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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Political control & influence > Political oppression & persecution > General
Memory of the Argentina Disappearances examines the history of the production, public circulation, and the interpretations and reinterpretations of the Nunca Mas report issued by Argentina's National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP). It was established in 1983 by constitutional president Raul Alfonsin to investigate the fate of thousands of people who had been disappeared by the state during the seventies. Upon publication in 1984, Nunca Mas became a bestseller, was translated into several languages and won greater public importance when the military juntas were brought to trial and the court accepted the report as key evidence. The report's importance was further enhanced with the adoption of CONADEP and Nunca Mas as models for truth commissions established in Latin America, and when it was postulated as a means for conveying an awareness of this past to Argentina's younger generations. This book contributes to understanding the political processes that led to Nunca Mas becoming the way in which Argentines remembered the disappearances and the country's political violence, and how its meaning is modified by new interpretations. Given the canonical nature of Nunca Mas, the book sheds light on the most substantial changes and the continuities in Argentina's social memory of its recent past.
This book tells the story of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the largest nonsectarian refugee relief agency in the world. Founded in the 1930s by socialist militants, the IRC attracted the support of renowned progressives such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Thomas, and Reinhold Niebuhr. But by the 1950s it had been absorbed into the American foreign policy establishment. Throughout the Cold War, the IRC was deeply involved in the volatile confrontations between the two superpowers and participated in an array of sensitive clandestine operations. The IRC thus evolved from a small organization of committed activists to a global operation functioning as one link in the CIA's covert network.
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 work investigates a case of political persecution that occurred over 50 years ago (the Wang case), but which still raises profound issues for the relationship between revolutionary regimes and the intellectuals who serve them. Song Jinshou has compiled a list of the documents of the Wang case.
Reproducing actual Soviet documents, this work examines what prison and labour camp files reveal of the fate of the poet Osip Mandelstam and the history of the Yiddish writer Pinhas Kahanovich (Der Nister). It also provides a guide to the analysis of Stalin-era prison and labour camp files.
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.
Memoirs of the Chinese author, Chen Xeuzhao, who was branded a rightist by the communist authorities. The book tells of her suffering during the Cultural Revolution.
This autobiographical novella was written in 1980 by one of China's leading dissidents, who was released from jail in late October 1990 again after being imprisoned as a pro-democracy activist in the wake of the Tiananmen incident of spring 1989. Wang recounts three episodes of extreme hardship in his life: incarceration in a Guomindang jail during the 1930s for his communist activism, on the run from Japanese troops during the 1940s in a bleak part of Shandong Province, and imprisonment as a "rightist" in Shanghai during the 1960s cultural revolution. The central theme of the three stories is extreme deprivation and "Hunger".
This autobiographical novella was written in 1980 by one of China's leading dissidents, who was released from jail in late October 1990 again after being imprisoned as a pro-democracy activist in the wake of the Tiananmen incident of spring 1989. Wang recounts three episodes of extreme hardship in his life: incarceration in a Guomindang jail during the 1930s for his communist activism, on the run from Japanese troops during the 1940s in a bleak part of Shandong Province, and imprisonment as a "rightist" in Shanghai during the 1960s cultural revolution. The central theme of the three stories is extreme deprivation and "Hunger".
Available for the first time in English, The Drama of Slavuta draws on Jewish sources and official Tsarist government archives in providing insight into the shutdown of a major nineteenth-century Jewish printing establishment during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855), when the persecution of Jews and suppression of Jewish culture reached unprecedented heights in Russia. The eminent historian Saul M. Ginsburg, who authored the original manuscript, successfully weaves an account of the persecution of the printing establishment's Hasidic owners, the Brothers Shapiro, into the larger scheme of official persecution of all Jews and thereby provides chilling insight into contemporary Russian attitudes towards Jews and Jewish culture. Contents: Volhynia Gubernia; Accusations Continue; The War Against Hasidism; "Yore-Deah"; Yakob Lipps; Forced Testimonies; The Imperial Decree; The Ushitza Story; The Military Commission's Verdict; "So Shall It Be"; "Araktsh Stones"; Moral Victors.
