title: Asperger syndrome

text: Hundreds of books, articles, and websites now describe AS and prevalence estimates have increased dramatically for ASD, with AS recognized as an important subgroup. Whether it should be seen as distinct from high-functioning autism is a fundamental issue requiring further study, and there are questions about the empirical validation of the DSM-IV and ICD-10 criteria. In 2013, DSM-5 eliminated AS as a separate diagnosis, folding it into the autism spectrum on a severity scale.


title: Asperger syndrome

text: People identifying with Asperger syndrome may refer to themselves in casual conversation as "aspies" (a term first used in print in the "Boston Globe" in 1998). Some autistic people have advocated a shift in perception of autism spectrum disorders as complex syndromes rather than diseases that must be cured. Proponents of this view reject the notion that there is an "ideal" brain configuration and that any deviation from the norm is pathological; they promote tolerance of neurodiversity. These views are the basis for the autistic rights and autistic pride movements. There is a contrast between the attitude of people with AS, who typically do not want to be cured and are proud of their identity; and parents of children with AS, who typically seek assistance and a cure for their children.


title: Asperger syndrome

text: Some researchers have argued that AS can be viewed as a different cognitive style, not a disorder, and that it should be removed from the standard "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual", much as homosexuality was removed. In a 2002 paper, Simon Baron-Cohen wrote of those with AS: "In the social world, there is no great benefit to a precise eye for detail, but in the worlds of maths, computing, cataloging, music, linguistics, engineering, and science, such an eye for detail can lead to success rather than failure." Baron-Cohen cited two reasons why it might still be useful to consider AS to be a disability: to ensure provision for legally required special support, and to recognize emotional difficulties from reduced empathy. Baron-Cohen argues that the genes for ASD's combination of abilities have operated throughout recent human evolution and have made remarkable contributions to human history.


title: Asperger syndrome

text: By contrast, Pier Jaarsma and Welin wrote in 2011 that the "broad version of the neurodiversity claim, covering low-functioning as well as high-functioning autism, is problematic. Only a narrow conception of neurodiversity, referring exclusively to high-functioning autists, is reasonable." They say that "higher functioning" individuals with autism may "not [be] benefited with such a psychiatric defect-based diagnosis ... some of them are being harmed by it, because of the disrespect the diagnosis displays for their natural way of being", but "think that it is still reasonable to include other categories of autism in the psychiatric diagnostics. The narrow conception of the neurodiversity claim should be accepted but the broader claim should not." Jonathan Mitchell, an autistic author and blogger who advocates a cure for autism, has described autism as having "prevented me from making a living or ever having a girlfriend. It's given me bad fine motor coordination problems where I can hardly write. I have an impaired ability to relate to people. I can't concentrate or get things done." He describes neurodiversity as a "tempting escape valve".


title: Cloud computing

text: Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a "pay as you go" model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users.


title: Cloud computing

text: Advocates of public and hybrid clouds claim that cloud computing allows companies to avoid or minimize up-front IT infrastructure costs. Proponents also claim that cloud computing allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster, with improved manageability and less maintenance, and that it enables IT teams to more rapidly adjust resources to meet fluctuating and unpredictable demand, providing burst computing capability: high computing power at certain periods of peak demand.


title: Cloud computing

text: According to IDC, the global spending on cloud computing services has reached $706 billion and expected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2025. While Gartner estimated that the global public cloud services end-user spending forecast to reach $600 billion by 2023. As per McKinsey & Company report, cloud cost-optimization levers and value-oriented business use cases foresees more than $1 trillion in run-rate EBITDA across Fortune 500 companies as up for grabs in 2030. In 2022, more than $1.3 trillion in enterprise IT spending is at stake from the shift to cloud, growing to almost $1.8 trillion in 2025, according to Gartner.


title: Cloud computing

text: The term "cloud" was used to refer to platforms for distributed computing as early as 1993, when Apple spin-off General Magic and AT&T used it in describing their (paired) Telescript and Personal Link technologies. In "Wired's" April 1994 feature "Bill and Andy's Excellent Adventure II", Andy Hertzfeld commented on Telescript, General Magic's distributed programming language:


title: Cloud computing

text: During the 1960s, the initial concepts of time-sharing became popularized via RJE (Remote Job Entry); this terminology was mostly associated with large vendors such as IBM and DEC. Full-time-sharing solutions were available by the early 1970s on such platforms as Multics (on GE hardware), Cambridge CTSS, and the earliest UNIX ports (on DEC hardware). Yet, the "data center" model where users submitted jobs to operators to run on IBM's mainframes was overwhelmingly predominant.


title: Cloud computing

text: In the 1990s, telecommunications companies, who previously offered primarily dedicated point-to-point data circuits, began offering virtual private network (VPN) services with comparable quality of service, but at a lower cost. By switching traffic as they saw fit to balance server use, they could use overall network bandwidth more effectively. They began to use the cloud symbol to denote the demarcation point between what the provider was responsible for and what users were responsible for. Cloud computing extended this boundary to cover all servers as well as the network infrastructure. As computers became more diffused, scientists and technologists explored ways to make large-scale computing power available to more users through time-sharing. They experimented with algorithms to optimize the infrastructure, platform, and applications, to prioritize tasks to be executed by CPUs, and to increase efficiency for end users.


title: Cloud computing

text: The use of the cloud metaphor for virtualized services dates at least to General Magic in 1994, where it was used to describe the universe of "places" that mobile agents in the Telescript environment could go. As described by Andy Hertzfeld:


title: Cloud computing

text: The use of the cloud metaphor is credited to General Magic communications employee David Hoffman, based on long-standing use in networking and telecom. In addition to use by General Magic itself, it was also used in promoting AT&T's associated Personal Link Services.


title: Cloud computing

text: In July 2002, Amazon created subsidiary Amazon Web Services, with the goal to "enable developers to build innovative and entrepreneurial applications on their own." In March 2006 Amazon introduced its Simple Storage Service (S3), followed by Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in August of the same year. These products pioneered the usage of server virtualization to deliver IaaS at a cheaper and on-demand pricing basis.


title: Cloud computing

text: In April 2008, Google released the beta version of Google App Engine. The App Engine was a PaaS (one of the first of its kind) which provided fully maintained infrastructure and a deployment platform for users to create web applications using common languages/technologies such as Python, Node.js and PHP. The goal was to eliminate the need for some administrative tasks typical of an IaaS model, while creating a platform where users could easily deploy such applications and scale them to demand.


title: Cloud computing

text: In early 2008, NASA's Nebula, enhanced in the RESERVOIR European Commission-funded project, became the first open-source software for deploying private and hybrid clouds, and for the federation of clouds.


title: Cloud computing

text: By mid-2008, Gartner saw an opportunity for cloud computing "to shape the relationship among consumers of IT services, those who use IT services and those who sell them" and observed that "organizations are switching from company-owned hardware and software assets to per-use service-based models" so that the "projected shift to computing ... will result in dramatic growth in IT products in some areas and significant reductions in other areas."


title: Cloud computing

text: In 2008, the U.S. National Science Foundation began the Cluster Exploratory program to fund academic research using Google-IBM cluster technology to analyze massive amounts of data.


title: Cloud computing

text: In 2009, the government of France announced Project Andromède to create a "sovereign cloud" or national cloud computing, with the government to spend €285 million. The initiative failed badly and Cloudwatt was shut down on 1 February 2020.


title: Cloud computing

text: In July 2010, Rackspace Hosting and NASA jointly launched an open-source cloud-software initiative known as OpenStack. The OpenStack project intended to help organizations offering cloud-computing services running on standard hardware. The early code came from NASA's Nebula platform as well as from Rackspace's Cloud Files platform. As an open-source offering and along with other open-source solutions such as CloudStack, Ganeti, and OpenNebula, it has attracted attention by several key communities. Several studies aim at comparing these open source offerings based on a set of criteria.


title: Cloud computing

text: On March 1, 2011, IBM announced the IBM SmartCloud framework to support Smarter Planet. Among the various components of the Smarter Computing foundation, cloud computing is a critical part. On June 7, 2012, Oracle announced the Oracle Cloud.


title: Cloud computing

text: In May 2012, Google Compute Engine was released in preview, before being rolled out into General Availability in December 2013.


title: Cloud computing

text: In 2019, Linux was the most common OS used on Microsoft Azure. In December 2019, Amazon announced AWS Outposts, which is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any customer datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience.


title: Cloud computing

text: The goal of cloud computing is to allow users to take benefit from all of these technologies, without the need for deep knowledge about or expertise with each one of them. The cloud aims to cut costs and helps the users focus on their core business instead of being impeded by IT obstacles. The main enabling technology for cloud computing is virtualization. Virtualization software separates a physical computing device into one or more "virtual" devices, each of which can be easily used and managed to perform computing tasks. With operating system–level virtualization essentially creating a scalable system of multiple independent computing devices, idle computing resources can be allocated and used more efficiently. Virtualization provides the agility required to speed up IT operations and reduces cost by increasing infrastructure utilization. Autonomic computing automates the process through which the user can provision resources on-demand. By minimizing user involvement, automation speeds up the process, reduces labor costs and reduces the possibility of human errors.


