Ingrid Betancourt's story - her exemplary courage, spirit and resilience - has captured the world's imagination. A politician and presidential candidate celebrated for her determination to combat the corruption and climate of fear endemic in Colombia, in 2002 she was taken hostage by FARC, a terrorist guerrilla organisation. She was held captive in the depths of the jungle for six and a half years, chained day and night for much of that time, constantly on the move and enduring gruelling conditions. She was freed and reunited with her children and relatives in 2008. It is Betancourt's indomitable spirit that drives this important and deeply moving book, telling in her own words the extraordinary drama of her capture and eventual rescue, and describes her fight to survive, mentally and physically. As she confronts the horror of what she went through, her story also goes beyond the specifics of her own confinement to offer an intensely intelligent, thoughtful and compassionate reflection on what it means to be human.

In this magisterial history of Lebanon, from the end of Ottoman rule to the Hezbollah and Hamas wars of today, acclaimed and fiercely independent Middle East journalist and historian David Hirst charts the interplay between a uniquely complex country and the broader struggles of the modern Middle East. Lebanon is the battleground on which the region's greater states pursue their strategic, political, and ideological conflicts--conflicts that sometimes escalate into full-scale proxy wars. Hirst warns that only serious diplomatic action from the Obama administration can prevent the next such action from engulfing the entire region.

Two enduring challenges in South African historiography are addressed by this group of committed scholars from SADET. The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 4 [1980-1990] firstly addresses the muted voices of largely unpublished black scholars, and secondly, ensures that the voices of the majority of our population are at the centre of the historic narrative. Comprising of 32 chapters, Volume 4 in the series focuses on the 1980s and `further fortifies the intellectual traditions set by the earlier volumes'. Included in the volume are chapters by Bernard Magubane on the apartheid state; Sifiso Ndlovu on the ANC and negotiations; Bhekizizwe Peterson on the arts; Zine Magubane on women's struggles; Gregory Houston on the ANC's underground and armed struggle; Thami ka Plaatjie on the PAC; Mbulelo Mzamane and Brown Maaba on the BCM and AZAPO; Eddy Maloka on the SACP; Christopher Saunders on the above-the-ground struggles conducted by white activists; and Jabulani Sithole on the trade union movement.

From the author of "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder," "Calamities of Exile" combines three gripping narratives that afford a sort of double CAT scan into the natures of both modern totalitarianism and timeless exile.
"Beautiful but harrowing chronicles of three exiles that probe the moral and personal risks of their encounters with totalitarianism. . . . Piercing and timely."--"Kirkus Reviews," starred review
"Weschler . . . combines a novelist's gift for drama with the objectivity and research skills of a journalist. . . . The result is three gripping profiles of very human but also extraordinary men."--"Publishers Weekly"
"[Weschler's] thorough accounting of the men's covert operations, assumed identities and strained relationships with fathers, wives, and colleagues creates a disturbing triptych of the perils of totalitarianism."--Lance Gould, "New York Times Book Review"
"Weschler tells these three tragic tales with an admirable combination of psychological penetration, intellectual thrust, concision and compassion."--Francis King, "Spectator"
"Endlessly absorbing. . . . Breathtaking."--Jeri Laber, "Los Angeles Times Book Review"

