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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Political control & influence > Political oppression & persecution > General
This book lifts the veil on what it’s like to cross a chasm in South Africa - from newspaper editor opposing apartheid repression to adviser in the Presidency and government in democracy. It is the personal story of Tony Heard, former Editor of the Cape Times, moving from journalist to spin-doctor, consultant, speechwriter and other official business. His new career covers a decade in the Presidency as a special adviser (2000-2010), and a dozen years in 3 government ministries/departments. In all, he serves governance for 22 years (June 1994 to June 2016), most of the first quarter century of his country’s freedom.
After isolated terrorist incidents in 2015, the Chinese leadership has cracked down hard on Xinjiang and its Uyghurs. Today, there are thought to be up to a million Muslims held in 're-education camps' in the Xinjiang region of North-West China. One of the few Western commentators to have lived in the region, journalist Nick Holdstock travels into the heart of the province and reveals the Uyghur story as one of repression, hardship and helplessness. China's Forgotten People explains why repression of the Muslim population is on the rise in the world's most powerful one-party state. This updated and revised edition reveals the background to the largest known concentration camp network in the modern world, and reflects on what this means for the way we think about China.
Since the 1970s, there have been three challenges to traditional, homogeneous 'national' identities across the Western world: political and socioeconomic inequality; neoliberal globalisation; and more diverse, multicultural societies. As in the US and elsewhere in Western Europe, the decline of an old, masculinised national identity has now begun to open a new, dark era for Britain. Since the 'war on terror' was added to the mix, 'others' in Britain have been brutally demonised. Muslims, routinely presented as the source of society's ills, are subjected to both symbolic and actual violence. Deep- seated and structurally racialised norms amplify the isolation and alienation impeding Muslim integration. Both these 'left-behind' Muslims and white-British groups who perceive themselves as the true nation are under pressure from ongoing geopolitical concerns in the Muslim world, as well as widening divisions at home. Tahir Abbas argues that, in this context, the symbiotic intersections between Islamophobia and radicalisation intensify and expand. His book is a warning of the world that results: a rise in hate crime, the institutionalisation of Islamophobia, and the normalisation of war and conflict.
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.
This book will arm activists on the streets-as well as anyone with an open mind on one of the key issues of our time-with a critical analysis and ultimately a redefinition of the very idea of policing. The book contends that when we talk about police and police reform, we speak the language of police legitimation through the art of euphemism. So state sexual assault become "body-cavity search," and ruthless beatings become "non-compliance deterrence." A Field Guide to the Police is a study of the indirect and taken-forgranted language of policing, a language we're all forced to speak when we talk about law enforcement. In entries like "Police dog," "Stop and frisk," and "Rough ride," the authors expose the way "copspeak" suppresses the true meaning and history of policing. Like any other field guide, it reveals a world that is hidden in plain view. The book argues that a redefined language of policing might help chart a future free society.
Shortlisted for the Palestine Book Awards 2018 Thousands of Palestinians, including children, are building and working on illegal Israeli settlements. Their bitter toil entails a daily rejection of their rights and subjects them to dangerous working conditions. Employing the Enemy is a deeply moving narrative that paints a faithful portrait of these workers and their families. Matthew Vickery explores not only the rationale, emotions and consequences of such employment but also why and how people collude with their own oppression. In doing so he draws attention to a previously neglected aspect of the Palestinian experience, exposing these practices as a new, insidious form of state-sponsored forced labour.
This book is a unique account by a survivor of both the Soviet and Nazi concentration camps: its author, Margarete Buber-Neumann, was a loyal member of the German Communist party. From 1935 she and her second husband, Heinz Neumann, were political refugees in Moscow. In April 1937 Neumann was arrested by the secret police, and executed by the end of the year. She herself was arrested in 1938. In Under Two Dictators Buber-Neumann describes the two years of suffering she endured in the Soviet prisons and in the huge Central-Asian concentration and slave labour camp of Karaganda; her extradition to the Gestapo in 1940 at the time of the Stalin-Hitler Friendship Pact; and her five years of suffering in the Nazi concentration and death camp for women, Ravensbruck. Her story displays extraordinary powers of observation and of memory as she describes her own fate, as well as those of hundreds of fellow prisoners. She explores the behaviour of the guards, supervisors, police and secret police and compares and contrasts Stalin and Hitler's methods of dictatorship and terror. First published in Swedish, German and English and subsequently translated and published in a further nine languages, Under Two Dictators is harrowing in its depiction of life under the rule of two of the most brutal regimes the western world has ever seen but also an inspiring story of survival, of ideology and of strength and a clarion call for the protection of democracy.