Kaneko Fumiko (1903-1926) wrote this memoir while in prison after being convicted of plotting to assassinate the Japanese emperor. Despite an early life of misery, deprivation, and hardship, she grew up to be a strong and independent young woman. When she moved to Tokyo in 1920, she gravitated to left-wing groups and eventually joined with the Korean nihilist Pak Yeol to form a two-person nihilist organization. Two days after the Great Tokyo Earthquake, in a general wave of anti-leftist and anti-Korean hysteria, the authorities arrested the pair and charged them with high treason. Defiant to the end (she hanged herself in prison on July 23, 1926), Kaneko Fumiko wrote this memoir as an indictment of the society that oppressed her, the family that abused and neglected her, and the imperial system that drove her to her death.
A Human Being Died That Night recounts an extraordinary dialogue. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a psychologist who grew up in a black South African township, reflects on her interviews with Eugene de Kock, the commanding officer of state-sanctioned death squads under apartheid. Gobodo-Madikizela met with de Kock in Pretoria's maximum-security prison, where he is serving a 212-year sentence for crimes against humanity. In profoundly arresting scenes, Gobodo-Madikizela conveys her struggle with contradictory internal impulses to hold him accountable and to forgive. Ultimately, as she allows us to witness de Kock's extraordinary awakening of conscience, she illuminates the ways in which the encounter compelled her to redefine the value of remorse and the limits of forgiveness.
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.
"Blisteringly witty." Kirkus "An essential guide." Publisher's Weekly "Timely." Booklist When Nina Jankowicz's first book on online disinformation was profiled in The New Yorker, she expected attention but not an avalanche of abuse and harassment, predominantly from men, online. All women in politics, journalism and academia now face untold levels of harassment and abuse in online spaces. Together with the world's leading extremism researchers, Jankowicz wrote one of the definitive reports on this troubling phenomenon. Drawing on rigorous research into the treatment of Kamala Harris - the first woman vice-president - and other political and public figures, Nina also uses her own experiences to provide a step-by-step plan for dealing with harassment, abuse, doxing and disinformation in online spaces. The result is a must-read for researchers, journalists and all women with a profile in the online space.
Examines decadence in our language, especially that language which leads to dehumanization and degradation of human beings. Powerful illustrations may be found in the fact that, for instance, Hitler's "Final Solution" appeared "reasonable" once the Jews were successfully labelled by the Nazis as sub-humans, "parasites," "vermin," or "bacilli." So, too, the subjugation of the American Indian was "defensible" since they were defined as "barbarians" and "savages." The author of this engrossing text that was originally published in 1974 by Public Affairs Press successfully identifies and critically comments on the racist, sexist, and ethnic slurs still predominant in society today, with the hope that this decadence will be cured. Winner of the 1983 George Orwell Award from the Committee on Doublespeak of the NCTE.
In Rock | Water | Life, Lesley Green examines the interwoven realities of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa, calling for environmental research and governance to transition to an ecopolitical approach that could address South Africa's history of racial oppression and environmental exploitation. Green analyses conflicting accounts of nature in environmental sciences that claim neutrality amid ongoing struggles for land restitution and environmental justice. Offering in-depth studies of environmental conflict in contemporary South Africa, Green addresses the history of contested water access in Cape Town; struggles over natural gas fracking in the Karoo; debates about decolonising science; the potential for a politics of soil in the call for land restitution; urban baboon management, and the consequences of sending sewage to urban oceans.
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. -- .
A Long Letter To My Daughter is award-winning South African author Marita van der Vyver's youth memoir. An unputdownable read that weaves together both love letter, to a daughter, a language and a country, whilst tracing Van der Vyver's early years. Above all, it is a mother's effort to make sense of a world that seems increasingly senseless.