A deaf-mute woman waiting for her brother to pick her up in front of shop window is arrested by two members of the Saudi "morality police" (mutawas) on suspicion of prostitution. They report their allegation to the governor of Riyadh, who accepts it without question and passes sentence. The next Friday she is stoned to death in public. A German woman married to a Saudi man makes the mistake of taking a taxi downtown without a male escort. For her "crime" she is arrested, raped, and thrown into prison. Later her German-Saudi baby son is taken away and she is deported to Cyprus without passport and money. A Syrian truck driver is accused of stealing the truck he is driving. As a consequence, both of his hands are amputated. Are these incredible but true incidents merely aberrations, the result of a few power-crazed officials acting outrageously outside the reach of a generally law-abiding society? Unfortunately, they are all too common in the theocratic police state that is contemporary Saudi Arabia. As the author vividly recounts in this shocking expose, in the wealthy Saudi oil kingdom there is no such thing as secular law or modern courts. Instead, Saudi princes create the laws, based on Sharia, Islamic law derived from the Koran and Hadith, and the muttawas act as judges, enforcers, and executioners. The author lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for many years. A fluent speaker of Arabic, he was told about the many appalling incidents reported in this book by victims and their friends and relatives. He cross-checked all the accounts here given through multiple interviews. Amazingly, in some cases, the actual victimizers themselves openly, often with condescending and smug contempt, corroborated the events. This revealing portrait of intolerance and social oppression presents an image that foreign reporters never see in the carefully controlled Saudi kingdom.

This book explores a century of business development of The South African Life Assurance Company, from a specific local focus to a national conglomerate expanding into global insurance markets. Established as a strategic vehicle to address Afrikaner economic marginalization and abject poverty at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sanlam has displayed both path dependence and a dynamic adaptability to complex changing contexts to become a global player. The strategic convergence of economic empowerment through the mobilization of savings into insurance products, as well as Afrikaner nationalism, assisted this growth. Sanlam has played an a-typical role in the economic empowerment of an ethnic entity through extensive investments into the industrializing South African economy. This strategic diversion created operational limitations that were only resolved early in the twenty-first century. As globalization, financial deregulation, and weakened Afrikaner political and social hegemony manifested, strategic change management relied on the path dependence of empowerment strategies to address new markets with similar needs to those of the early stakeholder market of 1918. The former mutual life office demutualized operations to become a diversified financial services group of companies operating across almost the entire African continent, as well as in India, Malaysia, and the UK. This volume presents a business history of strategic management of an insurance enterprise, and its transformation from a defined cultural context into an international empowerment strategy through innovation on all levels of business operation and organization. This book is an Open Access publication, available online under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

This special issue deals with the phenomenon of violence in the post-Soviet space. The central preoccupation is to examine both political and legal discourses and practices of internal and external violence, broadly conceived, in this space. Simultaneously the special issue aspires to situate these discourses and practices in the broader literature on political violence and ethnic and separatist conflict, and to examine these from political, legal, and security studies perspectives. The issue approaches the problem of violence in the post-Soviet space from three perspectives: The international-structural, inter-state, and domestic-political. The contributors focus on structural sources of violence: The relevance of the self-determination principle, the role of democratisation, and the relationship between violent behaviour inside and outside the state. They also analyse the role of the Russian Federation in generating, perpetuating, and mitigating political violence. Finally, they adopt a bottom-up approach, exploring how non-state actors contribute to political violence.

Toyo Suyemoto is known informally by literary scholars and the media as ""Japanese America's poet laureate."" But Suyemoto has always described herself in much more humble terms. A first-generation Japanese American, she has identified herself as a storyteller, a teacher, a mother whose only child died from illness, and an internment camp survivor. Before Suyemoto passed away in 2003, she wrote a moving and illuminating memoir of her internment camp experiences with her family and infant son at Tanforan Race Track and, later, at the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, from 1942 to 1945. A uniquely poetic contribution to the small body of internment memoirs, Suyemoto's account includes information about policies and wartime decisions that are not widely known, and recounts in detail the way in which internees adjusted their notions of selfhood and citizenship, lending insight to the complicated and controversial questions of citizenship, accountability, and resistance of first- and second-generation Japanese Americans. Suyemoto's poems, many written during internment, are interwoven throughout the text and serve as counterpoints to the contextualizing narrative. A small collection of poems written in the years following her incarceration further reveal the psychological effects of her experience.

