Apocalypse Observed is about religious violence. By analysing five of the most notorious cults of recent years, the authors present a fascinating and revealing account of religious sects and conflict.
Cults covered include:
* the apocalypse at Jonestown
* the Branch Davidians at Waco
* the violent path of Aum Shinrikyo
* the mystical apocalypse of the Solar Temple
* the mass suicide of Heaven's Gate.
Through comparative case studies and in-depth analysis, the authors show how religious violence can erupt not simply from the beliefs of the cult followers or the personalities of their leaders, but also from the way in which society responds to the cults in its midst.

Children bereaved by the death of one parent at the hands of the other, almost always the father, in effect lose both parents, and are often forgotten in the midst of such dramatic situations. Reflecting the increased interest in child protection and child law systems, this second edition of When Father Kills Mother brings to public knowledge, in amplified form information about the effects of psychological trauma and bereavement on children. By combining knowledge about bereavement with that of post-traumatic stress disorder, the book remains informative and essential reading for all those involved in the field, both professionally and personally.

Related link: Free Email Alerting

From Melos to My Lai presents an erudite, provocative and moving analysis of the accounts of violence in the literature and history of ancient Greece and in the film literature and veterans' accounts of the Vietnam War. This comparative investigation examines the nature of violence, its impact on society and culture, especially as reflected from the perspective of the survivors. The survivors include not only actual combatants, but those with whom they interact: their comrades, their wives and children, families and society as a whole.
From Melos to My Lai provides a unique contribution to the study of the impact of violence on its participants and its audience which combines an examination of the artistic representations of violence and the real-life accounts of those involved in it.

Apocalypse Observed is a book about religious violence. By analysing five of the most notorious cults of recent years, the authors present a fascinating and revealing account of religious sects and conflict.
*the apocalypse at Jonestown
*the Branch Davidians at Waco
*the violent path of Aum Shinrikyo
*the mystical apocalypse of the Solar Temple
*the mass suicide of Heaven's Gate
Through comparative case studies and in-depth analysis, the authors show how religious violence can erupt not simply from the beliefs of the cult followers or the personalities of their leaders, but also from the way in which society responds to the cults in its midst.

The Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (also known as the Istanbul Convention) was adopted by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe on 7 April 2011. The Convention entered into force on 1 August 2014 and has currently been ratified by 22 states. This Convention constitutes a crucial development as regards the movement to combat gender-based violence, as it sets new legally binding standards in this area. This book provides a detailed analysis of the Convention and its potential to make an impact in relation to the specific issue of domestic violence. The book places the Istanbul Convention in context with regard to developments relating to domestic violence as a human rights issue. The background to the adoption of the Convention is examined, and the text of this instrument is analysed in detail. Comparative analysis is engaged in with reference to the duties that have been placed on states by other bodies such as the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and the European Court of Human Rights. Comparisons are also drawn with the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women and with the relevant provisions of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa. An in-depth examination of the advantages of the adoption of the Istanbul Convention by the Council of Europe is provided along with a detailed analysis of the challenges faced by the Convention. The book concludes with a number of brief reflections in relation to the question of whether the adoption of a UN convention on violence against women may be a possible development, and the potential such an instrument holds, in the context of domestic violence.

Looks at Aum's claims about itself and asks, why did a religious movement ostensibly focussed on yoga, meditation, asceticism and enlightenment become involved in violent activities, and discusses Aum's spiritual roots, placing it in the context of contemporary Japanese religious patterns.

Did Ajax and Achilles ever suffer from Post-traumatic stress syndrome?

In this absorbing account, Vietnam veteran and classics scholar Lawrence A Tritle offers an incisive analysis of war and its impact upon the soldier and civilian from the classical age to the present day.
Tritle discusses the links between battlefield experiences that affect the participants and victims of war in every age, drawing examples from sources as diverse as the Iliad, Michael Herr's Dispatches, Thucydides' account of the Pelopenesian Wars, and the Oliver Stone film Platoon. Each instance sheds light on some of the most puzzling phemonena of war and shows how the heroes of epic responded to battle with their own forms of "shellshock," battle-madness and bonding. Tritle examines such issues as:

How can ordinarily decent men can commit acts of extraordinary savagery?