title: Cloud computing

text: Cloud computing uses concepts from utility computing to provide metrics for the services used. Cloud computing attempts to address QoS (quality of service) and reliability problems of other grid computing models.


title: Cloud computing

text: The National Institute of Standards and Technology's definition of cloud computing identifies "five essential characteristics":


title: Cloud computing

text: Though service-oriented architecture advocates "Everything as a service" (with the acronyms EaaS or XaaS, or simply aas), cloud-computing providers offer their "services" according to different models, of which the three standard models per NIST are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). These models offer increasing abstraction; they are thus often portrayed as "layers" in a stack: infrastructure-, platform- and software-as-a-service, but these need not be related. For example, one can provide SaaS implemented on physical machines (bare metal), without using underlying PaaS or IaaS layers, and conversely one can run a program on IaaS and access it directly, without wrapping it as SaaS.


title: Cloud computing

text: "Infrastructure as a service" (IaaS) refers to online services that provide high-level APIs used to abstract various low-level details of underlying network infrastructure like physical computing resources, location, data partitioning, scaling, security, backup, etc. A hypervisor runs the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational system can support large numbers of virtual machines and the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements. Linux containers run in isolated partitions of a single Linux kernel running directly on the physical hardware. Linux cgroups and namespaces are the underlying Linux kernel technologies used to isolate, secure and manage the containers. Containerisation offers higher performance than virtualization because there is no hypervisor overhead. IaaS clouds often offer additional resources such as a virtual-machine disk-image library, raw block storage, file or object storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software bundles.


title: Cloud computing

text: The NIST's definition of cloud computing describes IaaS as "where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, and deployed applications; and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls)."


title: Cloud computing

text: IaaS-cloud providers supply these resources on-demand from their large pools of equipment installed in data centers. For wide-area connectivity, customers can use either the Internet or carrier clouds (dedicated virtual private networks). To deploy their applications, cloud users install operating-system images and their application software on the cloud infrastructure. In this model, the cloud user patches and maintains the operating systems and the application software. Cloud providers typically bill IaaS services on a utility computing basis: cost reflects the number of resources allocated and consumed.


title: Cloud computing

text: PaaS vendors offer a development environment to application developers. The provider typically develops toolkit and standards for development and channels for distribution and payment. In the PaaS models, cloud providers deliver a computing platform, typically including an operating system, programming-language execution environment, database, and the web server. Application developers develop and run their software on a cloud platform instead of directly buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers. With some PaaS, the underlying computer and storage resources scale automatically to match application demand so that the cloud user does not have to allocate resources manually.


title: Cloud computing

text: Some integration and data management providers also use specialized applications of PaaS as delivery models for data. Examples include iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) and dPaaS (Data Platform as a Service). iPaaS enables customers to develop, execute and govern integration flows. Under the iPaaS integration model, customers drive the development and deployment of integrations without installing or managing any hardware or middleware. dPaaS delivers integration—and data-management—products as a fully managed service. Under the dPaaS model, the PaaS provider, not the customer, manages the development and execution of programs by building data applications for the customer. dPaaS users access data through data-visualization tools.


title: Cloud computing

text: In the software as a service (SaaS) model, users gain access to application software and databases. Cloud providers manage the infrastructure and platforms that run the applications. SaaS is sometimes referred to as "on-demand software" and is usually priced on a pay-per-use basis or using a subscription fee. In the SaaS model, cloud providers install and operate application software in the cloud and cloud users access the software from cloud clients. Cloud users do not manage the cloud infrastructure and platform where the application runs. This eliminates the need to install and run the application on the cloud user's own computers, which simplifies maintenance and support. Cloud applications differ from other applications in their scalability—which can be achieved by cloning tasks onto multiple virtual machines at run-time to meet changing work demand. Load balancers distribute the work over the set of virtual machines. This process is transparent to the cloud user, who sees only a single access-point. To accommodate a large number of cloud users, cloud applications can be "multitenant", meaning that any machine may serve more than one cloud-user organization.


title: Cloud computing

text: The pricing model for SaaS applications is typically a monthly or yearly flat fee per user, so prices become scalable and adjustable if users are added or removed at any point. It may also be free. Proponents claim that SaaS gives a business the potential to reduce IT operational costs by outsourcing hardware and software maintenance and support to the cloud provider. This enables the business to reallocate IT operations costs away from hardware/software spending and from personnel expenses, towards meeting other goals. In addition, with applications hosted centrally, updates can be released without the need for users to install new software. One drawback of SaaS comes with storing the users' data on the cloud provider's server. As a result, there could be unauthorized access to the data. Examples of applications offered as SaaS are games and productivity software like Google Docs and Office Online. SaaS applications may be integrated with cloud storage or File hosting services, which is the case with Google Docs being integrated with Google Drive, and Office Online being integrated with OneDrive.


title: Cloud computing

text: In the mobile "backend" as a service (m) model, also known as backend as a service (BaaS), web app and mobile app developers are provided with a way to link their applications to cloud storage and cloud computing services with application programming interfaces (APIs) exposed to their applications and custom software development kits (SDKs). Services include user management, push notifications, integration with social networking services and more. This is a relatively recent model in cloud computing, with most BaaS startups dating from 2011 or later but trends indicate that these services are gaining significant mainstream traction with enterprise consumers.


title: Cloud computing

text: Serverless computing is a cloud computing code execution model in which the cloud provider fully manages starting and stopping virtual machines as necessary to serve requests, and requests are billed by an abstract measure of the resources required to satisfy the request, rather than per virtual machine, per hour. Despite the name, it does not actually involve running code without servers. Serverless computing is so named because the business or person that owns the system does not have to purchase, rent or provide servers or virtual machines for the back-end code to run on.


title: Cloud computing

text: Function as a service (FaaS) is a service-hosted remote procedure call that leverages serverless computing to enable the deployment of individual functions in the cloud that run in response to events. FaaS is considered by some to come under the umbrella of "serverless computing", while some others use the terms interchangeably.


title: Cloud computing

text: Private cloud is cloud infrastructure operated solely for a single organization, whether managed internally or by a third party, and hosted either internally or externally. Undertaking a private cloud project requires significant engagement to virtualize the business environment, and requires the organization to reevaluate decisions about existing resources. It can improve business, but every step in the project raises security issues that must be addressed to prevent serious vulnerabilities. Self-run data centers are generally capital intensive. They have a significant physical footprint, requiring allocations of space, hardware, and environmental controls. These assets have to be refreshed periodically, resulting in additional capital expenditures. They have attracted criticism because users "still have to buy, build, and manage them" and thus do not benefit from less hands-on management, essentially "[lacking] the economic model that makes cloud computing such an intriguing concept".


title: Cloud computing

text: Cloud services are considered "public" when they are delivered over the public Internet, and they may be offered as a paid subscription, or free of charge. Architecturally, there are few differences between public- and private-cloud services, but security concerns increase substantially when services (applications, storage, and other resources) are shared by multiple customers. Most public-cloud providers offer direct-connection services that allow customers to securely link their legacy data centers to their cloud-resident applications.


title: Cloud computing

text: Several factors like the functionality of the solutions, cost, integrational and organizational aspects as well as safety & security are influencing the decision of enterprises and organizations to choose a public cloud or on-premises solution.


title: Cloud computing

text: Hybrid cloud is a composition of a public cloud and a private environment, such as a private cloud or on-premises resources, that remain distinct entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models. Hybrid cloud can also mean the ability to connect collocation, managed and/or dedicated services with cloud resources. Gartner defines a hybrid cloud service as a cloud computing service that is composed of some combination of private, public and community cloud services, from different service providers. A hybrid cloud service crosses isolation and provider boundaries so that it can't be simply put in one category of private, public, or community cloud service. It allows one to extend either the capacity or the capability of a cloud service, by aggregation, integration or customization with another cloud service.


title: Cloud computing

text: Varied use cases for hybrid cloud composition exist. For example, an organization may store sensitive client data in house on a private cloud application, but interconnect that application to a business intelligence application provided on a public cloud as a software service. This example of hybrid cloud extends the capabilities of the enterprise to deliver a specific business service through the addition of externally available public cloud services. Hybrid cloud adoption depends on a number of factors such as data security and compliance requirements, level of control needed over data, and the applications an organization uses.


title: Cloud computing

text: Another example of hybrid cloud is one where IT organizations use public cloud computing resources to meet temporary capacity needs that can not be met by the private cloud. This capability enables hybrid clouds to employ cloud bursting for scaling across clouds. Cloud bursting is an application deployment model in which an application runs in a private cloud or data center and "bursts" to a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity increases. A primary advantage of cloud bursting and a hybrid cloud model is that an organization pays for extra compute resources only when they are needed. Cloud bursting enables data centers to create an in-house IT infrastructure that supports average workloads, and use cloud resources from public or private clouds, during spikes in processing demands. The specialized model of hybrid cloud, which is built atop heterogeneous hardware, is called "Cross-platform Hybrid Cloud". A cross-platform hybrid cloud is usually powered by different CPU architectures, for example, x86-64 and ARM, underneath. Users can transparently deploy and scale applications without knowledge of the cloud's hardware diversity. This kind of cloud emerges from the rise of ARM-based system-on-chip for server-class computing.


