This book is a comprehensive exposition of the interaction of a national (the Serbian people) and a religiou (the Orthodox Christian faith) content, in the formation of a distinctive national identity and a mode of being. Its interdisciplinary approach, drawing on sociology, social anthropology, theology, political theory, Balkan historiography, and Serbian folklore, is deployed to provide a powerful and original analysis of how Serbian Orthodoxy has resulted in the sacralisation of the Serbian nation by framing the parameters of its existence. Addresses the following questions: what 'makes' a Serb? Are meaningful assumptions possible by introducing Serbian Orthodoxy as the primal point of reference? Why does religion appear to have an especially strong appeal?

FROM THE BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF MY SEDITIOUS HEART AND THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS, A NEW AND PRESSING DISPATCH FROM THE HEART OF THE CROWD AND THE SOLITUDE OF A WRITER'S DESK The chant of 'Azadi!' - Urdu for 'Freedom!' - is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see as the Indian Occupation. Ironically, it also became the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu Nationalism. Even as Arundhati Roy began to ask what lay between these two calls for Freedom - a chasm or a bridge? - the streets fell silent. Not only in India, but all over the world. The Coronavirus brought with it another, more terrible understanding of Azadi, making a nonsense of international borders, incarcerating whole populations, and bringing the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could. In this series of electrifying essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism. The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times. The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another. For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity, to imagine another world.

Palestine: A Socialist Introduction systematically tackles a number of important aspects of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, contextualizing it in an increasingly polarized world and offering a socialist perspective on how full liberation can be won. Through an internationalist, anti-imperialist lens, this book explores the links between the struggle for freedom in the United States and that in Palestine, and beyond. It examines both the historical and contemporary trajectory of the Palestine solidarity movement in order to glean lessons for today's organizers, and compellingly lays out the argument that, in order to achieve justice in Palestine, the movement has to take up the question of socialism regionally and internationally. Contributors include: Jehad Abusalim, Shireen Akram-Boshar, Omar Barghouti, Nada Elia, Toufic Haddad, Remi Kanazi, Annie Levin, Mostafa Omar, Khury Petersen-Smith, and Daphna Thier.

Since the 19th century, there has been a slow transformation in the nature of the norms that regulate political competition and the uses of state power. Monarchies whose legitimating principles appealed to divine sanction have steadily given way to republican regimes normatively grounded in appeals to 'the people.' Ideals of liberty, equality and solidarity have gained ground relative to ideals of hierarchy and dependence. Yet while in some ways the world is more democratic now than ever, new forms of non-democracy and new justifications for it have emerged. Drawing on a wide variety of examples and data from around the world, this important new text provides a global account of the history and theory of non-democratic government over the past two centuries. Grounded in the most recent social science research, it shows how non-democratic regimes have ruled through many different institutions, from parties to armies to dynastic families, and examines the economic and social performance of these different types of non-democracy, as well as the development of justifications for them. It discusses how over the last century personal dictatorships and totalitarian regimes have given way to hybrid regimes combining electoral competition with various restrictions on the ability of parties and other social groups to effectively compete for control of the state. The book assesses the processes through which non-democratic regimes change, and sometimes democratize, from cultural change and economic development to collective action and revolution. Offering a cutting-edge analysis of the complex issue of non-democratic politics, this is the perfect introduction for students with an interest in how authoritarianism exerts itself in the modern age. Accompanying online resources for this title can be found at bloomsburyonlineresources.com/non-democratic-politics. These resources are designed to support teaching and learning when using this textbook and are available at no extra cost.

Ever wonder how politics turned into a take-no-prisoners blood sport? The New York Times bestselling author of Stonewalled pulls back the curtain on the shady world of opposition research and reveals the dirty tricks those in power use to influence your opinions.

Behind most major political stories in the modern era, there is an agenda; an effort by opposition researchers, spin doctors, and outside interests to destroy an idea or a person. The tactic they use is the Smear. Every day, Americans are influenced by the Smear without knowing it. Paid forces cleverly shape virtually every image you cross. Maybe you read that Donald Trump is a racist misogynist, or saw someone on the news mocking the Bernie Sanders campaign. The trick of the Smear is that it is often based on some shred of truth, but these media-driven "hit pieces" are designed to obscure the truth. Success hinges on the Smear artist’s ability to remain invisible; to make it seem as if their work is neither calculated nor scripted. It must appear to be precisely what it is not.

