ability who was prime minister to Duke Jing of Qi (547-490 B.C. )-the state that occupies what is now Shandong. Without cynicism, but full of shrewdness, these anecdotes do not lack appeal; some have often been selected as anthology pieces, of which this one is representative: When Master Yan was sent as an ambassador to Chu, the people of the country constructed a little gate next to the great one and invited him to enter. Yan Zi refused, declaring that it was suitable for an envoy to a country of dogs, but that it was to Chu that he had come on assignment. The chamberlain had him enter by the great gate. The King of Chu received him and said to him: Was there then no one in Qi, for them to have sent you? How can you say there is no one in Qi, when there would be darkness in our capital of Linzi if the people of the three hundred quarters spread out their sleeves, and it would rain if they shook off their perspiration-so dense is the population. But then why have you been sent? The practice in Qi is to dispatch a worthy envoy to a worthy sovereign; I am the most unworthy. . . . 2. Legalism. The diplomatic manipulations and other little anecdotes we have seen in the Yan Zi chunqiu were of little interest to the Legalists, who took their name from the idea that the hegemonic power of the state is founded on a system of implacable laws supposing the abolition of hereditary privileges-indeed a tabula rasa that rejects morals and traditions. In fact, historians associate them with all thought that privileges efficacy. From this point of view, the most ancient Legalist would be the artisan of Qis hegemony in the seventh century B. C. , Guan Zi (Master Guan). The work that was handed down under his name is a composite text and in reality contains no material prior to the third century B. C. Whether or not he should be considered a Legalist, Guan Zi 12 Chinese Literature, Ancient and Classical embodies the idea that the power of the state lies in its prosperity, and this in turn depends on the circulation of goods. In sum, Guan Zi stands for a proto-mercantilism diametrically opposed to the primitive physiocraticism of Gongsun Yang (altV (also known as Shang Yang ), minister of Qin in the fourth century. Shang jun shu 1 (The 2 Book of Lord Shang), which is attributed to Gongsun Yang, gives the Legalist ideas a particularly brutal form: It is the nature of people to measure that which is advantageous to them, to seize the best, and to draw to themselves that which is profitable. The enlightened lord must take care if he wants to establish order in his country and to be able to turn the population to his advantage, for the population has at its disposal a great number of means to avoid the strictness that it fears. Within the country he must cause the people to consecrate themselves to farming; without he must cause them to be singly devoted to warfare. This is why the order of a sage sovereign consists of multiplying interdictions in order to prevent infractions and relying on force to put an end to fraud. (Shang jun shu, Suan di) Shang Yangs prose is laden with archaisms, which hardly lighten the weight of his doctrine. It is in the work of Han Fei Zi 4-T- (ca. 280-233) that Legalism found its most accomplished formulation. The book Han Fei Zi contains a commentary on the Classic of the Way and of Power of Lao Zi in which the ideal of Taoist non-action is realized by the automatism of laws. The artifice of the latter may go back to the Confucianism of Xun Zi (Master Xun, also known as Xun Qing ,Ajja, ca. 300-230 B. C. ), a school rejected by orthodox Confucianism. Xun Zi, who happens to have been the teacher of Han Fei Zi, developed the brilliant theory that human nature inclines individuals to satisfy their egoistic appetites: it was therefore bad for advanced societies of the time. The rites-culture-are necessary for socialization. Xun Zis Chapter 1. Antiquity 13 argumentation was unprecedentedly elaborate, examining every facet of a question while avoiding repetition. In a scintillating style peppered with apologues, Han Fei Zi argues that the art of governing requires techniques other than the simple manipulation of rewards and punishments. The prince is the cornerstone of a system that is supposed to ensure him of a protective impenetrableness. The state must devote itself to eliminating the useless, noxious five parasites or vermin: the scholars, rhetoricians, knights-errant, deserters, and merchants (perhaps even artisans). 3. The Fathers of Taoism. A philosophy of evasion, this school was opposed to social and political engagement. From the outset Taoism was either a means to flee society and politics or a form of consolation for those who encountered reversals in politics and society. The poetic power of its writings, which denounced limits and aphorisms of reason, explains the fascination that it continues to hold for intellectuals educated through the rationalism of the Confucians. These works, like most of the others from antiquity that were attributed to a master, in fact seem to be rather disparate texts of a school. The Dao de jing ittitg (Classic of the Way and of Power) remains the most often translated Chinese work—and the first translated, if one counts the lost translation into Sanskrit by the monk Xuanzang WM in the seventh century A. D. This series of aphorisms is attributed to Lao Zi (Master. Lao or The Old Master), whom tradition considers a contemporary of Confucius. He is said to have left this testament as he departed the Chinese world via the Xiangu Pass for the West. In their polemics against the Buddhists, the Taoists of the following millennium used this story as the basis on which to affirm that the Buddha was none other than their Chinese Lao Zi, who had been converting the barbarians of the West since his departure from China. Modern scholarship estimates that the Lao Zi could not date earlier than the third century B. C. The 1973 discoveries at Mawang Dui in Hunan confirmed what scholars had suspected for centuries: the primitive Lao Zi is reversed in respect to 14 Chinese Literature, Ancient and Classical  ours: a De dao jing 1,M1# § (Classic of Power and the Way). Its style, which is greatly admired for its obscure concision, seems to owe much to the repair work of the commentator Wang Bi . T3 (226-249). Thus it is tenable that the primitive Lao Zi was a work of military strategy. Whatever it was, the text that is preferred today runs a little over 5,000 characters and is divided into 81 sections (9 x 9). The Taoist attitude toward life is expressed here in admirably striking formulae, which lend themselves to many esoteric interpretations: He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know (#56). Govern a great state as you would fry small fish! (#60). Practice non-action, attend to the useless, taste the flavorless. (#63) The Zhuang Zi ate, written by Zhuang Zhou 4. -B1 or Zhuang Zi (Master Zhuang), was apparently abridged at about the same time as the Lao Zi, but at the hands of the commentator Guo Xiang # -IM (d. 312), who cut it from fifty-two to thirty-three sections. Scholars cannot agree whether the seven initial sections, called the inner chapters, are from the same hand of Zhuang Zhou as the sixteen following, called the outer chapters, and the final ten miscellaneous chapters. It is in the final ten that we find a characteristic arrangement of reconstructions from the first century, works of one school attributed to one master. In fact, it is the first part which gives the most lively impression of an encounter with an animated personality whose mind is strangely vigorous and disillusioned: Our life is limited, but knowledge is without limit. To follow the limitless with that which is limited will exhaust one. To go unrelentingly after knowledge is exhausting and c.

