![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
|
Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Political control & influence > Political oppression & persecution > General
A gripping history of China's deteriorating relationship with Hong Kong, and its implications for the rest of the world. For the 150 years that Hong Kong was a British colony, people, money and technology flowed freely, while Hong Kong residents enjoyed freedoms that simply did not exist in mainland China. When the territory was handed over to China in 1997, the Communist Party promised that Hong Kong would remain highly autonomous for fifty years. Now, at the halfway mark, it is clear that China has not kept its word. Universal suffrage and free elections have not been instituted and activists have been jailed en masse following the decree of a sweeping national security law by Beijing. As China continues to expand its global influence, Hong Kong serves as a chilling preview of how dissenters could be treated in regions that fall under the emerging superpower's control. A Hong Kong resident from 1992 to 2021, Mark L. Clifford has witnessed this transformation first-hand and has unrivalled access to the full range of the city's society, from student protestors to billionaire businessmen and senior government officials. A powerful and dramatic mix of history and on-the-ground reporting, Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World is the definitive account of one of the most important geopolitical standoffs of our time.
The concentrations camps that existed in the colonised world at the turn of the 20th Century are a vivid reminder of the atrocities committed by imperial powers on indigenous populations. This study explores British, American and Spanish camp cultures, analysing debates over their legitimacy and current discussions on retributive justice.
This book analyzes the development of the Stalinist state of the 1930s from the perspective of the changing nature of center-local relations. It examines the trend toward greater central state control over the formation and implementation of economic policy and the shift toward increased state repression through a series of archive-based case studies of the center's interactions with its republican and regional bodies. The book provides the basis for a new conceptualization of the Stalinist state.
ON THE NIGHT TRAINS, THE LAST STOP WAS ALWAYS HELL.
This bibliography includes English-language first-person accounts of individuals who survived or witnessed, as bystanders, journalists, diplomats, or liberators, genocidal acts in this century. The primary focus is on diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies, oral histories, interviews and statements in newspaper articles or other texts. A secondary focus is on reports, films, microfilm collections, and archives that contain first-person accounts, essays about first-person accounts, and bibliographies that list first-person accounts. Although there are bibliographies devoted to specific genocidal acts and one general bibliography on genocide, this volume is the first to cover first-person accounts. The volume opens with a lengthy introductory essay on genocide. It then devotes chapters to specific genocidal acts, including German extermination of the Hereros, Ottoman genocide of the Armenians, Soviet-induced famine in the Ukraine, the Soviet's Great Purge, the Soviet deportation of whole nations, the Holocaust, Gypsies during the Holocaust, Indonesian genocide of Communists and suspected Communists, Ugandan genocides, Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh, Burundi genocide of the Hutus, Indonesian genocide in East Timor, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, threatened genocide of the Baha'is, and genocide of various indigenous peoples. The chapters are subdivided by type of account, and all entries are annotated. The work includes subject and author indexes. The book will be a useful resource for historians, political scientists, and sociologists interested in genocide and international human relations.
'This elegantly written, erudite book is essential reading for all of us, whatever our identifications' - Lynne Segal Antisemitism is one of the most controversial topics of our time. The public, academics, journalists, activists and Jewish people themselves are divided over its meaning. Antony Lerman shows that this is a result of a 30-year process of redefinition of the phenomenon, casting Israel, problematically defined as the 'persecuted collective Jew', as one of its main targets. This political project has taken the notion of the 'new antisemitism' and codified it in the flawed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's 'working definition' of antisemitism. This text is the glue holding together an international network comprising the Israeli government, pro-Israel advocacy groups, Zionist organisations, Jewish communal defence bodies and sympathetic governments fighting a war against those who would criticise Israel. The consequences of this redefinition have been alarming, supressing free speech on Palestine/Israel, legitimising Islamophobic right-wing forces, and politicising principled opposition to antisemitism.