Veteran journalist Sharyl Attkisson has witnessed this practice firsthand. After years of being pitched hit jobs and puff pieces, she’s an expert at detecting Smear campaigns. Now, the hard-hitting investigative reporter shares her inside knowledge, revealing how the Smear takes shape and who its perpetrators are—including Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal and, most influential of all, "right-wing assassin turned left-wing assassin" (National Review) political operative David Brock and his Media Matters for America empire.

Attkisson exposes the diabolical tactics of Smear artists, and their outrageous access to the biggest names in political media—operatives who are corrupting the political process, and discouraging widespread citizen involvement in our democracy.

  An explosive romantasy YA, perfect for fans of The Hunger Games and Lore. "A thrilling, fast-paced, and brutal tale of revenge, loyalty, courage, and friendship. Avery has created a world that is merciless in its cruelty and trickery, and a cast of gods who revel in causing chaos, but Ara, a heroine full of heart, is more than a match for even the wickedest of them." - Melinda Salisbury, bestselling author of Her Dark Wings Every Lunar Eclipse signifies the beginning of The Immortal Games: an epic set of games played by the Gods of Olympus, with randomly-selected humans as their Tokens. The stakes are high; the Gods covet entertainment and glory above all else, for the Tokens, it's about survival. 17-year-old Ara wants revenge. Revenge on the Gods for allowing her older sister to die in the Games. She's determined to be selected as a Token and find a weapon powerful enough to kill a God. But when she's plucked from the clutches of death by Hades, God of the Underworld, the odds are stacked against her. Hades is the outcast of the Gods, and the only one who has never won the games. But he soon realises that Ara does not fear death, just as she does not fear him, and when a wager with Zeus and Poseidon puts both their futures at stake, the games take on a new meaning. With each challenge, the games become more brutal. Can Ara put aside her rage and survive? For fans of Circe, Ariadne and The Silence of the Girls. Perfectly plotted Greek Mythology and Astrology makes this the perfect YA for BookTok. Cover stunningly illustrated by Instagram star, Tom Roberts.

In spite of the intense preoccupation with individual and self in modern Western thought, the social sciences have tended to focus on groups and collectives and downplay the individual. This implicit view has also coloured the study of social life in China where both Confucian ethics and Communist policies have shaped collective structures with little room for individual agency and choice. What is actually happening, however, is a growing individualization of China - not only changing perceptions of the individual but also rising expectations for individual freedom, choice and individuality. The individual has also become a basic social category in China, and a development has begun that permeates all areas of social, economic and political life. How this process evolves in a state and society lacking two of the defining characteristics of European individualization - a culturally embedded democracy and a welfare system - is one of the questions that the volume explores. A strength of this volume is that its authors succeed in depicting the individualization process in conceptually acute and empirically sensitive terms, and as something with its own distinctively Chinese profile. That makes this book a 'must read' for all those wanting to understand present-day Chinese society, with all of its ambivalences, contingencies and contradictions.

Born in 1970s North Korea, Lucia Jang grew up in a typical household-her parents worked in the factories and the family scraped by on rationed rice and a small garden. Nightly, she bowed to her photo of Kim Il-Sung. But it was the beginning of a chaotic period with a decade-long famine resulting in more than a million deaths. In this harsh time, Jang married an abusive man who sold their baby. She left him and went home to help her family by illegally crossing the river to China to trade goods. She was caught and imprisoned twice. After giving birth to a second child, which the government ordered to be killed, she escaped with him, fleeing under gunfire across the Chinese border. This stunning demonstration of love and courage reflects the range of experiences many North Korean women have endured.

'Remarkable. A thoughtful and perceptive book.' - Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer The world is currently experiencing the lowest levels of democracy we have seen in over thirty years. Autocracy is on the rise, and while the cost of autocracy seems evident, it nevertheless remains an attractive option to many. While leaders like Viktor Orban disrupt democratic foundations from within, autocrats like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin do so from abroad, eroding democratic institutions and values and imperilling democracies that appear increasingly fragile. There are even those who, disillusioned with the current institutions in place, increasingly think authoritarianism can deliver them a better life than democracy has or could. They're wrong. Autocracy is not the solution - better democracy is. But we have to make the case for it. We have to combat institutional rot by learning from one another, and, at times, from our rivals. And we have to get our own houses in order. Only then can we effectively stand up for democratic values around the world and defeat the dictators.

