For South Koreans, the twenty years from the early 1960s to late 1970s were the best and worst of times-a period of unprecedented economic growth and of political oppression that deepened as prosperity spread. In this masterly account, Carter J. Eckert finds the roots of South Korea's dramatic socioeconomic transformation in the country's long history of militarization-a history personified in South Korea's paramount leader, Park Chung Hee. The first volume of a comprehensive two-part history, Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866-1945 reveals how the foundations of the dynamic but strongly authoritarian Korean state that emerged under Park were laid during the period of Japanese occupation. As a cadet in the Manchurian Military Academy, Park and his fellow officers absorbed the Imperial Japanese Army's ethos of victory at all costs and absolute obedience to authority. Japanese military culture decisively shaped Korea's postwar generation of military leaders. When Park seized power in an army coup in 1961, he brought this training and mentality to bear on the project of Korean modernization. Korean society under Park exuded a distinctively martial character, Eckert shows. Its hallmarks included the belief that the army should intervene in politics in times of crisis; that a central authority should plan and monitor the country's economic system; that the Korean people's "can do" spirit would allow them to overcome any challenge; and that the state should maintain a strong disciplinary presence in society, reserving the right to use violence to maintain order.

All roads lead to Johannesburg, remarks the narrator of Alan Paton's novel Cry, The Beloved Country. Taking this quote as her impetus, Loren Kruger guides readers into the heart of South Africa's largest city. Exploring a wide range of fiction, film, architecture, performance, and urban practices from trading to parades, Imagining the Edgy City traverses Johannesburg's rich cultural terrain over the last century. The "edgy city" in Kruger's exploration refers not only to persistent boundaries between the haves and have-nots but also to the cosmopolitan diversity and innovation that has emerged from Johannesburg. The book begins with the building boom, performances and uneven but noteworthy inter-racial exchange that marked the city's fiftieth-anniversary celebration at the Empire Exhibition in 1936. This celebration rapidly gave way to the political repression and civil unrest that characterized South Africa from 1950 to 1990. Yet poetry, drama, fiction, and photography continued to thrive, bearing witness not only against apartheid but to alternatives beyond it. In the late twentieth century, the not quite post-apartheid condition fired the artistic imaginations of film makers as well as novelists. Urban neglect, rising crime, and the influx of migrants inspired noir cinema-like Michael Hammon's Wheels and Deals-and fiction about migration from Achmat Dangor to Phaswane Mpe, and in the twenty-first, urban renewal has produced public art that incorporates the desire lines of newcomers as well as natives. Alongside well-known artists such as Nadine Gordimer, William Kentridge, and David Goldblatt, the book introduces many artists, architects, writers, and other chroniclers who have hitherto received little attention abroad. Ultimately, Johannesburg emerges as a city whose negotiation of the tensions between incivility and innovation invites comparisons with modern conurbations across the world, not only African cities such as Dakar, or other cities of the "south" such as Bogota, but also with major metropolises in North America and Europe from Chicago to Paris. A multi-faceted work that speaks to scholars in urban studies, literature, and history, Imagining the Edgy City is a rich example of interdisciplinary scholarship at its best.

El Salvador's civil war, which left at least 75,000 people dead and displaced more than a million, ended in 1992. The accord between the government and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) has been lauded as a model post-Cold War peace agreement. But after the conflict stopped, crime rates shot up. The number of murder victims surpassed wartime death tolls. Those who once feared the police and the state became frustrated by their lack of action. Peace was not what Salvadorans had hoped it would be. Citizens began saying to each other, "It's worse than the war.""El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy" challenges the pronouncements of policy analysts and politicians by examining Salvadoran daily life as told by ordinary people who have limited influence or affluence. Anthropologist Ellen Moodie spent much of the decade after the war gathering crime stories from various neighborhoods in the capital city of San Salvador. True accounts of theft, assaults, and murders were shared across kitchen tables, on street corners, and in the news media. This postconflict storytelling reframed violent acts, rendering them as driven by common criminality rather than political ideology. Moodie shows how public dangers narrated in terms of private experience shaped a new interpretation of individual risk. These narratives of postwar violence--occurring at the intersection of self and other, citizen and state, the powerful and the powerless--offered ways of coping with uncertainty during a stunted transition to democracy.