Death camps are the most enduring image of the Holocaust, but they were only the final expression of a destruction process that began in 1933. In that year the Nazi regime mobilized members of an entire society to destroy their neighbors. Lawmakers, judges, attorneys, and the rest of the legal system played a crucial role in reassuring good Germans that a war on Jews was legitimate. Nazi Justiz emphasizes the prewar years of a robust Western European nation at peace with all countries. Such emphasis demonstrates that a Holocaust can happen in any country sharing the heritage of Western civilization, and warns of the inevitable outcome once ordinary people are targeted in a destruction process. Using original decrees, court decisions, and first-hand recollections of participants, Nazi Justiz documents how the German legal system transformed itself into a criminal organization. We see not only how the legal system shaped everyday life, but how good Germans and the business community benefited from the Holocaust. Germany in the 1930s-before the war-is emphasized. Such emphasis demonstrates that a Holocaust can happen in any country sharing the heritage of Western civilization, and warns of the inevitable outcome once ordinary people are targeted in a process of destruction. No other book has so much information on the Holocaust in peacetime Germany; indeed, the chapters on property confiscation and residential concentration are unique. With a richness of detail evoking an immediacy normally found in novels, Nazi Justiz offers a chilling portrayal of persons filled with so much goodness that they become oblivious to horrors they cause.
The ongoing assassinations of anti-apartheid activists led to rumours that some kind of third force must be responsible. The South African government flatly denied any involvement. All investigations of the matter were met with stony silence. The first crack in the wall came with the publication by the Vrye Weekblad newspaper of the extraordinary story of Dirk Coetzee, former Security Branch Captain. His tale of murder, kidnapping, bombing and poisoning provided corroboration of the shocking confessions made by Almond Nofemela on death row. Slowly the dark secret started unravelling under the probing of determined journalists. In The Heart Of The Whore introduces the reader to the secret underworld of the death squads. It explains when and why they were created, who ran them, what methods they employed, who the victims and perpetrators were. Jacques Pauw was more closely involved with the subject than any other person outside the police and armed forces. In this groundbreaking work he looks at the devastating effect of the secret war on the opponents of apartheid as well as the corrosive effects on the people who committed these crimes. Jacques Pauw is the author of the bestselling book The President’s Keepers. He is an award-winning journalist, television documentary producer and author. This is NOT an updated edition, just a re-release of the original 1992 book.
This book tells the story of three Black men--Z. K. Matthews, Nelson Mandela, and Stephen Biko--who committed their lives to win freedom for all South Africans. Using a sociopsychological retrospective, Juckes interweaves accounts of the lives of these three men with sociopolitical developments to reveal the complex interaction that occurs between social processes and individual actors, revealing how leaders come into being and how their actions influence social developments. Each man's political character captured the demands of the time and used the available resources of his age in the quest for freedom; the pressure--over time--from the activities of these three men and the movements they supported made liberation inevitable.
*Winner of the European Award for Investigative And Judicial Journalism 2021* *Winner of the Premio Alessandro Leogrande Award for Investigative Journalism 2022* 'I want to live in a society where secret power is accountable to the law and to public opinion for its atrocities, where it is the war criminals who go to jail, not those who have the conscience and courage to expose them.' It is 2008, and Stefania Maurizi, an investigative journalist with a growing interest in cryptography, starts looking into the little-known organisation WikiLeaks. Through hushed meetings, encrypted files and explosive documents, what she discovers sets her on a life-long journey that takes her deep into the realm of secret power. Working closely with WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange and his organisation for her newspaper, Maurizi has spent over a decade investigating state criminality protected by thick layers of secrecy, while also embarking on a solitary trench warfare to unearth the facts underpinning the cruel persecution of Assange and WikiLeaks. With complex and disturbing insights, Maurizi's tireless journalism exposes atrocities, the shameful treatment of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, on up to the present persecution of WikiLeaks: a terrifying web of impunity and cover-ups. At the heart of the book is the brutality of secret power and the unbearable price paid by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and truthtellers.
