Gultan Kisanak, a Kurdish journalist and former MP, was elected co-mayor of Diyarbakir in 2014. Two years later, the Turkish state arrested and imprisoned her. Her story is remarkable, but not unique. While behind bars, she wrote about her own experiences and collected similar accounts from other Kurdish women, all co-chairs, co-mayors and MPs in Turkey; all incarcerated on political grounds. The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics is a one-of-a-kind collection of prison writings from more than 20 Kurdish women politicians. Here they reflect on their personal and collective struggles against patriarchy and anti-Kurdish repression in Turkey; on the radical feminist principles and practices through which they transformed the political structures and state offices in which they operated. They discuss what worked and what didn't, and the ways in which Turkey's anti-capitalist and socialist movements closely informed their political stances and practices. Demonstrating Kurdish women's ceaseless political determination and refusal to be silenced - even when behind bars - the book ultimately hopes to inspire women living under even the most unjust conditions to engage in collective resistance.

The twenty-first century so far has seen the global rise of authoritarian populism, systematic racism, and dogmatic metaphysics. Even though these events demonstrate the growth of an age of 'unreason', in this original and compelling book John Roberts resists the assumption that such thinking displays an unthinking irrationality or loss of reason; instead he asserts that an important feature of modern reactionary politics is that it offers a supposedly convincing integration of the particular and the universal. This move is defined by what Roberts calls the 'reasoning of unreason' and has deep roots in the history of Western thought and politics. Tracing the dark history of enlightenment-disenlightenment, John Roberts explores 'the reasoning of unreason' across centuries from Aquinas, William of Ockham, the most important treatise on witchcraft Malleus Maleficarum, Locke, Kant, and Count Arthur de Gobineau, to Social Darwinism, Nazism, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Friedrich von Hayek. Roberts provides a new set of philosophical-political tools to understand the formation and denigration of the rational subject and the current reinvestment in various forms of political unreason globally. The Reasoning of Unreason is the first book to draw on the philosophy of reason, political philosophy, political theory and political history, in order to produce a dialectical account of the 'making of reason' internal to the forces of unreason and the limits of reason.

This Scholastic Classics edition of George Orwell's classic dystopian novel is perfect for students and Orwell enthusiasts alike. Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. Winston Smith has always been a dutiful citizen of Oceania, rewriting history to meet the demands of the Ministry of Truth. But with each lie that he writes, Winston starts to resent the totalitarian party that seeks power for its own sake and punishes those that desire individuality. When Winston begins a secret relationship with his colleague Julia, he soon realises it's virtually impossible to escape the watchful eye of Big Brother... Totalitarianism, identity and independence, repression, power, language, rebellion, technology and modernisation are some of the themes that run throughout this novel.

The book reveals how everyday people survived political persecution and oppression, and champions human resilience in the face of unrelenting political terror. In Life in War, the reader accompanies Shannon Woodcock, the author and historian, through intimate interviews with six Albanian men and women. We hear how everyday people survived shocking living conditions, political persecution and oppression dependent on ethnicity, political status, gender and sexuality. This is a thorough and vivid history of lived communism in Albania, charting political and ideological shifts through the experiences of those who survived. Life is War stands as remarkable and profound testimony to the resilience of humanity in the face of unrelenting political terror. An accurate and precise historical work, engagingly rendered from life narratives, it plunges the reader into the difficult emotional truths that are at the core of remembering Albania's communist past. Life is War is a valuable contribution to studies of everyday life under communism and dictatorship. Eloquently written and expertly researched, it will appeal to readers interested in life histories, war, communism, European history and trauma studies.

While the genre of testimonio has deep roots in oral cultures and in Latin American human rights struggles, the publication and subsequent adoption of This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga & Anzaldua, 1983) and, more recently, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Latina Feminist Group, 2001), have demonstrated the power of testimonio as a genre that exposes brutality, disrupts silencing, and builds solidarity among women of colour. Within the field of education, scholars are increasingly taking up testimonio as a pedagogical, methodological, and activist approach to social justice, which transgresses traditional paradigms in academia. Unlike the more usual approach of researchers producing unbiased knowledge, the testimonio challenges objectivity by situating the individual in communion with a collective experience marked by marginalization, oppression, or resistance. This approach has resulted in new understandings about how marginalized communities build solidarity, and respond to and resist dominant culture, laws, and policies that perpetuate inequity. This book contributes to our understanding of testimonio as it relates to methodology, pedagogy, research, and reflection in pursuit of social justice. A common thread among the chapters is a sense of political urgency to address inequities within Chicana/o and Latina/o communities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Equity & Excellence in Education.

