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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > General
This edited volume places the body at the centre of critical thinking about war and its consequences. War is fundamentally embodied. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women. From steeled combatants to abject victims, war occupies innumerable bodies in a multitude of ways, profoundly shaping lives and ways of being human. Giving the body an analytic recognition that it warrants and has often been denied in conventional war studies, this book brings together new interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the numerous affective, sensory and embodied practices through which war lives and breeds. It focuses on how war is prepared, enacted and reproduced through embodied action, suffering and memory. As such, the book promotes new directions in theorising war and transformations in warfare, via an explicit focus on the body. This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of war studies, security studies, sociology, anthropology, military studies, politics and IR in general.
Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras are four Spanish speaking countries in Central America that possess uniformed military institutions. These four countries represent different approaches to reforms of civil-military relations, and embody varying degrees of success in both institutional democratization and the managing of security forces. In this book, Orlando J. Perez expertly examines the competing theories of civil-military relations in Central America to advance our understanding of the origins, consequences and persistence of militarism in Latin America. Divided into four parts, Perez begins by proposing a theoretical framework for analyzing civil-military relations, including an analysis of how U.S. foreign and military policy affects the establishment of stable civilian supremacy over the armed forces. Part Two examines the institutional and legal structures under which civil-military relations are carried out revealing in Part Three the reorientation of the missions and roles performed by the armed forces in each country. The concluding part analyzes the role beliefs of members of the military and public opinion about the armed forces in relation to other institutions. Combining both qualitative and quantitative data, Perez bridges the gap between structural and cultural analyses for a more comprehensive understanding of the links between micro and macro level factors that influence civil-military relations and democratic governance.
Human trafficking has moved from relative obscurity to a major area of research, policy and teaching over the past ten years. Research has sprung from criminology, public policy, women s and gender studies, sociology, anthropology, and law, but has been somewhat hindered by the failure of scholars to engage beyond their own disciplines and favoured methodologies. Recent research has begun to improve efforts to understand the causes of the problem, the experiences of victims, policy efforts, and their consequences in specific cultural and historical contexts. " Global Human Trafficking: Critical issues and contexts" foregrounds recent empirical work on human trafficking from an interdisciplinary, critical perspective. The collection includes classroom-friendly features, such as introductory chapters that provide essential background for understanding the trafficking literature, textboxes explaining key concepts, discussion questions for each chapter, and lists of additional resources, including films, websites, and additional readings for each chapter. The authors include both eminent and emerging scholars from around the world, drawn from law, anthropology, criminology, sociology, cultural studies, and political science and the book will be useful for undergraduate and graduate courses in these areas, as well as for scholars interested in trafficking."
Following the ICC intervention in 2005, northern Uganda has been at the heart of international justice debates. The emergent controversy, however, missed crucial aspects of Acholi realities: that the primary moral imperative in the wake of wrongdoing was not punishment but, instead, the restoration of social harmony. Drawing upon abundant fieldwork and in-depth interviews with almost 200 women, Holly Porter examines issues surrounding wrongdoing and justice, and sexual violence and rape, among the Acholi people in northern Uganda. This intricate exploration offers evidence of a more complicated and nuanced explanation of rape and its aftermath, suggesting a re-imagining of the meanings of post-atrocity justice, whilst acknowledging the role of sex, power and politics in all sexual experiences between coercion and consent. With its wide investigation of social life in northern Uganda, this provocative study offers vital analysis for those interested in sexual and gender violence, post-conflict reconstruction and human rights.
This collection brings together historians, political theorists and literary scholars to provide historical perspectives on the modern debate over freedom of speech, particularly the question of whether limitations might be necessary given religious pluralism and concerns about hate speech. It integrates religion into the history of free speech and rethinks what is sometimes regarded as a coherent tradition of more or less absolutist justifications for free expression. Contributors examine the aims and effectiveness of government policies, the sometimes contingent ways in which freedom of speech became a reality and a wide range of canonical and non-canonical texts in which contemporaries outlined their ideas and ideals. Overall, the book argues that while the period from 1500 to 1850 witnessed considerable change in terms of both ideas and practices, these were more or less distinct from those that characterise modern debates. -- .
