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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Political control & influence > Political oppression & persecution > General
In the late 1990s, the issue of diamonds contributing to conflict began to receive global attention. In response, the Kimberley Process, an international agreement drawn up in 2003, was implemented to reduce the trade of conflict diamonds and provide a way to certify the global diamond trade. This study looks at the political economy of resource-wealthy states in Africa to understand responses to the Kimberley Process, asking why some African states have higher levels of compliance and co-operation than others. Using cross-country comparisons to explain differing state policies and outcomes, Nathan Munier explores whether domestic, private economic actors matter in how international agreements operate. In doing so, he asks why states that regularly ignore international agreements will use scarce resources to raise their level of compliance with the Kimberley Process. Focusing on the domestic political economy of states, in contrast to past theories of state responses to international agreements, Munier finds that economic dependence and the preferences of private actors are essential in understanding the variation of state responses to international agreements.
This book is written as an attempt to understand what psycho-historical factors played a dominant role and undoubtly contributed to Afrikaners creating apartheid in 1948. The main factors are humiliation by the British, and unprocessed grief due to the Anglo-Boer War when the women and children were put into British concentration camps, leaving the survivors with a deep fear of survival as a people, in a country where they were far outnumbered by black people. The book follows their tracks from 1795 till 1948. The book is not about apartheid, it's about what determined it's creation in 1948 from a psychological perspective. It's a psycho-historical study.
A provocative and probing argument showing how human beings can for the first time in history take charge of their moral fate. Is tribalism-the political and cultural divisions between Us and Them-an inherent part of our basic moral psychology? Many scientists link tribalism and morality, arguing that the evolved "moral mind" is tribalistic. Any escape from tribalism, according to this thinking, would be partial and fragile, because it goes against the grain of our nature. In this book, Allen Buchanan offers a counterargument: the moral mind is highly flexible, capable of both tribalism and deeply inclusive moralities, depending on the social environment in which the moral mind operates. We can't be morally tribalistic by nature, Buchanan explains, because quite recently there has been a remarkable shift away from tribalism and toward inclusiveness, as growing numbers of people acknowledge that all human beings have equal moral status, and that at least some nonhumans also have moral standing. These are what Buchanan terms the Two Great Expansions of moral regard. And yet, he argues, moral progress is not inevitable but depends partly on whether we have the good fortune to develop as moral agents in a society that provides the right conditions for realizing our moral potential. But morality need not depend on luck. We can take charge of our moral fate by deliberately shaping our social environment-by engaging in scientifically informed "moral institutional design." For the first time in human history, human beings can determine what sort of morality is predominant in their societies and what kinds of moral agents they are.
Reflections on the Bicentenary of the 1819 Massacre of Reformers in Manchester Two hundred years after the massacre of protestors in Manchester, known as Peterloo, distinguished scholars of Romantic-era literature join together in this commemorative volume to assess the implications of the violence. Contributors explore how attitudes toward violence and the claims of people to participate in government were reflected and revised in the verbal and visual culture of the time. Their analyses provide fresh insights into cultural engagement as a means of resisting oppression and a sign of the resilience of humanity in facing threats and force. Key Features Provides a multi-perspectival, historical revaluation of the violence of Peterloo Draws on contemporary theorizations of violence by Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek and Rob Nixon to account for the cultural factors leading to Peterloo Supplements treatments of Peterloo centering on English history with attention to the significance of that event from Scottish, Irish and North American perspectives
This title is part of American Studies Now and available as an e-book first. Visit ucpress.edu/go/americanstudiesnow to learn more. On July 23, 1967, the eyes of the world fixed on Detroit, as thousands took to the streets to vent their frustrations with white racism, police brutality, and vanishing job prospects in the place that gave rise to the American Dream. Mainstream observers contended that the "riot" brought about the ruin of a once-great city; for them, the municipal bankruptcy of 2013 served as a bailout paving the way for the rebuilding of Detroit. Challenging this prevailing view, Scott Kurashige portrays the past half century as a long rebellion whose underlying tensions continue to haunt the city and the U.S. nation-state. He sees Michigan's scandal-ridden "emergency management" regime, set up to handle the bankruptcy, as the most concerted effort to put it down by disenfranchising the majority black citizenry and neutralizing the power of unions. Are we succumbing to authoritarian plutocracy or can we create a new society rooted in social justice and participatory democracy? The corporate architects of Detroit's restructuring have championed the creation of a "business-friendly" city, where billionaire developers are subsidized to privatize and gentrify Downtown, while working-class residents are being squeezed out by rampant housing evictions, school closures, water shutoffs, toxic pollution, and militarized policing. Grassroots organizers, however, have transformed Detroit into an international model for survival, resistance, and solidarity through the creation of urban farms, freedom schools, and self-governing communities. This epochal struggle illuminates the possible futures for our increasingly unstable and polarized nation.
