Search results for ""Author Roger Owen""

The monarchical presidential regimes that prevailed in the Arab world for so long looked as though they would last indefinitely—until events in Tunisia and Egypt made clear their time was up. The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life exposes for the first time the origins and dynamics of a governmental system that largely defined the Arab Middle East in the twentieth century.Presidents who rule for life have been a feature of the Arab world since independence. In the 1980s their regimes increasingly resembled monarchies as presidents took up residence in palaces and made every effort to ensure their sons would succeed them. Roger Owen explores the main features of the prototypical Arab monarchical regime: its household; its inner circle of corrupt cronies; and its attempts to create a popular legitimacy based on economic success, a manipulated constitution, managed elections, and information suppression.Why has the Arab world suffered such a concentration of permanent presidential government? Though post-Soviet Central Asia has also known monarchical presidencies, Owen argues that a significant reason is the “Arab demonstration effect,” whereby close ties across the Arab world have enabled ruling families to share management strategies and assistance. But this effect also explains why these presidencies all came under the same pressure to reform or go. Owen discusses the huge popular opposition the presidential systems engendered during the Arab Spring, and the political change that ensued, while also delineating the challenges the Arab revolutions face across the Middle East and North Africa.

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A critical study of the role of the Welsh theatre in the Welsh language, 1979-1997, with specific reference to how Welsh identity and nationhood is reflected in the experimental work of vigorous drama companies throughout Wales. 8 black-and-white photographs.

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Gwenlyn Parry was one of the most important Welsh-language playwrights of the twentieth century and played a key role in the popularisation and flourishing of drama in the theatre and on television during the 1970s and 1980s. Parry's major stage plays - Saer Doliau, Ty ar y Tywod, Y Ffin and Y Twr - had a substantial impact, and were instrumental in solidifying a new relationship between drama and theatrical production in Welsh, bringing the theatricality of the Absurd to a popular audience for the first time. His plays have been the subject of much critical attention in Welsh, and have been reinterpreted in production on many occasions, both in their original form and in translation. This study is the first extended treatment of his life and work in English, and examines the complex and occasionally paradoxical relationship between the autobiographical aspects of his writing and his use of theatrical form.

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Land was the major economic resource in the pre-modern Middle East. Questions of ownership, of access, of management and of control occupied a central role in administration, in law, and in rural practice over many centuries. And changes in land regimes, such as those which took place in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were bound to have significant repercussions at all levels of society.Nevertheless, the subject of land and property relations is still not well understood. It has also been hindered by a concentration on Islamic legal categories which often had little connection with property relations on the ground and by the assumption that the Middle East witnessed much the same passage from pre-modern to modern forms of property as is supposed to have taken place in Europe.

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