Examining a series of El Nino-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.

Longlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Matthew Horace was an officer at the federal, state, and local level for 28 years working in every state in the country. Yet it was after seven years of service when Horace found himself face-down on the ground with a gun pointed at his head by a white fellow officer, that he fully understood the racism seething within America's police departments. Using gut-wrenching reportage, on-the-ground research, and personal accounts garnered by interviews with police and government officials around the country, Horace presents an insider's examination of police tactics, which he concludes is an "archaic system" built on "toxic brotherhood." Horace dissects some of the nation's most highly publicized police shootings and communities highlighted in the Black Lives Matter movement and beyond to explain how these systems and tactics have had detrimental outcomes to the people they serve. Horace provides fresh analysis on communities experiencing the high killing and imprisonment rates due to racist policing such as Ferguson, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Chicago from a law enforcement point of view and uncovers what has sown the seeds of violence. Timely and provocative, The Black and The Blue sheds light on what truly goes on behind the blue line.

A groundbreaking and surprising look at contemporary censorship in China As authoritarian governments around the world develop sophisticated technologies for controlling information, many observers have predicted that these controls would be ineffective because they are easily thwarted and evaded by savvy Internet users. In Censored, Margaret Roberts demonstrates that even censorship that is easy to circumvent can still be enormously effective. Taking advantage of digital data harvested from the Chinese Internet and leaks from China's Propaganda Department, this important book sheds light on how and when censorship influences the Chinese public. Roberts finds that much of censorship in China works not by making information impossible to access but by requiring those seeking information to spend extra time and money for access. By inconveniencing users, censorship diverts the attention of citizens and powerfully shapes the spread of information. When Internet users notice blatant censorship, they are willing to compensate for better access. But subtler censorship, such as burying search results or introducing distracting information on the web, is more effective because users are less aware of it. Roberts challenges the conventional wisdom that online censorship is undermined when it is incomplete and shows instead how censorship's porous nature is used strategically to divide the public. Drawing parallels between censorship in China and the way information is manipulated in the United States and other democracies, Roberts reveals how Internet users are susceptible to control even in the most open societies. Demonstrating how censorship travels across countries and technologies, Censored gives an unprecedented view of how governments encroach on the media consumption of citizens.

The NRA steadfastly maintains that the 30,000 gun-related deaths and 300,000 assaults with firearms in the United States every year are a small price to pay to guarantee freedom. As former NRA President Charlton Heston put it, "freedom isn't free."

And when gun enthusiasts talk about Constitutional liberties guaranteed by the Second Amendment, they are referring to freedom in a general sense, but they also have something more specific in mind---freedom from government oppression. They argue that the only way to keep federal authority in check is to arm individual citizens who can, if necessary, defend themselves from an aggressive government.

In the past decade, this view of the proper relationship between government and individual rights and the insistence on a role for private violence in a democracy has been co-opted by the conservative movement. As a result, it has spread beyond extreme "militia" groups to influence state and national policy.

In "Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea," Josh Horwitz and Casey Anderson reveal that the proponents of this view base their argument on a deliberate misreading of history. The Insurrectionist myth has been forged by twisting the facts of the American Revolution and the founding of the United States, the denial of civil rights to African-Americans after the Civil War, and the rise of the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler. Here, Horwitz and Anderson set the record straight. Then, challenging the proposition that more guns equal more freedom, they expose Insurrectionism---not government oppression---as the true threat to freedom in the U.S. today.

Joshua Horwitz received a law degree from George Washington University and is currently a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence. He has spent nearly two decades working on gun violence prevention issues. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Casey Anderson holds a law degree from Georgetown University and is currently a lawyer in private practice in Washington, D.C. He has served in senior staff positions with the U.S. Congress, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and Americans for Gun Safety. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.

From the million reader Substack phenomenon comes a vital narrative that explains how America, once a beacon of democracy, now teeters on the brink of autocracy - and how we can turn back.

In Democracy Awakening, American historian Heather Cox Richardson examines how, over the decades, an elite minority have made war on American ideals. By weaponising language and promoting false history, they are leading Americans into authoritarianism and creating a disaffected population.