Bangladesh: A Suffering People Under State Terrorism explores the destructive political situation in Bangladesh under the one-party and one-person rule of the despotic Sheikh Hasina. The contributors to this edited collection examine the catastrophic political environment of the country in view of the Hasina regime's relentless oppression and repression since 2009, the authoritarian rule of her father in the early 1970s as well as the topic of Indian political, cultural and economic hegemony to which this dictatorial regime is increasingly surrendering Bangladesh's national interest, integrity and sovereignty. The contributors also attempt to expose the wholesale corruption and unprecedented vote-rigging that have rendered the regime completely illegal and illegitimate. They also highlight how the regime has been clinging to power by systemically unleashing terror and tyranny through its widespread networks of state machinery.
Slavoj Zizek's prolific comments on anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, scapegoating, popular nationalism, the refugee crisis, Eurocentrism, the War on Terror, neocolonialism, global justice, and rioting comprise a dizzying array of thinking. But what can we pull out of his various writings and commentaries on race in the contemporary world? Is there anything approaching a Zizekian philosophy of race? Zahi Zalloua argues here that there is and that the often polemical style of Zizek's pronouncements shouldn't undermine the importance and urgency of his work in this area. Zalloua not only examines Zizek's philosophy of race but addresses the misconceptions that have arisen and some of the perceived shortcomings in his work to date. Zizek on Race also puts Zizek in dialogue with critical race and anti-colonial studies, dwelling on the sparks struck up by this dialogue and the differences, gaps, and absences it points up. Engaging Zizek's singular contribution to the analysis of race and racism, Zizek on Race both patiently interrogates and critically extends his direct comments on the topic, developing more fully the potential of his thought. In a response to the book, Zizek boldly reaffirms his theoretical stance, clarifying further his often difficult-to-work-out positions on some of his more controversial pronouncements.
The war on terror has brought to light troubling actions by the United States government which many claim amount to torture. But as this book shows, state-sanctioned violence and degrading, cruel, and unusual punishments have a long and contentious history in the nation. Organized around five broad thematic periods in American history--colonial America and the early republic; slavery and the frontier; imperialism, Jim Crow, and World Wars I and II; the Cold War, Vietnam, and police torture; and the war on terror--this annotated documentary history traces the low and high points of official attitudes toward state violence. Robert M. Pallitto provides a critical introduction, historical context, and brief commentary and then lets the documents speak for themselves. The result is a nearly 400-year history that traces the continuities and changes in debates over the meaning of torture and state violence in the U.S. and shows where state actions and policies have pushed and exceeded constitutional and international normative limits. Rigorously researched--and sometimes chilling--this volume is the first comprehensive reference work on state violence and torture in the U.S.
The searing accounts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniia Ginsberg and Varlam Shalamov opened the world's eyes to the terrors of the Soviet Gulag. But not until now has there been a memoir of life inside the camps written from the perspective of an actual employee of the Secret police. In this riveting memoir, superbly translated by Deborah Kaple, Fyodor Mochulsky describes being sent to work as a boss at the forced labor camp of Pechorlag in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle. Only twenty-two years old, he had but a vague idea of the true nature of the Gulag. What he discovered was a world of unimaginable suffering and death, a world where men were starved, beaten, worked to death, or simply executed. Mochulsky details the horrific conditions in the camps and the challenges facing all those involved, from prisoners to guards. He depicts the power struggles within the camps between the secret police and the communist party, between the political prisoners (most of whom had been arrested for the generic crime of "counter-revolutionary activities") and the criminal convicts. And because Mochulsky writes of what he witnessed with the detachment of the engineer that he was, readers can easily understand how a system that destroyed millions of lives could be run by ordinary Soviet citizens who believed they were advancing the cause of socialism. Mochulsky remained a communist party member his entire life-he would later become a diplomat-but was deeply troubled by the gap between socialist theory and the Soviet reality of slave labor and mass murder. This unprecedented memoir takes readers into that reality and sheds new light on one of the most harrowing tragedies of the 20th century.
