In this absorbing, up-to-the-minute book, acclaimed technology and politics analyst Micah Sifry sets the extraordinary story of WikiLeaks in the context of the international struggle for transparency.

Sifry argues that activists and open-source web projects have had a seismic impact on the way the world works, and describes how crowd-sourcing initiatives have analysed MPs' expenses, recorded political violence in Kenya and reduced bribery in India -with mixed reactions from political elites.

Fascinating, thoughtful and often eye-opening, this is an essential guide to the new age of transparency.

"Manifestos For The Twenty-First Century" is a "Seagull" Series created in collaboration with Index On Censorship, a home and a voice for freedom of expression since it was founded in 1972. From the earliest times human beings have found it difficult to represent their own bodies in a straightforward way. At the dawn of art, representations of the nude body focused almost entirely on fertility, with some cultures explicit and others rather more prudish about representing the unclothed body. With the coming of Christianity, representations of the nude became associated with the idea of the Fall of Man and original sin. This conflicted with the need to show nude or nearly nude bodies when representing episodes from the Passion of Christ and the martyrdoms of popular saints. These tensions have been inherited in ever more complex form by modern society. Today, representations of the nude remain a battleground, fought over by libertarians and anti-libertarians. Most recently, feminism has challenged images of the female nude, while an increasing moral panic now restricts the depiction of the naked child - images which would have been commonplace in the art of the Renaissance. "Censoring the Body" exposes our bodies and our ideas about our bodies, revealing the complex historical and cultural legacies which frame - and obscure - our vision.

Fans and detractors of popular music tend to agree on one thing: popular music is a bellwether of an individual's political and cultural values. In the United States, for example, one cannot think of the counterculture apart from its music. For that reason, in virtually every country in the world, some group identifies popular music as a source of potential danger and wants to regulate it. "Policing Pop" looks into the many ways in which popular music and artists around the world are subjected to censorship, ranging from state control and repression to the efforts of special interest or religious groups to limit expression. The essays collected here focus on the forms of censorship as well as specific instances of how the state and other agencies have attempted to restrict the types of music produced, recorded and performed within a culture. Several show how even unsuccessful attempts to exert the power of the state can cause artists to self-censor. Others point to material that taxes even the most liberal defenders of free speech. Taken together, these essays demonstrate that censoring agents target popular music all over the world, and they raise questions about how artists and the public can resist the narrowing of cultural expression. Author note: Martin Cloonan teaches Popular Music Culture at the University of Glasgow and is the author of "Banned! Censorship of Popular Music in Britain, 1967-1992". Reebee Garofalo is Professor at the College of Public and Community Service and is affiliated with the American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston; his most recent book is "Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the USA".

This impassioned history tells a story of censorship and politics during the early Cold War. The author recounts the 1950 Empire Zinc Strike in Bayard, New Mexico, the making of the extraordinary motion picture 'Salt of the Earth' by Local 890 of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, and the films suppression by Hollywood, federal and state governments, and organised labour. This disturbing episode reflects the intense fear that gripped America during the Cold War and reveals the unsavoury side of the rapprochement between organised labour and big business in the 1950s. In the face of intense political opposition, blackballed union activists, blacklisted Hollywood artists and writers, and Local 890 united to write a script, raise money, hire actors and crews, and make and distribute the film. Rediscovered in the 1970s, Salt of the Earth is a revealing celluloid document of socially conscious unionism that sought to break down racial barriers, bridge class divisions, and emphasise the role of women. Lorence has interviewed participants in the strike and film such as Clinton Jencks and Paul Jarrico and has consulted private and public archives to reconstruct the story of this extraordinary documentary and the co-ordinated efforts to suppress it.