Many books tell us what has happened over the last five years. In Democracy Awakening, Richardson wrangles America's meandering and confusing news feed into a coherent story to explain how America got to this perilous point, what we should pay attention to, and what the future of democracy holds.

A myth-dispelling, comprehensive guide to the Chinese economy and its path to ascendancy.

China's economy has been booming for decades now. A formidable and emerging power on the world stage, the China that most Americans picture is only a rough sketch, based on American news coverage, policy, and ways of understanding.

Enter Keyu Jin: a world-renowned economist who was born in China, educated in the U.S., and is now a tenured professor at the London School of Economics. A person fluent in both Eastern and Western cultures, and a voice of the new generation of Chinese who represent a radical break from the past, Jin is uniquely poised to explain how China became the most successful economic story of our time, as it has shifted from primarily state-owned enterprise to an economy that is thriving in entrepreneurship, and participation in the global economy.

China’s economic realm is colorful and lively, filled with paradoxes and conundrums, and Jin believes that by understanding the Chinese model, the people, the culture and history in its true perspective, one can reconcile what may appear to be contradictions to the Western eye.

What follows is an illuminating account of a burgeoning world power, its past, and its potential future.

In these lyrical and powerful essays, Thomas Glave draws on his experiences as a politically committed, gay Jamaican American to deliver a condemnation of the prejudices, hatreds, and inhumanities that persist in the United States and elsewhere. Exposing the hypocrisies of liberal multiculturalism, Glave offers instead a politics of heterogeneity in which difference informs the theory and practice of democracy. At the same time, he experiments with language to provide a model of creative writing as a tool for social change. From the death of black gay poet Essex Hemphill to the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib, Glave puts forth an ethical understanding of human rights to make vital connections across nations, races, genders, and sexualities.   Thomas Glave is assistant professor of English at SUNY Binghamton. He is author of Whose Song? and Other Stories.

This book analyzes the practice of Russia honoring her legal obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR): to secure to everyone within its jurisdiction the rights and freedoms defined in the Convention (Article 1 of the ECHR). The study comes to the conclusion that the impact of the ECHR on the Russian legal system, in terms of its implementation by domestic courts, is unsatisfactory. The jurisprudence of the Supreme Court and Supreme Arbitration Court is an attempt to demonstrate to the Council of Europe that the ECHR is being applied, rather than to implement the ECHR. In contrast, the jurisprudence emerging from decisions of the Russian Federation's Constitutional Court and district courts indicates a better understanding of the spirit of the ECHR. Still, the rare instances in which domestic courts implemented the ECHR were, more often than not, prompted by applicants' arguments based on ECHR case-law, rather than by the courts. The book suggests methods of ensuring a more effective implementation of the ECHR's provisions within Russian national law. It develops recommendations on how to assess the Russian government's compliance with judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, and how to interpret explanations submitted by Russia to the Secretary General of the Council of Europe on her implementation of the ECHR.

This volume combines empirically oriented and theoretically grounded reflections upon various forms of LGBT activist engagement to examine how the notion of intersectionality enters the political context of contemporary Serbia and Croatia. By uncovering experiences of multiple oppression and voicing fear and frustration that accompany exclusionary practices, the contributions to this book seek to reinvigorate the critical potential of intersectionality, in order to generate the basis for wider political alliances and solidarities in the post-Yugoslav space. The authors, both activists and academics, challenge the systematic absence of discussions of (post-)Yugoslav LGBT activist initiatives in recent social science scholarship, and show how emancipatory politics of resistance can reshape what is possible to imagine as identity and community in post-war and post-socialist societies. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the areas of history and politics of Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav states, as well as to those working in the fields of political sociology, European studies, social movements, gay and lesbian studies, gender studies, and queer theory and activism.

The controversial anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks made headlines around the world when it released hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents in 2010. Allowed advance access, The New York Times sorted, searched, and analyzed these secret archives, placed them in context, and played a crucial role in breaking the WikiLeaks story.
Open Secrets is the essential collection of the Times's expert reporting and analysis, as well as the definitive chronicle of the documents' release and the controversy that ensued. An introduction by Times executive editor, Bill Keller, details the paper's cloak-and-dagger relationship with a difficult source. Extended profiles of Assange and Bradley Manning, the Army private suspected of being his source, offer keen insight into the main players. Collected news stories offer a broad and deep view into Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the messy challenges facing American power in Europe, Russia, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Also included are editorials by the Times, opinion columns by Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, and others, and original essays on what the fracas has revealed about American diplomacy and government security. Open Secrets also contains a fascinating selection of original cables and war logs, offering an unvarnished look at diplomacy in action.

