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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > General
ContentsWho will control Iraq's Oil? Ken Coates - EditorialAntonia Juhasz - Oil and the Bush Agenda Alexis Lykiard - Defining Terms Paul Rogers - Tony Blair's Long War Mairead Corrigan Maguire - Eliminate Nuclear Weapons Mikhail Gorbachev - We Still Need Disarmament Robert Fisk - Armenia: The First Holocaust
Since 1954, a discrete and select group of wealthy and powerful individuals have attended a private, yearly conference to discuss matters of their choosing. This group represents European and North American elites, as well as new talent and rising stars, from the worlds of politics, business, media, academia, the military and even royalty, and has included household names such as Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger and even Prince Philip. In recent years their number have featured David Cameron, Tony Blair, Angela Merkel, Bill Clinton and David Rockefeller. These are 'the Bilderbergers', named after the hotel where their secret gatherings were first hosted. What is their purpose, why do they meet, and what do they want? Investigative writer Gerhard Wisnewski explores the numerous claims of conspiracy that swirl around the group, revealing names of participants, their agendas and their goals. The scene opens in the sun-kissed seaside resort of Vouliagmeni, Greece, where Wisnewski attempts to observe and report on a Bilderberg conference. He soon attracts aggressive attention from police and undercover security, and it is made abundantly clear he is not welcome. From this rude introduction, Wisnewski works backwards to the founding of the Bilderbergers in 1954 by a shadowy Jesuit with secret service allegiances. Examining records and hidden reports, Wisnewski uncovers the true history of the organization, the alliances among key individuals and their common interests. Are the Bilderbergers puppet-masters, pulling strings behind the scenes? Are plans afoot to create a global government and a new political system? To what extent do they represent a clandestine super-government? This book offers a unique view into the workings of power, and the secret methods of those who seek to govern and control behind the scenes.
Understanding the presidency of the United States requires taking seriously the role that individuals play in history, but at the same time also taking seriously the realization that individual presidents are bound by legal and institutional structures as well as by cultural and economic forces often beyond their control. This is why the task of this book is to characterize the modern American presidency from a variety of academic disciplines such as history, political science and cultural studies as well as from different theoretical approaches. The essays collected in this volume grew out of conference papers held at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA), which was held in Heidelberg between May 15 and 18, 2008. Many essays are deliberately interpretive, some offer assessments of individual presidents and of particular events, others are more contextual and focus on presidential performance, on presidential rhetoric or on representations of the presidency in fiction, film and drama.
We fear that the growing threat of violent attack, whether from terrorism or other sources, has upset the balance between existential concepts of political power, which emphasize security, and traditional notions of constitutional limits meant to protect civil liberties. We worry that constitutional states cannot, during a time of war, terror, and extreme crisis, maintain legality and preserve civil rights and freedoms. David W. Bates allays these concerns by revisiting the theoretical origins of the modern constitutional state, which, he argues, recognized and made room for tensions among law, war, and the social order. We traditionally associate the Enlightenment with the taming of absolutist sovereign power through the establishment of a legal state based on the rights of individuals. In his critical rereading, Bates shows instead that Enlightenment thinkers conceived of political autonomy in a systematic, theoretical way. Focusing on the nature of foundational violence, war, and existential crises, eighteenth-century thinkers understood law and constitutional order not as a constraint on political power but as the logical implication of that primordial force. Returning to the origin stories that informed the beginnings of political community, Bates reclaims the idea of law, warfare, and the social order as intertwining elements subject to complex historical development. Following an analysis of seminal works by seventeenth-century natural-law theorists, Bates reviews the major canonical thinkers of constitutional theory (Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau) from the perspective of existential security and sovereign power. Countering Carl Schmitt's influential notion of the autonomy of the political, Bates demonstrates that Enlightenment thinkers understood the autonomous political sphere as a space of law protecting individuals according to their political status, not as mere members of a historically contingent social order.