Between 1949 and 1955 Britain was swept by a rising tide of panic about "American-style" or "horror" comics. The British press cried out in alarm: "Now Ban This Filth That Poisons Our Children," "Drive Out the Horror Comics." As one frenzied columnist protested: "I feel as though I have been trudging through a sewer. Here is a terrible twilight zone between sanity and madness . . . peopled by monsters, grave robbers, human flesh eaters." A campaign against ghoulish comic books climaxed in an Act of Parliament making it illegal to publish or sell any material in comic form deemed to be "harmful to children."

But behind the facade of concern for the protection of children, another very different story lurked. This book explores the British campaign by asking some rather different questions. Who were the people at the heart of the anti-comics campaign? Why and how did the British Communist Party come to play a central role, and yet end up attacking a group of comics which were "on their side" in assaulting their rationality of McCarthyism?

The British "horror comics" campaign reveals the inadequacy of some conventional assessments of anti-media panics. In showing a curious gap between the private concerns of the campaigners and their public rhetoric, "A Haunt of Fears," originally published in Britain in 1983, raises serious questions about the state of British culture during this era.

Swedish journalist and author Braw draws on declassified documents and interviews in Japan and the US to reveal how the US occupation authorities established elaborate systems of censorship and disinformation among the Japanese press, scientists, and even novelists and poets, about the bombing of Hi

Most Americans tend to view censorship as a repressive aspect of other societies or historical eras, one that touches on our lives only in relation to national security or certain cold war considerations. In this provocative history of censorship, Sue Curry Jansen challenges conventional thought with a bold new view: that censorship, an embodiment of the relationship between power and knowledge, is as much a feature of liberal, market societies as it is of totalitarianisms. Building on an analytic tradition laid out by such thinkers as Marcuse and Foucault, Jansen addresses the notion of "market censorship" and shows how the marketplace has become an arena for liberal "power-knowledge." She also analyzes Marx's critique of bourgeois censorship, examines censorship at various levels of Soviet society, and takes an incisive look at economic censorship within our own capitalist nation. The book concludes with a discussion on strategies of resistance to this powerful, and indeed universal, form of social control.

After being forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy, Julian Assange is now in a high security prison in London where he faces extradition to the United States and imprisonment for the rest of his life. The charges Assange faces are a major threat to press freedom. James Goodale, who represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, commented: "The charge against Assange for 'conspiring' with a source is the most dangerous I can think of with respect to the First Amendment in all my years representing media organizations." It is critical now to build support for Assange and prevent his delivery into the hands of the Trump administration. That is the urgent purpose of this book. A wide range of distinguished contributors, many of them in original pieces, here set out the story of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, the importance of their work, and the dangers for us all in the persecution they face. In Defense of Julian Assange is a vivid, vital intervention into one of the most important political issues of our day.

Winner of the 2020 R. Gapper Prize for the Best Book in French Studies Since the beginnings of African cinema, the realm of beauty on screen has been treated with suspicion by directors and critics alike. James S. Williams explores an exciting new generation of African directors, including Abderrahmane Sissako, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Fanta Regina Nacro, Alain Gomis, Newton I. Aduaka, Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Mati Diop, who have begun to reassess and embrace the concept of cinematic beauty by not reducing it to ideological critique or the old ideals of pan-Africanism. Locating the aesthetic within a range of critical fields - the rupturing of narrative spectacle and violence by montage, the archives of the everyday in the 'afropolis', the plurivocal mysteries of sound and language, male intimacy and desire, the borderzones of migration and transcultural drift - this study reveals the possibility for new, non-conceptual kinds of beauty in African cinema: abstract, material, migrant, erotic, convulsive, queer. Through close readings of key works such as Life on Earth (1998), The Night of Truth (2004), Bamako (2006), Daratt (Dry Season) (2006), A Screaming Man (2010), Tey (Today) (2012), The Pirogue (2012), Mille soleils (2013) and Timbuktu (2014), Williams argues that contemporary African filmmakers are proposing propitious, ethical forms of relationality and intersubjectivity. These stimulate new modes of cultural resistance and transformation that serve to redefine the transnational and the cosmopolitan as well as the very notion of the political in postcolonial art cinema.