Saying that political and social oppression is a deeply unjust and widespread condition of life is not a terribly controversial statement. Likewise, theorists of justice frequently consider our obligation to not turn a blind eye to oppression. But what is our culpability in the endurance of oppression? In this book, Mara Marin complicates the primary ways in which we make sense of human and political relationships and our obligations within them. Rather than thinking of relationships in terms of our intentions, Marin thinks of them as open-ended and subject to ongoing commitments. Commitments create open-ended expectations and vulnerabilities on the part of others, and therefore also obligations. By this rationale, our actions sustain oppressive or productive structures in virtue of their cumulative effects, not the intentions of the actors.When we violate our obligations we oppress others. Over the chapters of her book, Marin applies her model of commitment to caregivers, marriage, and bargaining power between labor and employers, and examines three types of social relations: political-legal relations, intimate relations of care, and work relations. By linking habitual action to obligation, Marin argues that we should see our responsibilities within such relationships as political and as creating norms for behavior over time. Commitment both points to the support our actions give to oppressive structures and to the ways in which our actions can weaken the same structures. Connected by Commitment examines our obligations to transform structures of oppression and offers commitment as a model for solidarity across race, gender, and class.
Under the legal and administrative system of Nazi Germany, people
categorized as Fremdvolkische (literally, "foreign people") were
subject to special laws that restricted their rights, limited their
protection under the law, and exposed them to extraordinary legal
sanctions and brutal, extralegal police actions. These special
laws, one of the central constitutional principles of the Third
Reich, applied to anyone perceived as different or racially
inferior, whether German citizens or not.
Scholars from across law and internet and media studies examine the human rights implications of today's platform society. Today such companies as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter play an increasingly important role in how users form and express opinions, encounter information, debate, disagree, mobilize, and maintain their privacy. What are the human rights implications of an online domain managed by privately owned platforms? According to the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, adopted by the UN Human Right Council in 2011, businesses have a responsibility to respect human rights and to carry out human rights due diligence. But this goal is dependent on the willingness of states to encode such norms into business regulations and of companies to comply. In this volume, contributors from across law and internet and media studies examine the state of human rights in today's platform society. The contributors consider the "datafication" of society, including the economic model of data extraction and the conceptualization of privacy. They examine online advertising, content moderation, corporate storytelling around human rights, and other platform practices. Finally, they discuss the relationship between human rights law and private actors, addressing such issues as private companies' human rights responsibilities and content regulation. Contributors Anja Bechmann, Fernando Bermejo, Agnes Callamard, Mikkel Flyverbom, Rikke Frank Jorgensen, Molly K. Land, Tarlach McGonagle, Jens-Erik Mai, Joris van Hoboken, Glen Whelan, Jillian C. York, Shoshana Zuboff, Ethan Zuckerman Open access edition published with generous support from Knowledge Unlatched and the Danish Council for Independent Research.
As a child growing up in Cambodia, Ronnie Yimsut played among the ruins of the Angkor Wat temples, surrounded by a close-knit community. As the Khmer Rouge gained power and began its genocidal reign of terror, his life became a nightmare. Teenaged Ronnie was left orphaned, literally buried under the bodies of his family and friends. In this stunning memoir, Yimsut describes how, in the wake of death and destruction, he decides to live. Escaping the turmoil of Cambodia, he makes a perilous journey through the jungle into Thailand, only to be sent to a notorious Thai prison. Fortunately, he is able to reach a refugee camp and ultimately migrate to the United States, another frightening journey to the unknown. Yet he prevailed, attending the University of Oregon and becoming an influential leader in the community of Cambodian immigrants. Facing the Khmer Rouge shows Ronnie Yimsut's personal quest to rehabilitate himself, make a new life in America, and then return to Cambodia to help rebuild the land of his birth.