title: Cloud computing

text: Hybrid cloud infrastructure essentially serves to eliminate limitations inherent to the multi-access relay characteristics of private cloud networking. The advantages include enhanced runtime flexibility and adaptive memory processing unique to virtualized interface models.


title: Cloud computing

text: Community cloud shares infrastructure between several organizations from a specific community with common concerns (security, compliance, jurisdiction, etc.), whether managed internally or by a third-party, and either hosted internally or externally. The costs are spread over fewer users than a public cloud (but more than a private cloud), so only some of the cost savings potential of cloud computing are realized.


title: Cloud computing

text: A cloud computing platform can be assembled from a distributed set of machines in different locations, connected to a single network or hub service. It is possible to distinguish between two types of distributed clouds: public-resource computing and volunteer cloud.


title: Cloud computing

text: Multicloud is the use of multiple cloud computing services in a single heterogeneous architecture to reduce reliance on single vendors, increase flexibility through choice, mitigate against disasters, etc. It differs from hybrid cloud in that it refers to multiple cloud services, rather than multiple deployment modes (public, private, legacy).


title: Cloud computing

text: Poly cloud refers to the use of multiple public clouds for the purpose of leveraging specific services that each provider offers. It differs from Multi cloud in that it is not designed to increase flexibility or mitigate against failures but is rather used to allow an organization to achieve more that could be done with a single provider.


title: Cloud computing

text: The issues of transferring large amounts of data to the cloud as well as data security once the data is in the cloud initially hampered adoption of cloud for big data, but now that much data originates in the cloud and with the advent of bare-metal servers, the cloud has become a solution for use cases including business analytics and geospatial analysis.


title: Cloud computing

text: HPC cloud refers to the use of cloud computing services and infrastructure to execute high-performance computing (HPC) applications. These applications consume considerable amount of computing power and memory and are traditionally executed on clusters of computers. In 2016 a handful of companies, including R-HPC, Amazon Web Services, Univa, Silicon Graphics International, Sabalcore, Gomput, and Penguin Computing offered a high performance computing cloud. The Penguin On Demand (POD) cloud was one of the first non-virtualized remote HPC services offered on a pay-as-you-go basis. Penguin Computing launched its HPC cloud in 2016 as alternative to Amazon's EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud, which uses virtualized computing nodes.


title: Cloud computing

text: Cloud architecture, the systems architecture of the software systems involved in the delivery of cloud computing, typically involves multiple "cloud components" communicating with each other over a loose coupling mechanism such as a messaging queue. Elastic provision implies intelligence in the use of tight or loose coupling as applied to mechanisms such as these and others.


title: Cloud computing

text: Cloud engineering is the application of engineering disciplines of cloud computing. It brings a systematic approach to the high-level concerns of commercialization, standardization and governance in conceiving, developing, operating and maintaining cloud computing systems. It is a multidisciplinary method encompassing contributions from diverse areas such as systems, software, web, performance, information technology engineering, security, platform, risk, and quality engineering.


title: Cloud computing

text: Cloud computing poses privacy concerns because the service provider can access the data that is in the cloud at any time. It could accidentally or deliberately alter or delete information. Many cloud providers can share information with third parties if necessary for purposes of law and order without a warrant. That is permitted in their privacy policies, which users must agree to before they start using cloud services. Solutions to privacy include policy and legislation as well as end-users' choices for how data is stored. Users can encrypt data that is processed or stored within the cloud to prevent unauthorized access. Identity management systems can also provide practical solutions to privacy concerns in cloud computing. These systems distinguish between authorized and unauthorized users and determine the amount of data that is accessible to each entity. The systems work by creating and describing identities, recording activities, and getting rid of unused identities.


title: Cloud computing

text: According to the Cloud Security Alliance, the top three threats in the cloud are "Insecure Interfaces and APIs", "Data Loss & Leakage", and "Hardware Failure"—which accounted for 29%, 25% and 10% of all cloud security outages respectively. Together, these form shared technology vulnerabilities. In a cloud provider platform being shared by different users, there may be a possibility that information belonging to different customers resides on the same data server. Additionally, Eugene Schultz, chief technology officer at Emagined Security, said that hackers are spending substantial time and effort looking for ways to penetrate the cloud. "There are some real Achilles' heels in the cloud infrastructure that are making big holes for the bad guys to get into". Because data from hundreds or thousands of companies can be stored on large cloud servers, hackers can theoretically gain control of huge stores of information through a single attack—a process he called "hyperjacking". Some examples of this include the Dropbox security breach, and iCloud 2014 leak. Dropbox had been breached in October 2014, having over 7 million of its users passwords stolen by hackers in an effort to get monetary value from it by Bitcoins (BTC). By having these passwords, they are able to read private data as well as have this data be indexed by search engines (making the information public).


title: Cloud computing

text: There is the problem of legal ownership of the data (If a user stores some data in the cloud, can the cloud provider profit from it?). Many Terms of Service agreements are silent on the question of ownership. Physical control of the computer equipment (private cloud) is more secure than having the equipment off-site and under someone else's control (public cloud). This delivers great incentive to public cloud computing service providers to prioritize building and maintaining strong management of secure services. Some small businesses that don't have expertise in IT security could find that it's more secure for them to use a public cloud. There is the risk that end users do not understand the issues involved when signing on to a cloud service (persons sometimes don't read the many pages of the terms of service agreement, and just click "Accept" without reading). This is important now that cloud computing is common and required for some services to work, for example for an intelligent personal assistant (Apple's Siri or Google Assistant). Fundamentally, private cloud is seen as more secure with higher levels of control for the owner, however public cloud is seen to be more flexible and requires less time and money investment from the user.


title: Cloud computing

text: According to Bruce Schneier, "The downside is that you will have limited customization options. Cloud computing is cheaper because of economics of scale, and—like any outsourced task—you tend to get what you get. A restaurant with a limited menu is cheaper than a personal chef who can cook anything you want. Fewer options at a much cheaper price: it's a feature, not a bug." He also suggests that "the cloud provider might not meet your legal needs" and that businesses need to weigh the benefits of cloud computing against the risks.


title: Cloud computing

text: In cloud computing, the control of the back end infrastructure is limited to the cloud vendor only. Cloud providers often decide on the management policies, which moderates what the cloud users are able to do with their deployment. Cloud users are also limited to the control and management of their applications, data and services. This includes data caps, which are placed on cloud users by the cloud vendor allocating a certain amount of bandwidth for each customer and are often shared among other cloud users.


title: Cloud computing

text: Privacy and confidentiality are big concerns in some activities. For instance, sworn translators working under the stipulations of an NDA, might face problems regarding sensitive data that are not encrypted. Due to the use of the internet, confidential information such as employee data and user data can be easily available to third-party organisations and people in Cloud Computing.


title: Cloud computing

text: Cloud computing has some limitations for smaller business operations, particularly regarding security and downtime. Technical outages are inevitable and occur sometimes when cloud service providers (CSPs) become overwhelmed in the process of serving their clients. This may result in temporary business suspension. Since this technology's systems rely on the Internet, an individual cannot access their applications, server, or data from the cloud during an outage.


title: Cloud computing

text: Cloud computing is still a subject of research. A driving factor in the evolution of cloud computing has been chief technology officers seeking to minimize risk of internal outages and mitigate the complexity of housing network and computing hardware in-house. They are also looking to share information to workers located in diverse areas in near and real-time, to enable teams to work seamlessly, no matter where they are located. Since the global pandemic of 2020, cloud technology jumped ahead in popularity due to the level of security of data and the flexibility of working options for all employees, notably remote workers. For example, Zoom grew over 160% in 2020 alone.


title: Cloud computing

text: The issue of carrying out investigations where the cloud storage devices cannot be physically accessed has generated a number of changes to the way that digital evidence is located and collected. New process models have been developed to formalize collection.


title: Cloud computing

text: In some scenarios existing digital forensics tools can be employed to access cloud storage as networked drives (although this is a slow process generating a large amount of internet traffic).


title: Cloud computing

text: For organizations using Office 365 with an 'E5' subscription, there is the option to use Microsoft's built-in e-discovery resources, although these do not provide all the functionality that is typically required for a forensic process.


title: Critical race theory

text: Critical race theory (CRT) is a cross-disciplinary examination, by social and civil-rights scholars and activists, of how laws, social and political movements, and media shape, and are shaped by, social conceptions of race and ethnicity. Goals include challenging all mainstream and "alternative" views of racism and racial justice, including conservative, liberal and progressive. The word "critical" in the name is an academic reference to critical thinking, critical theory, and scholarly criticism, rather than criticizing or blaming people.


title: Critical race theory

text: CRT is also used in sociology to explain social, political, and legal structures and power distribution as through a "lens" focusing on the concept of race, and experiences of racism. For example, the CRT conceptual framework examines racial bias in laws and legal institutions, such as highly disparate rates of incarceration among racial groups in the United States. A key CRT concept is intersectionalitythe way in which different forms of inequality and identity are affected by interconnections of race, class, gender, and disability. Scholars of CRT view race as a social construct with no biological basis. One tenet of CRT is that racism and disparate racial outcomes are the result of complex, changing, and often subtle social and institutional dynamics, rather than explicit and intentional prejudices of individuals. CRT scholars argue that the social and legal construction of race advances the interests of White people at the expense of people of color, and that the liberal notion of U.S. law as "neutral" plays a significant role in maintaining a racially unjust social order, where formally color-blind laws continue to have racially discriminatory outcomes.


