A global system of mass, warrantless, government surveillance now imperils privacy and other civil liberties essential to sustaining the free world. This project to unilaterally, totally control information flow is a product of complex, ongoing interplay between technological, political, legal, corporate, economic, and social factors, including research and development of advanced, digital technologies; an unremitting "war on terror"; relaxed surveillance laws; government alliances with information technology companies; mass media manipulation; and corporate globalism. This book details these and other factors contributing to this degenerative trend; specifies recommendations for constructive change; and provides a platform for grassroots efforts to stop the decline before it is too late.

Thriving in the context of political vacuums created by state weakness, the armed non-state actors in the Middle East, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Kurds increasingly demonstrate features of both state and non-state actors and act autonomously in their foreign policy. Rethinking State-Non-State Alliances: Change and Continuity in the U.S.-Kurdish Relationship investigates the growing influence of Middle Eastern non-state actors as agents of foreign policy through an analysis of the U.S.-Kurdish relationship. Ozum Yesiltas analyzes the underlying causes of increased U.S.-Kurdish cooperation since the early 1990s and addresses the extent to which existing approaches in international relations are adequate in explaining the changing political landscape in the Middle East that brought the U.S. and Kurds together in new ways. Yesiltas draws attention to the ways in which U.S-Kurdish interactions contributed to the escalation of Kurdish nationalism as a transnational phenomenon, and how the growing saliency of Kurdish transnational politics reshapes U.S. foreign policy and broader regional order.

Philosophy and the African American Modern Freedom Struggle: A Freedom Gaze describes the ideas that defined the movement and struggle to be free by Black people in the United States during their Modern Era. Using a historical perspective, this work engages the question of how the historical experience of oppression and the denial of humanity created space for the development of a certain consciousness. The existence and demonstration of agency within the ideas of the African diaspora and the creation of an intentional community with the aim of defining and attaining freedom are dissected in order to understand the Black community as a whole during the modern era.

In the 1970s and 1980s West Germany was a pioneer in both the use of the new information technologies for population surveillance and the adoption of privacy protection legislation. During this era of cultural change and political polarization, the expansion, bureaucratization, and computerization of population surveillance disrupted the norms that had governed the exchange and use of personal information in earlier decades and gave rise to a set of distinctly postindustrial social conflicts centered on the use of personal information as a means of social governance in the welfare state. Combining vast archival research with a groundbreaking theoretical analysis, this book gives a definitive account of the politics of personal information in West Germany at the dawn of the information society.

This book examines the ways in which Russia and Belarus use disinformation, "weaponised" historical narratives, and the politics of memory for domestic and foreign policy purposes, utilising these factors to justify aggressive foreign policy in defensive terms and, domestically, for legitimating local ruling elites, consolidating the states' propaganda machines, and mobilising both societies around national power centres. Besides analysing Russian and Belarusian disinformation, geopolitical narratives, and policies, the book also assesses the effectiveness of these measures and discusses how the West can counteract the geopolitical narratives disseminated by Russia and Belarus that attempt to undermine Western democracies and weaken the resilience of its societies.

For the past thirty years, Howard Caygill has been a distinctive and radical voice in continental philosophy. For the first time, this volume gathers together Caygill's most significant philosophical essays, the majority of which are not freely available and many of which are previously unpublished. Here, a major philosopher is at work, offering rich, rigorous and politically-engaged readings of canonical and lesser-known figures and texts. From Kant and Frantz Fanon to Herman Kahn, founder of the Hudson Institute, Caygill uncovers the untapped resources that the history of philosophy provides for contemporary thought, whilst critically pushing beyond the limits of the tradition. Divided into two parts, the first part of the collection reveals the philosophical backdrop to Caygill's acclaimed study of political resistance, On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (2015), whilst the second part sees Caygill further develop his account of resistance through wide-ranging analyses of contemporary culture. Exploring numerous subjects, including Nietzsche, metaphysics, radical politics, and digital resistance, to name but a few, Force and Understanding introduces readers to the orienting themes of Caygill's thought and provides the opportunity to engage with one of the most astute, learned, and critical philosophical minds around.