Attitudes toward the "enemy"

The impact of war on waiting wives, lovers and civilian bystanders

Remembering the fallen soldier: from the classic Athenian funeral speech to the Vietnam Wall

How veterans live with physical and psychological injury

This memorable book is for readers who wonder about the meaning and experience of battle, about the impact of war and violence on our culture, and for anyone interested in the culture of ancient Greece.

To forget after Auschwitz is considered barbaric. Baer and Sznaider question this assumption not only in regard to the Holocaust but to other political crimes as well. The duties of memory surrounding the Holocaust have spread around the globe and interacted with other narratives of victimization that demand equal treatment. Are there crimes that must be forgotten and others that should be remembered? In this book the authors examine the effects of a globalized Holocaust culture on the ways in which individuals and groups understand the moral and political significance of their respective histories of extreme political violence. Do such transnational memories facilitate or hamper the task of coming to terms with and overcoming divisive pasts? Taking Argentina, Spain and a number of sites in post-communist Europe as test cases, this book illustrates the transformation from a nationally oriented ethics to a trans-national one. The authors look at media, scholarly discourse, NGOs dealing with human rights and memory, museums and memorial sites, and examine how a new generation of memory activists revisits the past to construct a new future. Baer and Sznaider follow these attempts to manoeuvre between the duties of remembrance and the benefits of forgetting. This, the authors argue, is the "ethics of Never Again."

Littleton, Colorado. Conyers, Georgia. Pearl, Mississippi. Jonesboro, Arkansas. Springfield, Oregon. In the aftermath of the latest incidences of school violence, Kids Killing Kids: Managing Violence and Gangs in Schools tackles the tough questions: How do we find out which students are potentially violent? What do we do with them? Is there an epidemic of children whose psychological problems go undetected until they erupt in violence? Are the parents really responsible?
Parents, administrators, fellow students, the media: we all look for someone to blame. Kids who look or act different fall under suspicion. The cry goes out for more gun control, less violence in television, movies and video games. President Clinton calls a conference to address violence in the media.
Add gangs to this mix and the situation becomes explosive. A factor in inner-city schools for years, new evidence suggests that gangs are now recruiting new members from suburban schools. Violence from conflicts between rival gangs adds to the already volatile atmosphere in schools.
While not all violence can be anticipated, there is no substitute for being proactive. Kids Killing Kids: Managing Violence and Gangs in Schools serves as a guide for detection, intervention, and prevention - providing solutions for our schools.

This study probes the complex relationship between nationalism, violence and Buddhism in 19th-20th century Burma. Graver's study examines present-day Burma and the struggle by Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi for a new Burmese identity. The present volume is a revised and expanded version of the study originally published by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies.

Probes the complex relationship between nationalism, violence and Buddhism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Burma, bringing us to present-day Burma and the struggle by Aung San Suu Kyi for a new Burmese identity.

eBook available with sample pages: HB:041518326X

Series Information:
The Making of the Contemporary World

"Cooney raises fundamental issues concerning the nature of the sociological enterprise in general and of the understanding of violence and conflict within society in particular. [He] is convincing in his demonstration that any understanding of violence and conflict within society must take into account the role of third parties (e.g., relatives, friends, neighbors, strangers, or legal officials) as a force for violence or peace."
--"Choice"

Why do some conflicts escalate into violence while others dissipate harmlessly? Under what circumstances will people kill, and why?

While homicide has been viewed largely in the pathological terms of "crime" and "deviance," violence, Mark Cooney contends, is a naturally-occurring form of conflict found throughout history and across cultures under certain social conditions. Cooney has analyzed the social control of homicide within and across over 30 societies and interviewed several dozens of prisoners incarcerated for murder or manslaughter, as well as members of their families. Violence such as homicide can only be understood, he argues, by transcending the traditional focus on the social characteristics of the killer and victims, and by looking at the role played by family members, friends, neighbors, onlookers, police officers, and judges. These third parties can be a source of peace or violence, depending on how they are configured in particular cases. Violence flourishes, Cooney demonstrates, when authority is either very strong or very weak and when third-party ties are strong and boundaries between groups sharply defined.