title: Critical race theory

text: CRT began in the United States in the post–civil rights era, as 1960s landmark civil rights laws were being eroded and schools were being re-segregated. With racial inequalities persisting even after civil rights legislation was enacted, CRT scholars in the 1970s and 1980s began reworking and expanding critical legal studies (CLS) theories on class, economic structure, and the law to examine the role of U.S. law in perpetuating racism. CRT, a framework of analysis grounded in critical theory, originated in the mid-1970s in the writings of several American legal scholars, including Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Cheryl Harris, Charles R. Lawrence III, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia J. Williams. CRT draws from the work of thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as the Black Power, Chicano, and radical feminist movements from the 1960s and 1970s.


title: Critical race theory

text: Academic critics of CRT argue it is based on storytelling instead of evidence and reason, rejects truth and merit, and opposes liberalism. Since 2020, conservative U.S. lawmakers have sought to ban or restrict the instruction of CRT along with other critical education in primary and secondary schools, as well as relevant training inside federal agencies. Advocates of such bans argue that CRT is false, anti-American, villainizes White people, promotes radical leftism, and indoctrinates children. Advocates of bans on CRT have been accused of misrepresenting the tenets and importance of CRT and of having the goal of broadly silencing discussions of racism, equality, social justice, and the history of race.


title: Critical race theory

text: In his introduction to the comprehensive 1995 publication of critical race theory's key writings, Cornel West described CRT as "an intellectual movement that is both particular to our postmodern (and conservative) times and part of a long tradition of human resistance and liberation."


title: Critical race theory

text: Law professor Roy L. Brooks defined critical race theory in 1994 as "a collection of critical stances against the existing legal order from a race-based point of view".


title: Critical race theory

text: In 2005, Tara J. Yosso described CRT as a "framework that can be used to theorize, examine and challenge the ways race and racism implicitly and explicitly impact on social structures, practices and discourses".


title: Critical race theory

text: Gloria Ladson-Billings, whoalong with co-author William Tatehad introduced CRT to the field of education in 1995, described it in 2015 as an "interdisciplinary approach that seeks to understand and combat race inequity in society." Ladson-Billings wrote in 1998 that CRT "first emerged as a counterlegal scholarship to the positivist and liberal legal discourse of civil rights."


title: Critical race theory

text: In 2017, University of Alabama School of Law professor Richard Delgado, a co-founder of critical race theory, and legal writer Jean Stefancic define CRT as "a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power".


title: Critical race theory

text: In 2021, Khiara Bridges, a law professor and author of the textbook "Critical Race Theory: A Primer", defined critical race theory as an "intellectual movement", a "body of scholarship", and an "analytical toolset for interrogating the relationship between law and racial inequality."


title: Critical race theory

text: The 2021 "Encyclopaedia Britannica" described CRT as an "intellectual and social movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour." In the video that accompanies the article, CRT is defined as a "way of thinking about the world, especially the social norms and legal practices that govern society".


title: Critical race theory

text: "Education Week" described the core of CRT as the idea that race is a social construct and racism is neither an individual bias nor prejudiceit is "embedded in the legal system" and supplemented with policies and procedures.


title: Critical race theory

text: Scholars of CRT say that race is not "biologically grounded and natural"; rather, it is a socially constructed category used to oppress and exploit people of color; and that racism is not an aberration, but a normalized feature of American society.


title: Critical race theory

text: According to CRT, negative stereotypes assigned to members of minority groups benefit white people and increase racial oppression.


title: Critical race theory

text: Individuals can belong to a number of different identity groups. The concept of intersectionalityone of CRT's main conceptswas introduced by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.


title: Critical race theory

text: Derrick Albert Bell Jr. (1930 – 2011), an American lawyer, professor, and civil rights activist, writes that racial equality is "impossible and illusory" and that racism in the U.S. is permanent.


title: Critical race theory

text: According to Bell, civil-rights legislation will not on its own bring about progress in race relations; alleged improvements or advantages to people of color "tend to serve the interests of dominant white groups", in what Bell calls "interest convergence". These changes do not typically affectand at times even reinforceracial hierarchies. This is representative of the shift in the 1970s, in Bell's re-assessment of his earlier desegregation work as a civil rights lawyer. He was responding to the Supreme Court's decisions that had resulted in the re-segregation of schools.


title: Critical race theory

text: The concept of standpoint theory became particularly relevant to CRT when it was expanded to include a black feminist standpoint by Patricia Hill Collins. First introduced by feminist sociologists in the 1980s, standpoint theory holds that people in marginalized groups, who share similar experiences, can bring a collective wisdom and a unique voice to discussions on decreasing oppression. In this view, insights into racism can be uncovered by examining the nature of the U.S. legal system through the perspective of the everyday lived experiences of people of color.


title: Critical race theory

text: According to "Encyclopedia Britannica", tenets of CRT have spread beyond academia, and are used to deepen understanding of socio-economic issues such as "poverty, police brutality, and voting rights violations", that are impacted by the ways in which race and racism are "understood and misunderstood" in the United States.


title: Critical race theory

text: Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic published an annotated bibliography of CRT references in 1993, listing works of legal scholarship that addressed one or more of the following themes: "critique of liberalism"; "storytelling/counterstorytelling and 'naming one's own reality'"; "revisionist interpretations of American civil rights law and progress"; "a greater understanding of the underpinnings of race and racism"; "structural determinism"; "race, sex, class, and their intersections"; "essentialism and anti-essentialism"; "cultural nationalism/separatism"; "legal institutions, critical pedagogy, and minorities in the bar"; and "criticism and self-criticism". When Gloria Ladson-Billings introduced CRT into education in 1995, she cautioned that its application required a "thorough analysis of the legal literature upon which it is based".


title: Critical race theory

text: First and foremost to CRT legal scholars in 1993 was their "discontent" with the way in which liberalism addressed race issues in the U.S. They critiqued "liberal jurisprudence", including affirmative action, color-blindness, role modeling, and the merit principle. Specifically, they claimed that the liberal concept of value-neutral law contributed to maintenance of the U.S.'s racially unjust social order.An example questioning foundational liberal conceptions of Enlightenment values, such as rationalism and progress, is Rennard Strickland's 1986 Kansas Law Review article, "Genocide-at-Law: An Historic and Contemporary View of the Native American Experience". In it, he "introduced Native American traditions and world-views" into law school curriculum, challenging the entrenchment at that time of the "contemporary ideas of progress and enlightenment". He wrote that U.S. laws that "permeate" the everyday lives of Native Americans were in "most cases carried out with scrupulous legality" but still resulted in what he called "cultural genocide".In 1993, David Theo Goldberg described how countries that adopt classical liberalism's concepts of "individualism, equality, and freedom"such as the United States and European countriesconceal structural racism in their cultures and languages, citing terms such as "Third World" and "primitive".In 1988, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw traced the origins of the New Right's use of the concept of color-blindness from 1970s neoconservative think tanks to the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s. She described how prominent figures such as neoconservative scholars Thomas Sowell and William Bradford Reynolds, who served as Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division from 1981 to 1988, called for "strictly color-blind policies". Sowell and Reynolds, like many conservatives at that time, believed that the goal of equality of the races had already been achieved, and therefore the race-specific civil rights movement was a "threat to democracy". The color-blindness logic used in "reverse discrimination" arguments in the post-civil rights period is informed by a particular viewpoint on "equality of opportunity", as adopted by Sowell, in which the state's role is limited to providing a "level playing field", not to promoting equal distribution of resources.Crenshaw claimed that "equality of opportunity" in antidiscrimination law can have both an expansive and a restrictive aspect. Crenshaw wrote that formally color-blind laws continue to have racially discriminatory outcomes. According to her, this use of formal color-blindness rhetoric in claims of reverse discrimination, as in the 1978 Supreme Court ruling on "Bakke", was a response to the way in which the courts had aggressively imposed affirmative action and busing during the Civil Rights era, even on those who were hostile to those issues. In 1990, legal scholar Duncan Kennedy described the dominant approach to affirmative action in legal academia as "colorblind meritocratic fundamentalism". He called for a postmodern "race consciousness" approach that included "political and cultural relations" while avoiding "racialism" and "essentialism".Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva describes this newer, subtle form of racism as "color-blind racism", which uses frameworks of abstract liberalism to decontextualize race, naturalize outcomes such as segregation in neighborhoods, attribute certain cultural practices to race, and cause "minimization of racism".In his influential 1984 article, Delgado challenged the liberal concept of meritocracy in civil rights scholarship. He questioned how the top articles in most well-established journals were all written by white men.