Overview Of The Company Almarai Business Essay

Overview Of The Company Almarai Business Essay The founder of Almarai is HH Prince Sultan Bin Mohammed Bin Saudi Al Kabeer who recognized the potential to transform the traditional dairy farming in Saudi Arabia in order to meet the needs of a growing domestic market. Numerous agricultural projects were developed under his guidance to achieve the objective of the company. Almarai stepped into the market with the processing of fresh milk and laban into the modern dairy farms. The Company has invested heavily in technologically advanced production facilities and recruiting the right person for the right job. Almarai is considered to be the second and the larger Central Processing Plant with a new cheese plant along with it. On a daily basis, Almarai is capable of serving high quality and hygienic products to more than 43,500 customers within the GCC countries. In 2005, Almarai moved from being a privately owned Company to a publicly listed company and it has over 70,000 shareholders. In 2007, with the acquisition of Western Bakeries, Almarai expanded its product line to include bakery products which improved distribution, and product innovation. The success of Almarai is because of its unique infrastructure which includes farms, dairy, juice and bakery processing plants. And also it is determined by the marketing and distribution expertise, all of which are working towards delivering a quality product to the consumer. Product / Services Details Juices: Almarai always uses the best fruit to make the juices that the customers love. It maintains good balance between good health and great taste. Home Snacks: Snacks products are the tastier and the simple one which would give relishing taste. Yoghurts and Desserts: Pure and calcium-rich favorites for the entire family. Desserts are made from 100% natural, fresh cows milk. Culinary Products: Almarai provides the tastiest cheeses, and richest creams which makes mothers work easy in the kitchen. Dairy Liquids: There is a complete range of delicious laban and milk based dairy products for the entire family. Kids Products: Kids products prove to be a fun and a healthy bunch for kids. Product Mix and Product Line Product Mix Product Line Juices Home Snacks Yoghurts and Desserts Culinary Products Dairy Liquids Kids Products Mixed Fruit, Strawberry, Alphonso Mango, Orange with Pulp, Orange, Orange and Carrot, Apple, Mango, Mango Mixed Fruit, Fruit Cocktail, Mixed Berry, lemon with Mint, Guava with Pulp. Cream Jar Mix, Cheddar Jar Cheese, Sliced Cheese, Square Cheese Portions, Block Cheddar, Halloumi Cheese. Yoghurt, Fresh Cream, Labneh, Layered fruit Yoghurt, Stirred Fruit Yoghurt, Sterilized Cream, Desserts. Tinned Cheese, Butter, Ghee, Mozzarella Cheese, Feta Cheese, Whipping Cream, Tomato Paste. Fresh laban, Fresh Milk, Flavored Fresh Milk, UHT Milk, Evaporated Milk, Advanced Nutrition. Triangled Cheese, UHT Flavored Milk, Zady Drinking Yoghurt, Zady Flavored Yoghurt, Zady Jelly Custard, Zady Fruit Dairy Snack. Product Strategies Product Strategy is the most important function of a company. Almarai was successful because of its unique blend of state-of-the-art infrastructure which includes farms, production operations and go-to-market system. The company distributes its products annually which covers more than 110 million kilometers in delivering dairy, juice, bakery and poultry products reaching up to 41, 797 customers across six GCC states. Ø Product Differentiation: In 1997, Almarai introduced fresh juice to complement the range of dairy products. Then the company for further expansion into bakery in 2007 with the acquisition of Western Bakeries. In the year 2009, poultry was added through the acquisition with Hail Agricultural Development Company (HADCO). During the same year, Almarai made acquisition with Mead Johnson Nutrition to form a 50-50 joint venture known as the International Pediatric Nutrition Company (IPNC). Ø Product Positioning: The way a firms product, brand or organization is placed on the market so it is easily acceptable and recognizable by the customers. * Almarai launches UHT Flavored Milk with different flavours which are targeted at kids. * Almarai enters into the market of baby food which provided the company the opportunities of expansion into new categories. Price Determination Almarai decides its price on the basis of competition. For example, for a pack of 300ml of Orange with Pulp is priced at Dhs 2.50 instead of Dhs 2.00. This pricing strategy makes consumers perceive the products to be affordable. All other branded products are priced between the ranges from Dhs 2 to Dhs 4. Pricing Strategy Pricing refers to the methods adopted by the companies to price their products or services. The cost to produce and design a product, its cost to distribute and promote it must be included in pricing. Pricing a product too high or too low could mean a loss of sales for the organization. Ø Cost Based Pricing:Almarai prices its products by following this strategy. It takes into account the cost of production and distribution, and then they decide final pricing for the products. Almarai milk as compared with Nadec Milk is less in price and also gives the same quantity as of Nadec. It is priced at Dhs 9 whereas Nadec Milk at Dhs 10. Ø Product Line Pricing: Pricing different products within the same product range but at different prices. For example, for a pack of 1.75L of Strawberry Juice costs around Dhs 8 whereas for a pack of 1.75L of Orange Juice is priced at Dhs 7. Distribution Channels used Almarai has long-haul fleet which transports raw milk from dairy farms to the Central Processing Plants and then it transports the finished goods from the production site to different designated sales locations. Almarai reaches to more than 42,000 shops within the GCC countries on daily basis. It ensures that the products are properly packed with appropriate temperatures for different products. The transports are specially designed so that the products are not spoiled