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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > General
Since ancient times the exercise of individual freedoms has been inseparable from the expansion of the market, driven by the search for profit. This force, namely capitalism, has stimulated human creativity and aggression in ways that have produced immense benefits. As capitalism has broadened its scope in the epoch of globalization, these benefits have become even greater. Human beings have been liberated to an even greater degree than hitherto from the tyranny of nature, from the control of others, from poverty and from war. The advances achieved by the globalization of capitalism have appeared all the more striking, when set against the failure of non-capitalist systems of economic organization. However, capitalist freedom is a two-edged sword. In an epoch of capitalist globalisation, its contradictions have intensified. They comprehensively threaten the natural environment. They have intensified global inequality within both rich and poor countries, and between the internationalised global power elite and the mass of citizens rooted within their respective nation. In this remarkable, expansive text, Peter Nolan explores the impact of the domineering economic phenomenon on our personal and social liberties.
In An introduction to political crime, Jeffrey Ian Ross provides the most comprehensive and contemporary analysis of political crime addressing both violent and nonviolent crimes committed by and against the state (e.g. political corruption, illegal domestic surveillance, and human rights violations) in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and other advanced industrialized democracies since the 1960s. Written by a respected social scientist, this book reviews appropriate theories of political crime and explains numerous definitional and conceptual issues, causes of political crimes, ways to control it, and effects of different types of political crime. Ross integrates new scholarship on state crime, and post 9/11 developments in both scholarship and current affairs and uses numerous examples to help readers understand the issues. The book is supported by a companion website, containing additional materials for both students and lecturers, which is available from the link above.
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.
Civil-Military Relations in Southeast Asia reviews the historical origins, contemporary patterns, and emerging changes in civil-military relations in Southeast Asia from colonial times until today. It analyzes what types of military organizations emerged in the late colonial period and the impact of colonial legacies and the Japanese occupation in World War II on the formation of national armies and their role in processes of achieving independence. It analyzes the long term trajectories and recent changes of professional, revolutionary, praetorian and neo-patrimonial civil-military relations in the region. Finally, it analyzes military roles in state- and nation-building; political domination; revolutions and regime transitions; and military entrepreneurship.
Since ancient times the exercise of individual freedom has been inseparable from the expansion of the market, driven by the search for profit. This force, namely capitalism, has stimulated human aggression and creativity in ways that have produced immense benefits. As capitalism has broadened its scope in the epoch of globalisation, so these benefits have become even greater. Human beings have been liberated to an even greater degree than hitherto from the tyranny of nature, from control by others over their lives, from poverty, and from war. The advances achieved by the globalisation of capitalism have appeared all the more striking when set against the failure of non-capitalist systems of economic organisation. However, capitalist freedom is a two-edged sword.In the epoch of capitalist globalisation, its contradictions have intensified. It threatens to produce intense conflict over access to scarce resources.
In The Blue Book of Freedom,"" R. J. Rummel asserts that democracy is the solution to the scourges that face the world. A student of war and peace for more than forty years, he has learned that democratic freedom provides a solution to the evils that have plagued mankind. ""The Blue Book of Freedom"" presents the results of his work in everyday language. The main points are: * Freedom is the way to economic and human security. * Free people never have famine. * Where people are free, political violence is minimal. * The more freedom a people enjoy, the less likely their government will murder them. * The less free the people in any two nations are, the bloodier and more destructive any war between them will be. * To do away with famine, mass impoverishment, democide (the murder by a government of its own people), and war, promote freedom. * Democratic freedom is a method of nonviolence and an antidote to war.""