Drawing on recent theory in the lively new sociological speciality of conflict management, Mark Cooney hasculled a vast array of evidence from modern and preindustrial societies to provide us with the first general sociological analysis of human violence.

While the causes of rampage violence have been analysed thoroughly in diverse academic disciplines, we hardly know anything about the factors that affect their consequences for public policy. This book addresses rampage shootings in Western Europe and their conditional impact on politicization and policy change in the area of gun control. The author sets out to unravel the factors that facilitate or impede the access of gun control to the political agenda in the wake of rampage shootings and analyses why some political debates lead to profound shifts of the policy status quo, while others peter out without any legislative reactions. In so doing, the book not only contributes to the theoretical literature on crisis-induced policy making, but also provides a wealth of case-study evidence on rampage shootings as empirical phenomena. In particular, the extent to which gun control gets politicized as a policy failure can either result from a bottom-up process (event severity and media pressure) or from a top-down logic (issue ownership and the electoral cycle). Including 12 case studies on the rampage shootings which have triggered a debate over the appropriateness of the affected countries gun policies, it illustrates that the way political processes unfold after rampage shootings depends strongly on specific causal configurations and draws comparisons between the cases covered in the book and the way rampage shootings are typically dealt with in the United States. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of public policy, policy analysis, European Politics and more broadly to comparative politics, criminology, psychology, and sociology. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315209425, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Eerie and menacing, timely and moving, Impossible Causes is an unputdownable novel that examines the consequences of silence kept at young women's expense. 'A tightly told and powerful story of sins, lies and secrets long held' i 'This highly atmospheric tale is both thrilling and poignant' Heat For seven months of the year, the remote island of Lark is fogbound, cut off completely from the mainland. The arrival of three strangers is the cause of much speculation: the first is a charismatic young teacher - the only male teacher on the island - the other two, a mother and her teenage daughter, seeking a place to hide from unspeakable tragedy. What have they come to escape? What will they find waiting for them on Lark? And whose body will soon be found lying in the island's stone circle?

For centuries international order has been troubled by small wars, insurrections, and revolts--low intensity conflicts. With the implosion of the Soviet empire many thought such violence could be eradicated through the growth of democracy, open societies, and increased productivity and education. Instead the world remains filled with turmoil, pogroms, famine, civil war, rebellion, and terror, often instigated by armed and dangerous zealots. To Americans such killers seem alien and inexplicable, fanatics without reason, beyond the reach of conventional containment or retaliation. J. Bowyer Bell here explores the psychological and strategic ecosystems (which he terms dragon worlds) of modern political violence and suggests how America might effectively deal with it. Dragonwars combines analysis with historical examples drawn from America's involvement with armed struggle in Lebanon, Central Am-erica, Greece, and Vietnam. In each instance, Bell argues, American policy was flawed by lack of empathy and historical understanding combined with a belief that failure could be traced to mistakes in details and procedures. The break up of the old bipolar U.S.-Soviet confrontation released suppressed ambitions, tribal greed, and greater flexibility for the small player. With new technologies of terror, zones of security will become smaller, since open societies present attractive targets for zealots. Bell rejects the notion that massive force can effect a swift and final result. Instead, a new type of warrior will be required; one versed in history and empathetic to the belief-systems of the dragonworlds in which they are deployed. Bell acknowledges that his proposals run counter to American belief and practice, but argues that in the face of insoluble conflicts, incremental advantages, through limited altered global arena, "Dragonwars" will prove an indispensable guide for policymakers, military planners, historians, and political scientists.

"This was several times with that damn cribbage board. I hate cribbage boards to this very day. They never beat us on the arms or legs or stuff, it was always on the bottom of the feet, I couldn't figure it out." Brian L., Huronia Regional Centre Survivor Over the past two decades, the public has borne witness to ongoing revelations of shocking, intense, and even sadistic forms of violence in spaces meant to provide care. This has been particularly true in institutions designed to care for people with disabilities. In this work, the authors not only describe institutional violence, but work to make sense of how and why institutional violence within care settings is both so pervasive and so profound. Drawing on a wide range of primary data, including oral histories of institutional survivors and staff, ethnographic observation, legal proceedings and archival data, this book asks: What does institutional violence look like in practice and how might it be usefully categorized? How have extreme forms violence and neglect come to be the cultural norm across institutions? What organizational strategies in institutions foster the abdication of personal morality and therefore violence? How is institutional care the crucial "first step" in creating a culture that accepts violence as the norm? This highly interdisciplinary work develops scholarly analysis of the history and importance of institutional violence and, as such, is of particular interest to scholars whose work engages with issues of disability, health care law and policy, violence, incarceration, organizational behaviour, and critical theory.