and last for longer time. Almarai transports the finished to small grocery stores and supermarkets. Almarai enjoys increasing incomes and demands that come from supermarkets where one shop for ones weekly requirement in a single visit. Packaging Packaging means covering or protecting the product with one or more suitable materials for ease in handling, transportation and marketing. Packaging not only differentiates one brand from another but also gives a preview of the product. Almarai ensures that all its products are properly packed and refrigerated in proper temperatures so that the products maintain its fresh nature and quality. Liquid products are transported in those transports which has refrigerator facility so that it does not get spoiled by over time. Almarai mainly emphasis on quality. Packaging is done in a very clear and uncluttered way so that it is easily recognizable. Promotion Almarai promotes its products through adopting various medium so that the product reaches the customers effectively. Newspaper Campaign Front and inner page color advertisements in various popular newspapers like Khaleej Times, 7 Days, Gulf news†¦etc Radio Campaign Emphasizing on the taste promotional and discount factors which attracts flow of customers to buy the product. Discounts The products are given to customers on discount promotional basis which in turn earns not only increase in profit margin but also goodwill among the customers. For example, Recently Almarai gave discounts of Dhs 2 offer reduction on all its pack of 1.75L Juices which was a new attraction even among the competitors. TV Commercials TV ads are considered as the most common medium for promoting the product. Almarai does regular TV commercials on different channels. It makes the advertisement so attractive especially when it comes for Kids products. Billboards and Holdings Almarai uses even this medium to promote its products and also to make people aware of its discounts and offerings. Almarai has such sites in different locations where people presence is more. Questionnaire Dear Sir / Madam, I am a student of University of Bedfordshire conducting a Survey based on Almarai Company for my Marketing Course. I request you to fill this questionnaire. This data will be used only for educational purpose. Name: Gender: Occupation: Age: a) 15 25 b) 25 35 c) 35 45 d) Above 50 1. Do you drink Almarai Juices? a) Yes b) No 2. Which Flavor you like the most? a) Orange b) Mango c) Strawberry d) Lemon e) Guava f) Cocktail g) Mixed Berry h) Apple 3. Which Brand of Juices you like the most? a) Almarai b) Al Rawabi c) Rani d) Caesar e) Masafi f) Lacnor 4. What is the reason behind choosing your brand? a) Tasty b) Price c)Availability d) Like e) Advertisement f) Quality 5. How much Quantity you purchase the most? a) 200ml b) 300ml c) 1.75L d) 1L 6. Have you tried any other Almarai products other than juices? a) Culinary Products (Tinned Cheese, Butter, Ghee, Feta Cheese, Whipping Cream) b) Dairy Liquids (Fresh Laban, Fresh Milk, Flavored Fresh Milk, UHT Milk, Evaporated Milk, Advanced Nutrition) c) Home Snacks (Cream Jar Cheese, Cheddar Jar Cheese, Sliced Cheese, Square Cheese Portions, Block Cheddar, Halloumi Cheese) d) Yoghurts and Desserts (Yoghurt, Fresh Cream, Labneh, Layered Fruit Yoghurt, Stirred Fruit Yoghurt, Sterilized Cream, Desserts) e) Kids Products (Triangled Cheese, UHT Flavored Milk, Zady Drinking Yoghurt, Zady Flavored Yoghurt, Zady Jelly Custard, Zady Fruit Dairy Snack) 7. Attractive discounts are offered? a) Agree b) Disagree c) Neutral 8. Are you satisfied with the Quality? a) Agree b) Disagree c) Neutral 9. Would you recommend Almarai products to your friends? a) Agree b) Disagree c) Neutral 10. What is your overall opinion about Almarai? a) Very Good b) Good c) Bad d) Very Bad e) Neutral

A postcolonial critique of liberal peacekeeping theory

A postcolonial critique of liberal peacekeeping theory Northern Statism at the Margins:   A postcolonial critique of liberal peacekeeping theory. Today, ‘humanitarian intervention or so-called ‘muscular peacekeeping occurs in contexts known as ‘complex emergencies, which combine elements of civil war, state collapse, human rights violations, ‘criminality and humanitarian crisis.   Often, local agents have formed vested interests connected to external powers, which induce them to reproduce situations of emergency.   Mark Duffield aptly refers to the ‘security-development nexus, in which global assemblages of crisis management are connected to the local reproduction of crisis.   This nexus deploys peacekeeping and peacebuilding as alternatives to recognising the impact of neoliberalism and imperialism on development (****).   Duffields analysis resonates with the idea of crisis-management in the work of Gayatri Spivak (1990: 97-8), who portrays crisis as a constant situation in a postcolonial world where the North constantly wards off the traumatic effects of colonialism.   While clear fro m official documents, this status of responses to the South as crisis management is not apparent in the fantasmatic discourse of public pronouncements and media coverage.   In this context, it becomes crucial to the critique of colonial power to simultaneously see the process of crisis management and its ideological construction to repress the colonial trauma.   An examination of liberal theories of peacekeeping must show their complicity in both these processes. This paper will pursue an approach of ‘seeing together in relation to liberal theory, by reading this theory together with the intervention in Somalia.   It will thus seek to draw out the complicities between false and oppressive assumptions in theory and colonial actions (and failures) in practice.   The main purpose of this paper will be to establish that liberal and instrumentalist peacekeeping theorists share a number of colonial assumptions.   While drawing on postcolonial studies, the approach will also engage with ethnography, anarchism and cultural studies as means of providing multiple angles from which to see situations.   