Since the controversy began, Homes's restudy has been criticized by Freeman. Now Holmes has published his dissertation findings along with more recent observations on the controversy. Because he conducted the only explicit restudy of the Manu'a group, and because of his own extensive research in the islands over three decades, Holmes's "Quest for the Real Samoa" is worth reading. While the book will not resolve the controversy, it does provide an interesting perspective, some new data, and useful insights into the controversy. . . . Holmes concludes that Mead's work will endure, not because it was flawless or because it is a model for contemporary research, but precisely because it was pioneering and controversial. He sees the tragedy of the controversy in Freeman's almost exclusive focus on Mead, which could obscure Freeman's potential contribution to Samoan ethnography. This is where Freeman and Holmes differe fundamentally. For Freeman, the ultimate issue is the refutation of Mead's ideas on Samoan adolescence. For Holmes, it is a deeper appreciation of the possibilities of Samoan ethnography. To get beyond the Mead/Freeman controversy, it is this latter path that should be explored. "American Anthropologist"

Holmes has a special claim to be heard, for in 1954 he did a restudy of Tau, the same village Mead had worked in 29 years before. While Mr. Holmes disagrees with her on various points, he does not find the truth' to be midway between Mead and Mr. Freeman. His work showed the quality of Mead's Samoan research to be remarkably high, ' while Mr. Freeman's refuation was, in Mr. Holmes's opinion, both methodologically shoddy and uncorroborated by the evidence. "New York Times Book RevieW"

This up-to-date second-edition work will stimulate and clarify readers' thinking on the key issues surrounding guns in the United States-especially on the debate over gun control. Most public debate and discussion about guns in U.S. society is rarely guided by research-not surprising, as most individuals have a personal opinion on this highly inflammatory topic based on their upbringing or personal experiences. Additionally, most research about gun use in America is confusing and contradictory, making it difficult for citizens to gain much from their attempts to investigate the topic objectively. This book offers concise, understandable coverage of all aspects of the issue, including incidence of gun violence; gun control; gun rights; government regulation, legislation, and court decisions; gun organizations (for gun control and for gun rights); gun enthusiast subcultures-for example, hunters, target shooters, and collectors; and U.S. attitudes toward guns. Many of the covered topics are placed in historical and cross-cultural perspective. The new edition of Gun Control in the United States: A Reference Handbook enables the reader to navigate and interpret the research to become sufficiently educated on any specific aspect of the gun issue to make an informed decision-for example, whether to support stricter or more lenient gun control; whether to become a gun owner; whether to support a particular political party or candidate; or whether to develop or to refine a particular philosophy regarding guns. Other aspects of the contemporary gun debate that are addressed include whether the Supreme Court's ruling that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right will withstand future challenges, whether the strong gun regulations used in Europe would be effective and applicable in reducing gun violence in the United States, and whether the diversity explosion created by the high rate of immigration from countries where guns are strictly controlled will soon change the politics of the U.S. gun control debate. Provides a balanced view of the contemporary gun debate in the United States, explaining the positions of both gun rights proponents and advocates of stricter gun control without demonizing either Draws on a vast array of research in criminology, history, law, medicine, politics, and social science to provide one of the most comprehensive single-source references on gun issues Presents current and historical data on U.S. gun violence-including homicides, suicides, and accidental shoots-and places these numbers against international statistics on gun violence, thereby providing the context to enable readers to reach their own opinion on the gun debate

The study of how life can be controlled, supported, and manipulated has become the most urgent scientific and political task of our society. Each discipline approaches this biopolitical dimension with its tools and agenda; however they ignore how labor over time has materially produced crucial transformations in the manipulation of life. By placing the social dimension of labor at the base of the discourse of life, this book engages with the work of key intellectual figures including Gramsci, Pasolini, the neo-feminist militants of Lotta Femminista, Negri, and Virno, and reconstructs a critical genealogy of the notion of biopolitics from the point of view of twentieth and twenty-first century Italy.

The author tests the hypothesis that hubris and the Bathsheba syndrome tend to affect all top leaders, by zooming in on the best known and very highest executives of our own day and age, and examines the psychological forces tugging at the top level of political leadership.

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.