In 2006, four years after the illegal prison in Guantanamo Bay opened, the Pentagon finally released the names of the 773 men held there, as well as 7,000 pages of transcripts from tribunals assessing their status as 'enemy combatants'. Andy Worthington is the only person to have analysed every page of these transcripts and this book reveals the stories of all those imprisoned in Guantanamo. Deprived of the safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, and, for the most part, sold to the Americans by their allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the detainees have struggled for five years to have their stories heard. Looking in detail at the circumstances of their capture, and at the coercive interrogations and unsubstantiated allegations that have been used to justify their detention. Stories of torture in Afghanistan and Guantanamo are uncovered, as well as new information about the process of 'extraordinary rendition' that underpins the US administration's 'war on terror'. Who will speak for the 773 men who have been held in Guantanamo? This passionate and brilliantly detailed book brings their stories to the world for the first time.

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.

Anti-Jewish pogroms rocked the Russian Empire in 1881-2, plunging both the Jewish community and the imperial authorities into crisis. Focusing on a wide range of responses to the pogroms, this book offers the most comprehensive, balanced, and complex study of the crisis to date. It presents a nuanced account of the diversity of Jewish political reactions and introduces a wealth of new sources covering Russian and other non-Jewish reactions to these events. Seeking to answer the question of what caused the pogroms' outbreak and spread, the book provides a fuller picture of how officials at every level responded to the national emergency and irrevocably lays to rest the myth that the authorities instigated or tolerated the pogroms. This is essential reading not only for Russian and Jewish historians but also for those interested in the study of ethnic violence more generally.

Does democracy decrease state repression in line with the expectations of governments, international organizations, NGOs, social movements, academics and ordinary citizens around the world? Most believe that a 'domestic democratic peace' exists, rivalling that found in the realm of interstate conflict. Investigating 137 countries from 1976 to 1996, this book seeks to shed light on this question. Specifically, three results emerge. First, while different aspects of democracy decrease repressive behaviour, not all do so to the same degree. Human rights violations are especially responsive to electoral participation and competition. Second, while different types of repression are reduced, not all are limited at comparable levels. Personal integrity violations are decreased more than civil liberties restrictions. Third, the domestic democratic peace is not bulletproof; the negative influence of democracy on repression can be overwhelmed by political conflict. This research alters our conception of repression, its analysis and its resolution.

Who Killed My Father is the story of a tough guy - the story of the little boy I never was. The story of my father. 'What a beautiful book' MAX PORTER In Who Killed My Father, Edouard Louis explores key moments in his father's life, and the tenderness and disconnects in their relationship. Told with the fire of a writer determined on social justice, and with the compassion of a loving son, the book urgently and brilliantly engages with issues surrounding masculinity, class, homophobia, shame and social poverty. It unflinchingly takes aim at systems that disadvantage those they seek to exclude - those who have their expectations, hopes and passions crushed by a society which gives them little thought. 'Edouard Louis is the vanguard of France's new generation of political writers' Evening Standard

The attention devoted to the unprecedented levels of imprisonment in the United States obscure an obvious but understudied aspect of criminal justice: there is no consistent punishment policy across the U.S. It is up to individual states to administer their criminal justice systems, and the differences among them are vast. For example, while some states enforce mandatory minimum sentencing, some even implementing harsh and degrading practices, others rely on community sanctions. What accounts for these differences?
The Politics of Imprisonment seeks to document and explain variation in American penal sanctioning, drawing out the larger lessons for America's overreliance on imprisonment. Grounding her study in a comparison of how California, Washington, and New York each developed distinctive penal regimes in the late 1960s and early 1970s--a critical period in the history of crime control policy and a time of unsettling social change--Vanessa Barker concretely demonstrates that subtle but crucial differences in political institutions, democratic traditions, and social trust shape the way American states punish offenders. Barker argues that the apparent link between public participation, punitiveness, and harsh justice is not universal but dependent upon the varying institutional contexts and patterns of civic engagement within the U.S. and across liberal democracies.
A bracing examination of the relationship between punishment and democracy, The Politics of Imprisonment not only suggests that increased public participation in the political process can support and sustain less coercive penal regimes, but also warns that it is precisely a lack of civic engagement that may underpin mass incarceration in the United States.