A multivocal account of why Egypt's defeated revolution remains a watershed in the country's political history. Bread and Freedom offers a new account of Egypt's 2011 revolutionary mobilization, based on a documentary record hidden in plain sight-party manifestos, military communiques, open letters, constitutional contentions, protest slogans, parliamentary debates, and court decisions. A rich trove of political arguments, the sources reveal a range of actors vying over the fundamental question in politics: who holds ultimate political authority. The revolution's tangled events engaged competing claims to sovereignty made by insurgent forces and entrenched interests alike, a vital contest that was terminated by the 2013 military coup and its aftermath. Now a decade after the 2011 Arab uprisings, Mona El-Ghobashy rethinks how we study revolutions, looking past causes and consequences to train our sights on the collisions of revolutionary politics. She moves beyond the simple judgments that once celebrated Egypt's revolution as an awe-inspiring irruption of people power or now label it a tragic failure. Revisiting the revolutionary interregnum of 2011-2013, Bread and Freedom takes seriously the political conflicts that developed after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, an eventful thirty months when it was impossible to rule Egypt without the Egyptians.

A data-rich analysis of how the four inter-related crises of 2020 — the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic collapse and K-shaped recovery, the clashes over the legacy of racism and policing, and assaults on the legitimacy of democratic institutions (abetted by conspiracy theories) — shaped not only the 2020 election, but also the future of our democracy. The 2020 election cycle was one of the most tumultuous in the nation's history. Early in the cycle, a global pandemic hit the US, paralyzing much of the economy and raising a multitude of questions about how people would go about voting. Then, beginning in late spring, a series of police brutality cases set off a nationwide wave of protests and civil disturbances related to racial justice concerns. In the final phase, the president of the United States refused to accept the results and incited his followers to storm the US Capitol. How did all of these momentous events shape voters' opinions? And what impact did they have on the outcome? To answer these questions, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and her collaborators surveyed 9,000 Americans over the course of the year to determine how voters reacted to the events on the ground, the campaigns' attempts at persuasion, and the post-election chaos that followed Biden's victory. Generally, American voters saw the multitude of crises through the lens of their polarized partisan predispositions. But why? Jamieson and her co-authors first stress that America has multiple electorates, and they are exposed to different informational environments. The divergent messages they received shaped not only their vote choice, but also how they made sense of these crises. Interestingly, though, while many voters were locked in place by their partisan priors, a majority of those who ended up voting for either Biden or Trump were unsure of their choice and whether they would actually vote at some point during the year. What led to both the wavering in people's choices and the attitudes they eventually adopted were in large part due to the differing media environments enveloping them: the messages from the campaigns, from their family and friends, as well from those in mass and social media. But this is not a simple story of "echo chambers," where individuals are immersed in only one type of media — far from it. The distinct media environments in which these electorates experienced the election were in fact complex and varied, and the interaction between these different types of media was key. Indeed, most voters were subject to cross-cutting information pressures and not only one type of partisan source. This book's focus on the ebb and flow of the campaign over time and the centrality of wavering voters makes this an authoritative and essential account of one of the most momentous American elections ever.

On 18th May 1980, student activists gathered in the South Korean city of Gwangju to protest the coup d'etat and martial law government of General Chun Doo-hwan. The security forces responded with unmitigated violence, and over the next ten days hundreds of students, activists and citizens were arrested, tortured and murdered. The events of the uprising shaped over a decade of resistance to the repressive South Korean regime, and paved the way for the country's democratisation in the 1990s. The subject of right-wing conspiracy and controversy in South Korea, the texts of Gwangju Uprising survived in underground circulation and were recently republished. This fresh translation by Slin Jung of the original text, compiled from eye-witness testimonies, forms a gripping and full account of both the events of the uprising and the political situation which preceded and followed the violence of those days. The edition contains a preface by Hwang Sok-yong, material which situates the uprising in its longer-term local and international context. The resulting volume is an unrivalled account of the movement for democracy and freedom in South Korea in the tumultuous period of the 1980s dictatorship. A vital collection for those interested in East Asian contemporary history and the global struggle for democracy.