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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > General
Why did it happen? Why did the United States begin to torture detainees during the War on Terror? Instead of an indictment, this book presents an "explanation." Crises produce rare opportunities for overcoming the domestic and foreign policy logjams facing political leaders. But what if the projects used to address the crisis and provide cover for their domestic policy initiatives come under serious threat from clandestine opponents? Then the restraints on interrogation can be overwhelmed, leading to the creation of informal institutions that allow the official establishment of torture. These ideas are tested using comparative historical narratives drawn from two cases where torture was adopted--the War on Terror and the Stalinist Terror--and one where it was not--the Mexican War. The book concludes with some thoughts about how the United States can avoid the legal establishment of torture in the future.
In all societies, past and present, many persons and groups have been subject to domination. Properly understood, domination is a great evil, the suffering of which ought to be minimized so far as possible. Surprisingly, however, political and social theorists have failed to provide a detailed analysis of the concept of domination in general. This study aims to redress this lacuna. It argues first, that domination should be understood as a condition experienced by persons or groups to the extent that they are dependent on a social relationship in which some other person or group wields arbitrary power over them; this is termed the 'arbitrary power conception' of domination. It argues second, that we should regard it as wrong to perpetrate or permit unnecessary domination and, thus, that as a matter of justice the political and social institutions and practices of any society should be organized so as to minimize avoidable domination; this is termed 'justice as minimizing domination', a conception of social justice that connects with more familiar civic republican accounts of freedom as non-domination. In developing these arguments, this study employs a variety of methodological techniques - including conceptual analysis, formal modelling, social theory, and moral philosophy; existing accounts of dependency, power, social convention, and so on are clarified, expanded, or revised along the way. While of special interest to contemporary civic republicans, this study should appeal to a broad audience with diverse methodological and substantive interests.
Why does the United States control the content of broadcast more strictly than it controls the content of print? In this provocative book, Matthew L. Spitzer explores the various rationales that support such different treatment and concludes that broadcast media should not be as strictly regulated as it is. Spitzer attacks the three most prevalent arguments in favor of broadcast control, utilizing insights from economics and social psychology and relating them to basic questions of First Amendment law and regulation of broadcasting. First, he shows that arguments centered on economic efficiency-such as those based on the supposed scarcity of the airwaves-can be applied equally to the print media. Next, responding to arguments that exposure to sexually explicit material encourages socially harmful conduct, he demonstrates that sexually explicit printed matter is at least as pernicious as broadcast erotica and that printed violence seems to have the same effects as broadcast violence. The third series of arguments-that broadcasting is more readily available to young children than is print-does have some validity, says Spitzer. However, we can shield children from exposure to broadcast material that may harm them by several methods: "zoning" broadcast violence and sexy by confining such matter to "adult" channels that can be received only by special receivers; allowing sex and violence to be broadcast only during the late night hours; and requiring television locks so that parents can monitor children's access to programming. According to Spitzer, there is not justification for censorship of indecent programming or for such regulations as the fairness doctrine or equal time for political candidates. His timely and spirited book makes a powerful case for changing national policy in this significant area.