Three to four dozen international and local organizations, up to one hundred thousand individuals, and millions of supporters are part of the phenomenon of Global Jihad. The Global Jihad Movement endeavors to name and differentiate these organizations and to explain their infrastructure, operational capabilities, and activities. It also analyzes their mutual and multi-lateral relations inside and outside the "jihadi framework." In essence, this is a "who's who" in the Global Jihad. The first section deals with ideology, focusing on the emergence of the Salafi and the Salafi-jihadi ideologies, which are still the most important factors behind the operational performance of Global Jihadi elements. The second section addresses the "affiliate groups" of al-Qaeda, such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and al-Qaeda in Iraq. This section focuses mainly on the groups that adopted al-Qaeda's Global Jihad strategy by incorporating Western targets in their vicinity of operations in their targeting policies. The next section discusses the different jihad arenas that have emerged over the last three decades, absorbing jihadi fighters from Islamic communities around the world. Finally, tThe last section examines the long process of radicalization, from regular and normative lifestyle patterns to the final jihadi stage-which in many cases involves martyrdom as suicide bombers in the name of radical Islam.
As an upbeat and peaceful uprising quickly and brutally descended into a zero-sum civil war, Syria has crumbled from a regional player into an arena in which a multitude of local and foreign actors compete. The volatile regional fault lines that run through Syria have ruptured during this conflict, and the course of events in this fragile yet strategically significant country will profoundly shape the future of the Levant.
Peace operations are increasingly on the front line in the international community's fight against organized crime; this book explores how, in some cases, peace operations and organized crime are clear enemies, while in others, they may become tacit allies. The threat posed by organized crime to international and human security has become a matter of considerable strategic concern for national and international decision-makers, so it is somewhat surprising how little thought has been devoted to addressing the complex relationship between organized crime and peace operations. This volume addresses this gap, questioning the emerging orthodoxy that portrays organized crime as an external threat to the liberal peace championed by western and allied states and delivered through peace operations. Based upon a series of case studies it concludes that organized crime is both a potential enemy and a potential ally of peace operations, and it argues for the need to distinguish between strategies to contain organized crime and strategies to transform the political economies in which it flourishes. The editors argue for the development of intelligent, transnational, and transitional law enforcement that can make the most of organized crime as a potential ally for transforming political economies, while at the same time containing the threat it presents as an enemy to building effective and responsible states. The book will be of great interest to students of peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, organised crime, Security Studies and IR in general.
What role did the courts play in the demise of Germany's first
democracy and Hitler's rise to power? Courtroom to Revolutionary
Stage challenges the orthodox interpretation of Weimar political
justice. Henning Grunwald argues that an exclusive focus on
reactionary judges and a preoccupation with number-crunching
verdicts has obscured precisely that aspect of trials most
fascinating to contemporary observers: their drama. Drawing on
untapped sources and material previously inaccessible in English,
Grunwald shows how an innovative group of party lawyers transformed
dry legal proceedings into spectacular ideological clashes.
Supported by powerful party legal offices (which have hitherto
escaped scholarly notice almost entirely), they developed a
sophisticated repertoire of techniques at the intersection of
criminal law, politics, and public relations.
A well-trained tracking dog can be the deciding factor that determines success in both criminal investigations and search-and-rescue operations. When the stakes are high, demanding the highest level of performance from your K9, you need training methods relied upon by police forces and SAR teams around the world. Dr. Resi Gerritsen and Ruud Haak show you how to train your dog in clean-scent tracking, a proven method that trains dogs to follow a particular scent on a track, while ignoring cross-tracks and other odors. In K9 Professional Tracking, you'll learn how to train a clean-scent tracking dog you can count on. You'll also learn to fully understand what your K9 is and is not capable of in the field. With the right knowledge and techniques, you'll be able to train tracking dogs to the highest professional standards.
After a year of trading colorful barbs with the American president and significant achievements in North Korea's decades-long nuclear and missile development programs, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared mission accomplished in November 2017. Though Kim's pronouncement appears premature, North Korea is on the verge of being able to strike the United States with nuclear weapons. South Korea has long been in the North Korean crosshairs but worries whether the United States would defend it if North Korea holds the American homeland at risk. The largely ceremonial summit between US president Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, and the unpredictability of both parties, has not quelled these concerns and leaves more questions than answers for the two sides' negotiators to work out. The Korean Peninsula's security situation is an intractable conflict, raising the question, "How did we get here?" In this book, former North Korea lead foreign service officer at the US embassy in Seoul Patrick McEachern unpacks the contentious and tangled relationship between the Koreas in an approachable question-and-answer format. While North Korea is famous for its militarism and nuclear program, South Korea is best known for its economic miracle, familiar to consumers as the producer of Samsung smartphones, Hyundai cars, and even K-pop music and K-beauty. Why have the two Koreas developed politically and economically in such radically different ways? What are the origins of a divided Korean Peninsula? Who rules the two Koreas? How have three generations of the authoritarian Kim dictatorship shaped North Korea? What is the history of North-South relations? Why does the North Korean government develop nuclear weapons? How do powers such as Japan, China, and Russia fit into the mix? What is it like to live in North and South Korea? This book tackles these broad topics and many more to explain what everyone needs to know about South and North Korea.