Multivocity is deployed to approximate a complex situation by viewing it from a number of different directions at once, each viewpoint being taken as an incomplete perspective.   Postcolonial theory will here be shadowed firstly by Richard J.F. Days anarchist critique of liberalism, to demonstrate the complicity and interchangeability of c olonial and statist standpoints.   Secondly, it will be traced through reflections on the intervention in Somalia by anthropologists and postcolonial theorists.   While recognising the danger of epistemological violence in the Northern anthropologists representation of the Other, such accounts are useful in exposing the structural gap between the theoretical framing of the situation and the situation as it appears from a more nuanced engagement.   There are doubtless also gaps between the anthropologists reconstruction and the immanent discourse of everyday life, but for the purposes of this paper it is necessary only that the anthropological account be closer to this discourse than is that of the normative theorists.   The article focuses on three related liberal theorists: Nicholas Wheeler, C.A.J. Coady and Fernando Tesà ³n.   The theorists discussed here are similar in their general frame, though varying in the degree of subtlety with which they express it.   Coady offers a more subtle theory that the other authors, but his subtlety supplements rather than overriding the performative effectivity of liberal discourse.   In this article, we treat them as part of a single discourse, and trace their colonial logic through a series of five interlinked assumptions which can be traced through all the theorists discussed. 1. Northern privilege as universalism The first problematic assumption is the view that a desituated Northern agent can assert and establish the content of a universal ethics.   Most often this is constructed in opposition to a straw-man of relativism.   It is not, however, the universalist stance which is most crucial to their colonial status.   Rather, it is the fact that they believe universally true positions can be established by reference solely to Northern experiences and values.   Their approach is thus colonial in foreclosing the need for dialogue with difference.   Northern standpoints are privileged by means of a separation between marked and unmarked terms.   The unmarked term of the civilised world becomes the exclusive referent for justifications of approaches to the ‘uncivilised other.  Ã‚   Hence, the ‘civilised world is ethically tautological: its relation to its Others is justified by its own values, which are the relevant referent because it is ‘civilised, a status it po ssesses by virtue of its values.   This reinforces the view that, despite the tenuousness of its moral realism, liberal cosmopolitanism is a paradigmatic ‘royal science, seeking to give a certain Law to its readers to provide a stable basis for moral order.   As Richard Day writes of Kymlicka, liberal theory produces ‘an utterance that does not anticipate a rejoinder (78).   The construction of monologism takes different forms in each theory.   Wheeler rests his account of the normative force of the duty to intervene on a liberal international relations (IR) perspective which is pitted mainly against the Realist view that states are incapable of normative concern.   His main concern is thus to show that normative restrictions, even if used or formulated in self-interested ways, can still be binding on states (2004: 4, 7, 24).   This sidesteps the question of how ethical positions should be reached, but has a symptomatic side-effect.   This construction of international normativity thus focuses on the emergence of normative communities among states (e.g. 2004: 23, 44).   Stateless societies can be the objects of intervention, but are excluded from the formation of the normative community which legitimates it, effectively relegated to terra nullius by the absence of a relevant international claimant not empty of people as ‘bare life, but e mpty of morally relevant agents, people who ‘matter as normative voices.   Things get no better when Wheeler briefly enters the field of discussion of how positions should be reached, rendering this process the exclusive province of the ‘values of civilized societies (2002: 303).   Hence, ‘civilised societies ask themselves if they are entitled to intervene; nobody thinks to ask the recipients.   In practice, this leads to a situation where the   UN believed that no consent was needed to intervene in Somalia due to the absence of a state able to give such consent (Wheeler 2002: 183).   Fernando Tesà ³n offers the most unreconstituted variant of the universalist global-local.   He adopts a strongly realist moral ontology in which moral truths are absolutely independent of their origins (Tesà ³n 2001:12).   Having asserted ontologically that such truths exist, he nevertheless provides no clear guide to the epistemological means by which they can be known.   But what he does not say, he shows by his performance as speaker of ethical ‘truths.   His reference is to a Northern in-group connected to the dominant fantasy frame, as for instance when he writes of ‘the shock we felt over the Srebrenica massacre (2001: 44).   The type of subject who felt shock at this juncture is of a certain type: tuned into the global media, experiencing the events of Bosnia from the outside, contained in a sphere of safety in which such events are shocking rather than horrifically quotidian and predictable.   This ‘we excludes by gradations the Srebrenica vic tims themselves, whose emotions were likely much sharper than mere shock; the solidarity activists, Muslim and secular, who would be angry but unsurprised at the Serbian atrocity and the UN betrayal; and the other recipients of intervention, the Somalis, Rwandans and so on, whose reactions remain opaque.   Like Tesà ³n, Coady is a moral realist who views ethics as a form of knowledge allowing universal claims and derived from human nature (2002: 13-14, 18).   