Popular protests are on the rise in China. However, since protesters rely on existing channels of participation and on patronage by elite backers, the state has been able to stymie attempts to generalize resistance and no large scale political movements have significantly challenged party rule. Yet the Chinese state is not monolithic. Decentralization has increased the power of local authorities, creating space for policy innovations and opening up the political opportunity structure. Popular protest in China - particularly in urban realm- not only benefits from the political fragmentation of the state, but also from the political communications revolution. The question of how and to what extent the internet can be used for mobilizing popular resistance in China is hotly debated. The government, virtual social organizations, and individual netizens both cooperate and compete with each other on the web. New media both increases the scope of the mobilizers and the mobilized (thereby creating new social capital), and provides the government with new means of social control (thereby limiting the political impact of the growing social capital). This volume is the first of its kind to assess the ways new media influence the mobilization of popular resistance and its possible effects in China today.

This book provides the reader with a ground-breaking understanding of disability and social movements. By describing how disability is philosophically, historically, and theoretically positioned, Carling-Jenkins is able to then examine disability relationally through an evaluation of the contributions of groups engaged in similar human rights struggles. The book locates disability rights as a new social movement and provides an explanation for why disability has been divided rather than united in Australia. Finally, it investigates whether the recent campaign to implement a national disability insurance scheme represents a re-emergence of the movement. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of both disability studies and social movements.

The 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel also resulted in the destruction of Palestinian society when some 80 per cent of the Palestinians who lived in the major part of Palestine upon which Israel was established became refugees. Israelis call the 1948 war their 'War of Independence' and the Palestinians their 'Nakba', or catastrophe. After many years of Nakba denial, land appropriation, political discrimination against the Palestinians within Israel and the denial of rights to Palestinian refugees, in recent years the Nakba is beginning to penetrate Israeli public discourse. This book, available at last in paperback, explores the construction of collective memory in Israeli society, where the memory of the trauma of the Holocaust and of Israel's war dead competes with the memory claims of the dispossessed Palestinians. Against a background of the Israeli resistance movement, Lentin's central argument is that co-memorating the Nakba by Israeli Jews is motivated by an unresolved melancholia about the disappearance of Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinians, a melancholia that shifts mourning from the lost object to the grieving subject. Lentin theorises Nakba co-memory as a politics of resistance, counterpoising co-memorative practices by internally displaced Israeli Palestinians with Israeli Jewish discourses of the Palestinian right of return, and questions whether return narratives by Israeli Jews, courageous as they may seem, are ultimately about Israeli Jewish self-healing rather than justice for Palestine. -- .

Since 1989, when the movement for Kashmiri independence took the form of an armed insurgency, it has been one of the most highly militarized regions in the world. This book is based on the idea that preserving memory is central to the struggle for justice and to someday rebuild a society shattered by two decades of armed conflict.

The official line is clear: the UK does not 'participate in, solicit, encourage or condone' torture. And yet, the evidence is irrefutable: when faced with potential threats to our national security, the gloves always come off. Drawing on previously unseen official documents, and the accounts of witnesses, victims and experts, prize-winning investigative journalist Ian Cobain looks beyond the cover-ups and the equivocations, to get to the truth. From WWII to the War on Terror, via Kenya and Northern Ireland, Cruel Britannia shows how the British have repeatedly and systematically resorted to torture, bending the law where they can, and issuing categorical denials all the while. What emerges is a picture of Britain that challenges our complacency and exposes the lie behind our reputation for fair play.

An investigation into how indigenous rights are conceived in legal language and doctrine In the twenty-first century, it is politically and legally commonplace that indigenous communities go to court to assert their rights against the postcolonial nation-state in which they reside. But upon closer examination, this constellation is far from straightforward. Indigenous communities make their claims as independent entities, governed by their own laws. And yet, they bring a case before the court of another sovereign, subjecting themselves to its foreign rule of law. According to Jonas Bens, when native communities enter into legal relationships with postcolonial nation-states, they "become indigenous." Indigenous communities define themselves as separated from the settler nation-state and insist that their rights originate from within their own system of laws. At the same time, indigenous communities must argue that they are incorporated in the settler nation-state to be able to use its judiciary to enforce these rights. As such, they are simultaneously included into and excluded from the state. Tracing how the indigenous paradox is inscribed into the law by investigating several indigenous rights cases in the Americas, from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, Bens illustrates how indigenous communities have managed-and continue to manage-to navigate this paradox by developing lines of legal reasoning that mobilize the concepts of sovereignty and culture. Bens argues that understanding indigeneity as a paradoxical formation sheds light on pressing questions concerning the role of legal pluralism and shared sovereignty in contemporary multicultural societies.