title: Critical race theory

text: The use of narrative (storytelling) to illuminate and explore lived experiences of racial oppression.One of the prime tenets of liberal jurisprudence is that people can create appealing narratives to think and talk about greater levels of justice. Delgado and Stefancic call this the "empathic fallacy"the belief that it is possible to "control our consciousness" by using language alone to overcome bigotry and narrow-mindedness. They examine how people of color, considered outsiders in mainstream US culture, are portrayed in media and law through stereotypes and stock characters that have been adapted over time to shield the dominant culture from discomfort and guilt. For example, slaves in the 18th-century Southern States were depicted as childlike and docile; Harriet Beecher Stowe adapted this stereotype through her character Uncle Tom, depicting him as a "gentle, long-suffering", pious Christian.


title: Critical race theory

text: Following the Civil War, the African-American woman was depicted as a wise, care-giving "Mammy" figure. During the Reconstruction period, African-American men were stereotyped as "brutish and bestial", a danger to white women and children. This was exemplified in Thomas Dixon Jr.'s novels, used as the basis for the epic film "The Birth of a Nation", which celebrated the Ku Klux Klan and lynching. During the Harlem Renaissance, African-Americans were depicted as "musically talented" and "entertaining". Following World War II, when many Black veterans joined the nascent civil rights movement, African Americans were portrayed as "cocky [and] street-smart", the "unreasonable, opportunistic" militant, the "safe, comforting, cardigan-wearing" TV sitcom character, and the "super-stud" of blaxploitation films.


title: Critical race theory

text: The empathic fallacy informs the "time-warp aspect of racism", where the dominant culture can see racism only through the hindsight of a past era or distant land, such as South Africa. Through centuries of stereotypes, racism has become normalized; it is a "part of the dominant narrative we use to interpret experience". Delgado and Stefancic argue that speech alone is an ineffective tool to counter racism, since the system of free expression tends to favor the interests of powerful elites and to assign responsibility for racist stereotypes to the "marketplace of ideas". In the decades following the passage of civil rights laws, acts of racism had become less overt and more covertinvisible to, and underestimated by, most of the dominant culture.


title: Critical race theory

text: Since racism makes people feel uncomfortable, the empathic fallacy helps the dominant culture to mistakenly believe that it no longer exists, and that dominant images, portrayals, stock characters, and stereotypeswhich usually portray minorities in a negative lightprovide them with a true image of race in America. Based on these narratives, the dominant group has no need to feel guilty or to make an effort to overcome racism, as it feels "right, customary, and inoffensive to those engaged in it", while self-described liberals who uphold freedom of expression can feel virtuous while maintaining their own superior position.Bryan Brayboy has emphasized the epistemic importance of storytelling in Indigenous-American communities as superseding that of theory, and has proposed a —Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribCrit).


title: Critical race theory

text: The view that a members of racial minority groups have a unique authority and ability to speak about racism. This is seen as undermining dominant narratives relating to racial inequality, such as legal neutrality and personal responsibility or bootstrapping, through valuable first-hand accounts of the experience of racism.


title: Critical race theory

text: Interest convergence is a concept introduced by Derrick Bell in his 1980 "Harvard Law Review" article, ""Brown v. Board of Education" and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma". In this article, Bell described how he re-assessed the impact of the hundreds of NAACP LDF de-segregation cases he won from 1960 to 1966, and how he began to believe that in spite of his sincerity at the time, anti-discrimination law had not resulted in improving Black children's access to quality education. He listed and described how Supreme Court cases had gutted civil rights legislation, which had resulted in African-American students continuing to attend all-black schools that lacked adequate funding and resources. In examining these Supreme Court cases, Bell concluded that the only civil-rights legislation that was passed coincided with the self-interest of white people, which Bell termed "interest convergence".


title: Critical race theory

text: One of the best-known examples of interest convergence is the way in which American geopolitics during the Cold War in the aftermath of World War II was a critical factor in the passage of civil rights legislation by both Republicans and Democrats. Bell described this in numerous articles, including the aforementioned, and it was supported by the research and publications of legal scholar Mary L. Dudziak. In her journal articles and her 2000 book "Cold War Civil Rights"based on newly released documentsDudziak provided detailed evidence that it was in the interest of the United States to quell the negative international press about treatment of African-Americans when the majority of the populations of newly decolonized countries which the U.S. was trying to attract to Western-style democracy, were not white. The U.S. sought to promote liberal values throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America to prevent the Soviet Union from spreading communism. Dudziak described how the international press widely circulated stories of segregation and violence against African-Americans.


title: Critical race theory

text: The Moore's Ford lynchings, where a World War II veteran was lynched, were particularly widespread in the news. American allies followed stories of American racism through the international press, and the Soviets used stories of racism against Black Americans as a vital part of their propaganda. Dudziak performed extensive archival research in the U.S. Department of State and Department of Justice and concluded that U.S. government support for civil-rights legislation "was motivated in part by the concern that racial discrimination harmed the United States' foreign relations". When the National Guard was called in to prevent nine African-American students from integrating the Little Rock Central High School, the international press covered the story extensively. The then-Secretary of State told President Dwight Eisenhower that the Little Rock situation was "ruining" American foreign policy, particularly in Asia and Africa. The U.S.'s ambassador to the United Nations told President Eisenhower that as two-thirds of the world's population was not white, he was witnessing their negative reactions to American racial discrimination. He suspected that the U.S. "lost several votes on the Chinese communist item because of Little Rock."


title: Critical race theory

text: The examination of race, sex, class, national origin, and sexual orientation, and how their intersections play out in various settings, such as how the needs of a Latina are different from those of a Black male, and whose needs are promoted. These intersections provide a more holistic picture for evaluating different groups of people. Intersectionality is a response to identity politics insofar as identity politics does not take into account the different intersections of people's identities.


title: Critical race theory

text: Delgado and Stefancic write, "Scholars who write about these issues are concerned with the appropriate unit for analysis: Is the black community one, or many, communities? Do middle- and working-class African-Americans have different interests and needs? Do all oppressed peoples have something in common?" This is a look at the ways that oppressed groups may share in their oppression but also have different needs and values that need to be analyzed differently. It is a question of how groups can be essentialized or are unable to be essentialized.


title: Critical race theory

text: From a essentialist perspective, one's identity consists of an internal "essence" that is static and unchanging from birth, whereas a non-essentialist position holds that "the subject has no fixed or permanent identity.” Racial essentialism diverges into biological and cultural essentialism, where subordinated groups may endorse one over the other. "Cultural and biological forms of racial essentialism share the idea that differences between racial groups are determined by a fixed and uniform essence that resides within and defines all members of each racial group. However, they differ in their understanding of the nature of this essence." Subordinated communities may be more likely to endorse cultural essentialism as it provides a basis of positive distinction for establishing a cumulative resistance as a means to assert their identities and advocacy of rights, whereas biological essentialism may be unlikely to resonate with marginalized groups as historically, dominant groups have used genetics and biology in justifying racism and oppression.


title: Critical race theory

text: Essentialism is the idea of a singular, shared experience between a specific group of people. Anti-essentialism, on the other hand, believes that there are other various factors that can affect a person’s being and their overall life experience. The race of an individual is viewed more as a social construct that does not necessarily dictate the outcome of their life circumstances. Race is viewed as “a social and historical construction, rather than an inherent, fixed, essential biological characteristic.” Anti-essentialism “forces a destabilization in the very concept of race itself…” The results of this destabilization vary on the analytic focus falling into two general categories, “... consequences for the analytic concepts of racial identity or racial subjectivity.”


title: Critical race theory

text: Exploration of how "the structure of legal thought or culture influences its content" in a way that determines social outcomes. Delgado and Stefancic cited "empathic fallacy" as one example of structural determinism—the "idea that our system, by reason of its structure and vocabulary, cannot redress certain types of wrong." They interrogate the absence of terms such as intersectionality, anti-essentialism, and jury nullification in standard legal reference research tools in law libraries.


title: Critical race theory

text: The exploration of more radical views that argue for separation and reparations as a form of foreign aid (including black nationalism).


title: Critical race theory

text: Camara Phyllis Jones defines institutionalized racism as "differential access to the goods, services, and opportunities of society by race. Institutionalized racism is normative, sometimes legalized and often manifests as inherited disadvantage. It is structural, having been absorbed into our institutions of custom, practice, and law, so there need not be an identifiable offender. Indeed, institutionalized racism is often evident as inaction in the face of need, manifesting itself both in material conditions and in access to power. With regard to the former, examples include differential access to quality education, sound housing, gainful employment, appropriate medical facilities, and a clean environment."


title: Critical race theory

text: The black-white binary is a paradigm identified by legal scholars through which racial issues and histories are typically articulated within a racial binary between Black and white Americans. The binary largely governs how race has been portrayed and addressed throughout U.S. history. Critical race theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic argue that anti-discrimination law has blindspots for non-black minorities due to its language being confined within the black-white binary.


title: Critical race theory

text: Scholars of critical race theory have focused, with some particularity, on the issues of hate crime and hate speech. In response to the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in the hate speech case of "R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul" (1992), in which the Court struck down an anti-bias ordinance as applied to a teenager who had burned a cross, Mari Matsuda and Charles Lawrence argued that the Court had paid insufficient attention to the history of racist speech and the actual injury produced by such speech.


title: Critical race theory

text: Critical race theorists have also argued in favor of affirmative action. They propose that so-called merit standards for hiring and educational admissions are not race-neutral and that such standards are part of the rhetoric of neutrality through which whites justify their disproportionate share of resources and social benefits.