A unique anthology of Gulag memoirs, edited and annotated by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum Anne Applebaum wields her considerable knowledge of a dark chapter in human history and presents a collection of the writings of survivors of the Gulag, the Soviet concentration camps. Although the opening of the Soviet archives to scholars has made it possible to write the history of this notorious concentration camp system, documents tell only one side of the story. Gulag Voices now fills in the other half. The backgrounds of the writers reflect the extraordinary diversity of the Gulag itself. Here are the personal stories of such figures as Dmitri Likhachev, a renowned literary scholar; Anatoly Marchenko, the son of illiterate laborers; and Alexander Dolgun, an American citizen. These remembrances-many of them appearing in English for the first time, each chosen for both literary and historical value-collectively spotlight the strange moral universe of the camps, as well as the relationships that prisoners had with one another, with their guards, and with professional criminals who lived beside them. A vital addition to the literature of this era,annotated for a generation that no longer remembers the Soviet Union, Gulag Voices will inform, interest, and inspire, offering a source for reflection on human nature itself.

George W. Bush calls them an 'alternative set of procedures', vital tools needed 'to protect the American people and our allies'. These 'tools' include forced standing for up to forty hours, sleep deprivation for weeks on end, dousing naked prisoners with ice water in rooms chilled to ten degrees, and strapping prisoners to inclined boards then flooding their mouths with water. These techniques are torture, and they are used by the United States of America. American Torture reveals how torture became standard practice in today's War on Terror. Long before Abu Ghraib became a household name, the US military and CIA used torture with impunity at home and abroad. Billions of dollars were spent during the Cold War studying, refining, then teaching these techniques to American interrogators and to foreign officers charged with keeping Communism at bay. As the Cold War ended, these tortures were legalised using the very laws designed to eradicate their use.

This is Henri Nouwen's personal account of a pilgrimage to Santiago Atitlan, a Mayan town in the highlands of Guatemala. It was there that an American priest, Father Stanley Rother, was murdered by a death squad in the parish where he served. In traveling to Santiago Nouwen hoped to learn more about this modern martyr about the faith that drew him there, and the love that held him in place, even when his life was threatened.

As a member of Salvador Allende's Personal Guards (GAP), Luz Arce worked with leaders of the Socialist Party during the Popular Unity Government from 1971 to1973. In the months following the coup, Arce served as a militant with others from the Left who opposed the military junta led by Augusto Pinochet, which controlled the country from 1973 to1990. Along with thousands of others in Chile, Arce was detained and tortured by Chile's military intelligence service, the DINA, in their attempt to eliminate alternative voices and ideologies in the country. Arce's testimonial offers the harrowing story of the abuse she suffered and witnessed as a survivor of detention camps, such as the infamous Villa Grimaldi.
But when faced with threats made to her family, including her young son, and with the possibility that she could be murdered as thousands of others had been, Arce began to collaborate with the Chilean military in their repression of national resistance groups and outlawed political parties. Her testimonial thus also offers a unique perspective from within the repressive structures as she tells of her work as a DINA agent whose identifications even lead to the capture of some of her former friends and companeros.
During Chile's return to democracy in the early 1990s, Arce experienced two fundamental changes in her life that led to the writing of her story. The first was a deep spiritual renewal through her contacts with the Catholic Church whose Vicariate of Solidarity had fought for human rights in the country during the dictatorship. The second was her decision to participate within the legal system to identify and bring to justice those members of the military who wereresponsible for the crimes committed from 1973 to1990. Luz Arce's book invites readers to rethink the definition of testimonial narrative in Latin America through the unique perspective of a survivor-witness-confessor.