During the Cold War ideological and politico-military rivalries mostly dictated the actions of the competing blocs, including their involvement in foreign conflicts. In Africa for instance, the East-West rivalry of the time not only fuelled conflicts but also appeared to undermine the use of diplomacy as a tool for peacemaking and conflict resolution. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union however, there was a transformation of the conflict arena in the continent, which presented new opportunities and threats. This therefore raises a fundamental question of how the end of the Cold War has affected the character of conflicts and their successful management in Africa. Using Liberia and Somalia as case studies, Post-Cold War Conflicts in Africa analyses how the post Cold War conflicts in these two countries and their management differed from what they would have been during the Cold War era. It shows for instance that while in Liberia the major powers appeared content to cede the management of the conflict to the sub-regional group, ECOMOG, in Somalia, the conflict appeared to be turned into an arena for simple military experiment without any of the old Cold War ideological rivalries playing any role in its trajectory or management. The book argues that the end of the Cold War offers an opportunity for the successful use of a new approach to conflict management in the continent, which would be anchored on traditional African diplomacy. This new approach would involve a triumvirate of eminent men and women from the continent, regional peacekeeping forces, and the warring factions themselves working in concert to replace the rifle with 'talking till every one agrees' _______________________ Augustine C. Ohanwe holds a PhD in International Politics. He has researched extensively on Cold War conflicts in Angola, Ethiopia, Somalia and Nigeria as well as post-Cold War conflicts in Liberia and Somalia. His books include The UN and post-Cold War Conflicts in Africa, (Helsinki University Press, 2000) and the collection of poems, Petals of Rose, (2005, Kirja Kerrallan)
Since 9/11 Western states have sought to integrate 'securitisation' measures within migration regimes as asylum seekers and other migrant categories come to be seen as agents of social instability or as potential terrorists. Treating migration as a security threat has therefore increased insecurity amongst migrant and ethnic minority populations.
This edited volume explores a range of approaches to nonviolent or popular resistance in the Second Intifada. Written by scholar-activists with diverse experiences in Israel-Palestine, the chapters in the volume provide the reader with an overview of how nonviolent resistance is conceived and practiced in a variety of settings within the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel, and internationally. The selections explore the themes of power, tactics, and the interactions between local and international activists.
Stories of government management failures often make the headlines, but quietly much gets done as well. What makes the difference? Ira Goldstein offers wisdom about how to lead and succeed in the federal realm, even during periods when the political climate is intensely negative, based on his decades of experience as a senior executive at two major government consulting firms and as a member of the US federal government's Senior Executive Service. The Federal Management Playbook coaches the importance of always keeping four key concepts in mind when planning for success: goals, stakeholders, resources, and time frames. Its chapters address how to effectively motivate government employees, pick the right technologies, communicate and negotiate with powerful stakeholders, manage risks, get value from contractors, foster innovation, and more. Goldstein makes lessons easy to apply by breaking each chapter's plans into three strategic phases: create an offensive strategy, execute your plan effectively, and play a smart defense. Additional tips describe how career civil servants and political appointees can get the most from one another, advise consultants on providing value to government, and help everyone better manage ever-present oversight. The Federal Management Playbook is a must-read for anyone working in the government realm and for students who aspire to public service.
"Rhetoric during wartime is about the creation of consensus," writes Justin Gustainis. In American Rhetoric and the Vietnam War, he discusses efforts to build or destroy public support of America's most controversial war of the century. Gustainis analyzes several important aspects of Vietnam era rhetoric: presidential rhetoric, protest rhetoric, and the war as portrayed in popular culture. Broadly defining rhetoric as the deliberate use of symbols to persuade, the author explores partisan use of speeches, marches, songs, military campaigns, gestures, destruction of property, comic strips, and films. Part One, Prowar Rhetoric, opens with a chapter devoted to the domino theory as a "condensation symbol." Subsequent chapters discuss the hero myth in reference to Kennedy and the Green Berets, rhetoric and the Tet Offensive, and Nixon's "Silent Majority." Part Two examines antiwar rhetoric, and includes studies of Daniel Berrigan, SDS and the Port Huron Statement, and the Weathermen. Gustainis argues that the antiwar movement did not stop the war, and may have prolonged it. In Part Three, he analyzes Doonesbury as antiwar rhetoric, then turns to an examination of how the war has been portrayed in popular film. Gustainis includes a political, military, and rhetorical chronology of the war as an appendix. Recommended for scholars and students of rhetoric and political communication.