This book explores the relationship between socialist psychiatry and political ideology during the Cold War, tracing Yugoslav 'psy' sciences as they experienced multiple internationalisations and globalisations in the post-WWII period. These unique transnational connections - with West, East and South - remain at the centre of this book. The author argues that the 'psy' disciplines provide a window onto the complications of Cold War internationalism, offering an opportunity to re-think postwar Europe's internal dynamics. She tells an alternative, pan-European narrative of the post-1945 period, demonstrating that, in the Cold War, there existed sites of collaboration and vigorous exchange between the two ideologically opposed camps, and places like Yugoslavia provided a meeting point, where ideas, frameworks and professional and cultural networks from both sides of the Iron Curtain could overlap and transform each other. Moreover, the book offers the first analysis of East European psychiatrists' contacts with and contributions to the decolonizing world, exploring their participation in broader political discussions about decolonization, anti-imperialism and non-alignment. The Yugoslav brand of East-West psychoanalysis and psychotherapy bred a truly unique intellectual framework, which enabled psychiatrists to think through a set of political and ideological dilemmas regarding the relationship between individuals and social structures. This book offers a thorough reinterpretation of the notion of 'communist psychiatry' as a tool used solely for political oppression, and instead emphasises the political interventions of East European psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
This book examines how opposition groups respond to the dilemma posed by authoritarian elections in the Arab World, with specific focus on Jordan and Algeria. While scholars have investigated critical questions such as why authoritarian rulers would hold elections and whether such elections lead to further political liberalization, there has been comparatively little work on the strategies adopted by opposition groups during authoritarian elections. Nevertheless, we know their strategic choices can have important implications for the legitimacy of the electoral process, reform, democratization, and post-election conflicts. This project fills in an important gap in our understanding of opposition politics under authoritarianism by offering an explanation for the range of strategies adopted by opposition groups in the face of contentious elections in the Arab World.
This book analyses the debates on colonial genocide in the 21st century and introduces cases where states are reluctant to acknowledge genocides. The author departs from traditional studies of the work of Raphael Lemkin or U.N. definitions of genocide so that readers can examine genocide recognition as a political act that is bound up in partial perceptions and political motivations. The study looks at the Tasmanian genocide, Al-Nakba, and several other tragic events. It also looks at the ways that these historical and contemporary debates about colonial genocides are related to today's conversations about apologies and other restorative justice acts. This work will be of interest to a wide range of audiences including researchers, scholars, graduate students, and policy makers in the fields of political history, genocide studies, and political science.
Europe has entered the 21st century in a state of growing uncertainty about the role and scope of traditional political rights. The scope of 'political rights' is a subject which has always provoked a degree of scholarly controversy, as indeed is reflected in the essays of this volume. Nonetheless, it has usually been taken as evident that the best cure for various threats to and defects of liberal democracy is more stringent rather than less stringent protection of rights such as freedom of speech, or freedom of political and other forms of association. But the global environment in which Europe finds itself has changed, and has gradually eroded these conventional wisdoms. The increased threat of terrorism on the one hand, epitomised by the events of September 11 2001, and the accession of the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe with their specific political traditions on the other hand, has placed this liberal-democratic consensus under considerable stress. The essays collected in this volume reflect this stress, and search for answers to the questions raised by the changing political environment. The contributions focus on the European experience but they are placed within a wider global context in reflecting on the appropriate scope and strength of protection of political rights. Under what circumstances is 'militant democracy' - democracy which is intolerant of the enemies of democracy - a cure to the real and imagined threats, and under what circumstances does it become part of the problem? Different chapters deal variously with the theory of political rights, the rights to freedom of expression and to freedom association (focusing particularly on the topical issue of party closures), the understanding of political rights in Central and Eastern Europe and its impact on the democratization of this region, the question of political rights of minorities in this region, and finally the effectiveness of the Council of Europe's monitoring mechanisms.
Set in Fordsburg between the 1950s and 1990s against the backdrop of apartheid, A Home on Vorster Street invites us into the life of Razina Theba and the vibrant community to which she and her characterful Indian-Muslim family belongs. The book offers an intimate, vividly told narrative of a family bound by loyalty to their culture, religion and each other. At times laugh-out-loud funny, and at others emotional, painful and tender-hearted, Theba’s memoir is a spirited exploration of the themes of family, racism, cultural heritage and identity.
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is the site of the largest mass repression of an ethnic and/or religious minority in the world today. Researchers estimate that since 2016 one million people have been detained there without trial. In the detention centres individuals are exposed to deeply invasive forms of surveillance and psychological stress, while outside them more than ten million Turkic Muslim minorities are subjected to a network of hi-tech surveillance systems, checkpoints and interpersonal monitoring. Existing reportage and commentary on the crisis tend to address these issues in isolation, but this ground-breaking volume brings them together, exploring the interconnections between the core strands of the Xinjiang emergency in order to generate a more accurate understanding of the mass detentions' significance for the future of President Xi Jinping's China. -- .