This position is counterposed to a simplified view of relativism (2002: 14), and again, its ontological firmness is undermined by its silence on epistemology.   No method is provided for distinguishing in practice between relative and universal positions, though such judgements are most definitely made in practice (2002: 16).   Again, it seems that the universal truth is established solely by Northern agents.   One establishes truth through the ‘courts of reason, feeling, experience and conscience, which may or may not produce an obvious answer (2002: 14).   Being internal to the desituated Northern observer, these ‘courts do not require any accountability to non-Northern Others, or any kind of reflexivity.  Ã‚   A Northern subject-position is introduced performatively.   Hence for instance, reactions of Northern media viewers are deemed facts of human nature (2002: 29, 36).   Hence it is clear that, while Others are allowed to make claims in these courts, but the judge remains resolutely Northern.   In practice, such universalism, operating as a global-local, provides space for linguistic despotism.   Deleuze and Guattari have argued that the persistence of despotism after the end of absolutist states relies on the despotic functioning of transcendentalist language (Anti-Oedipus 207).   In peacekeeping discourse, this transcendentalism is expressed especially in the binary between civilised and uncivilised, which creates the conditions for sovereignty and states of exception.   One can thus think of peacekeeping violence in terms of law-founding violence, a suspension of ethics in the creation of a statist order.   Hence, Hardt and Negri are right in arguing that ‘[m]odern sovereignty†¦ does not put an end to violence and fear but rather puts an end to civil war by organizing violence and fear into a coherent and stable political order.   Peacekeeping in the dominant discourse is the violence which forms a bridge between ‘anarchy (the demonised Other) and liberal-democracy, cutting through complexity with the simplicity of brute force (Debrix 110).   The effects of this discursive asymmetry are made clear in Sherene Razacks investigation of peacekeeping violence.   Razacks book focuses on instances of torture and murder by Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia, and accounts for such violence as expressions of discourses of superiority (10).  Ã‚   Razack argues that Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia committed atrocities because of their identity as agents of a civilised nation operating in a hostile, otherworldly context.   They use such categories to construct an ‘affective space of belonging (24).   The identity of Canadian peacekeepers as citizens of a civilised nation lead to the denial of personhood to Somali Others (Razack 9).   The stance as civilised outsiders leads to violence through the operation of a binary of civilised versus savage which is inherently racialised (13).   The civilisers are counterposed to the ‘dark corners of the earth in a narrative which places Northern peacekeepers outside history (12).  Ã‚   They are assigned the task of sorting out problems of Southern others at some risk to themselves (32).   ‘History is evacuated and the simplest of stories remains: more civilized states have to keep less civilized states in line (48).   Sites such as Somalia thus become viewed as utterly hostile, sites of absolute evil in which anarchy blurs with terrain and climate (15, 84).   Since the South is constituted as an inferior category, peacekeepers enter a space where their ability to relate to others humanity is impeded (54, 155).   Such black holes, or extraordinary spaces, become sites of exception and emergency (44).   Excluded from dialogue by the myth of its absolu te evil, the Other is taken to understand little but force (38-9, 93).   Canadian peacekeepers involved in abuses were acting on a narrative bearing little resemblance to their actual situation in a largely peaceful town (73).   They in effect went looking for enemies, scheming to lure and trap Somalis who were then assumed to fit stereotypes (79-81).   The narrative of imposing order amidst chaos creates conditions in which peacekeepers initiate conflict to provide a context in which to respond overwhelmingly and brutally.   Paradoxically, peacekeepers thereby often become unable even to keep the peace between themselves and their local hosts, let alone to impose it among locals.   2.   State as necessary; social order The second problematic grouping of assumptions concern the social role of the state.   Liberal theorists view the state as identical with or essential to society, and as something without which a decent life is impossible.   This is taken as a truism.   As Richard Day argues, liberal scholars systematically ignore arguments that stateless life might be preferable to life under the state, in an intellectual doubling of the move of liberal states to ruthlessly suppress movements aspiring to stateless life.   Despite their criticisms of particular state policies, liberals consistently think about social life from the standpoint of the state.   As Day writes, liberalism identifies with the state by adopting its subject-position (79).   This fixation on the state expresses itself normatively in the attachment of overriding significance to themes of order, security and stability.   For instance, the UN resolution on Somalia called for action ‘to restore peace, stability and law and order (cited Lyons and Samatar 34).   On the other side, metonymic slippage is established between terms like statelessness, lawlessness, anarchy, chaos and barbarism.   This conceptual conflation combines into a single concept at least four distinct phenomena:   state collapse as such, the collapse of society (such as everyday meanings and relations), the existence of a situation of civil war, and the existence of a set of ‘lawless actions similar to criminality (such as murder, torture, rape, armed robbery and extortion).   