A chilling wartime diary of the destruction of the Lithuanian/Polish Jews, recorded by a non-Jew About sixty thousand Jews from Wilno (Vilnius, Jewish Vilna) and surrounding townships in present-day Lithuania were murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators in huge pits on the outskirts of Ponary. Over a period of several years, Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Polish journalist who lived in the village of Ponary, was an eyewitness to the murder of these Jews as well as to the murders of thousands of non-Jews on an almost daily basis. He chronicled these events in a diary that he kept at great personal risk. Written as a simple account of what Sakowicz witnessed, the diary is devoid of personal involvement or identification with the victims. It is thus a unique document: testimony from a bystander, an "objective" observer without an emotional or a political agenda, to the extermination of the Jews of the city known as "the Jerusalem of Lithuania." Sakowicz did not survive the war, but much of his diary did. Painstakingly pieced together by Rahel Margolis from scraps of paper hidden in various locations, the diary was published in Polish in 1999. It is here published in English for the first time, extensively annotated by Yitzhak Arad to guide readers through the events at Ponary.

In the spring and summer of 1952, fifteen Soviet Jews, including five prominent Yiddish writers and poets, were secretly tried and convicted; multiple executions soon followed in the basement of Moscow's Lubyanka prison. The defendants were falsely charged with treason and espionage because of their involvement in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and because of their heartfelt response as Jews to Nazi atrocities on occupied Soviet territory. Stalin had created the committee to rally support for the Soviet Union during World War II, but he then disbanded it after the war as his paranoia mounted about Soviet Jews. For many years, a host of myths surrounded the case against the committee. Now this book, which presents an abridged version of the long-suppressed transcript of the trial, reveals the Kremlin's machinery of destruction. Joshua Rubenstein provides annotations about the players and events surrounding the case. In a long introduction, drawing on newly released documents in Moscow archives and on interviews with relatives of the defendants in Israel, Russia, and the United States, Rubenstein also sets the trial in historical and political context and offers a vivid account of Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Dear Leader contains astonishing new insights about North Korea which could only be revealed by someone working high up in the regime. It is also the gripping story of how a member of the inner circle of this enigmatic country became its most courageous, outspoken critic.

Jang Jin-sung held one of the most senior ranks in North Korea's propaganda machine, helping tighten the regime's grip over its people. Among his tasks were developing the founding myth of North Korea, posing undercover as a South Korean intellectual and writing epic poems in support of the dictator, Kim Jong-il. Young and ambitious, his patriotic work secured him a bizarre audience with Kim Jong-il himself, thus granting him special status as one of the 'Admitted'. This meant special food provisions, a travel pass and immunity from prosecution and harm. He was privy to state secrets, including military and diplomatic policies, how the devastating 'Scrutiny' was effected, and the real position of one of the country's most powerful, elusive men, Im Tong-ok.

Because he was praised by the Dear Leader himself, he had every reason to feel satisfied with his lot and safe. Yet he could not ignore his conscience, or the disparity between his life and that of those he saw starving on the street. After breaking security rules, Jang Jin-sung, together with a close friend, was forced to flee for his life: away from lies and deceit, towards truth and freedom.

From 1952 to 1981, South Africa's apartheid government ran an art school for the training of African art teachers at Indaleni, in what is today KwaZulu-Natal. The Art of Life in South Africa is the story of the students, teachers, art, and politics that circulated through a small school, housed in a remote former mission station. It is the story of a community that made its way through the travails of white supremacist South Africa and demonstrates how the art students and teachers made together became the art of their lives. Daniel Magaziner radically reframes apartheid-era South African history. Against the dominant narrative of apartheid oppression and black resistance, as well as recent scholarship that explores violence, criminality, and the hopeless entanglements of the apartheid state, this book focuses instead on a small group's efforts to fashion more fulfilling lives for its members and their community through the ironic medium of the apartheid-era school. There is no book like this in South African historiography. Lushly illustrated and poetically written, it gives us fully formed lives that offer remarkable insights into the now cliched experience of black life under segregation and apartheid.