Robben Island prison in South Africa held thousands of black political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, who opposed apartheid. This book reconstructs the inmates' resistance strategies to show how these men created a political and social order behind bars. Survival was their first goal; challenging apartheid was their true aim. So although Robben Island was designed to repress, it was continually transformed by its political inmates into a site of resistance. The book theorizes that, where material conditions permit, the most far-reaching and effective forms of resistance involve constructive political action which seeks to remake existing power relationships. This theory is demonstrated in three focuses of the book: the activism of Robben Islanders, the effects of political prisoner resistance on the apartheid state machinery, and in comparative cases which illustrate various international instances of political prisoners shaping both prisons and political orders.
In November 2004, Mulrunji Doomadgee's tragic death triggered civil unrest within the Indigenous community of Palm Island. This led to the first prosecution of a Queensland police officer in relation to a death in custody. Despite prolonged media attention, much of it negative and full of stereotypes, few Australians know the turbulent history of 'Australia's Alcatraz', a political prison set up to exile Queensland's 'troublesome blacks'. In Palm Island, Joanne Watson gives the first substantial history of the island from pre contact to the present, set against a background of some of the most explosive episodes in Queensland history. Palm Island, often heart wrenching and at times uplifting, is a study in the dynamics of power and privilege, and how it is resisted.
"The times Kakar writes about have . . . pervasively influenced every life in Afghanistan. . . . He was continuously faced with different versions of the Afghan experience as his country went through one of the great cataclysms of its history. We are fortunate to have his account."--Robert Canfield, editor of "Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective "This is the first history of recent events in Afghanistan by a native historian trained in London. Kakar writes objectively about the Soviets, the Afghan government, and the Mujahideen. With personal observations, including years spent in Kabul's notorious Pul-i Charkhi prison, this book is unique in revealing many events hitherto not known or recorded. It will remain a standard work on the tragic years of contemporary Afghanistan."--Richard N. Frye, Harvard University "Kakar, one of Afghanistan's most distinguished scholars, has provided an outstanding account of a complex and interesting phase of modern Afghanistan history. . . . A fascinating and absorbing analysis . . . exhaustive and most valuable."--Vartan Gregorian, President, Brown University
**Winner of the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose** 'A devastating front-line account of the police killings and the young activism that sparked one of the most significant racial justice movements since the 1960s: Black Lives Matter ... Lowery more or less pulls the sheet off America ... essential reading' Junot Diaz, The New York Times, Books of 2016 'Electric ... so well reported, so plainly told and so evidently the work of a man who has not grown a callus on his heart' Dwight Garner, The New York Times, 'A Top Ten Book of 2016' 'I'd recommend everyone to read this book ... it's not just statistics, it's not just the information, but it's the connective tissue that shows the human story behind it. I really enjoyed it' Trevor Noah, host of Comedy Central's 'The Daily Show' A deeply reported book on the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement, offering unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America, and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it In over a year of on-the-ground reportage, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled across the US to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. In an effort to grasp the scale of the response to Michael Brown's death and understand the magnitude of the problem police violence represents, Lowery conducted hundreds of interviews with the families of victims of police brutality, as well as with local activists working to stop it. Lowery investigates the cumulative effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with constant discrimination, failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs. Offering a historically informed look at the standoff between the police and those they are sworn to protect, They Can't Kill Us All demonstrates that civil unrest is just one tool of resistance in the broader struggle for justice. And at the end of President Obama's tenure, it grapples with a worrying and largely unexamined aspect of his legacy: the failure to deliver tangible security and opportunity to the marginalised Americans most in need of it.
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.