This runs against the warnings of more informed empirical scholars who emphasise the need to disaggregate these phenomena (Menkhaus State Collapse 405, 407).   On an explanatory level, statist authors tend to attribute the other aspects of a complex emergency, particularly social conflict and ‘lawless actions, to the absence of a state (or of the right kind of state).   Hence, they fail to distinguish between peaceful and warring stateless societies, or between ‘lawless stateless societies and those with some degree of diffuse ‘governance.  Ã‚   A society such as Somalia is stateless, hence necessarily beset by civil war and social predation.   As a result, it is assumed that the response to problems related to civil war and ‘lawlessness must be resolved by the restoration or construction of a proper state.   An absence is taken as the explanation for various effects, with no sense of what specific forces cause these effects.   The possibility that the worst problems in complex emergencies could be mitigated instead by moving towards a more peaceful and less predatory type of statelessness a possibility at the forefront of the empirical literature on Somalia for example is simply ruled out in advance.   Also excluded from the frame is the need to establish and engage with contingent causes of intergroup conflict.   These themes can be traced through the work of the authors under discussion.   Wheeler deems ‘state breakdown and a collapse of law and order a sufficient cause for intervention (2002: 34).   In referring to situations in which ‘the target state had collapsed into lawlessness and civil strife (2002: 2), he clearly conflates statelessness, ‘lawlessness and civil war: state collapse itself means ‘lawlessness and civil strife; this is what a society becomes when a state collapses.   Furthermore, ‘lawlessness and the ‘breakdown of authority are taken to be the cause of famine in Somalia (2002: 176, 206), notwithstanding the continued absence of state authority in the famine-free years since 1994.   Wheeler also rather strangely refers to state-building as the removal of ‘the gun from political life (2002: 306).   States are not known for their lack of guns.   Writing in 2002 by which time Somalia had experienced a stateless peace for nearly a decade   Wheeler argues that ‘[d]isarming the warlords and establishing the rule of law were crucial in preventing Somalia from falling back into civil war and famine (2002: 190).   What Somalia needed, he decided, was a ‘law-governed polity (2002: 173).   To this end, he advocates ‘the imposition of an international protectorate that could provide a security framework for years, if not decades, to come (2002: 306), effectively the recolonisation of the country.   In constructing criteria for the success of an intervention, Wheelers position is again ambiguous.   His exact demand is that a successful intervention establish ‘a political order   hospitable to the protection of human rights (2002: 37).   Yet when he discusses Somalia, and faces the problem that humanitarian relief and state-building were contradictory goals, he takes a pro-statebuilding position (2002: 189-90).   This can be interpreted to mean that he assumes that only a statist order could possibly be hospitable to human rights, notwithstanding the appalling human rights record of the previous Somali state.   Yet there is no reason why local polities could not be assessed in terms of human rights (Menkhaus and Pendergast, 2).   In Tesà ³ns account, a Hobbesian position on state collapse, including the identity of state collapse, societal collapse, ‘lawlessness and civil war, is explicitly advocated.   ‘Anarchy is the complete absence of social order, which inevitably leads to a Hobbesian war of all against all (2001: 7).   People are thus prevented from conducting ‘meaningful life in common (2001: 7).   It is clear that state and society are so closely linked here as to be indistinguishable; it is left unclear if the ‘absence of social order means the absence merely of the state or of other forms of social life.   Given that contexts such as Somalia do not in fact involve the collapse of all social life, it must be assumed that the former is being inferred from the latter.   We see once more the reproduction of the conflation of statelessness with a range of problems, in apparent ignorance of the possibility of other kinds of statelessness.   The solution is taken to be pervasive imposition of liberal social forms.   Humanitarian aid simply addresses ‘the symptoms of anarchy and tyranny, whereas building ‘democratic, rights-based institutions addresses a central cause of the problem and does ‘the right thing for the society (2001: 37).   As a result, situations of anarchy necessarily lead to barbaric interpersonal behaviour which is seriously unjust, causing a ‘moral collapse of sovereignty and a loss of the right to self-government (2001: 2-3).   The difference between statist societies and stateless societies is not, he tersely declares, a matter of legitimate dispute.   The difference is a matter of what all ‘reasonable views will accept and what they will not (2001: 13-14).   This boundary reproduces the tautological ethical stance of the Northern agent.   While emotively related to the extreme effects of civil war and predatory violence, this position in effect declares any stateless society to be beyond the pale regardless of whether it displays these characteristics.   The gesture of Schmittian sovereignty, deciding on the exclusion of those deemed unreasonable, is particularly dangerous given that intervention happens in contexts where the majority of local agents show such characteristi cs.   Peacekeepers primed to enter situations deemed uncondonable are doomed to violent contact with local agents (including ‘victims who do condone them, because their very frame is constructed to exclude engagement.   Again in Coadys work, the assumption that states exist for benevolent purposes is prominent.   States are viewed as responsible for the protection of citizens (2002: 11-12).   