Since 1898, the United States and the United Nations have deployed military force more than three dozen times in attempts to rebuild failed states. Currently there are more state-building campaigns in progress than at any time in the past century including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Sudan, Liberia, Cote d Ivoire, and Lebanon and the number of candidate nations for such campaigns in the future is substantial. Even with a broad definition of success, earlier campaigns failed more than half the time. In this book, Paul D. Miller brings his decade in the U.S. military, intelligence community, and policy worlds to bear on the question of what causes armed, international state-building campaigns by liberal powers to succeed or fail. The United States successfully rebuilt the West German and Japanese states after World War II but failed to build a functioning state in South Vietnam. After the Cold War the United Nations oversaw relatively successful campaigns to restore order, hold elections, and organize post-conflict reconstruction in Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua, and elsewhere, but those successes were overshadowed by catastrophes in Angola, Liberia, and Somalia. The recent effort in Iraq and the ongoing one in Afghanistan where Miller had firsthand military, intelligence, and policymaking experience are yielding mixed results, despite the high levels of resources dedicated and the long duration of the missions there. Miller outlines different types of state failure, analyzes various levels of intervention that liberal states have tried in the state-building process, and distinguishes among the various failures and successes those efforts have provoked."
This book introduces students to the dynamic and complex enterprise that is homeland security. Using a broad lens, the authors explore key operational and content areas, as well as the practices and policies that are part of an effective homeland security program. With original essays from academics and practitioners, the book encapsulates the breadth of homeland security as it exists today. Topical coverage includes: administration, intelligence, critical infrastructure protection, emergency management, terrorism and counterterrorism, law and policy, technology and systems, strategic planning, strategic communication, civil-military affairs, private sector involvement, environmental security, and public health. Accessible, engaging, and comprehensive, this is an essential resource for courses on homeland security.
In Mobilizing Restraint, Emmanuel Teitelbaum argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, democracies are better at managing industrial conflict than authoritarian regimes. This is because democracies have two unique tools at their disposal for managing worker protest: mutually beneficial union-party ties and worker rights. By contrast, authoritarian governments have tended to repress unions and to sever mutually beneficial ties to organized labor. Many of the countries that fall between these two extremes from those that have only the trappings of democracy to those that have imperfectly implemented democratic reforms exert control over labor in the absence of overt repression but without the robust organizational and institutional capacity enjoyed by full-fledged democracies. Based on the recent history of industrial conflict and industrial peace in South Asia, Teitelbaum argues that the political exclusion and repression of organized labor commonly witnessed in authoritarian and hybrid regimes has extremely deleterious effects on labor relations and ultimately economic growth. To test his arguments, Teitelbaum draws on an array of data, including his original qualitative interviews and survey evidence from Sri Lanka and three Indian states Kerala, Maharashtra, and West Bengal. He also analyzes panel data from fifteen Indian states to evaluate the relationship between political competition and worker protest and to study the effects of protective labor legislation on economic performance. In Teitelbaum's view, countries must undergo further political liberalization before they are able to replicate the success of the sophisticated types of growth-enhancing management of industrial protest seen throughout many parts of South Asia."
In Mobilizing Restraint, Emmanuel Teitelbaum argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, democracies are better at managing industrial conflict than authoritarian regimes. This is because democracies have two unique tools at their disposal for managing worker protest: mutually beneficial union-party ties and worker rights. By contrast, authoritarian governments have tended to repress unions and to sever mutually beneficial ties to organized labor. Many of the countries that fall between these two extremes from those that have only the trappings of democracy to those that have imperfectly implemented democratic reforms exert control over labor in the absence of overt repression but without the robust organizational and institutional capacity enjoyed by full-fledged democracies. Based on the recent history of industrial conflict and industrial peace in South Asia, Teitelbaum argues that the political exclusion and repression of organized labor commonly witnessed in authoritarian and hybrid regimes has extremely deleterious effects on labor relations and ultimately economic growth. To test his arguments, Teitelbaum draws on an array of data, including his original qualitative interviews and survey evidence from Sri Lanka and three Indian states Kerala, Maharashtra, and West Bengal. He also analyzes panel data from fifteen Indian states to evaluate the relationship between political competition and worker protest and to study the effects of protective labor legislation on economic performance. In Teitelbaum's view, countries must undergo further political liberalization before they are able to replicate the success of the sophisticated types of growth-enhancing management of industrial protest seen throughout many parts of South Asia."