In a powerful new book, Boggs traces the historical evolution of American politics by focusing on the gradual triumph of corporate and military power over democratic institutions and practices. The consequences of expanding United States global presence since World War II--involving an integrated and interwoven system of power based in the permanent war economy, national security-state, and corporate interests--has meant erosion of democratic politics, strengthening of the imperial presidency, increased corporate and military influence over elections and legislation, weakening of popular governance, and diminution of citizenship. The events of 9/11 and their aftermath, including the War on Terror, two lengthy wars and foreign occupations, new threats of war, and massive increases in Pentagon spending, have only deepened the trend toward ever-more concentrated forms of power in a society that ostensibly embraces democratic values. Such developments, Boggs argues, have deep origins in American history going back to the founding documents, ideological precepts of the Constitution, early oligarchic rule, slavery, the Indian wars, and westward colonial expansion.
From the bestselling author of Kleptopia comes a true story about Cuckooland – a world where the rich can buy everything – including the truth. Everywhere, the powerful are making a renewed claim to the greatest prize of all: to own the truth. The power to choose what you want reality to be and impose that reality on the world. For three years, Tom Burgis followed a lead that took him deeper and deeper into Cuckooland – the place where the rich own the truth. The trail snaked from the Kremlin to Kathmandu, Stockholm to the Steppe, from a blood-soaked town square in Uzbekistan to a royal retreat in Scotland. Burgis hunted down oligarchs, developed secret sources and traced vast sums of money flowing between multinational corporations, ex-Soviet dictators and the west’s ruling elites. And he found one man who wanted the power to bend reality to his will. This book tells an astonishing story: a tale of secrets and lies that reveals how fragile that truth can be. Whether it’s in Kazakh torture chambers or the UK’s High Court, the lords of Cuckooland are seizing control of the truth. They decree what stories may be told about war and money and power, what we are permitted to know – and more importantly, what we are not. From the bestselling author of Kleptopia, Cuckooland is a deeply reported work of non-fiction that reads like a thriller. It is a story of how globalisation and technological revolution have combined to imperil the foundation of free societies: that the truth belongs to the many, not the few.
Shares wrenching accounts of the everyday violence experienced by emancipated African Americans Well after slavery was abolished, its legacy of violence left deep wounds on African Americans' bodies, minds, and lives. For many victims and witnesses of the assaults, rapes, murders, nightrides, lynchings, and other bloody acts that followed, the suffering this violence engendered was at once too painful to put into words yet too horrible to suppress. In this evocative and deeply moving history Kidada Williams examines African Americans' testimonies about racial violence. By using both oral and print culture to testify about violence, victims and witnesses hoped they would be able to graphically disseminate enough knowledge about its occurrence and inspire Americans to take action to end it. In the process of testifying, these people created a vernacular history of the violence they endured and witnessed, as well as the identities that grew from the experience of violence. This history fostered an oppositional consciousness to racial violence that inspired African Americans to form and support campaigns to end violence. The resulting crusades against racial violence became one of the political training grounds for the civil rights movement.
There is a growing body of work on white farmers in Zimbabwe. Yet the role played by white women - so-called `farmers' wives' - on commercial farms has been almost completely ignored, if not forgotten. For all the public role and overt power ascribed to white male farmers, their wives played an equally important, although often more subtle, role in power and labour relations on white commercial farms. This `soft power' took the form of maternalistic welfare initiatives such as clinics, schools, orphan programmes and women's clubs, most overseen by a `farmer's wife'. Before and after Zimbabwe's 1980 independence these played an important role in attracting and keeping farm labourers, and governing their behaviour. After independence they also became crucial to the way white farmers justified their continued ownership of most of Zimbabwe's prime farmland. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the role that farm welfare initiatives played in Zimbabwe's agrarian history. Having assessed what implications such endeavours had for the position and well-being of farmworkers before the onset of `fast-track' land reform in the year 2000, Hartnack examines in vivid ethnographic detail the impact that the farm seizures had on the lives of farmworkers and the welfare programmes which had previously attempted to improve their lot.