The question of the responsibility inherent in the unrivaled might of the U.S. military is one that continues to take up headlines across the globe. This award-winning group of reporters and scholars, including, among others, David Rieff, Peter Maass, Philip Gourevitch, William Shawcross, George Packer, Bill Berkeley and Samantha Power revisit four of the worst instances of state-sponsored killing--Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor--in the last half of the twentieth century in order to reconsider the success and failure of U.S. and U.N. military and humanitarian intervention.Featuring original essays and reporting, "The New Killing Fields" poses vital questions about the future of peacekeeping in the next century. In addition, theoretical essays by Michael Walzer and Michael Ignatieff frame the issue of intervention in terms of today's post-cold war reality and the future of human rights.

In providing a counterweight to the notion that political violence has irrevocably changed in a globalised world, Violence and the state offers an original and innovative way in which to understand political violence across a range of discipline areas. It explores the complex relationship between the state and its continued use of violence through a variety of historical and contemporary case studies, including the Napoleonic Wars, Nazi and Soviet 'eliticide', the consolidation of authority in modern China, post-Soviet Russia, and international criminal tribunals. It also looks at humanitarian intervention in cases of organised violence, and the willingness of elites to alter their attitude to violence if it is an instrument to achieve their own ends. The interdisciplinary approach, which spans history, sociology, international law and International Relations, ensures that this book will be invaluable to a broad cross-section of scholars and politically engaged readers alike. -- .

Nora Strejilevich was a young woman when her brother and other family members and friends disappeared at the hands of the military junta that held power in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Ostensibly part of a systematic campaign to eliminate left-wing terrorism, the violence perpetrated by the junta far exceeded anything the leftists ever dreamed of, enveloping not only the violent left but other dissidents and innocent civilians as well, and particularly targeting the Jewish population. A "desaparecida" herself, Strejilevich survived kidnapping and torture to speak of her experience with a dignified voice and a clear-eyed realism that extends from one end of the political spectrum to the other.

In the first English translation of her elegant fictional memoir "Una sola muerte numerosa," Strejilevich combines autobiography, documentary journalism, fiction, magical realism, and poetry to express the "choir of voices" of the more than 30,000 souls who were imprisoned and abused. She engages the reader in the history of a bloody military coup and state-sanctioned anti-Semitism, exploring themes of exile, identity, and violence. Above all, "A Single, Numberless Death" is Nora Strejilevich's gripping story of survival.

"This is a ground-breaking book on a subject of capital importance, and I think it] should start a debate about modern literature with a rich potential for further development." Michael Scammell

Return from the Archipelago is the first comprehensive historical survey and critical analysis of the vast body of narrative literature about the Soviet gulag. Leona Toker organizes and characterizes both fictional narratives and survivors memoirs as she explores the changing hallmarks of the genre from the 1920s through the Gorbachev era. Toker reflects on the writings and testimonies that shed light on the veiled aspects of totalitarianism, dehumanization, and atrocity. Identifying key themes that recur in the narratives-arrest, the stages of trial, imprisonment, labor camps, exile, escapes, special punishment, the role of chance, and deprivation.Toker discusses the historical, political, and social contexts of these accounts and the ethical and aesthetic imperative they fulfill. Her readings provide extraordinary insight into the prisoners experiences of the Soviet penal system. Special attention is devoted to the writings of Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but many works that are not well known in the West, especially those by women, are addressed. Consideration is also given to events that recently brought many memoirs to light years after they were written. A pioneering book on an important subject, Return from the Archipelago is an authoritative resource for scholars in Russian history and literature."