title: Critical race theory

text: In his 2009 article "Will the Real CRT Please Stand Up: The Dangers of Philosophical Contributions to CRT", Curry distinguished between the original CRT key writings and what is being done in the name of CRT by a "growing number of white feminists". The new CRT movement "favors narratives that inculcate the ideals of a post-racial humanity and racial amelioration between compassionate (Black and White) philosophical thinkers dedicated to solving America's race problem." They are interested in discourse (i.e., how individuals speak about race) and the theories of white Continental philosophers, over and against the structural and institutional accounts of white supremacy which were at the heart of the realist analysis of racism introduced in Derrick Bell's early works, and articulated through such African-American thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Judge Robert L. Carter.


title: Critical race theory

text: Although the terminology "critical race theory" began in its application to laws, the subject emerges out of the broader frame of critical theory in how it analyzes power structures in society despite whatever laws may be in effect. In the 1998 article, "Critical Race Theory: Past, Present, and Future", Delgado and Stefancic trace the origins of CRT to the early writings of Derrick Albert Bell Jr. including his 1976 "Yale Law Journal" article, "Serving Two Masters" and his 1980 "Harvard Law Review" article entitled "Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma".


title: Critical race theory

text: In the 1970s, as a professor at Harvard Law School Bell began to critique, question and re-assess the civil rights cases he had litigated in the 1960s to desegregate schools following the passage of "Brown v. Board of Education". This re-assessment became the "cornerstone of critical race theory". Delgado and Stefancic, who together wrote "Critical Race Theory: a Introduction" in 2001, described Bell's "interest convergence" as a "means of understanding Western racial history". The focus on desegregation after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in "Brown"declaring school segregation unconstitutionalleft "civil-rights lawyers compromised between their clients' interests and the law". The concern of many Black parentsfor their children's access to better educationwas being eclipsed by the interests of litigators who wanted a "breakthrough" in their "pursuit of racial balance in schools". In 1995, Cornel West said that Bell was "virtually the lone dissenter" writing in leading law reviews who challenged basic assumptions about how the law treated people of color.


title: Critical race theory

text: In his "Harvard Law Review" articles, Bell cites the 1964 Hudson v. Leake County School Board case which the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (NAACP LDF) won, mandating that the all-white school board comply with desegregation. At that time it was seen as a success. By the 1970s, White parents were removing their children from the desegregated schools and enrolling them in segregation academies. Bell came to believe that he had been mistaken in 1964 when, as a young lawyer working for the LDF, he had convinced Winson Hudson, who was the head of the newly formed local NAACP chapter in Harmony, Mississippi, to fight the all-White Leake County School Board to desegregate schools. She and the other Black parents had initially sought LDF assistance to fight the board's closure of their schoolone of the historic Rosenwald Schools for Black children. Bell explained to Hudson, thatfollowing "Brown"the LDF could not fight to keep a segregated Black school open; they would have to fight for desegregation. In 1964, Bell and the NAACP had believed that resources for desegregated schools would be increased and Black children would access higher quality education, since White parents would insist on better quality schools; by the 1970s, Black children were again attending segregated schools and the quality of education had deteriorated.


title: Critical race theory

text: Bell began to work for the NAACP LDF shortly after the Montgomery bus boycott and the ensuing 1956 Supreme Court ruling following "Browder v. Gayle" that the Alabama and Montgomery bus segregation laws were unconstitutional. From 1960 to 1966 Bell successfully litigated 300 civil rights cases in Mississippi. Bell was inspired by Thurgood Marshall, who had been one of the two leaders of a decades-long legal campaign starting in the 1930s, in which they filed hundreds of lawsuits to reverse the "separate but equal" doctrine announced by the Supreme Court's decision in "Plessy v. Ferguson" (1896). The Court ruled that racial segregation laws enacted by the states were not in violation of the United States Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality. The "Plessy" decision provided the legal mandate at the federal level to enforce Jim Crow laws that had been introduced by white Southern Democrats starting in the 1870s for racial segregation in all public facilities, including public schools. The Court's 1954 "Brown" decisionwhich held that the "separate but equal" doctrine is unconstitutional in the context of public schools and educational facilitiesseverely weakened "Plessy". The Supreme Court concept of constitutional colorblindness in regards to case evaluation began with "Plessy". Before "Plessy", the Court considered color as a determining factor in many landmark cases, which reinforced Jim Crow laws. Bell's 1960s civil rights work built on Justice Marshall's groundwork begun in the 1930s. It was a time when the legal branch of the civil rights movement was launching thousands of civil rights cases. It was a period of idealism for the civil rights movement.


title: Critical race theory

text: At Harvard, Bell developed new courses that studied American law through a racial lens. He compiled his own course materials which were published in 1970 under the title "Race, Racism, and American Law". He became Harvard Law School's first Black tenured professor in 1971.


title: Critical race theory

text: During the 1970s, the courts were using legislation to enforce affirmative action programs and busingwhere the courts mandated busing to achieve racial integration in school districts that rejected desegregation. In response, in the 1970s, neoconservative think tankshostile to these two issues in particulardeveloped a color-blind rhetoric to oppose them, claiming they represented reverse discrimination. In 1978, "Regents of the University of California v. Bakke", when Bakke won this landmark Supreme Court case by using the argument of reverse racism, Bell's skepticism that racism would end increased. Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. held that the "guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color." In a 1979 article, Bell asked if there were any groups of the White population that would be willing to suffer any disadvantage that might result from the implementation of a policy to rectify harms to Black people resulting from slavery, segregation, or discrimination.


title: Critical race theory

text: Bell resigned in 1980 because of what he viewed as the university's discriminatory practices, became the dean at University of Oregon School of Law and later returned to Harvard as a visiting professor.


title: Critical race theory

text: While he was absent from Harvard, his supporters organized protests against Harvard's lack of racial diversity in the curriculum, in the student body and in the faculty. The university had rejected student requests, saying no sufficiently qualified black instructor existed. Legal scholar Randall Kennedy writes that some students had "felt affronted" by Harvard's choice to employ an "archetypal white liberal... in a way that precludes the development of black leadership".


title: Critical race theory

text: One of these students was Kimberlé Crenshaw, who had chosen Harvard in order to study under Bell; she was introduced to his work at Cornell. Crenshaw organized the student-led initiative to offer an alternative course on race and law in 1981based on Bell's course and textbookwhere students brought in visiting professors, such as Charles Lawrence, Linda Greene, Neil Gotanda, and Richard Delgado, to teach chapter-by-chapter from "Race, Racism, and American Law".


title: Critical race theory

text: Critical race theory emerged as an intellectual movement with the organization of this boycott; CRT scholars included graduate law students and professors.


title: Critical race theory

text: Alan Freeman was a founding member of the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement that hosted forums in the 1980s. CLS legal scholars challenged claims to the alleged value-neutral position of the law. They criticized the legal system's role in generating and legitimizing oppressive social structures which contributed to maintaining an unjust and oppressive class system. Delgado and Stefancic cite the work of Alan Freeman in the 1970s as formative to critical race theory. In his 1978 "Minnesota Law Review" article Freeman reinterpreted, through a critical legal studies perspective, how the Supreme Court oversaw civil rights legislation from 1953 to 1969 under the Warren Court. He criticized the narrow interpretation of the law which denied relief for victims of racial discrimination. In his article, Freeman describes two perspectives on the concept of racial discrimination: that of victim or perpetrator. Racial discrimination to the victim includes both objective conditions and the "consciousness associated with those objective conditions". To the perpetrator, racial discrimination consists only of actions without consideration of the objective conditions experienced by the victims, such as the "lack of jobs, lack of money, lack of housing". Only those individuals who could prove they were victims of discrimination were deserving of remedies. By the late 1980s, Freeman, Bell, and other CRT scholars left the CLS movement claiming it was too narrowly focused on class and economic structures while neglecting the role of race and race relations in American law.


title: Critical race theory

text: In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, and Stephanie Phillips organized a workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison entitled "New Developments in Critical Race Theory". The organizers coined the term "Critical Race Theory" to signify an "intersection of critical theory and race, racism and the law."


title: Critical race theory

text: Afterward, legal scholars began publishing a higher volume of works employing critical race theory, including more than "300 leading law review articles" and books. In 1990, Duncan Kennedy published his article on affirmative action in legal academia in the "Duke Law Journal", and Anthony E. Cook published his article "Beyond Critical Legal Studies" in the "Harvard Law Review". In 1991, Patricia Williams published "The Alchemy of Race and Rights", while Derrick Bell published "Faces at the Bottom of the Well" in 1992. Cheryl I. Harris published her 1993 "Harvard Law Review" article "Whiteness as Property" in which she described how passing led to benefits akin to owning property. In 1995, two dozen legal scholars contributed to a major compilation of key writings on CRT.


title: Critical race theory

text: By the early 1990s, key concepts and features of CRT had emerged. Bell had introduced his concept of "interest convergence" in his 1973 article. He developed the concept of racial realism in a 1992 series of essays and book, "Faces at the bottom of the well: the permanence of racism." He said that Black people needed to accept that the civil rights era legislation would not on its own bring about progress in race relations; anti-Black racism in the U.S. was a "permanent fixture" of American society; and equality was "impossible and illusory" in the US. Crenshaw introduced the term "intersectionality" in the 1990s.