The US government spends billions of dollars every year to reduce
uncertainty: to monitor and forecast everything from the weather to
the spread of disease. In other words, we spend a lot of money to
anticipate problems, identify opportunities, and avoid mistakes. A
substantial portion of what we spend--over $50 billion a year--goes
to the US Intelligence Community.
This clandestine history of Operation Ajax to overthrow the Prime Minister of Iran was written for the US Central Intelligence Agency in March 1954 by Dr. Donald N. Wilber. It gives a unique insight into the extent to which the CIA and its British ally went in pursuit of their aim to remove Iran's elected head of government in 1952-53. It also includes many interesting parallels with contemporary developments in the Middle East. Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq was Prime Minister of Iran for just over two years, from April 1951 to August 1953, when he was removed from power in a complex plot prepared by the British and US intelligence agencies. Shortly after coming to office, Mossadeq enforced the Oil Nationalisation Act, which involved the expropriation of Anglo Iranian Oil Company's assets. In response, the British foreign secretary, Herbert Morrison, announced that the Mossadeq government would not be allowed to export any oil produced in the formerly British-controlled refinery at Abadan. In October 1952, Mossadeq declared Britain 'an enemy', and cut all diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom. In November and December of that year, British intelligence officials suggested to American intelligence that he should be ousted. Near the end of April 1953, Donald N. Wilber, covert consultant to Near East and Africa Division of the CIA, was selected by the Division to go to Nicosia, and in close collaboration with the SIS (the British Secret Intelligence Service), draw up a plan for the overthrow of Mossadeq...
Since at least the Middle Ages, the laws of war have distinguished between combatants and civilians under an injunction now formally known as the principle of distinction. The principle of distinction is invoked in contemporary conflicts as if there were an unmistakable and sure distinction to be made between combatant and civilian. As is so brutally evident in armed conflicts, it is precisely the distinction between civilian and combatant, upon which the protection of civilians is founded, cannot be taken as self-evident or stable. Helen M. Kinsella documents that the history of international humanitarian law itself admits the difficulty of such a distinction. In The Image Before the Weapon, Kinsella explores the evolution of the concept of the civilian and how it has been applied in warfare. A series of discourses including gender, innocence, and civilization have shaped the legal, military, and historical understandings of the civilian and she documents how these discourses converge at particular junctures to demarcate the difference between civilian and combatant. Engaging with works on the law of war from the earliest thinkers in the Western tradition, including St. Thomas Aquinas and Christine de Pisan, to contemporary figures such as James Turner Johnson and Michael Walzer, Kinsella identifies the foundational ambiguities and inconsistencies in the principle of distinction, as well as the significant role played by Christian concepts of mercy and charity. She then turns to the definition and treatment of civilians in specific armed conflicts: the American Civil War and the U.S.-Indian Wars of the nineteenth century, and the civil wars of Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s. Finally, she analyzes the two modern treaties most influential for the principle of distinction: the 1949 IV Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War and the 1977 Protocols Additional to the 1949 Conventions, which for the first time formally defined the civilian within international law. She shows how the experiences of the two world wars, but particularly World War II, and the Algerian war of independence affected these subsequent codifications of the laws of war. As recognition grows that compliance with the principle of distinction to limit violence against civilians depends on a firmer grasp of its legal, political, and historical evolution, The Image before the Weapon is a timely intervention in debates about how best to protect civilian populations."
Since the end of the Cold War, transnational non-state forces have
been a major source of global instability, with many ominous and
disruptive flows of people, goods, and services moving readily
across international boundaries. And because these activities are
so multifaceted and so intertwined within the fabric of society,
they remain largely invisible until the intrusion is well-advanced
and difficult to reverse. Thus, the threat posed by transnational
organized crime ultimately undermines the "total security" of
countries--including the economic, cultural, and political
dimensions--and now presents an international security challenge of
staggering proportions.