'This book will change the way you think about today's new media technologies' - Daniel J. Solove, author of ""The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age"". Whether you're purchasing groceries with your Safeway 'club card' or casting a vote on ""American Idol"", those data are being collected. From Amazon to iTunes, smart phones to GPS devices, Google to TiVo - all of these products and services give us an expansive sense of choice, access, and participation. Mark Andrejevic shows, however, that these continuously evolving new technologies have also been employed as modes of surveillance and control, most disturbingly exemplified by revelations about the NSA's secret monitoring of our phone calls, e-mails, and internet searches. Many contend that our proliferating interactive media empower individuals and democratize society. But, Andrejevic asks, at what cost? In ""iSpy"", he reveals that these and other highly advertised benefits are accompanied by hidden risks and potential threats that we all tend to ignore. His book, providing the first sustained critique of a concept that has been a talking point for twenty years, debunks the false promises of the digital revolution still touted by the popular media while seeking to rehabilitate, rather than simply write off, the potentially democratic uses of interactive media. Andrejevic opens up the world of digital rights management and the data trail each of us leaves - data about our locations, preferences, or life events that are already put to use in various economic, political, and social contexts. He notes that, while citizens are becoming increasingly transparent to private and public monitoring agencies, they themselves are unable to access the information gathered about them - or know whether it's even correct. (The watchmen, it seems, don't want to be watched.) He also considers the appropriation of consumer marketing for political campaigns in targeting voters and examines the implications of the Internet for the so-called War on Terror. In ""iSpy"", Andrejevic poses real challenges for our digital future. Amazingly detailed, compellingly readable, it warns that we need to temper our enthusiasm for these technologies with a better understanding of the threats they pose - to be able to distinguish between interactivity as centralized control and as collaborative participation.
Speaking of Freedom analyzes the development of ideas about freedom and politics in contemporary French thought from existentialism to deconstruction, in relation to several of the most prominent twentieth century liberation struggles. It describes the paradox of freedom-that freedom "kills itself" in both thought and practice: in the attempt to theorize the indeterminate, and in the revolution or emancipatory discourse that dies as it hurries towards its utopian conclusion, rejecting one system only to be enslaved by another. Both the philosophical wariness of the concept of liberation that one finds in Foucault and Derrida, and the desire for freedom from oppression expressed by anti-colonialists and feminists, are shown to be necessary for political practice. The book thus provides a cogent analysis of some of the most difficult concepts of contemporary continental philosophy, along with a profound sense of engagement with liberation struggles.
Social Movements cleverly translates the art of collective action and mobilization by excluded groups to facilitate understanding social change from below. Students learn the core components of social movements, the theory and methods used to study them, and the conditions under which they can lead to political and social transformation. This fully class-tested book is the first to be organized along the lines of the major subfields of social movement scholarship-framing, movement emergence, recruitment, and outcomes-to provide comprehensive coverage in a single core text. Features include: use of real data collected in the U.S. and around the world the emphasis on student learning outcomes case studies that bring social movements to life examples of cultural repertoires used by movements (flyers, pamphlets, event data on activist websites, illustrations by activist musicians) to mobilize a group topics such as immigrant rights, transnational movement for climate justice, Women's Marches, Fight for $15, Occupy Wall Street, Gun Violence, Black Lives Matter, and the mobilization of popular movements in the global South on issues of authoritarian rule and neoliberalism With this book, students deepen their understanding of movement dynamics, methods of investigation, and dominant theoretical perspectives, all while being challenged to consider their own place in relation to social movements.
The first edition of "The New Cold War" was published to great critical acclaim. Edward Lucas has established himself as a top expert in the field, appearing on numerous programs, including Lou Dobbs, MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, CNN, and NPR. Since "The""New Cold War" was first published in February 2008, Russia has become more authoritarian and corrupt, its institutions are weaker, and reforms have fizzled. In this revised and updated third edition, Lucas includes a new preface on the Crimean crisis, including analysis of the dismemberment of Ukraine, and a look at the devastating effects it may have from bloodshed to economic losses. Lucas reveals the asymmetrical relationship between Russia and the West, a result of the fact that Russia is prepared to use armed force whenever necessary, while the West is not. Hard-hitting and powerful, "The New Cold War" is a sobering look at Russia's current aggression and what it means for the world.
This study demonstrates that Syria's role in the Middle East has
been, since 1974, an unabated terrorist war against all attempts to
resolve peacefully the Arab-Israeli conflict. Marius Deeb provides
evidence that Syria's role in Lebanon, since 1975, has been to
perpetuate the conflict among the various Lebanese communities in
order to keep its domination of Lebanon
Australia is less secure than it has ever been, and the greatest threat comes from our elected government. Political leaders increasingly promote secrecy, ignorance and fear to introduce new laws that undermine individual liberties and safety. It is a criminal offence to receive or publish a wide range of information unrelated to national security. Our defence weapons are so dependent on US technical support that Australia couldn't defend itself without US involvement. And comprehensive databases on citizens' digital fingerprints and facial recognition characteristics are being amassed by the Commonwealth. Conspiracy? Paranoia? Read Secret: The Making of Australia's Security State and you decide. Fresh archival material and revealing details of conversations between former CIA, US State Department and Australian officials will make you reconsider the world around you.