title: Critical race theory

text: In 1995, pedagogical theorists Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate began applying the critical race theory framework in the field of education. In their 1995 article Ladson-Billings and Tate described the role of the social construction of white norms and interests in education. They sought to better understand inequities in schooling. Scholars have since expanded work to explore issues including school segregation in the U.S.; relations between race, gender, and academic achievement; pedagogy; and research methodologies.


title: Critical race theory

text: , over 20 American law schools and at least three non-American law schools offered critical race theory courses or classes. Critical race theory is also applied in the fields of education, political science, women's studies, ethnic studies, communication, sociology, and American studies. Other movements developed that apply critical race theory to specific groups. These include the Latino-critical (LatCrit), queer-critical, and Asian-critical movements. These continued to engage with the main body of critical theory research, over time developing independent priorities and research methods.


title: Critical race theory

text: CRT has also been taught internationally, including in the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia. According to educational researcher Mike Cole, the main proponents of CRT in the UK include David Gillborn, John Preston, and Namita Chakrabarty.


title: Critical race theory

text: CRT scholars draw on the work of Antonio Gramsci, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. DuBois. Bell shared Paul Robeson's belief that "Black self-reliance and African cultural continuity should form the epistemic basis of Blacks' worldview."


title: Critical race theory

text: Their writing is also informed by the 1960s and 1970s movements such as Black Power, Chicano, and radical feminism. Critical race theory shares many intellectual commitments with critical theory, critical legal studies, feminist jurisprudence, and postcolonial theory. University of Connecticut philosopher, Lewis Gordon, who has focused on postcolonial phenomenology, and race and racism, wrote that CRT is notable for its use of postmodern poststructural scholarship, including an emphasis on "subaltern" or "marginalized" communities and the "use of alternative methodology in the expression of theoretical work, most notably their use of "narratives" and other literary techniques".


title: Critical race theory

text: Standpoint theory, which has been adopted by some CRT scholars, emerged from the first wave of the women's movement in the 1970s. The main focus of feminist standpoint theory is epistemologythe study of how knowledge is produced. The term was coined by Sandra Harding, an American feminist theorist, and developed by Dorothy Smith in her 1989 publication, "The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology". Smith wrote that by studying how women socially construct their own everyday life experiences, sociologists could ask new questions. Patricia Hill Collins introduced black feminist standpointa collective wisdom of those who have similar perspectives in society which sought to heighten awareness to these marginalized groups and provide ways to improve their position in society.


title: Critical race theory

text: Critical race theory draws on the priorities and perspectives of both critical legal studies (CLS) and conventional civil rights scholarship, while also sharply contesting both of these fields. UC Davis School of Law legal scholar Angela P. Harris, describes critical race theory as sharing "a commitment to a vision of liberation from racism through right reason" with the civil rights tradition. It deconstructs some premises and arguments of legal theory and simultaneously holds that legally constructed rights are incredibly important. CRT scholars disagreed with the CLS anti-legal rights stance, nor did they wish to "abandon the notions of law" completely; CRT legal scholars acknowledged that some legislation and reforms had helped people of color. As described by Derrick Bell, critical race theory in Harris' view is committed to "radical critique of the law (which is normatively deconstructionist) and... radical emancipation by the law (which is normatively reconstructionist)".


title: Critical race theory

text: University of Edinburgh philosophy professor Tommy J. Curry says that by 2009, the CRT perspective on a race as a social construct was accepted by "many race scholars" as a "commonsense view" that race is not "biologically grounded and natural." Social construct is a term from social constructivism, whose roots can be traced to the early science wars, instigated in part by Thomas Kuhn's 1962 "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". Ian Hacking, a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science, describes how social construction has spread through the social sciences. He cites the social construction of race as an example, asking how race could be "constructed" better.


title: Critical race theory

text: According to the "Encyclopaedia Britannica", aspects of CRT have been criticized by "legal scholars and jurists from across the political spectrum." Criticism of CRT has focused on its emphasis on storytelling, its critique of the merit principle and of objective truth, and its thesis of the "voice of color". Critics say it contains a "postmodernist-inspired skepticism of objectivity and truth", and has a tendency to interpret "any racial inequity or imbalance [...] as proof of institutional racism and as grounds for directly imposing racially equitable outcomes in those realms", according to "Britannica". Proponents of CRT have also been accused of treating even well-meaning criticism of CRT as evidence of latent racism.


title: Critical race theory

text: In a 1997 book, law professors Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry criticized CRT for basing its claims on personal narrative and for its lack of testable hypotheses and measurable data.


title: Critical race theory

text: CRT scholars including Crenshaw, Delgado, and Stefancic responded that such critiques represent dominant modes within social science which tend to exclude people of color. Delgado and Stefancic wrote that "In these realms [social science and politics], truth is a social construct created to suit the purposes of the dominant group."


title: Critical race theory

text: Farber and Sherry have also argued that anti-meritocratic tenets in critical race theory, critical feminism, and critical legal studies may unintentionally lead to antisemitic and anti-Asian implications.


title: Critical race theory

text: They write that the success of Jews and Asians within what critical race theorists posit to be a structurally unfair system may lend itself to allegations of cheating and advantage-taking.


title: Critical race theory

text: In response, Delgado and Stefancic write that there is a difference between criticizing an unfair system and criticizing individuals who perform well inside that system.


title: Critical race theory

text: In June 2021, following media reports that the proposed national curriculum was "preoccupied with the oppression, discrimination and struggles of Indigenous Australians", the Australian Senate approved a motion tabled by right-wing senator Pauline Hanson calling on the federal government to reject CRT, despite it not being included in the curriculum. Despite this, CRT is gaining increasing popularity in Australian academic circles, to investigate indigenous issues/studies, anti-Muslim racism and Black Africans' experiences.


title: Critical race theory

text: Conservatives within the UK government began to criticize CRT in late 2020. Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch, who is of Nigerian descent, said during a parliamentary debate to mark Black History Month, "We do not want to see teachers teaching their pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt [...] Any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law."


title: Critical race theory

text: In an open letter, 101 writers of the Black Writers' Guild denounced Badenoch for remarks about popular anti-racism books such as "White Fragility" and "Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race", made in an interview in "The Spectator", in which she said, "many of these booksand, in fact, some of the authors and proponents of critical race theoryactually want a segregated society".


title: Critical race theory

text: Critical race theory has stirred controversy in the United States for promoting the use of narrative in legal studies, advocating "legal instrumentalism" as opposed to ideal-driven uses of the law, and encouraging legal scholars to promote racial equity.


title: Critical race theory

text: Before 1993, the term "critical race theory" was not part of public discourse. In the spring of that year, conservatives launched a campaign led by Clint Bolick to portray Lani Guinierthen-President Bill Clinton's nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rightsas a radical because of her connection to CRT. Within months, Clinton had withdrawn the nomination, describing the effort to stop Guinier's appointment as "a campaign of right-wing distortion and vilification".


title: Critical race theory

text: Amy E. Ansell writes that the logic of legal instrumentalism reached wide public reception in the O. J. Simpson murder case when attorney Johnnie Cochran "enacted a sort of applied CRT", selecting an African-American jury and urging them to acquit Simpson in spite of the evidence against hima form of jury nullification. Legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen calls this the "most striking example" of CRT's influence on the U.S. legal system. Law professor Margaret M. Russell responded to Rosen's assertion in the "Michigan Law Review", saying that Cochran's "dramatic" and "controversial" courtroom "style and strategic sense" in the Simpson case resulted from his decades of experience as an attorney; it was not significantly influenced by CRT writings.


title: Critical race theory

text: In 2010, a Mexican-American studies program in Tucson, Arizona, was halted because of a state law forbidding public schools from offering race-conscious education in the form of "advocat[ing] ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals". Certain books, including a primer on CRT, were banned from the curriculum. Matt de la Peña's young-adult novel "Mexican WhiteBoy" was banned for "containing 'critical race theory according to state officials. The ban on ethnic-studies programs was later deemed unconstitutional on the grounds that the state showed discriminatory intent: "Both enactment and enforcement were motivated by racial animus", federal Judge A. Wallace Tashima ruled.


title: Critical race theory

text: In the run-up to and aftermath of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, opposition to critical race theory was adopted as a campaign theme by Donald Trump and various conservative commentators on "Fox News" and right-wing talk radio shows. In September 2020, after seeing a piece on "Fox News" in which conservative activist Christopher Rufo denounced CRT, Trump issued an executive order directing agencies of the United States federal government to cancel funding for programs that mention "white privilege" or "critical race theory", on the basis that it constituted "divisive, un-American propaganda" and that it was "racist".


title: Critical race theory

text: In a speech on September 17, 2020, Trump denounced critical race theory and announced the formation of the 1776 Commission to promote "patriotic education". On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden rescinded Trump's order and dissolved the 1776 Commission. Opposition to what was purported to be critical race theory was subsequently adopted as a major theme by several conservative think tanks and pressure groups, including the Heritage Foundation, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council and organizations funded by the Koch brothers. According to "The Washington Post", conservative lawmakers and activists have used the term as "a catchall phrase for nearly any examination of systemic racism". Rufo wrote on Twitter, "The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory'."