Intervention can legitimately be aimed at ‘failed or profoundly unstable states (2002: 21), and has the goals of ‘ensuring political stability and enduring safety (2002: 30), liberal code for state-building.   It is not unusual in peacekeeping theory to find a distinction drawn between ordinary human rights (identified with concrete violations) and extraordinary human rights (identified with the collapse of legitimate state power), a binary which ethically voids the very concept of rights by identifying its actualisation with a particular social order.   In other varieties, one finds it in distinctions between truly shocking and merely wrong forms of violation, between ‘extremely barbarous and mundane abuses, or between law and order as a primary goal of intervention and human security as a secondary luxury (see Coady 2002: 16, 28, Tesà ³n 2001: 37, Walzer Just and Unjust Wars 108, Lund 2003: 28-9, 47-8, Paris 2004: 47-8).   This serves to put the denial of rights, or of the state, in the South (or rather, its crisis-points) in an incommensurable category distinct from human rights abuses in and by the North (and its Southern allies).   With human rights deemed impossible in a stateless society, rights-violation is excused as ‘law-creating violence, the creation of an order where rights become possible, but which does not require prefigurative recognition of rights in the present, a position not dissimilar to the telos of socialism in Stalinist ideology.   The declaration of justice and rights as the purpose of the state sits uncomfortably with the kind of state likely to result in practice from statebuilding in contexts such as Somalia.   Clearly, Tesà ³n has transmuted his normative position on what states should do into an essentialist position on what states are, which leaves him with a project of building a state per se, without regard for whether the project or the resultant state serves the ascribed goals.  Ã‚   In the meantime, the patently obvious existence of customary rights in societies such as Somalia is conveniently ignored.   Presumably, as rights of the ‘uncivilised, these rights do not count as fully ‘human.   In practice, the effects of such a statist frame are to disengage peacekeepers from populations they are supposed to be rescuing, constructing them as epistemologically-privileged bearers of a project of social reconstruction which is in the interests, regardless of the wishes, of the locals.   This framework produces a paradigmatically colonial arrogance.   Peacekeepers misperceived unfamiliar institutions as an absence of institutions, leading to racist effects.   Empirical scholars have approached Somalia with a frame distorted by such statism, as when Lyons and Samatar portray the country as a ‘Hobbesian world without law or institutions, divided between ‘the most vulnerable and ‘the most vicious (Lyons and Samatar 7; c.f. Makinda ****).   In practice, the Somali intervention was framed by Northern insecurities about ‘disorder in the context of global neoliberalism.   According to one cultural analyst, the intervention was an attempt to suture th e field of global disorder, acting out a predetermined script in an attempt to create an appearance of fixed order, namely, neoliberalism as the end of history (Debrix 97-9).   This suture is necessary because of the gap separating neoliberal ideology from the actuality of global disorder (107).   It was to fail because an excess of uncontrollable images arising from local difference began to disempower the global order (Debrix 126).   In Somalia, peacekeepers found themselves in a society with very different assumptions about state power. According to Menkhaus, ‘there is perhaps no other issue on which the worldviews of external and internal actors are more divergent than their radically different understanding of the state (Menkhaus State Collapse 409).   ‘For many Somalis, the state is an instrument of accumulation and domination, enriching and empowering those who control it and exploiting and harassing the rest of the population (Menkhaus Governance 87).  Ã‚   Hence, statebuilding was misconceived as necessary for peacebuilding in a setting where it was virtually impossible.   Menkhaus and Pendergast argue that the ‘radical localization of politics in Somalia is often misunderstood as disorder and crisis, when in fact it is part of the functioning of local social life.  Ã‚   ‘The challenge to the international community is to attempt to work with this â€Å"stateless† pol itical reality in Somalia rather than against it.   It is a myth to see the intervention as rebuilding a state, since an effective state has never existed in Somalia (Menkhaus State Collapse 412).   Somalia has historically been resistant to the implantation of the state-form, and previous colonial and neo-colonial states, arising mainly as channels for global patronage flows, were caught between the extractive and despotic use of concentrated power by the clan which dominated the state and moves to balance against this excessive power by other clans.   Even such an artificial state has been made impossible by changing conditions (Menkhaus and Pendergast 2-3).   Attempts to rebuild a centralised state have exacerbated conflict between clan militias, which compete for the ‘potential spoils of such a state (Menkhaus and Pendergast 13).   With the capital viewed as the site or ‘house of state power, the battle for the state encouraged clan conflicts for control of the capital (Jan 2001: 81; )    Where state-building has occurred in postwar Somalia, it has been similarly marked by strong extractive and divisive tendencies (Lewis 81-3).   Hence, to favour stateb uilding in Somalia is to contribute to exacerbating conflict by taking stances between diffuse forces which favour some and disempower others.   In seeking local collaborators in building the state, the UN ended up favouring some clan militias against others (Rutherford 16, 23, 40-1).   On the other hand, empirical evidence does not confirm the view that peace required a strong state.   