No topic is more polarizing than guns and gun control. From a gun
culture that took root early in American history to the mass
shootings that repeatedly bring the public discussion of gun
control to a fever pitch, the topic has preoccupied citizens,
public officials, and special interest groups for decades. What Everyone Needs to Know(r) is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
Over sixty percent of all infectious human diseases, including tuberculosis, influenza, cholera, and hundreds more, are shared with other vertebrate animals. Arresting Contagion "tells the story of how early efforts to combat livestock infections turned the United States from a disease-prone nation into a world leader in controlling communicable diseases. Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode show that many innovations devised in the fight against animal diseases, ranging from border control and food inspection to drug regulations and the creation of federal research labs, provided the foundation for modern food safety programs and remain at the heart of U.S. public health policy. America s first concerted effort to control livestock diseases dates to the founding of the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) in 1884. Because the BAI represented a milestone in federal regulation of commerce and industry, the agency encountered major jurisdictional and constitutional obstacles. Nevertheless, it proved effective in halting the spread of diseases, counting among its early breakthroughs the discovery of Salmonella "and advances in the understanding of vector-borne diseases. By the 1940s, government policies had eliminated several major animal diseases, saving hundreds of thousands of lives and establishing a model for eradication that would be used around the world. Although scientific advances played a key role, government interventions did as well. Today, a dominant economic ideology frowns on government regulation of the economy, but the authors argue that in this case it was an essential force for good."
This book explores different forms of mediated offence in the context of Trump's America, Brexit Britain, and the rise of far-right movements across the globe. In this political landscape, the so-called 'right to offend' is often seen as a legitimate weapon against a 'political correctness gone mad' that stifles 'free speech'. Against the backdrop of these current developments, this book aims to generate a productive dialogue among scholars working in a variety of intellectual disciplines, geographical locations and methodological traditions. The contributors share a concern about the complex and ambiguous nature of offence as well as about the different ways in which this so-called 'negative affect' comes to matter in our everyday and socio-political lives. Through a series of instructive case studies of recent media provocations, the authors illustrate how being offended is more than an individual feeling and is, instead, closely tied to political structures and power relations.
How did the Shah of Iran become a modern despot? In 1953, Iranian monarch Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi emerged victorious from a power struggle with his prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, thanks to a coup masterminded by Britain and the United States. Mosaddeq believed the Shah should reign not rule, but the Shah was determined that no one would make him a mere symbol. In this meticulous political history, Ali Rahnema details Iran’s slow transition from constitutional to despotic monarchy. He examines the tug of war between the Shah, his political opposition, a nation in search of greater liberty, and successive US administrations with their changing priorities. He shows how the Shah gradually assumed control over the legislature, the judiciary, the executive, and the media, and clamped down on his opponents’ activities. By 1968, the Shah’s turn to despotism was complete. The consequences would be far-reaching.
In a striking departure from conventional treatments of the Greek Civil War and its effects on the people of Greece, Dangerous Citizens begins by placing it within a larger historical context beginning in 1929 when the Greek state set up numerous exile and rehabilitation camps on the Greek archipelago, and extending up until 2004 with the famous trial of the Revolutionary Organization 17 November. Using ethnographic interviews, archival material, unpublished personal narratives, and memoirs of political prisoners and dissidents, Dangerous Citizens examines the various tortured microhistories that have created the modern Greek citizen as a fraught political subject. Returning to ethnographic terrain that is intimately familiar to PanourgiA, she analyzes the difficulties of conducting ethnographic research on a subject matter that not only spans several decades but which has also now become historical. Dangerous Citizens also analyzes how a liberal state (Greece) engaged in a process of excision of an increasingly large segment of its population as dangerous to the nation leaving a fundamental scar that is still visible. Through detailed ethnographic work, PanourgiA shows that the past is not a space of comfort, and what people remember as the truth is deeply instructive of how people manage and negotiate the past without being mendacious.Between 1929 and 1974 tens of thousands of dissidents were imprisoned and tortured in concentration and rehabilitation camps. PanourgiA's anthropological focus in this book is on two particular camps that have been ignored in the scholarly literature: Al Dabaa (in Egypt) and YAros (in Greece). In Al Dabaa, Greek men from Athens were exiled betweenJanuary and June 1945. These men ranged in age from 16 to 60 and had either participated in the Resistance against the Germans during the Second World War as members of the leftist army ELAS, or were members of Athens-based ELAS Youth. They were arrested and exiled by the British Occupation Forces after the Germans retreated (in October 1944). YAros is the second camp PanourgiA focuses on, used as a place of imprisonment, first between 1947-1963, and again during the dictatorship of 1967-1974. By using a widened historical frame PanourgiA demonstrates that the effects of the Greek Civil War are palpable in the everyday lives of Greek citizens even today.