Tony Smith CBE spent his career managing our UK border controls, from junior immigration officer to Head of the UK Border Force. He spent more than four decades in the front line of the conflict between those who argue for open borders and free movement and those whose focus is on building barriers. He played a prominent role in managing security on both sides of the Atlantic after the 9/11 attacks in North America. Along the way he has worked constantly to make controls more efficient, better informed and fairer, yet less vulnerable to abuse. After retirement in 2013, he became a prominent media spokesman on border control issues, from tackling legal immigration crime, human smuggling and terrorist travel to managing borders through Brexit and beyond. This is his story.

In Muslim countries, apostasy and blasphemy laws are defended on the grounds that they are based on Islamic Shari'a and intended to protect religion. But blasphemy and apostasy laws can be used both to suppress thought and debate and to harass religious minorities, both inside and outside Islam. This book - comprising contributions from Muslim scholars, experts and activists - critically and constructively engages with the theological, historical and legal reasoning behind the most restrictive state laws around the world to open up new ways of thinking. The book focuses on the struggle within Muslim societies in Iran, Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia where blasphemy and apostasy laws serve powerful groups to silence dissent and stifle critical thought. The first part of the book covers the development of the law in shifting historical circumstances and surveys the interpretations of Qur'anic verses that seem to affirm freedom of religion. The second part examines the present politics and practices of prosecuting alleged blasphemers and/or apostates in Muslim countries. The third part looks to the future and where reforms of the law could be possible. Debates on Islam and freedom of expression are often cast in polarizing terms of rights versus religion, East versus West. This volume avoids such approaches by bringing together a diverse group of Muslim scholars and activists with the knowledge, commitment and courage to contest repressive interpretations of religion and provide a resource for reclaiming the human rights to freedom of expression and belief.

Alternative Media Meets Mainstream Politics: Activist Nation Rising demonstrates the rising role that alternative media play in contemporary mainstream political communication. The rise of the modern Internet and social media platforms have allowed for the proliferation of alternative media across society in ways that were not possible twenty years ago. Today, alternative media have become more intertwined with mainstream media and have become increasingly relevant in mainstream political communication. Contributors focus on three primary sites where such media seem to have established growing influence in recent years: political parties, mainstream political news, and the production of participatory media that allow for engagement. Scholars of communication, political science, sociology, and media studies will find this collection useful.

Aspirations, desires, opportunism and exploitation are seldom considered as fundamental elements of donor-driven development as it impacts on the lives of people in poor countries. Yet, alongside structural interventions, emotional or affective engagements are central to processes of social change and the making of selves for those caught up in development's slipstream. Intimate Economies of Development lays bare the ways that culture, sexuality and health are inevitably and inseparably linked to material economies within trajectories of modernization in the Greater Mekong Sub-region. As migration expands and opportunities proliferate throughout Asia, different cultural groups increasingly interact as a result of targeted interventions and globalising economic formations; but they do so with different capabilities and expectations. This book uniquely grounds its arguments in interlocking details of people's everyday lives and aspirations in developing Asia, while also engaging with changing social values and moral frameworks. Part and parcel of a widening landscape of mobility and contingent intimacy is the ever-present threats of infectious disease, most prominently HIV/AIDS, and human trafficking. Thus, impact assessment and targeted interventions aim to address negative consequences that frequently accompany infrastructure development and market expansion. This path-breaking book, drawn on more than 20 years of ethnographic research in the Mekong region, shows how current models of mitigation cannot adequately cope with health risks generated by wide-ranging entrepreneurialism and enduring structural violence as dreams of 'the good life' are relentlessly enmeshed in strategies of livelihood improvement.

National intelligence cultures are shaped by their country's history and environment. Featuring 32 countries (such as Albania, Belgium, Croatia, Norway, Latvia, Montenegro), the work provides insight into a number of rarely discussed national intelligence agencies to allow for comparative study, offering hard to find information into one volume. In their chapters, the contributors, who are all experts from the countries discussed, address the intelligence community rather than focus on a single agency. They examine the environment in which an organization operates, its actors, and cultural and ideological climate, to cover both the external and internal factors that influence a nation's intelligence community. The result is an exhaustive, unique survey of European intelligence communities rarely discussed.