Throughout history and across cultures, the spy chief has been a leader of the state security apparatus and an essential adviser to heads of state. In democracies, the spy chief has become a public figure, and intelligence activities have been brought under the rule of law. In authoritarian regimes, however, the spy chief was and remains a frightening and opaque figure who exercises secret influence abroad and engages in repression at home. This second volume of Spy Chiefs goes beyond the commonly studied spy chiefs of the United States and the United Kingdom to examine leaders from Renaissance Venice to the Soviet Union, Germany, India, Egypt, and Lebanon in the twentieth century. It provides a close-up look at intelligence leaders, good and bad, in the different political contexts of the regimes they served. The contributors to the volume try to answer the following questions: how do intelligence leaders operate in these different national, institutional and historical contexts? What role have they played in the conduct of domestic affairs and international relations? How much power have they possessed? How have they led their agencies and what qualities make an effective intelligence leader? How has their role differed according to the political character of the regime they have served? The profiles in this book range from some of the most notorious figures in modern history, such as Feliks Dzerzhinsky and Erich Mielke, to spy chiefs in democratic West Germany and India.
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."
Disputing the notion of a 'miracle' transition in South Africa, the author argues that the new South Africa had to happen as it did because of the socio-historical make-up of the country and the leading players involved.He identifies and explains some of the turning points at which critical choices were made by local and international forces. Alexander, a former leading political activist and commentator who spent time on Robben Island, goes beyond what he calls 'the effervescence of parliamentary debate and grandstanding' and explores a range of issues in post-apartheid South Africa including national identity and the rainbow nation, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the role and status of language, showing the volatility, the tentativeness, and the fluidity of the evolving situation. Neville Alexander teaches at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town
The popular education and adult literacy movements in Chile have historically represented competing paths toward a literate society: one born and nurtured through bitter nineteenth-century labor struggles, the other a compensatory effort by the modern state to limit the political potential of literacy. Robert Austin's book explores the contest between the state and popular education in three paradigmatic Latin American regimes: that of Eduardo Frei Montalva (Christian Democrat, 1964-70), Salvador Allende (Socialist, 1970-73) and Augusto Pinochet (Dictator, 1973-90). Robert Austin's engaging narrative captures the relationship between the Chilean state, formal and non-formal literacy, and popular education, from the demise of liberal capitalism to the consolidation of neoliberalism. This remarkable investigation of the dynamic link between the historical process, literacy, and pedagogy celebrates popular education's victory in securing the inclusion, and subsequent empowerment, of women and ethnic minorities. The State, Literacy, and Popular Education in Chile, 1964-1990 will be of great interest to political scientists, cultural historians, and scholars of education.
On 8 February 1971, Marxist revolutionaries attacked the gendarmerie outpost at the village of Siyahkal in Iran’s Gilan province. Barely two months later, the Iranian People’s Fada’i Guerrillas officially announced their existence and began a long, drawn-out urban guerrilla war against the Shah’s regime. In Call to Arms, Ali Rahnema provides a comprehensive history of the Fada’is, beginning by asking why so many of Iran’s best and brightest chose revolutionary Marxism in the face of absolutist rule. He traces how radicalised university students from different ideological backgrounds morphed into the Marxist Fada’is in 1971, and sheds light on their theory, practice and evolution. While the Fada’is failed to directly bring about the fall of the Shah, Rahnema shows they had a lasting impact on society and they ultimately saw their objective achieved.
Mexico's movement toward independence from Spain was a key episode
in the dissolution of the great Spanish Empire, and its
accompanying armed conflict arguably the first great war of
decolonization in the nineteenth century. This book argues that in
addition to being a war of national liberation, the struggle was
also an internal war pitting classes and ethnic groups against each
other, an intensely localized struggle by rural people, especially
Indians, for the preservation of their communities.
