An exploration of the diverse experiments in digital futures as they advance far from the celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. In Networking Peripheries, Anita Chan shows how digital cultures flourish beyond Silicon Valley and other celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The evolving digital cultures in the Global South vividly demonstrate that there are more ways than one to imagine what digital practice and global connection could look like. To explore these alternative developments, Chan investigates the diverse initiatives being undertaken to “network” the nation in contemporary Peru, from attempts to promote the intellectual property of indigenous artisans to the national distribution of digital education technologies to open technology activism in rural and urban zones. Drawing on ethnographic accounts from government planners, regional free-software advocates, traditional artisans, rural educators, and others, Chan demonstrates how such developments unsettle dominant conceptions of information classes and innovations zones. Government efforts to turn rural artisans into a new creative class progress alongside technology activists' efforts to promote indigenous rights through information tactics; plans pressing for the state wide adoption of open source–based technologies advance while the One Laptop Per Child initiative aims to network rural classrooms by distributing laptops. As these cases show, the digital cultures and network politics emerging on the periphery do more than replicate the technological future imagined as universal from the center.

Enlightenment' is a universal concept, but its meaning is most clearly revealed by seeing how it was engaged with, reconfigured or rejected, on a local level. Peripheries of the Enlightenment seeks to rethink the 'centre/periphery' model, and to consider the Enlightenment as a more widely spread movement with national, regional and local varieties, focusing on activity as much as ideas. The debate is introduced by two chapters which explore the notion of periphery from vantage points at the very heart of 'enlightened' Europe: Ferney and Geneva. Through thirteen ensuing chapters, the interaction between 'Enlightenment' and 'periphery' is explored in a variety of spatial and temporal contexts ranging from Mexico to Russia. Drawing on urban and provincial as well as national case studies, contributors argue that we can learn at least as much about the Enlightenment from commentators at the geographical and cultural borders of the 'enlightened' world as from its most radical theorists in its early epicentres. Crossing the boundaries between histories of literature, religion, science and political and economic thought, Peripheries of the Enlightenment is not only international in its outlook but also interdisciplinary in its scope, and offers readers a new and more global vision of the Enlightenment.

This book partakes of the post-colonial reassessment of the nineteenth century, where agency is seen to lie, not just with the colonising centre, but also with the colonised periphery. Here, missionaries from a peripheral part of Europe -- including a Norway striving to decolonise itself -- try to convert the Santals, an Indian tribe which had rebelled against the intruding colonial order. Provincialising the European origins of the missionaries, the authors try to explore the Santal response. Missionary sources have been used to recast such encounters, but the response seldom has had a documented voice. The Santals, however, wrote thousands of pages as part of the missionary project to document their culture, showing their efforts to reconstruct and re-appropriate their own culture. Subaltern voices emerge, as working-class missionaries and Santals meet, bypassing the centres of hegemony, and oppose the disenchantment of colonial experience to the memory of a glorious past. "For some years, a space is created at the edge of empire, where the missionary adventurer, and Santals in search of a new identity, together build a new Christian community. The missionaries succeed only because of the Santal engagement -- born, not just from their appropriation of missionary ideas, but also from their resistance to the Hindu majority and to colonialism. But soon colonial power relations erode missionary independence, as they come to depend on the churches of their homeland, while the Santals are absorbed into the exploitative economics of colonialism. The space allowed by an encounter of peripheries' is closed.

Transcript of addresses.

This volume investigates the role of the transnational terrorist and criminal organizations in the peace-building processes, with a particular focus on the Western Balkan region. Conducted within the framework of human security analysis, the research focuses on the security of the human being.

Problems of Economic Transition consists of papers presented at a colloquium held in April 1991 by experts in various aspects of regional development from 10 countries of Europe (Eastern and Western), USA and Canada. These papers present an overview of problems at national, regional and local levels and possible solutions.