A thorough exploration of an individual's right to bodily autonomy versus the state's power to regulate and control the bodies of its citizens. The Human Body on Trial asks the basic question: Who's in charge of your body-you or the authorities? Four narrative chapters examine key constitutional questions addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court over the past century concerning the power of the state to regulate the human body, placing the issues in historical context and examining the contemporary legal and medical knowledge that informed each decision. The book focuses on individual cases, such as Jacobson v. Massachusetts (compulsory vaccination), Buck v. Bell (forced sterilization), and Roe v. Wade (abortion), and discusses such controversial issues as AIDS testing and physician-assisted suicide. A special reference section includes court decisions and other primary documents. Timeline of major events in the evolution of the legal right of individual autonomy from the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 to the 2002 ruling in State of Oregon and Peter Rasmussen, et al. v. John Ashcroft regarding implementing Oregon's Death with Dignity Act Excerpts from key legal documents from the Roe v. Wade (1973) decision to the lesser known Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942) ruling by the Supreme Court overturning the mandated sterilization for three-time offenders convicted of certain felonies
The challenges faced by the coalition forces are ever-growing, and the need for real solutions is increasingly urgent. In coffee shops across America-and across the world-people of all political, educational, and moral backgrounds share similar discussions of current events. The topics of the morning: Iraq and the mismanagement of the war on terror. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, the American soldiers and the Iraqi police were left to pick up the pieces of the shattered country. That is, until American law enforcement personnel joined the fray. Former Midwest police officer Larry D. Allen delivers a firsthand account of how the logical path to success in Iraq will be paved with the training of Iraqi police forces by civilian American police officers. His personal perspective on a complicated war brings home one simple truth: no matter what the goal, both Iraq and the United States will only succeed if their militaries partner with proactive and dedicated "civilian" police-the folks on the ground working among the people.
Many of the photographs are as familiar as they are iconic: Nelson Mandela gazing through the bars of his prison cell on Robben Island; a young Miriam Makeba smiling and dancing; Hugh Masekela as a schoolboy receiving the gift of a trumpet from Louis Armstrong; Henry ‘Mr Drum’ Nxumalo; the Women’s March of 1955; the Sophiatown removals; the funeral of the Sharpeville massacre victims … Photographer Jürgen Schadeberg was the man behind the camera, recording history as it unfolded in apartheid South Africa, but his personal story is no less extraordinary. His affiliation for the displaced, the persecuted and the marginalised was already deeply rooted by the time he came to South Africa from Germany in 1950 and began taking pictures for the fledgling Drum magazine. In this powerfully evocative memoir of an international, award-winning career spanning over 50 years – in Europe, Africa and the US – this behind-the-scenes journey with a legendary photojournalist and visual storyteller is a rare and special privilege. Schadeberg’s first-hand experiences as a child in Berlin during the Second World War, where he witnessed the devastating effect of the repressive Nazi regime, and felt the full wrath of the Allied Forces’ relentless bombing of the city, are vividly told. The only child of an actress, who left her son largely to his own devices, Jürgen became skilled at living by his wits, and developed a resourcefulness that held him in good stead throughout his life. At the end of the war, his mother married a British officer and emigrated to South Africa, leaving Jürgen behind in a devastated Germany to fend for himself. With some luck and a great deal of perseverance, he was able to pursue his interest in photography in Hamburg, undergoing training as an unpaid ‘photographic volunteer’ at the German Press Agency, then graduating to taking photos at football matches. After two years there, Jürgen made the decision to travel to South Africa. He arrived at Johannesburg station on a cold winter’s morning. He had a piece of paper with his mother’s address on it, his worldly possessions in a small, cheap suitcase on the platform beside him, and his Leica camera, as always, around his neck.
Shelton confirms the power of talk in the specific case of the 1994 debate on comprehensive health care reform and beyond. He provides a context rich with detail concerning health care and health care reform in America and a social scientific examination of specific discourse factors that includes narratives, naming, and medical metaphors. Shelton's assessment of the debate reveals that opposition discourse was much more directly impacted and broader in scope. This is followed by a rhetorical analysis that extends the genre of crisis rhetoric. Shelton's rhetorical analysis reveals that the virtual crisis of big government both subsumed and overwhelmed the actual health care crisis. Such an assessment--including an ethical analysis of the 1994 floor debate and detailed consideration of the social existence of hatred for government--produces a host of research and scholarly implications. A thoughtful analysis that will be of value to scholars and researchers in political communication and public policy.