One of Stalin's most heinous acts was the ruthless repression of millions of peasants in the early 1930s, an act that established the very foundations of the gulag. Solzhenitsyn barely touched upon this brutal episode in his magisterial Gulag Archipelago and subsequent writers passed over the subject in silence. Now, with the opening of Soviet archives, an entirely new dimension of Stalin's brutality has been uncovered. The Unknown Gulag is the first book in English to explore this untold story.
Historian Lynne Viola reveals how, in one of the most egregious episodes of Soviet repression, Stalin drove two million peasants into internal exile, to work as forced laborers. The book shows how entire families were callously thrown out of their homes, banished from their villages, and sent to the icy hinterlands of the Soviet Union, where in the course of a decade, almost a half million would die as a result of disease, starvation, or exhaustion. Drawing on pioneering research in the previously closed archives of the central and provincial Communist Party, the Soviet state, and the secret police, Viola documents the history of this tragic episode. She delves into what long remained an entirely hidden world within the gulag, throwing new light on Stalin's consolidation of power, the rise of the secret police as a state within the state, and the complex workings of the Soviet system. But first and foremost, she movingly captures the day-to-day life of Stalin's first victims, telling the stories of the peasant families who experienced one of the twentieth century's most horrific instances of mass repression.
A compelling story of human suffering and survival in Stalin's Soviet Union, here is a new chapter in the history of the gulag, virtually hidden from sight until now.

It is commonly assumed that the issue of religion declines in political significance as societies modernise. However, the upheaval associated with the shift from authoritarian to more open regimes can be accompanied by a revitalisation of religion. Individuals within these societies are struggling to find meaning in the seeming chaos of political change; religious elites are seeking to define their own role within the new order; and political elites are looking for new ways of ensuring legitimacy and building national unity. In this book John Anderson constructs a theoretical framework where he compares and contrasts the politics of religious liberty in two Southern European countries, two Central-Eastern European countries and the evolution of the former USSR, particularly Russia. Exploring these issues of religious 'recognition' and religious diversity, Anderson attempts to expose the wider problem of creating a democratic mentality in such transitional societies, through extensive original research and interviews.

Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin is the first book devoted exclusively to popular participation in the 'Great Terror', a period in which millions of people were arrested, interrogated, shot, and sent to labor camps. The book shifts attention from the machinations of top Party leaders to the mechanisms by which repression engulfed Soviet society. In the unions and the factories, repression was accompanied by a mass campaign for democracy. Party leaders urged workers to criticize and remove corrupt and negligent officials. Workers, shop foremen, local Party members, and union leaders adopted the slogans of repression and used them, often against each other, to redress long-standing grievances, shift blame for intractable problems in production, and advance personal agendas. Repression quickly became a mass phenomenon; not only in the number of victims it claimed, but in the number of perpetrators it spawned. Using new, formerly secret archival sources, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin takes us into the unions and the factories to observe how ordinary people moved through clear stages toward madness and self-destruction.

Kim Yong shares his harrowing account of life in a labor camp--a singularly despairing form of torture carried out by the secret state. Although it is known that gulags exist in North Korea, little information is available about their organization and conduct, for prisoners rarely escape both incarceration and the country alive. "Long Road Home" shares the remarkable story of one such survivor, a former military official who spent six years in a gulag and experienced firsthand the brutality of an unconscionable regime.

As a lieutenant colonel in the North Korean army, Kim Yong enjoyed unprecedented privilege in a society that closely monitored its citizens. He owned an imported car and drove it freely throughout the country. He also encountered corruption at all levels, whether among party officials or Japanese trade partners, and took note of the illicit benefits that were awarded to some and cruelly denied to others.

When accusations of treason stripped Kim Yong of his position, the loose distinction between those who prosper and those who suffer under Kim Jong-il became painfully clear. Kim Yong was thrown into a world of violence and terror, condemned to camp No. 14 in Hamkyeong province, North Korea's most notorious labor camp. As he worked a constant shift 2,400 feet underground, daylight became Kim's new luxury; as the months wore on, he became intimately acquainted with political prisoners, subhuman camp guards, and an apocalyptic famine that killed millions.