'A scrupulous piece of reporting, necessary, timely and very sobering' John Le Carré

A Sunday Times Best Book of 2018

Agent. Prisoner. Target.
Who is Sergei Skripal?

4 March 2018, Salisbury, England. A man and his daughter are found slumped on a bench, poisoned by the deadly nerve agent Novichok. He was a Russian national that became a MI6 spy.

Russia are publicly accused of carrying out the attack by the British government, sparking a diplomatic crisis between Russia and the West.

Then two innocent people find a discarded perfume bottle used in the attack and one of them, Dawn Sturgess, tragically dies. It is now a murder investigation. How exactly did we get here?

In The Skripal Files Mark Urban explains the most shocking espionage incident in a decade. Based on interviews with Sergei before his poisoning, Urban describes precisely how an otherwise loyal Russian intelligence officer was turned into an agent by MI6, how Skripal was betrayed so that he found himself in a Siberian prison, and why, years later, was he was targeted for assassination.

This book examines the relationship between total war, state-organized genocide, and the emergence of modern identity. The Holocaust, Bartov argues, can only be understood within the context of the century's predilection to apply systematic and destructive methods to resolve conflicts over identity.

State-sponsored torture and peacebuilding encapsulate the essence of many of the current conflicts in Indonesia. Papua in particular provides a thought-provoking example of the intricacy and complexity of building peace amidst enduring conflict and violence. This book examines the complex power relations that have constructed the gruesome picture of the fifty-year practice of torture in Papua, as well as the ongoing Papuan peacebuilding movements that resist the domineering power of the Indonesian state over Papuans. Conceptualising 'theatres of torture and peace', the book argues that torture in Papua is performed in public by the Indonesian state in order to communicate its policy of terror towards Papuans - it is not meant for extracting information, gaining confessions or exacting punishment. A Torture Dataset is provided, codifying evidence from a broad range of cases, collected through sensitive interviews. In examining the data, the author crafts a new, more holistic framework for analyzing cases of torture and employs an interdisciplinary approach integrating three different theories: Foucault's theory of governmentality and sovereignty, Kristeva's theory of abjection and Metz's theory of memoria passionis (the memory of suffering). The book successfully establishes a new understanding of torture as 'public theatre' and offers a new perspective of strengthening the existing Papuan peacebuilding framework of Papua Land of Peace. It will be of interest to academics working on Southeast Asian Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Transitional Justice, Peacebuilding, Human Rights and Anthropology of Violence.

An innovative study that examines how peaceful, domestic tactics by individual human rights activists and organizational activists, with public support, can force an authoritarian regime to make key concessions. Robert Press explores the creation and impact of a culture of resistance. He examines how domestic pressure can be more important than foreign pressure for political reform, especially in underdeveloped, authoritarian states. This study of contemporary Kenya fills a gap in traditional social movement theory to show how a resistance movement actually starts. Contrary to long-dominant theory, the book shows how the initiative for such a movement can come from activists themselves in the face of severe obstacles in society. With its unique findings on the effects of individual activism and peaceful resistance, this book will attract a broad audience in the study and practice of international relations, comparative politics, sociology, interest groups, peace and conflict, and human rights.

From 1952 to 1981, South Africa's apartheid government ran a school for the training of African art teachers at Indaleni, in what is today KwaZulu-Natal. The Art Of Life In South Africa is about the students, teachers, art, ideas, and politics that led to the school's founding, and which circulated during the years of its existence at a remote former mission station. It is a story of creativity, beauty, and community in twentieth-century South Africa.

Daniel Magaziner radically reframes apartheid-era South African history. Against the dominant narrative of apartheid oppression and black resistance, this book focuses instead on a small group's efforts to fashion more fulfilling lives through the ironic medium of an apartheid-era school.

Lushly illustrated with almost 100 images, this book gives us fully formed lives and remarkable insights into life under segregation and apartheid.