In original essays written by both senior scholars as well as rising younger scholars in the field of international ethics, this volume addresses the ethics of war in an era when non-state actors are playing an increasingly prominent role in armed conflict. Central to this concern is the issue of whether, or under what conditions, non-state actors can be said to have the "authority" to participate in war. The contributors therefore explore and analyze the problems with, and possibilities for, incorporating non-state actors into the traditionally state-centric moral vocabulary about war--namely, the just war tradition.
The author explores the practice and effects of the European Union's democracy promotion efforts vis-a-vis its authoritarian neighbours in the Middle East and North Africa. She argues that the same set of factors facilitated both international cooperation of authoritarian regimes on democracy promotion and their persistence during the Arab Spring.
Minority languages in Europe, as part of a common cultural
heritage, need protection. The contributions to this book reflect
urgent, stimulating and productive debates among researchers in
sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, politics and sociology,
and among language activists and policy makers. At the heart of the
debate are the effectiveness of the existing political and legal
frameworks aimed at protecting linguistic and cultural diversity,
and prospects for the survival of minority languages in the process
of European integration.
As the twenty-first century is ushered in, rebels, revolutionaries and political dissidents remain a major roadblock to the structuring of a new world order. Challenging their national or local institutions of authority--political or economic, social or religious--aggrieved individuals and disgruntled communities continue to wage their eternal struggles against those perceived as perverting the common good. "Rebels with a Cause" seeks to explain the minds, motives, means, and morality of those who espouse individual as well as communal dissent and resistance--violent or otherwise--in the name of some greater good. The ranks of political offenders vary widely: Civil Disobedients; Conscientious Objectors; Dissidents; Fanatics; Freedom Fighters; Fundamentalists; Militants; Political Prisoners; Pseudo-Politicals; Rebels; Resisters; Revolutionaries and Terrorists. The cast of characters is equally diverse and colorful: from Rome's Brutus to South Africa's Nelson Mandela. From America's John Brown and Susan B. Anthony to John Wilkes Booth and Timothy J. McVeigh. From Cuba's Che Guevara to the anonymous heroes of Beijing's Tienaman Square. From the Soviet Union's Aleksander Solzhenistzen to Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi. "Rebels" portrays political offenders as products of three unorthodoxies. They constitute neither traditional political actors, nor common criminals or lawful belligerents. As players in the political arena, they refuse to abide by the rules and means of conventional politics--the ballot box and the rule of law. Offending against the prevailing law, they nevertheless disclaim the common criminal's venal goals to assert their own pursuit of altruistic communal and just objectives. Finally, as militant activists they act surreptiously, disclaim uniforms and insignias, proclaim allegiance to no sovereign and in their resort to indiscriminate violence they spurn the rules of lawful belligerency. This triple unorthodoxy has made the development of coherent public responses to political dissidents, resisters and rebels particularly difficult. "Rebels" does not only identify the actors and social forces that have caused nearly half of all countries throughout the globe to become infected with the ethnic, religious, tribal, clannish, and racial strife which now tear them apart. Acknowledging that domestic conflicts are replacing international warfare as the source of political disorder and violence in the emerging decades, "Rebels" also offers both readers and antagonists new insights and constructive approaches for the making of a less hostile and violent world. "Rebels with a Cause" will help readers address some of this era's most troublesome questions. What weight should one give to the demands of his conscience or the urgings of his or her faith? When should one reject the rules of those in power and stand up against evil laws and governments? Is one ever entitled to disobey the commands of an allegedly "democratic" regime? What means may one justly use in the struggle against tyrants, dictators, and other abusers of power? And when does a dissenter cease to be a freedom fighter and become a terrorist? "Rebels with a Cause" responds to these and other pressing contemporary questions with a "Bill of Rights on Just Authority and Just Resistance" as a guide for both the governed and those who govern.
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