Most Canadians know little, if anything at all, about the role of the Canadian Air Force in the 1999 Kosovo Air War. Yet lives were at put at stake as mission dedication and military skill were pushed to the limit. Some of Canada's most prominent journalists attempted to report on the war, but came away virtually empty handed. Daily briefings given at the National Defence Headquarters provided so little information most Ottawa journalists simply stopped going. The decision of the military to choke Canada's news media was deliberate and based on a tactical and strategic rationale. Scattering Chaff explores the role of the Canadian Air Force in the bombing campaigns of the Kosovo Air War while examining the military's interference with the news media attempting to report to the Canadian public. It explores the ways in which the military has come to manage the media as an element of operational security, mission focus, and of popular opinion. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the war's Canadian participants and a treasure-trove of unpublished documents and photographs, this book is an unprecedented investigation of a little-known conflict and the forces that prevented it from being better known.

Vasilii Aksenov, Andrei Bitov, and Venedikt Erofeev were among the most acclaimed authors of samizdat, the literature that was self-published in the former Soviet Union in order to evade censorship and prosecution. In Uncensored, Ann Komaromi uses their work to argue for a far more sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon of samizdat, showing how the material circumstances of its creation and dissemi nation exercised a profound influence on the very idea of dissidence, reconfiguring the relationship between author and reader. Using archival research to fully illustrate samizdat's social and historical context, Komaromi arrives at a more nuanced theoretical position that breaks down the opposition between the autonomous work of art and direct political engagement. The similarities between samizdat and digital culture have particular relevance for contemporary discourses of dissident subjectivity.

Censorship and book burning are still present in our lives. Lawrence Hill shares his experiences of how ignorance and the fear of ideas led a group in the Netherlands to burn the cover of his widely successful novel, The Book of Negroes, in 2011. Why do books continue to ignite such strong reactions in people in the age of the Internet? Is banning, censoring, or controlling book distribution ever justified? Hill illustrates his ideas with anecdotes and lists names of Canadian writers who faced censorship challenges in the twenty-first century, inviting conversation between those on opposite sides of these contentious issues. All who are interested in literature, freedom of expression, and human rights will enjoy reading Hill's provocative essay.

Art is continuously subjected to insidious forms of censorship. This may be by the Church to guard against moral degeneration, by the State to promote a specific political agenda or by the art market, to elevate one artist above another. Now, and in the last century, artwork that touches on ethnic, religious, sexual, national or institutional sensitivities is liable to be destroyed or hidden away, ignored or side-lined. Drawing from new research into historical and contemporary case-studies, Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork provides diverse ways of understanding the purpose and mechanisms of art censorship across distinct geopolitical and cultural contexts from Iran, Japan, and Uzbekistan to Britain, Ireland, Canada, Macedonia, Soviet Russia, and Cyprus. Its contributions uncover the impact of this silent control of the production and exhibition of art and consider how censorship has affected art practice and public perceptions of artworks.

"Manifestos For The Twenty-First Century" is a Seagull Series created in collaboration with Index On Censorship, a home and a voice for freedom of expression since it was founded in 1972. Despite Western culture's roots and much touted pride in its classical Greek and Roman legacy, the sexual freedoms of the ancient world have had no place in the official cultures of Western societies. As late as the 19th Century, homosexuality was the "love that dare not speak its name". In "Censoring Sexuality", Paul Bailey examines and analyses the various kinds of censorship - political, literary, cultural - which have oppressed and silenced homosexual men and women. Such a history of censorship extends, of course, way beyond Europe. American puritanism has hugely impacted not only on the lives but also the art works of writers and film-makers whilst the moral values of Hollywood have influenced generations. Discussing artists as diverse as Marcel Proust, Benjamin Britten, WH Auden and Terence Rattigan, Saki and Ronald Firbank, "Censoring Sexuality" explores the true nature of "camp" and the rich tradition of subversive and comic art created by the censoring of the sexual.