After years of meticulous planning, and with the help of old friends, Kim escaped and came to the United States via China, Mongolia, and South Korea. Presented here for the first time in its entirety, his story not only testifies to the atrocities being committed behind North Korea's wall of silence, but it also illuminates the daily struggle to maintain dignity and integrity in the face of unbelievable odds. Like the work of Solzhenitsyn, this rare portrait tells a story of resilience as it reveals the dark forms of oppression, torture, and ideological terror at work in our world today.

This international history uncovers an American security program in which Washington reached into fifteen Latin American countries to seize more than 4,000 German expatriates and intern them in the Texas desert. The crowd of Nazi Party members, antifascist exiles, and even Jewish refugees were lumped together in camps riven by strife. The book, first published in 2003, examines the evolution of governmental policy, its impact on individuals and emigrant communities, and the ideological assumptions that blinded officials in both Washington and Berlin to Latin American realities. Franklin Roosevelt's vaunted Good Neighbor policy was a victim of this effort to force reluctant Latin American governments to hand over their German residents, while the operation ruined an opportunity to rescue victims of the Holocaust. This study makes a very contemporary argument: that security measures based on group affiliation rather than individual actions are as unjust and ineffective in foreign policy as they are in law enforcement.

Chechnya From Nationalism to Jihad James Hughes "James Hughes has produced the most comprehensive, thoroughly documented, and up-to-date study of the Chechen conflict available. This sophisticated and subtle analysis places Chechnya in the context of broader debates about nationalism and ethnic politics, theories of empire and secession, and the propensity of new democracies to go to war."--Matthew Evangelista, Cornell University "Hughes offers a new way of thinking about ethnopolitical conflict by examining conflict dynamics as part of the causation chain in a conflict."--"History: Reviews of New Books" "Does the book have value for the military historian? Absolutely."--"Journal of Military History " "an excellent starting point for anyone looking for insight into how the radical Sunni Salafi movement both evolved and commandeered the struggle in Chechnya, which could also serve as an example as to how Al-Qaeda could hijack other nationalist struggles in the future."--"International Affairs" "An exemplary case study. . . . Throughout, insights into the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reconstitution of a federated Russia, and the leadership of Vladimir Putin abound. . . . Highly recommended."--"Choice" The sheer scale and brutality of the hostilities between Russia and Chechnya stand out as an exception in the mostly peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union. "Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad" provides a fascinating analysis of the transformation of secular nationalist resistance in a nominally Islamic society into a struggle that is its antithesis, jihad. Hughes locates Chechen nationalism within the wider movement for national self-determination that followed the collapse of the Soviet empire. When negotiations failed in the early 1990s, political violence was instrumentalized to consolidate opposing nationalist visions of state-building in Russia and Chechnya. The resistance in Chechnya also occurred in a regional context where Russian hegemony over the Caucasus, especially the resources of the Caspian basin, was in retreat, and in an international context of rising Islamic radicalism. Alongside Bosnia, Kashmir, and other conflicts, Chechnya became embedded in Osama Bin Laden's repertoire of jihadist rhetoric against the "West." It was not simply Russia's destruction of a nationalist option for Chechnya, or "Wahabbist" infiltration from without, that created the political space for Islamism. Rather, we must look also at how the conflict was fought. The lack of proportionality and discrimination in the use of violence, particularly by Russia, accelerated and intensified the Islamic radicalization and thereby transformed the nature of the conflict. James Hughes is Professor of Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. National and Ethnic Conflict in the 21st Century 2007 296 pages 6 x 9 5 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-2030-8 Paper $26.50s 17.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-0231-1 Ebook $26.5s 17.50 World Rights Political Science Short copy: The conflict in Chechnya involves many of the most contentious issues in contemporary international politics. By providing us with a persuasive and challenging study, Hughes sets out the indispensable lessons for other conflicts involving the volatile combination of insurgency and counterinsurgency, most notably the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Over much of its rule, the regime of Hafez al-Asad and his successor Bashar al-Asad deployed violence on a massive scale to maintain its grip on political power. In this book, Salwa Ismail examines the rationalities and mechanisms of governing through violence. In a detailed and compelling account, Ismail shows how the political prison and the massacre, in particular, developed as apparatuses of government, shaping Syrians' political subjectivities, defining their understanding of the terms of rule and structuring their relations and interactions with the regime and with one another. Examining ordinary citizens' everyday life experiences and memories of violence across diverse sites, from the internment camp and the massacre to the family and school, The Rule of Violence demonstrates how practices of violence, both in their routine and spectacular forms, fashioned Syrians' affective life, inciting in them feelings of humiliation and abjection, and infusing their lived environment with dread and horror. This form of rule is revealed to be constraining of citizens' political engagement, while also demanding of their action.