Vladimir Putin has dominated Russian politics since Boris Yeltsin relinquished the presidency in his favour in May 2000. He served two terms as president, before himself relinquishing the post to his prime minister, Dimitri Medvedev, only to return to presidential power for a third time in 2012. Putin’s rule, whether as president or prime minister, has been marked by a steady increase in domestic repression and international assertiveness. Despite this, there have been signs of liberal growth and Putin – and Russia – now faces a far from certain future. In Kremlin Winter, Robert Service, acclaimed biographer of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky and one of our finest historians of modern Russia, brings his deep understanding of that country to bear on the man who leads it. He reveals a premier who cannot take his supremacy for granted, yet is determined to impose his will not only on his closest associates but on society at large. It is a riveting insight into power politics as Russia faces a blizzard of difficulties both at home and abroad.
This collection investigates the sharpening conflict between the nation state and the internet through a multidisciplinary lens. It challenges the idea of an inherently global internet by examining its increasing territorial fragmentation and, conversely, the notion that for states online law and order is business as usual. Cyberborders based on national law are not just erected around China's online community. Cultural, political and economic forces, as reflected in national or regional norms, have also incentivised virtual borders in the West. The nation state is asserting itself. Yet, there are also signs of the receding role of the state in favour of corporations wielding influence through de-facto control over content and technology. This volume contributes to the online governance debate by joining ideas from law, politics and human geography to explore internet jurisdiction and its overlap with topics such as freedom of expression, free trade, democracy, identity and cartographic maps.
What if you could peer into the minds of an entire population? What if you could target the weakest with rumours that only they saw? In 2016, an obscure British military contractor turned the world upside down. Funded by a billionaire on a crusade to start his own far-right insurgency, Cambridge Analytica combined psychological research with private Facebook data to make an invisible weapon with the power to change what voters perceived as real. The firm was created to launch the then unknown Steve Bannon's ideological assault on America. But as it honed its dark arts in elections from Trinidad to Nigeria, 24-year-old research director Christopher Wylie began to see what he and his colleagues were unleashing. He had heard the disturbing visions of the investors. He saw what CEO Alexander Nix did behind closed doors. When Britain shocked the world by voting to leave the EU, Wylie realised it was time to expose his old associates. The political crime of the century had just taken place - the weapon had been tested - and nobody knew.
In a sweeping review of forty truth commissions, Priscilla Hayner delivers a definitive exploration of the global experience in official truth-seeking after widespread atrocities. When Unspeakable Truths was first published in 2001, it quickly became a classic, helping to define the field of truth commissions and the broader arena of transitional justice. This second edition is fully updated and expanded, covering twenty new commissions formed in the last ten years, analyzing new trends, and offering detailed charts that assess the impact of truth commissions and provide comparative information not previously available. Placing the increasing number of truth commissions within the broader expansion in transitional justice, Unspeakable Truths surveys key developments and new thinking in reparations, international justice, healing from trauma, and other areas. The book challenges many widely-held assumptions, based on hundreds of interviews and a sweeping review of the literature. This book will help to define how these issues are addressed in the future.
The complexity of the twenty-first century threat landscape contrasts markedly with the bilateral nuclear bargaining context envisioned by classical deterrence theory. Nuclear and conventional arsenals continue to develop alongside anti-satellite programs, autonomous robotics or drones, cyber operations, biotechnology, and other innovations barely imagined in the early nuclear age. The concept of cross-domain deterrence (CDD) emerged near the end of the George W. Bush administration as policymakers and commanders confronted emerging threats to vital military systems in space and cyberspace. The Pentagon now recognizes five operational environments or so-called domains (land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace), and CDD poses serious problems in practice. In Cross-Domain Deterrence, Erik Gartzke and Jon R. Lindsay assess the theoretical relevance of CDD for the field of International Relations. As a general concept, CDD posits that how actors choose to deter affects the quality of the deterrence they achieve. Contributors to this volume include senior and junior scholars and national security practitioners. Their chapters probe the analytical utility of CDD by examining how differences across, and combinations of, different military and non-military instruments can affect choices and outcomes in coercive policy in historical and contemporary cases.