In this penetrating study, Mohd Aarif Rather tackles the problem of the Kashmir Valley, one of the most complex situations in international politics, from the perspective of human security. The Kashmir conflict involves disputed borders between two nuclear power, India and Pakistan, and a local population that has become increasingly alienated from Indian federal rule. Kashmir has also witnessed intense militarization, resulting in various security issues, problematized identities, and disputed demarcation of frontiers. Unlike previous studies of the Kashmir conflict, Mapping Human Security Challenges departs from conventional analyses of security issues. This study moves our understanding of Kashmir to a grassroots level, and assesses the challenges posed by intensive militarisation to the ability (or inability) to lead a life as one wishes. The paradigmatic militarisation prevailing in the valley of Kashmir allows for an examination of the numerous challenges demanded by human security. Unexplored security issues frequently identified in the world today are thus central to this book.
"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind
of the oppressed." Like all of Steve Biko's writings, those words
testify to the passion, courage, and keen insight that made him one
of the most powerful figures in South Africa's struggle against
apartheid. They also reflect his conviction that black people in
South Africa could not be liberated until they united to break
their chains of servitude, a key tenet of the Black Consciousness
movement that he helped found.
Nigeria's return to civilian rule in May 1999 has been marked by interstices of democratic gains and unprecedented levels of violence, tension, and insecurity. Challenging the State in Africa critically analyzes the emergence of the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) and its quest for self-determination in Africa's most populous country and largest multi-ethnic state. Drawing on a multi-disciplinary framework, the book opens up new vistas to the connections between the absence or limited notion of citizenship (rights) and political violence in Africa. It focuses on the notion of citizenship-deficit, and it offers a critical analysis of the ways in which the gap between alienated citizens and the Nigerian state widens social cleavages, fuels alienation, and politicizes identities. (Series: African Politics/Politiques Africaines - Vol. 4)
What is freedom? In this study, Thomas Dumm challenges the conventions that have governed discussions and debates concerning modern freedom by bringing the work of Michel Foucault into dialogue with contemporary liberal thought. While Foucault has been widely understood to have characterized the modern era as being opposed to the realization of freedom, Dumm shows how this characterization conflates FoucaultOs genealogy of discipline with his overall view of the practices of being free. Dumm demonstrates how FoucaultOs critical genealogy does not shrink from understanding the ways in which modern subjects are constrained and shaped by forces greater than themselves, but how it instead works through these constraints to provide, not simply a vision of liberation, but a joyous wisdom concerned with showing us, in his words, that we Oare much freer than we feel.O Both as an introduction to Foucault and as an intervention in liberal theory, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom is bound to change how we think about the limits and possibilities of freedom in late modernity.
This rich study examines the everyday politics of a rice farming village in central Luzon. Contending that the faction and patron-client relationships emphasized by conventional studies are but one part of Philippine political life, Kerkvliet offers a nuanced and fascinating portrait of political relationships among villagers. The world he portrays is complex and multifaceted: in a period of flux, relations of status and class shift as traditional roles give way to new social identities. The author demonstrates how disputes over land or controversies around wages lie at the heart of political life regardless of whether they manifest themselves in the usual political arenas. Kerkvliet shows how everyday politics illuminates contending beliefs about what is just and who has rights to particular resources. Furthermore, relationships between people in different class and status positions are far less harmonious than they might appear on the surface. Embedded in this contentious interaction are divergent ideas about how resources should be distributed the privileged emphasize values supported by capitalism, while the poor press rights to the satisfaction of basic needs and to human dignity. A comprehensive and masterful classic, Everyday Politics in the Philippines revises our notions of political life in the developing world. Now available again with a new preface, postscript, and updated bibliography, this updated edition will be welcomed by a broad range of social scientists."
As Junk Bond felon Michael Milken attempts to transform public education on the model of the HMO, he is hailed in the mainstream press as having "done more to help mankind than Mother Theresa." Even as BP Amoco, a notorious U.S. polluter, is charged with funding and arming paramilitaries in Colombia, it freely distributes science curricula that portrays itself as a loving protector of citizens from a dangerous and 'out of control' nature. These as well as many other examples abound as Professors Robin Truth Goodman and Kenneth J. Saltman take on the corporate educators, media monopolies, and oil companies in their new book Strange Love: How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market. Saltman and Goodman show how corporate-produced curricula, films, and corporate-promoted books often use depictions of family love, childhood innocence, and compassion in order to sell the public on policies that ironically put the profit of multinational corporations over the well-being of people. In doing so Goodman and Saltman reveal the extent to which globalization depends upon education and also show how battles over culture, language, and the control of information are matters of life, death, and democracy. |
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