title: Critical race theory

text: In early 2021, Republican-backed bills were introduced to restrict teaching critical race theory in public schools in several states, including Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas. Several of these bills specifically mention "critical race theory" or single out "The New York Times" 1619 Project. CRT is only taught at a university level, though some lower-level curricula have reflected basic themes of CRT.


title: Critical race theory

text: In mid-April 2021, a bill was introduced in the Idaho Legislature that would effectively ban any educational entity from teaching or advocating "sectarianism", including critical race theory or other programs involving social justice. On May 4, 2021, the bill was signed into law by Governor Brad Little. On June 10, 2021, the Florida Board of Education unanimously voted to ban public schools from teaching critical race theory at the urging of governor Ron DeSantis. As of July 2021, 10 U.S. states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory, and 26 others were in the process of doing so. In June 2021, the American Association of University Professors, the American Historical Association, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and PEN America released a joint statement stating their opposition to such legislation, and by August 2021, 167 professional organizations had signed onto the statement. In August 2021, the Brookings Institution recorded that eight statesIdaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Iowa, New Hampshire, Arizona, and South Carolinahad passed regulation on the issue, though also noted that none of the bills that passed, with the exception of Idaho's, actually contained the words "critical race theory". Brookings also noted that these laws often extend beyond race to discussions of gender.


title: Critical race theory

text: Timothy D. Snyder, historian and professor at Yale University, has called these new state laws "memory laws" — "government actions designed to guide public interpretation of the past". Early memory laws were intended to protect victim groups, such as from revisionism attempts by holocaust deniers, but most recently have been used by Russia to protect "the feelings of the powerful", then by Donald Trump's 1776 Report in January 2021, followed by Republican-led legislatures submitting these bills. Snyder called the Idaho version "Kafkaesque in its censorship: It affirms freedom of speech and then bans divisive speech."


title: Critical race theory

text: , 66 educational gag orders had been filed for the year in 26 state legislatures (12 bills had already been passed into law) that would inhibit teaching any race theory in schools, universities, or state agencies, by teachers, employers or contractors. Penalties vary, but predominantly include loss of funding for schools and institutions. However, in some cases the bills mandate firing of employees.


title: Critical race theory

text: On January 15, 2022, his first day in office, governor of Virginia Glenn Youngkin signed multiple executive orders, including barring the teaching of critical race theory in public schools.


title: Critical race theory

text: Within critical race theory, various sub-groupings focus on issues and nuances unique to particular ethno-racial and/or marginalized communities. This includes the intersection of race with disability, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, or religion. For example, disability critical race studies (DisCrit), critical race feminism (CRF), Jewish Critical Race Theory (HebCrit, pronounced "Heeb"), Black Critical Race Theory (Black Crit), Latino critical race studies (LatCrit), Asian American critical race studies (AsianCrit), South Asian American critical race studies (DesiCrit), Quantitative Critical Race Theory (QuantCrit) and American Indian critical race studies (sometimes called TribalCrit). CRT methodologies have also been applied to the study of white immigrant groups. CRT has spurred some scholars to call for a second wave of whiteness studies, which is now a small offshoot known as Second Wave Whiteness (SWW). Critical race theory has also begun to spawn research that looks at understandings of race outside the United States.


title: Critical race theory

text: Another offshoot field is disability critical race studies (DisCrit), which combines disability studies and CRT to focus on the intersection of disability and race.


title: Critical race theory

text: Latino critical race theory (LatCRT or LatCrit) is a research framework that outlines the social construction of race as central to how people of color are constrained and oppressed in society. Race scholars developed LatCRT as a critical response to the "problem of the color line" first explained by W. E. B. Du Bois. While CRT focuses on the Black–White paradigm, LatCRT has moved to consider other racial groups, mainly Chicana/Chicanos, as well as Latinos/as, Asians, Native Americans/First Nations, and women of color.


title: Critical race theory

text: In "Critical Race Counterstories along the Chicana/Chicano Educational Pipeline", Tara J. Yosso discusses how the constraint of POC can be defined. Looking at the differences between Chicana/o students, the tenets that separate such individuals are: the intercentricity of race and racism, the challenge of dominant ideology, the commitment to social justice, the centrality of experience knowledge, and the interdisciplinary perspective.


title: Critical race theory

text: LatCRTs main focus is to advocate social justice for those living in marginalized communities (specifically Chicana/os), who are guided by structural arrangements that disadvantage people of color. Social institutions function as dispossessions, disenfranchisement, and discrimination over minority groups, while LatCRT seeks to give voice to those who are victimized. In order to do so, LatCRT has created two common themes:


title: Critical race theory

text: First, CRT proposes that white supremacy and racial power are maintained over time, a process that the law plays a central role in. Different racial groups lack the voice to speak in this civil society, and, as such, CRT has introduced a new critical form of expression, called the "voice of color". The voice of color is narratives and storytelling monologues used as devices for conveying personal racial experiences. These are also used to counter metanarratives that continue to maintain racial inequality. Therefore, the experiences of the oppressed are important aspects for developing a LatCRT analytical approach, and it has not been since the rise of slavery that an institution has so fundamentally shaped the life opportunities of those who bear the label of criminal.


title: Critical race theory

text: Secondly, LatCRT work has investigated the possibility of transforming the relationship between law enforcement and racial power, as well as pursuing a project of achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination more broadly. Its body of research is distinct from general critical race theory in that it emphasizes immigration theory and policy, language rights, and accent- and national origin-based forms of discrimination. CRT finds the experiential knowledge of people of color and draws explicitly from these lived experiences as data, presenting research findings through storytelling, chronicles, scenarios, narratives, and parables.


title: Critical race theory

text: Asian critical race theory looks at the influence of race and racism on Asian Americans and their experiences in the U.S. education system. Like Latino critical race theory, Asian critical race theory is distinct from the main body of CRT in its emphasis on immigration theory and policy.


title: Critical race theory

text: The Critical Philosophy of Race (CPR) is inspired by both Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory's use of interdisciplinary scholarship. Both CLS and CRT explore the covert nature of mainstream use of "apparently neutral concepts, such as merit or freedom."


title: Chechnya

text: Chechnya (; ), officially the Chechen Republic, is a republic of Russia. It is situated in the North Caucasus of Eastern Europe, close to the Caspian Sea. The republic forms a part of the North Caucasian Federal District, and shares land borders with the country of Georgia to its south; with the Russian republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia, and North Ossetia-Alania to its east, north, and west; and with Stavropol Krai to its northwest.


title: Chechnya

text: After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Checheno-Ingush ASSR split into two parts: the Republic of Ingushetia and the Chechen Republic. The latter proclaimed the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, which sought independence. Following the First Chechen War of 1994–1996 with Russia, Chechnya gained "de facto" independence as the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, although "de jure" it remained a part of Russia. Russian federal control was restored in the Second Chechen War of 1999–2009, with Chechen politics being dominated by Akhmad Kadyrov, and later his son Ramzan Kadyrov.


title: Chechnya

text: It is home to the indigenous Chechens, part of the Nakh peoples, and of primarily Muslim faith. Grozny is the capital and largest city.


title: Chechnya

text: According to Leonti Mroveli, the 11th-century Georgian chronicler, the word Caucasian is derived from the Nakh ancestor Kavkas.


title: Chechnya

text: According to George Anchabadze of Ilia State University: American linguist Johanna Nichols "has used language to connect the modern people of the Caucasus region to the ancient farmers of the Fertile Crescent" and her research suggests that "farmers of the region were proto-Nakh-Daghestanians." Nichols stated: "The Nakh–Dagestanian languages are the closest thing we have to a direct continuation of the cultural and linguistic community that gave rise to Western civilisation."


title: Chechnya

text: Traces of human settlement dating back to 40,000 BC were found near Lake Kezanoi. Cave paintings, artifacts, and other archaeological evidence indicate continuous habitation for some 8,000 years. People living in these settlements used tools, fire, and clothing made of animal skins.


title: Chechnya

text: The Caucasian Epipaleolithic and early Caucasian Neolithic era saw the introduction of agriculture, irrigation, and the domestication of animals in the region. Settlements near Ali-Yurt and Magas, discovered in modern times, revealed tools made out of stone: stone axes, polished stones, stone knives, stones with holes drilled in them, clay dishes etc. Settlements made out of clay bricks were discovered in the plains. In the mountains there were settlements made from stone and surrounded by walls; some of them dated back to 8000 BC. This period also saw the appearance of the wheel (3000 BC), horseback riding, metal works (copper, gold, silver, iron), dishes, armor, daggers, knives and arrow tips in the region. The artifacts were found near Nasare-Cort, Muzhichi, Ja-E-Bortz (alternatively known as Surkha-khi), Abbey-Gove (also known as Nazran or Nasare).


title: Chechnya

text: The German scientist Peter Simon Pallas believed that the Vainakh people (Chechens and Ingush) were the direct descendants from Alania. In 1239, the Alania capital of Maghas and the Alan confederacy of the Northern Caucasian highlanders, nations, and tribes was destroyed by Batu Khan (a Mongol leader and a grandson of Genghis Khan).