President Bill Clinton has been more than generous, Blaney and Benoit point out, in providing fodder for examination of image restoration in politics. His accusers have also done their part in making the public aware of the president's real and perceived shortcomings. As the authors detail, Bill Clinton has been the subject of a tremendous, if not unprecedented, amount of scrutiny by his personal and political enemies.

Blaney and Benoit systematically review the background of the various scandals that have marred the Clinton presidency. They concentrate on the techniques used to advance the various accusations and the approaches taken by the president and his supporters to deflect the attacks. All scholars and researchers interested in political communication and rhetoric in contemporary American politics and the presidency will find this to be essential reading.

Around the world in the twentieth century, political violence in emerging states gave rise to different kinds of silence within their societies. This book explores the histories of these silences, how they were made, maintained, evaded, and transformed. This book gives a comprehensive view of the ongoing evolutions and multiple faces of silence as a common strand in the struggles of state-building. It begins with chapters that examine the construction of "regimes of silence" as an act of power, and it continues through explorations of the ambiguous limits of speech within communities marked by this violence. It highlights national and transnational attempts to combat state silences, before concluding with a series of considerations of how these regimes of silence continue to be extrapolated in the gaps of records and written history. This volume explores histories of the composed silences of political violence across the emerging states of the late twentieth century, not solely as a present concern of aftermath or retrospection but as a diachronic social and political dimension of violence itself. This book makes a major original contribution to international history, as well as to the study of political terror, human rights violations, social recovery, and historical memory.

This book begins discussion at a point where many civil-military conversations end. Hartwell identifies underlying dynamics, key issues, and challenges that civilian and military organizations encounter when negotiating their roles in real and virtual volatile environments. These include managing expectations, understanding organizational missions and cultures, building trust, and exploring different approaches to violence. The impact of applied technologies on decision making processes and interventions is discussed in terms of recent and future complex crises. Linking earlier history to current discussions, this study makes an important contribution by reframing issues and outlining strategies to avoid unintended consequences and more effectively protect civilians in future operations. While geographic focus is on the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, and Asia-Pacific, the core issues are applicable to negotiating civil-military relationships in a wide range of environments.

The book presents the reader with an applied analysis of how the concepts of information and manipulation were illustrated in the Romanian press when the Securitate files were revealed, based on the case of Mona Musca, a controversial topic that was widely debated by most dailies at the time. One of the most important roles played by the press is agenda setting - the role of setting priorities on the individual's agenda. Journalists draw up an imaginary list of topics of primary interest for public debate and forming different currents of opinion. The analyzed press segment revealed the predilection for a speech condemning Mona Musca. The message received by the target audience was not a balanced, objective one, but one that contradicts the deontology of the journalistic profession.

Revolutions come in waves and cycles. We are again riding the crest of a revolutionary epic, much like 1848 or 1917, from the Arab Spring to movements against austerity in Greece to the Occupy movement. In Wages of Rebellion , Chris Hedges- who has chronicled the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline in his books Empire of Illusion and Death of the Liberal Class - investigates what social and psychological factors cause revolution, rebellion, and resistance. Drawing on an ambitious overview of prominent philosophers, historians, and literary figures he shows not only the harbingers of a coming crisis but also the nascent seeds of rebellion. Hedges' message is clear: popular uprisings in the United States and around the world are inevitable in the face of environmental destruction and wealth polarization.Focusing on the stories of rebels from around the world and throughout history, Hedges investigates what it takes to be a rebel in modern times. Utilizing the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, Hedges describes the motivation that guides the actions of rebels as sublime madness" , the state of passion that causes the rebel to engage in an unavailing fight against overwhelmingly powerful and oppressive forces. For Hedges, resistance is carried out not for its success, but as a moral imperative that affirms life. Those who rise up against the odds will be those endowed with this sublime madness."From South African activists who dedicated their lives to ending apartheid, to contemporary anti-fracking protests in Alberta, Canada, to whistleblowers in pursuit of transparency, Wages of Rebellion shows the cost of a life committed to speaking the truth and demanding justice. Hedges has penned an indispensable guide to rebellion.