'Soros has become a standard bearer for liberal democracy' Financial Times George Soros - universally known for his philanthropy, progressive politics and investment success, and now under sustained attack from the far right, nationalists, and anti-Semites around the world - gives an impassioned defence of his core belief in open society. George Soros is among the world's most prominent public figures. He is one of the history's most successful investors and his philanthropy, led by the Open Society Foundations, has donated over $14 billion to promote democracy and human rights in more than 120 countries. But in recent years, Soros has become the focus of sustained right-wing attacks in the United States and around the world based on his commitment to open society, progressive politics and his Jewish background. In this brilliant and spirited book, Soros offers a compendium of his philosophy, a clarion call-to-arms for the ideals of an open society: freedom, democracy, rule of law, human rights, social justice, and social responsibility as a universal idea. In this age of nationalism, populism, anti-Semitism, and the spread of authoritarian governments, Soros's mission to support open societies is as urgent as it is important.
According to newspaper headlines and television pundits, the cold
war ended many months ago; the age of Big Two confrontation is
over. But forty years ago, Americans were experiencing the
beginnings of another era--of the fevered anti-communism that came
to be known as McCarthyism. During this period, the Cincinnati Reds
felt compelled to rename themselves briefly the "Redlegs" to avoid
confusion with the other reds, and one citizen in Indiana
campaigned to have The Adventures of Robin Hood removed from
library shelves because the story's subversive message encouraged
robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. These developments
grew out of a far-reaching anxiety over communism that
characterized the McCarthy Era.
When and how might the term genocide appropriately be ascribed to the experience of North American Indigenous nations under settler colonialism? Laurelyn Whitt and Alan W. Clarke contend that, if certain events which occurred during the colonization of North America were to take place today, they could be prosecuted as genocide. The legal methodology that the authors develop to establish this draws upon the definition of genocide as presented in the United Nations Genocide Convention and enhanced by subsequent decisions in international legal fora. Focusing on early British colonization, the authors apply this methodology to two historical cases: that of the Beothuk Nation from 1500-1830, and of the Powhatan Tsenacommacah from 1607-77. North American Genocides concludes with a critique of the Conventional account of genocide, suggesting how it might evolve beyond its limitations to embrace the role of cultural destruction in undermining the viability of human groups.
What makes a slave a slave? What does it mean to think about slavery as a political question? This book examines slavery and freedom as founding narratives of the liberal subject and of modernity. Laura Brace asks what happens when we try to bring slaves back into history, and into the history of political thought in particular. Looking at scholarship on both 'old' and 'new' slavery, the book assesses the work of Aristotle, Locke, Hegel, Kant, Wollstonecraft and Mill, and explores the contemporary concerns of human trafficking and the prison industrial complex to consider the limitations of 'new slavery' discourse.
Although often overlooked, anti-Polish sentiment was central to Nazi ideology. At the outset of World War II, Hitler initiated a process of 'depolonization' (Entpolonisierung) which resulted in the death or displacement of a significant number of Polish people living in Nazi-occupied territories. By examining policies of indirect extermination through a detailed study of Szmalcowka, a 'displacement' camp located in Toru? in Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia, Tomasz Ceran explores the terrible consequences of Nazi ideology. He provides both an in-depth historical account of a little-known camp and an important analysis of Nazi practices and policy-making in the Polish territories which were annexed. A strong addition to World War II literature, Ceran's book is essential reading for scholars and students interested in World War II, Polish History, Nazi ideology and the nature of violence and resilience.
In Being Kurdish in a Hostile World, Ayub Nuri writes of growing up during the Iran-Iraq War, of Saddam Hussein's chemical attack that killed thousands in Nuri's home town of Halabja, of civil war, of living in refugee camps, and of years of starvation that followed the UN's sanctions. The story begins with the historic betrayal by the French and British that deprived the Kurds of a country of their own. Nuri recounts living through the 2003 American invasion and the collapse of Hussein's totalitarian rule, and how, for a brief period, he felt optimism for the future. Then came bloody sectarian violence, and recently, the harrowing ascent of ISIS, which Nuri reported from Mosul.
Robben Island prison in South Africa held thousands of black political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, who opposed apartheid. This study reconstructs the inmates' resistance strategies to demonstrate how they created a political and social order behind bars. Although survival was their primary goal, challenging apartheid was their ultimate objective. Robben Island was continually transformed by its political inmates into a site of resistance, despite being designed to repress. |
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