One night in April 2014, members of the terrorist organization Boko Haram raided the small town of Chibok in northeast Nigeria and abducted 276 young girls from the local boarding school. The event caused massive, international outrage. Some of the girls were able to escape and award-winning journalist Wolfgang Bauer spent several weeks with them as they recounted their ordeal. In Stolen Girls, he gives voice to these girls, allowing them to speak for themselves - about their lives before the abduction, about the horrors during their captivity, and their dreams of a better future.
An in-depth investigation of the Romanian secret police's file on Muller, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, re-creating a "file story" of her surveillance. "Herta Muller should share her Nobel with the Securitate." This comment by a former officer in the Romanian secret police, or Securitate, was in reaction to hearing that Muller, a German writer originally from Romania, had won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Communist Romania's infamous secret police was indeed a protagonist in Muller's work, though an undesired and dreaded one: most of her writings are deeply and explicitly anchored in Ceausescu's Romania and her own traumatic experiences with the Securitate. Muller's file traces her surveillance from 1983 until after she emigrated to West Germany in 1987. She has written extensively in reaction to reading her file, but primarily addresses its gaps, begging the question what information the file does in fact contain. This book is an in-depth investigation of Muller's file, and engages with other related files, including that of her then-husband, the writer Richard Wagner. Valentina Glajar treats the files as primary sources in order to re-create the story of Muller's surveillance by the Securitate. In such an intrusive culture of surveillance, surviving the system often meant a certain degree of entanglement: for victims, collaborators, and implicated subjects alike. Veiled in secrecy for decades, these compelling and complex documents shed light on a boundary between victims and perpetrators as porous as the Iron Curtain itself.
After Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was filmed going in to the Saudi consulate in Turkey, he was never seen alive again. What happened next turned into a major international scandal, now finally pieced together by Channel 4's BAFTA award-winning Foreign Affairs Correspondent Jonathan Rugman. Described by Donald Trump as the 'worst cover-up ever', this is the first comprehensive account of one of the most notorious and outrageous murder plots of our time. In The Killing in the Consulate, Rugman pieces together in minute-by-minute detail the events after Khashoggi entered the Saudi diplomatic building on 2 October 2018, expecting to receive the documentation that would enable him to marry Hatice Cengiz, patiently waiting for him outside. Little did they realise, he was entering a trap, as a 15-man Saudi hit squad had just flown in to the country and was waiting for him. Within minutes he had been viciously murdered and his body was quickly disposed of. The Saudis thought they would be able to get away with it all, and concocted a far-fetched story to cover it up. But what they didn't realise was that Turkey's President Erdogan's security and intelligence agencies had bugged the consulate, and captured the horrific events on tape. Based on confidential sources, dramatic new evidence and in-depth research across several countries, Rugman reveals the context behind the murder and attempted cover-up. He shows how a power struggle between Erdogan and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, had such fatal results. The prince had seemed to promise a new and more open era for his country, while also investing vast sums in arms deals with the West. Inevitably other nations, including President Trump and the USA, were drawn into the affair, which created the biggest crisis in US-Saudi relations since 9/11. Skilfully, Rugman draws together all the strands to tell a gripping story of one man's tragedy that had global consequences.
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.
The Unlikely Mr Rogue is the story of the quiet man behind the so-called ‘rogue unit’ at SARS, who has become a lightning rod for so many in politics today. It takes the reader on a journey – Ivan’s growing up in Merebank, KZN, his politicisation, his friendship with Pravin Gordhan and his running of Operation Vula from Lusaka, reporting to Oliver Tambo. In some ways, the setting up of SARS was Operation Vula revisited. Many of the same operatives were now working for a higher purpose. And this higher purpose, of providing the money to reduce inequality in the state, was a daily mantra for Gordhan, Pillay and others. They really believed in it. Groenink tells of the early 1990s in Lusaka, of their falling in love, of the insecurity in coming back to the country, and the times when Ivan was in charge of stationery in the bowels of Shell House. This is the story of a good man, an unlikely man, a quiet man, determined to use SARS to fund the post-liberation nation-building, and his downfall at the hands of his enemies and a scurrilous Sunday Times. |
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