Mass communication is used by governments to support their war efforts while media images are created or manipulated to inform, persuade or guide the consumers of those images. But this book looks beyond the obvious. The contributors examine historical and contemporary examples that reflect the role of the media or mass communication or both during wartime. The essays highlight the centrality of communication to the perpetuation and to the resolution of war, suggesting that the symbiotic relationship between communication and war is as important to understand as war itself.
Following the ICC intervention in 2005, northern Uganda has been at the heart of international justice debates. The emergent controversy, however, missed crucial aspects of Acholi realities: that the primary moral imperative in the wake of wrongdoing was not punishment but, instead, the restoration of social harmony. Drawing upon abundant fieldwork and in-depth interviews with almost 200 women, Holly Porter examines issues surrounding wrongdoing and justice, and sexual violence and rape, among the Acholi people in northern Uganda. This intricate exploration offers evidence of a more complicated and nuanced explanation of rape and its aftermath, suggesting a re-imagining of the meanings of post-atrocity justice, whilst acknowledging the role of sex, power and politics in all sexual experiences between coercion and consent. With its wide investigation of social life in northern Uganda, this provocative study offers vital analysis for those interested in sexual and gender violence, post-conflict reconstruction and human rights.
Biometric identification and registration systems are being proposed by governments and businesses across the world. Surprisingly they are under most rapid, and systematic, development in countries in Africa and Asia. In this groundbreaking book, Keith Breckenridge traces how the origins of the systems being developed in places like India, Mexico, Nigeria and Ghana can be found in a century-long history of biometric government in South Africa, with the South African experience of centralized fingerprint identification unparalleled in its chronological depth and demographic scope. He shows how empire, and particularly the triangular relationship between India, the Witwatersrand and Britain, established the special South African obsession with biometric government, and shaped the international politics that developed around it for the length of the twentieth century. He also examines the political effects of biometric registration systems, revealing their consequences for the basic workings of the institutions of democracy and authoritarianism.
Northern Ireland has entered what is arguably the key phase in its troubled political history -- truth recovery and dealing with the legacy of the past -- yet the void in knowledge and the lack of academic literature with regard to victims' rights is particularly striking. This book analyzes truth recovery as a fundamental aspect of the transition from political violence to peace, democracy and stability in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Kirk Simpson argues that it is essential for any process of truth recovery in Northern Ireland to provide the victims of political violence with the opportunity to express and articulate their narratives of suffering within the context of public dialogic processes. He outlines a unique and original model: that victims of political violence should be enabled to engage in meaningful truth recovery through a Habermasian process of public democratic deliberation and communication involving direct dialogue with the perpetrators of such violence. This process of 'communicative justice' is framed within Habermas' theory of communicative action and can help to ensure that legitimate truth recovery publicly acknowledges the trauma of victims and subjects perpetrator narratives of political violence to critical scrutiny and rational deconstruction. Crucially, the book aims to contribute to the empowerment of victims in Northern Ireland by stimulating constructive discussion and awareness of hitherto silenced narratives of the conflict. This difficult and unsettling interrogation and interpretation of the conflict from a comparatively 'unknown perspective' is central to the prospects for critically examining and mastering the past in Northern Ireland.
"Absorbing... Ambitious... Indispensable. A genuine gift to social movements everywhere." -Naomi Klein From protests around climate change and immigrant rights, to Occupy, the Arab Spring, and #BlackLivesMatter, a new generation is unleashing strategic nonviolent action to shape public debate and force political change. When mass movements erupt onto our television screens, the media consistently portrays them as being spontaneous and unpredictable. Yet, in this book, Mark and Paul Engler look at the hidden art behind such outbursts of protest, examining core principles that have been used to spark and guide moments of transformative unrest. With incisive insights from contemporary activists, as well as fresh revelations about the work of groundbreaking figures such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Gene Sharp, and Frances Fox Piven, the Englers show how people with few resources and little conventional influence are engineering the upheavals that are reshaping contemporary politics. Nonviolence is usually seen simply as a philosophy or moral code. This Is an Uprising shows how it can instead be deployed as a method of political conflict, disruption, and escalation. It argues that if we are always taken by surprise by dramatic outbreaks of revolt, we pass up the chance to truly understand how social transformation happens.