Statelessness as such did not cause civil war or social problems.   Until the 1980s, Somalia was extremely safe, despite or because of its weak state; the source of security was communal, not juridical (Menkhaus State Collapse 412).   Similarly, Somalia rapidly returned to peace after the UN departure, with conflict infrequent between 1995 and 2006 (Menkhaus Governance 87-8).   In part, this was due to the declining local influence of warlords inside their own clans.   Ameen Jan analyses the post-UN scenario as a revival of processes frozen by the intervention, which were already moving national power towards clans and clan power towards civilians (2001: 53-5).   Another apparent anomaly is that the de facto independent northwestern region of Somaliland successfully constructed peace and local political institutions with meagre resources, at the same time that expensive U N peace conferences were failing (Lewis ix-x).   This process succeeded because it arose from the grassroots and started with reconciliation on issues of contention, many of which were social issues such as buying off militia members and resolving land disputes (Lewis 91, 94-5; Menkhaus, Governance 91).   Hence, the causes of the civil war in parts of Somalia were contingent products of circumstances which are unlikely to recur (Menkhaus and Pendergast 7, 15).   Having started from the wrong premises, it is no surprise that the wrong conclusions were reached.   Successful peacebuilding in Somalia would involve a transition from a violent diffuse acephalous society to a peaceful diffuse acephalous society, whereas the colonial assumptions of peacekeepers instead sought to override the entire structure of Somali society as a means to construct their preferred form of order.   In practice, this obsession with order and interpellation of otherness as disorder expresses itself in reliance on hard power.   The UN and US sought to rely on technical and military power as a substitute for engagement in the context (Debrix 115, Wheeler 2002: 181, 205).   This tends to reproduce the very context posited by the Northern discourse.   Pieterse has argued that the emphasis on hard power in interventions reinforces or even creates rigid ethnic categories and authoritarian institutions, hence creating the conditions for humanitarian crisis. The emphasis on hard power stemming from the problematic of sovereignty effectively rendered peacebuilding impossible.   While local clan reconciliation conferences were more effective in practice, the UN approach focused on militia leaders, a process which tended to entrench their power and disaggregate them from their support-base (Jan 2001: 63).   This misrepresented their power through the frame of sovereignty.   Clan militias, like Clastrean chiefs, did not hold stable power.   They were speculative and temporary, and subject to rapid decomposition (Lewis 80, Menkhaus and Pendergast 4-5).   Lewis views the Somali militias as clan militias involved mainly in territorial conflicts (Lewis 75).   Far from dominating the context, militias depended on soft power within clans to a great degree, and were unable even to implement accords among themselves due to their limited influence over their clans (Menkhaus and Pendergast 4-5).   Clastres theory of warfare in indigenous societies, the source of the Deleuzian theory of war-machines, emphasises the role of intergroup alliances and balancing as quasi-intentional means of warding off concentrated power and transcendentalism. Intergroup feuding expresses ‘the will of each community to assert its difference,‘[t]o assure the permanence of the dispersion, the parcelling, the atomization of the groups.   Such a situation of centrifugal forces is indeed typical of the kind of conflict settings which peacekeeping interventions target.   Somalis are predominantly nomads, and form the archetypal nomadic war-machines carrying out the diffusion of social power.   The frame applied from the North is, however, rather dangerous: the logic of the war-machine is misunderstood as a primal Hobbesian violence.   This sets peacekeepers up for colonial warfare.   The terminal crisis of the UN intervention arose from the redefinition of one of the two major allia nces of clan militias as an enemy.   Focused unduly on the person of General Aidid, the escalation arose following an attack on UN troops which was interpreted as a violation of transcendental sovereignty, an attack on protected bodies of exceptional value.   In the local frame, however, it was reconfigured as horizontal warfare rather than vertical enforcement, and the UN became seen as the ‘sixteenth Somali faction (Jan 2001: 72).   Hence, it seems that an incapacity to think outside a narrowly statist frame was the source both of a violently colonial intervention, and of the constitutive unrealisability of the goals of the intervention.   It would seem that statism and colonialism intersect, with certain Southern societies judged as inferior for their lack of state forms.   This expresses the promotion of the Northern state, in spite of its increasing authoritarianism and colonial legacy, as an unmarked term to which the world should aspire.   Although it is outside the scope of this paper, it is also apparent that Southern states are typically pathologised as the wrong ‘type of state too corrupt, too contaminated by the dirty world of social life, insufficiently able to mobilise uncontested concentrated power or authority.   It is possible that the club of ‘real democracies, or ‘successful states, is actually a repetition of Fanons club of the civilised, held up as a goal for those w ho are constitutively excluded from it.   3.   Victims The third set of assumptions of such theories are concentrated in the figure of the victim.   The victim is a contradictory figure, for, while she is the quasi-absolute ethical referent of peacekeeping theory, the figure on whose behalf other ethical principles may be suspended, whose call is the source of an imp