No country can rival the sheer diversity of intelligence organizations that Germany has experienced over the past 300 years. Given its pivotal geographical and political position in Europe, Germany was a magnet for foreign intelligence operatives, especially during the Cold War. As a result of this, it is no wonder that during certain periods of history Germany was probably busier spying on its own citizens than on its enemies. Because of the Gestapo and the SS of Nazi Germany to the Stasi of the German Democratic Republic, the fear of domestic abuse by security agencies with police powers runs far deeper in German society than elsewhere in the West. The Historical Dictionary of German Intelligence presents the turbulent history of German intelligence through a chronology, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the agencies and agents, the operations and equipment, the tradecraft and jargon, and many of the countries involved. No military reference collection is complete without it.
Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, world experts on the study of terror and security, propose a theory of violence that contextualizes not only recent acts of terror but also instances of terrorism that stretch back centuries. Beginning with ancient Palestine and its encounters with Jewish terrorism, the authors analyze the social, political, and cultural factors that sponsor extreme violence, proving religious terrorism is not the fault of one faith, but flourishes within any counterculture that adheres to a totalistic ideology. When a totalistic community perceives an external threat, the connectivity of the group and the rhetoric of its leaders bolster the collective mindset of members, who respond with violence. In ancient times, the Jewish "sicarii" of Judea carried out stealth assassinations against their Roman occupiers. In the mid-twentieth century, to facilitate their independence, Jewish groups committed acts of terror against British soldiers and the Arab population in Palestine. More recently, Yigal Amir, a member of a Jewish terrorist cell, assassinated Yitzhak Rabin to express his opposition to the Oslo Peace Accords. Conducting interviews with former Jewish terrorists, political and spiritual leaders, and law-enforcement officials, and culling information from rare documents and surveys of terrorist networks, Pedahzur and Perliger construct an extensive portrait of terrorist aggression, while also describing the conditions behind the modern rise of zealotry.
Of the sixty-nine professors fired nationwide for political reasons
during the McCarthy Era, nearly half were from the University of
California. A small band of men and women at California's Berkeley
and Los Angeles campuses defied the stranglehold of McCarthyism in
a refusal to sign the non-communist loyalty oath required by the
institution. While college professors across the nation meekly
acquiesced to non-communist oaths in order to keep their jobs, this
group of "nonsigners" resisted in defense of free speech.
The use of secret police, security agencies and informers to spy on, disrupt and undermine opposition to the dominant political and economic order has a long history. This book reflects on the surveillance, harassment and infiltration that pervades the lives of activists, organisations and movements that are labelled as 'threats to national security'. Activists and scholars from the UK, South Africa, Canada, the US, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand expose disturbing stories of political policing to question what lies beneath state surveillance. Problematising the social amnesia that exists within progressive political networks and supposed liberal democracies, Activists and the Surveillance State shows that ultimately, movements can learn from their own repression, developing a critical and complex understanding of the nature of states, capital and democracy today that can inform the struggles of tomorrow.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Providence, Rhode Island, an early industrial center, became a magnet for Catholic immigrants seeking jobs. The city created as a haven for Protestant dissenters was transformed by the arrival of Italian, Irish, and French-Canadian workers. By 1905, more than half of its population was Catholic Rhode Island was the first state in the nation to have a Catholic majority. Civic leaders, for whom Protestantism was an essential component of American identity, systematically sought to exclude the city's Catholic immigrants from participation in public life, most flagrantly by restricting voting rights. Through her account of the newcomers' fight for political inclusion, Evelyn Savidge Sterne offers a fresh perspective on the nationwide struggle to define American identity at the turn of the twentieth century.In a departure from standard histories of immigrants and workers in the United States, Ballots and Bibles views religion as a critical tool for new Americans seeking to influence public affairs. In Providence, this book demonstrates, Catholics used their parishes as political organizing spaces. Here they learned to be speakers and leaders, eventually orchestrating a successful response to Rhode Island's Americanization campaigns and claiming full membership in the nation. The Catholic Church must, Sterne concludes, be considered as powerful an engine for ethnic working-class activism from the 1880s until the 1930s as the labor union or the political machine." |
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