China's mistreatment of its Uyghur minority has drawn international condemnation and sanctions. The repression gripping Xinjiang is also hugely costly to China in Renminbi, personnel, and stifled economic productivity. Despite this, the Chinese Communist Party persists in its policies. Why? Drawing on extensive original data, Potter and Wang demonstrate insecurities about the stability of the regime and its claim to legitimacy motivate Chinese policies. These perceived threats to core interests drive the ferocity of the official response to Uyghur nationalism. The result is harsh repression, sophisticated media control, and selective international military cooperation. China's growing economic and military power means that the country's policies in Xinjiang and Central Asia have global implications. Zero Tolerance sheds light on this problem, informing policymakers, scholars, and students about an emerging global hotspot destined to play a central role in international politics in years to come.

China's mistreatment of its Uyghur minority has drawn international condemnation and sanctions. The repression gripping Xinjiang is also hugely costly to China in Renminbi, personnel, and stifled economic productivity. Despite this, the Chinese Communist Party persists in its policies. Why? Drawing on extensive original data, Potter and Wang demonstrate insecurities about the stability of the regime and its claim to legitimacy motivate Chinese policies. These perceived threats to core interests drive the ferocity of the official response to Uyghur nationalism. The result is harsh repression, sophisticated media control, and selective international military cooperation. China's growing economic and military power means that the country's policies in Xinjiang and Central Asia have global implications. Zero Tolerance sheds light on this problem, informing policymakers, scholars, and students about an emerging global hotspot destined to play a central role in international politics in years to come.

This collection of prison writings straddles two continents, and compares and contrasts the political struggles that gave birth to two vibrant new democracies of the twenty-first century: South Africa and the Czech Republic. The triumph over decades of suffering endured by the ordinary citizens of these two countries is symbolized by their leaders, Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel.

While the moral stature of these two men continues to act as a beacon for other political aspirants in a new century, they call upon us all to acknowledge the role played by ordinary men and women in effecting freedom and justice. For this reason, Fallen Walls focuses on the experiences of ordinary prisoners of conscience. It records three voices from the apartheid-era cells of Robben Island--Joseph Mati, Johnson Mgabela, Monde Mkunqwana--and three voices from communist-era prisons in Czechoslovakia--Jiri Mesicki, Lola Skodova, and Jiri Stransky. There are striking similarities as well as differences between the two sets of stories. On a personal level, the tales from Robben Island are characterized by an absence of bitterness and thoughts of revenge, while a sense of bleak isolation and lingering bitterness pervades accounts from the Czechoslovakian prisons and labor camps. The buoyant tone of triumph of the South Africans is balanced by the darker, more skeptical mood of the Czechs. In an age that teeters so precariously between hope and despair, the narratives of these six prisoners of conscience remind us not only of what we are, but also of what we may become.

In a timely warning against complacency, Vaclav Havel notes in his foreword that "the authors remind us anew of the price that is so often paid for freedom and democracy." Fallen Walls will be of interest to historians, sociologists, human rights activists, and political scientists.

Strikes, protests, and riots by Chinese workers have been rising over the past decade. The state has addressed a number of grievances, yet has also come down increasingly hard on civil society groups pushing for reform. Why are these two seemingly clashing developments occurring simultaneously? Manfred Elfstrom uses extensive fieldwork and statistical analysis to examine both the causes and consequences of protest. The book adopts a holistic approach, encompassing national trends in worker-state relations, local policymaking processes and the dilemmas of individual officials and activists. Instead of taking sides in the old debate over whether non-democracies like China's are on the verge of collapse or have instead found ways of maintaining their power indefinitely, it explores the daily evolution of autocratic rule. While providing a uniquely comprehensive picture of change in China, this important study proposes a new model of bottom-up change within authoritarian systems more generally.

Illustrated with prints from a unique archive of glass and celluloid negatives from the Aegean island of Anafi, this book deals with the life of people who were sent into internal exile under the Metaxas dictatorship (1936-1942). Like others before and after, this regime used imprisonment, internal deportation and exile as a means of containing and isolating a wide variety of people who were thought to be 'public dangers'. Drawing on published and unpublished memoirs and on firsthand accounts of former exiles, it gives a vivid picture of a by no means unified collection of people, facing a common set of problems on an island at the borders of the Greek State. During the Occupation, the Anafi exiles faced privation, hunger and finally the dissolution of the commune. This is a human drama which will interest a wide range of readers.

The arrest in 1998 and subsequent detention in London of General Augusto Pinochet on the orders of Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon occasioned worldwide debate and raised numerous issues of critical significance for politics, human rights and international law. This paper traces the progress of the case against Pinochet since its inception in Spain, through his 17-month detention in London, and up to its continuation in Chile. The work provides a survey of events and developments so far, and offers an initial review of some of the issues raised. It includes a detailed chronology of events from the time of Pinochet's arrest up to October 2000.