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is the site of the largest mass repression of an ethnic and/or religious minority in the world today. Researchers estimate that since 2016 one million people have been detained there without trial. In the detention centres individuals are exposed to deeply invasive forms of surveillance and psychological stress, while outside them more than ten million Turkic Muslim minorities are subjected to a network of hi-tech surveillance systems, checkpoints and interpersonal monitoring. Existing reportage and commentary on the crisis tend to address these issues in isolation, but this ground-breaking volume brings them together, exploring the interconnections between the core strands of the Xinjiang emergency in order to generate a more accurate understanding of the mass detentions' significance for the future of President Xi Jinping's China. -- .
The creation of Afghanistan in 1880, following the Second Anglo-Afghan War, gave an empowering voice to the Pashtun people, the largest ethnic group in a diverse country. In order to distil the narrative of the state's formation and early years, a Pashtun-centric version of history dominated Afghan history and the political process from 1880 to the 1970s. Alternative discourses made no appearance in the fledgling state which lacked the scholarly institutions and any sense of recognition for history, thus providing no alternatives to the narratives produced by the British, whose quasi-colonial influence in the region was supreme. Since 1970, the ongoing crises in Afghanistan have opened the space for non-Pashtuns, including Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks, to form new definitions of identity, challenge the official discourse and call for the re-writing of the long-established narrative. At the same time, the Pashtun camp, through their privileged position in the political settlements of 2001, have attempted to confront the desire for change in historical perceptions by re-emphasising the Pashtun domination of Afghan history. This crisis of hegemony has led to a deep antagonism between the Pashtun and non-Pashtun perspectives of Afghan history and threatens the stability of political process in the country.
This book explores the role of coercion in the relationship between the citizens and regimes of communist Eastern Europe. Looking in detail at Soviet collectivisation in 1928-34, the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and the Polish Solidarity Movement of 1980-84, it shows how the system excluded channels to enable popular grievances to be translated into collective opposition; how this lessened the amount of popular protest, affected the nature of such protest as did occur and entrenched the dominance of state over society.
The twentieth century has seen both the greatest triumph of Jewish history and its greatest tragedy: the birth of the nation of Israel, and the state-sponsored genocide of the Holocaust. A People Apart is the first study to examine the role played by the Jews themselves, across the whole of Europe, during the century and a half leading up to these events.
This book explores how new governments and societies deal with a legacy of past repression, in Portugal, Spain, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Germany after reunification, as well as Russia, the Southern Cone of Latin America and Central America, as well as South Africa. It looks at official truth commissions, trials and amnesties and purges and unofficial social initiatives to deal with the past. The book also assesses the significance of forms of reckoning with the past for a process of democratic deepening as well as the importance of international actors in shaping policies to deal with past legacies in some of the countries examined.
The second instalment in a gripping memoir by Sakine Cansiz (codenamed 'Sara') chronicles the Kurdish revolutionary's harrowing years in a Turkish prison, following her arrest in 1979 at the age of 21. Jailed for more than a decade for her activities as a founder and leader of the Kurdish freedom movement, she faced brutal conditions and was subjected to interrogation and torture. Remarkably, the story she tells here is foremost one of resistance, with courageous episodes of collective struggle behind bars including hunger strikes and attempts at escape. Along the way she also presents vivid portraits of her fellow prisoners and militants, a snapshot of the Turkish left in the 1980s, a scathing indictment of Turkey's war on Kurdish people - and even an unlikely love story. The first prison memoir by a Kurdish woman to be published in English, this is an extraordinary document of an extraordinary life. Translated by Janet Biehl.
The Ba'th Party came to power in 1968 and remained for thirty-five years, until the 2003 US invasion. Under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, who became president of Iraq in 1979, a powerful authoritarian regime was created based on a system of violence and an extraordinary surveillance network, as well as reward schemes and incentives for supporters of the party. The true horrors of this regime have been exposed for the first time through a massive archive of government documents captured by the United States after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It is these documents that form the basis of this extraordinarily revealing book and that have been translated and analyzed by Joseph Sassoon, an Iraqi-born scholar and seasoned commentator on the Middle East. They uncover the secrets of the innermost workings of Hussein's Revolutionary Command Council, how the party was structured, how it operated via its network of informers and how the system of rewards functioned. |
You may like...
Germany and the Second World War…
Ralf Blank, Joerg Echternkamp, …
Hardcover
R12,608
Discovery Miles 126 080
Franci's War - The incredible true story…
Franci Rabinek Epstein
Hardcover
(1)
|