It is twenty-five years since the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda when in the course of three terrible months more than 1 million people were murdered. In the intervening years a pernicious campaign has been waged by the perpetrators to deny this crime, with attempts to falsify history and blame the victims for their fate. Facts are reversed, fake news promulgated, and phoney science given credence. Intent to Deceive tells the story of this campaign of genocide denial from its origins with those who planned the massacres. With unprecedented access to government archives including in Rwanda Linda Melvern explains how, from the moment the killers seized the power of the state, they determined to distort reality of events. Disinformation was an integral part of their genocidal conspiracy. The genocidaires and their supporters continue to peddle falsehoods. These masters of deceit have found new and receptive audiences, have fooled gullible journalists and unwary academics. With their seemingly sound research methods, the Rwandan genocidaires continue to pose a threat, especially to those who might not be aware of the true nature of their crime. The book is a testament to the survivors who still live the horrors of the past. Denial causes them the gravest offence and ensures that the crime continues. This is a call for justice that remains perpetually delayed.
Imagine being physically denied access to your office, business or livelihood. Imagine being refused entry to a shop or being told who you can or cannot sit with at a restaurant. Imagine being barred from a hospital room when you or your family member needs critical care. Unthinkable? Today, these scenarios and worse are happening in 'democracies' all over the world, and could be our collective future - orchestrated by AI, Big Tech and state-sponsored apps - all in the name of 'protecting' public health with vaccine passports. The stakes could not be higher. If you do not have a vaccine passport, you will be prevented from accessing basic services, from earning a living or travelling within your own country. Even if you do have one, you will be exposed to unprecedented levels of government and corporate surveillance, data mining and behavioural control. In Scanned, investigative journalist Nick Corbishley examines and exposes the lies and overreach that underpin the wholesale erosion of personal freedoms that is happening at an alarming rate. In clear language supported by rigorous research, Corbishley uncovers how the rollout of vaccine passports not only represents an unprecedented violation of privacy and bodily autonomy, but how it perpetuates the idea that a 'small' collective sacrifice will allow us to return to normality. If things continue on the current path, Corbishley makes clear, getting back to 'normal' is never happening. Put simply, instead of a return to normality, we will see the creation of a starkly different form of existence in which most of us will have virtually no agency over our own lives. Inside Scanned, you'll also find: The massive implications of a tech-enabled digital ID, social credit systems and biometric tracking How basic freedoms and privacy are being handed over to the state and private companies without our knowledge or consent How government programmes and increased surveillance will facilitate discrimination, segregation and stigmas for huge segments of the population Few people want to be seen as outliers, especially if it means feeling responsible or being blamed for the suffering and deaths of others. 'But there is a fundamental flaw in applying the "greater good" argument to vaccine passports,' Corbishley writes, 'because the passports themselves offer precious little in the way of potential good - and a huge amount in the way of potential harm.' This is not a liberal or conservative debate. This is not a vaccinated or unvaccinated debate. This is about freedom, global democracy and how much we are willing to give up. This is about deciding when it is time to say, 'enough!'
Police Ethics, Fourth Edition, provides an analysis of corruption in law enforcement organizations. The authors argue that the noble cause-a commitment to "doing something about bad people"-is a central "ends-based" police ethic. This fundamental principle of police ethics can paradoxically open the way to community polarization and increased violence, however, when officers violate the law on behalf of personally held moral values. This book is about the power that police use to do their work and how it can lead police to abuse their positions at the individual and organizational levels. It provides students of policing with a realistic understanding of the kinds of problems they will confront in the practice of police work. This timely new edition offers police administrators direction for developing agency-wide corruption prevention strategies, and a re-written chapter further expands our level of understanding of corruption by covering the Model of Circumstantial Corruptibility in detail. The fourth edition also discusses critical ethical issues relating to the relationship between police departments and minority communities, including Black Lives Matter and other activist groups. In the post-Ferguson environment, this is a crucial text for students, academicians, and law enforcement professionals alike. |
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