Individuals struggle to find meaning within the chaos of states undergoing political change. Religious elites seek to define their role within the new order while political elites search for new ways to ensure legitimacy and develop national unity. Contrasting the politics of religious liberty in a number of Southern and Eastern European countries, John Anderson explores the broader issue of creating a democratic mentality in such transitional societies. In the process he exposes the use of privilege and discrimination practiced by religious and political elites in these societies.

Omar Bartov argues that war, genocide and modern identity have been intimately linked. By comparing German, French and Jewish sources, this book demonstrates the need to view the Holocaust within the context of our era's predilection to resolve its conflicts over identity by massive application of destructive technologies.

This book offers an analysis of paramilitary imprisonment in Northern Ireland, in particular the thirty year struggle concerning the prisoners' assertion of their political status. Based upon interviews with former prisoners and staff, this book locates that experience within the broader literature on imprisonment. Four forms of prisoner resistance are examined including dirty protest and hunger strike; violence, destruction, and intimidation; escape; and resorts to the law. In addition three models of prison management are developed including reactive containment, criminalization, and managerialism. Finally the book considers the release of paramilitary prisoners and its relevance to the conflict resolution process in Northern Ireland.

Revelations about U.S policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world's leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America's most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI's "most wanted" list. She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners.
Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.

Published in Poland after World War II, this collection of concentration camp stories shows atrocious crimes becoming an unremarkable part of a daily routine. Prisoners eat, work, sleep, and fall in love a few yards from where other prisoners are systematically slaughtered. The will to survive overrides compassion, and the line between the normal and the abnormal wavers, then vanishes. Borowski, a concentration camp victim himself, understood what human beings will do to endure the unendurable. Together, these stories constitute not only a masterpiece of Polish - and world - literature but stand as cruel testimony to the level of inhumanity of which man is capable.

Activated by injustice, members of over-policed communities lead the current movement for civil rights in the United States. Responding to decades of abuse by law enforcement and an excessive criminal justice system, activists protested police brutality in Ferguson, organized against stop-and-frisk in New York City, and fueled the rise of Black Lives Matter. Yet, scholars did not anticipate this resistance, instead anticipating the political withdrawal of marginalized citizens. In Mobilized by Injustice, Hannah L. Walker excavates the power of criminal justice to inspire political action. Mobilization results from the belief that one's experiences are a consequence of policies that target people like one's self on the basis of group affiliation like race, ethnicity and class. In order to identify how individuals connect their experiences to a collective struggle, Walker centralizes the voices of those most impacted by criminal justice, pairing personal narratives with analysis of several surveys. She finds that the mobilizing power of the criminal justice system is broad, crosses racial boundaries and extends to the loved ones of custodial citizens. Mobilized by Injustice offers a compelling account of the criminal justice system as a spark for the formation of a movement with the potential to remake American politics.

Soon to be a major film, co-written and directed by Angelina Jolie Pitt Until the age of five, Loung Ung lived in Phnom Penh, one of seven children of a high-ranking government official. She was a precocious child who loved the open city markets, fried crickets, chicken fights and being cheeky to her parents. When Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into Phnom Penh in April 1975, Loung's family fled their home and were eventually forced to disperse to survive. Loung was trained as a child soldier while her brothers and sisters were sent to labour camps. The surviving siblings were only finally reunited after the Vietnamese penetrated Cambodia and started to destroy the Khmer Rouge. Bolstered by the bravery of one brother, the vision of the others and the gentle kindness of her sister, Loung forged on to create for herself a courageous new life. First They Killed My Father is an unforgettable book told through the voice of the young and fearless Loung. It is a shocking and tragic tale of a girl who was determined to survive despite the odds.