The greatest accomplishment of Western civilization is arguably the achievement of individual liberty through limits on the power of the state. In the war-torn twentieth century, we rarely hear that one of the main costs of armed conflict is long-term loss of liberty to winners and losers alike. Beyond the obvious and direct costs of dead and wounded soldiers, there is the lifetime struggle of veterans to live with their nightmares and their injuries; the hidden economic costs of inflation, debts, and taxes; and more generally the damages caused to our culture, our morality, and to civilization at large. The new edition is now available in paperback, with a number of new essays. It represents a large-scale collective effort to pierce the veils of myth and propaganda to reveal the true costs of war, above all, the cost to liberty.

Central to this volume are the views of Ludwig von Mises on war and foreign policy. Mises argued that war, along with colonialism and imperialism, is the greatest enemy of freedom and prosperity, and that peace throughout the world cannot be achieved until the central governments of the major nations become limited in scope and power. In the spirit of these theorems by Mises, the contributors to this volume consider the costs of war generally and assess specific corrosive effects of major American wars since the Revolution. The first section includes chapters on the theoretical and institutional dimensions of the relationship between war and society, including conscription, infringements on freedom, the military as an engine of social change, war and literature, and the right of citizens to bear arms. The second group includes reconsiderations of Lincoln and Churchill, an analysis of the anti-interventionist idea in American politics, a discussion of the meaning of the "just war," an assessment of how World War I changed the course of Western civilization, and finally two eyewitness accounts of the true horrors of actual combat by veterans of World War II. The Costs of War is unique in its combination of historical scope and timeliness for current debates about foreign policy and military intervention. It will be of interest to historians, political scientists, economists, and sociologists.

Considering both feminist approaches to male violence and those perspectives that treat such violent behaviour as pathological, Adam Jukes explores how depth psychology can be used to treat men who batter women.

'I do think it is an extremely well-written and edited book that is a useful resource to add to the growing literature on bullying. The topic is of particular relevance to EPs and if you have not read anything so far on school bullying, I recommend that you start with this book.' - Lisa Stanley, Kingston Upon Hull

'An invaluable resource for researchers, educators, and others interested in bullying - a must-have text for anyone who desires to understand and end this worldwide source of childhood distress.' - Renae Duncan, Murray State University, APA Review of Books

In the current information age, Americans are bombarded daily with stories and images portraying a rising tide of violence. Drawing on media that includes television, newspaper, fiction, film, painting and photography, as well as interviews and focus groups, Karen Cerulo explores the ways in which individuals think about, depict and evaluate violence. Moving beyond typical studies that focus on violent story content, Deciphering Violence decodes the role of story structure itself and how the sequencing of facts can systematically influence our moral judgements of violent acts. The book identifies institutionalized forms of violent storytelling and raises new possibilities both for decreasing public tolerance of violence and increasing social control of the phenomenon.

In this text, Gill Allwood explores theories of masculinity emerging from French feminist theories of gender and from French feminist practice concerning violence towards women, highlighting both the commonalities and the specificities of the French case. She discusses the particular concern of French theorists with seduction, their rejection of the term "gender" and the centrality of the difference debate. In the first part of the book, Allwood separately examines feminist theories of gender and sexual difference and the problem of male violence. She goes on to consider the developments which are taking place on the borderline between the two, examining the way in which these developments have contributed to an understanding of masculinity. Readdressing problems and debates that will be familiar to English-speaking readers, the text exposes cultural differences and similarities in the ways in which these problems are approached and it provides a detailed account of the changes in both feminist action and theory in France in recent years. This analysis of feminism in France should be of interest to student and scholars in French studies, European studies, gender studies and cultura