Terror, in the sense of mass, unjust arrests, characterized the USSR during the late 1930s. But, argues Robert Thurston in this controversial book, Stalin did not intend to terrorize the country and did not need to rule by fear. Memoirs and interviews with Soviet people indicate that many more believed in Stalin's quest to eliminate internal enemies than were frightened by it. Drawing on recently opened Soviet archives and other sources, Thurston shows that between 1934 and 1936 police and court practice relaxed significantly. Then a series of events, together with the tense international situation and memories of real enemy activity during the savage Russian Civil War, combined to push leaders and people into a hysterical hunt for perceived "wreckers." After late 1938, however, the police and courts became dramatically milder. Coercion was not the key factor keeping the regime in power. More important was voluntary support, fostered at least in the cities by broad opportunities to criticize conditions and participate in decision making on the local level. The German invasion of 1941 found the populace deeply divided in its judgment of Stalinism, but the country's soldiers generally fought hard in its defense. Using German and Russian sources, the author probes Soviet morale and performance in the early fighting. Thurston's portrait of the era sheds new light on Stalin and the nature of his regime. It presents an unconventional and less condescending view of the Soviet people, depicted not simply as victims but also as actors in the violence, criticisms, and local decisions of the 1930s. Ironically, Stalinism helped prepare the way for the much more active society and for the reforms of fifty years later.

Often likened to Rigoberta Menchu and Nadine Gordimer, Nawal El Saadawi is one of the world's leading feminist authors. Director of Health and Education in Cairo, she was summarily dismissed from her post in 1972 for her political writing and activities. In 1981 she was imprisoned by Anwar Sadat for alleged "crimes against the State" and was not released until after his assassination. "Memoirs from the Women's Prison" offers both first hand witness to women's resistance to state violence and fascinating insights into the formation of women's community. Saadawi describes how political prisoners, both secular intellectuals and Islamic revivalists, forged alliances to demand better conditions and to maintain their sanity in the confines of their cramped cell. Saadawi's haunting prose makes Memoirs an important work of twentieth-century literature. Recognized as a classic of prison writing, it touches all who are concerned with political oppression, intellectual freedom, and personal dignity.

This is the story of the Venerable Palden Gyatso who, in 1992, was released after 33 years of incarceration in Chinese prisons in Tibet, and fled to India, bringing with him tales of his torture. The book begins with his early childhood, his ordination as a monk and his studies. In 1959, he was arrested after having taken part in a non-violent demonstration for Tibetan freedom. Interrogated, shackled and beaten, he was formally labelled a reactionary and sentenced to the first of seven years of his long sentence. In the years that followed, he was a witness to the systematic rape of his culture and religion, the burning of the monasteries and all literature. He was starved, subjected to countless "study sessions" during the Cultural Revolution, and repeatedly beaten and tortured with electric shock batons until his release in 1992, on the promise that he would return to a quiet monastic life. Instead, he escaped across the Nepalese border to relate the atrocities he suffered inside the prison, and those suffered by his friends and family on the outside, to the rest of the world. Tsering Shakya is the author of "The Dragon in the Land of the Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947".

In this book the author chronicles the abuse by the British state of emergency laws: harassment and intimidation of civilians; injuries and deaths caused by rubber and plastic bullets; collusion between British security forces, British intelligence and loyalist paramilitaries; unjust killings and murders by the security forces; excessive punishments and degrading strip-searches in prisons - abuses ignored by all but a handful of individuals and civil rights organisations.

James B. Given analyzes the inquisition in one French region in order to develop a sociology of medieval politics. Established in the early thirteenth century to combat widespread popular heresy, inquisitorial tribunals identified, prosecuted, and punished heretics and their supporters. The inquisition in Languedoc was the best documented of these tribunals because the inquisitors aggressively used the developing techniques of writing and record keeping to build cases and extract confessions.

Using a Marxist and Foucauldian approach, Given focuses on three inquiries: what techniques of investigation, interrogation, and punishment the inquisitors worked out in the course of their struggle against heresy; how the people of Languedoc responded to the activities of the inquisitors; and what aspects of social organization in Languedoc either facilitated or constrained the work of the inquisitors. Punishments not only inflicted suffering and humiliation on those condemned, he argues, but also served as theatrical instruction for the rest of society about the terrible price of transgression. Through a careful pursuit of these inquires, Given elucidates medieval society's contribution to the modern apparatus of power.