A brilliant examination of Robert Mugabe dictatorship and the nature of modern tyranny, written by an award winning novelist and journalist.Christopher Hope met his first dictator when he was 6 years old. Dr Henrik Verwoerd was a neighbour of the Hope family and went on to become the architect of apartheid. He was the first, but not the last. In this remarkable book, Christopher Hope searches out the unmistakable 'perfume' that marks out a tyrant, a tyrant like Robert Mugabe. Hope though the days of Verwoerd were gone until Robert Mugabe began to mimic the old Doctor. Hope dissects the person and presumption of Mugabe, the mixture of terror and comedy that makes up his dictatorship. Furthermore Perfume of a Tyrant describes the nature of modern tyranny, its wild paranoia, its murderous conviction of righteousness, its narrow depleted vocabulary and its inability to concede power, however small. Even though modern tyranny is not exclusively Zimbabwean, African or European, in Robert Mugabe is its leading exponent
Between 1976 and 1983, during a period of brutal military dictatorship, armed forces in Argentina abducted 30,000 citizens. These victims were tortured and killed, never to be seen again. Although the history of "los desaparecidos," "the disappeared," has become widely known, the stories of the Argentines who miraculously survived their imprisonment and torture are not well understood. "The Reappeared" is the first in-depth study of an officially sanctioned group of Argentine former political prisoners, the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Cordoba, which organized in 2007. Using ethnographic methods, anthropologist Rebekah Park explains the experiences of these survivors of state terrorism and in the process raises challenging questions about how societies define victimhood, what should count as a human rights abuse, and what purpose memorial museums actually serve. The men and women who reappeared were often ostracized by those who thought they must have been collaborators to have survived imprisonment, but their actual stories are much more complex. Park explains why the political prisoners waited nearly three decades before forming their own organization and offers rare insights into what motivates them to recall their memories of solidarity and resistance during the dictatorial past, even as they suffer from the long-term effects of torture and imprisonment. "The Reappeared" challenges readers to rethink the judicial and legislative aftermath of genocide and forces them to consider how much reparation is actually needed to compensate for unimaginable--and lifelong--suffering.
Between 1976 and 1983, during a period of brutal military dictatorship, armed forces in Argentina abducted 30,000 citizens. These victims were tortured and killed, never to be seen again. Although the history of "los desaparecidos," "the disappeared," has become widely known, the stories of the Argentines who miraculously survived their imprisonment and torture are not well understood. "The Reappeared" is the first in-depth study of an officially sanctioned group of Argentine former political prisoners, the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Cordoba, which organized in 2007. Using ethnographic methods, anthropologist Rebekah Park explains the experiences of these survivors of state terrorism and in the process raises challenging questions about how societies define victimhood, what should count as a human rights abuse, and what purpose memorial museums actually serve. The men and women who reappeared were often ostracized by those who thought they must have been collaborators to have survived imprisonment, but their actual stories are much more complex. Park explains why the political prisoners waited nearly three decades before forming their own organization and offers rare insights into what motivates them to recall their memories of solidarity and resistance during the dictatorial past, even as they suffer from the long-term effects of torture and imprisonment. "The Reappeared" challenges readers to rethink the judicial and legislative aftermath of genocide and forces them to consider how much reparation is actually needed to compensate for unimaginable--and lifelong--suffering.
On April 28, 2004, the Abu Ghraib photos of prisoner torture and humiliation appeared on 60 Minutes, setting off an international scandal. Less than seven weeks later, Susan L. Burke, a Philadelphia attorney, field a landmark lawsuit on behalf of the detainees, presenting a case against two private contractors, CACI International and Titan Inc. Burke set out to prove that contractors, soldiers, and officers worked together, or conspired, to torture and kill detainees. McKelvey examines how it is that many of the abusers can never be brought to justice, operating as they do outside the US system of criminal laws. Along the way she has tea with Saddam Hussein's mistress, meets with suspected terrorists, including a ghost detainee, and interviews victims from American detention centers, all the while uncovering vital sources touched upon by no other journalist. Following Burke's lawsuit through the courts, and drawing on interviews with current and former military personnel, translators, and interrogators, as well as listening to the harrowing personal stories of numerous detainee plaintiffs, McKelvey examines the many underreported, under-investigated crimes of Abu Ghraib.
How does religion stimulate and feed imperial ambitions and
violence? Recently this question has acquired new urgency, and in
"Religion, Empire, and Torture, "Bruce Lincoln approaches the
problem via a classic but little-studied case: Achaemenian Persia.
""Frontiers and Ghettos is based on the idea that when it comes to ethnopolitical conflict, lousy is better than horrible. How outcomes better than horrible arise, despite ideological imperatives, hatreds, and predatory opportunities, is brilliantly analyzed in this empirically rich, vividly written, and provocative comparison of Serbian and Israeli policies toward Croatians, Muslims and Palestinians. A terrific book!"--Ian S. Lustick, author of "Unsettled States, Disputed Lands "Abusive governments try to avoid leaving fingerprints on acts of repression, often using paramilitaries or death squads for deniability. James Ron reveals that territorial boundaries can serve a similar function. Abuse is more likely, he shows, as one crosses the frontiers of established state power, obscuring the signature of official action. This original and insightful book encourages us to expose cross-border involvement in human rights violations and re-establish official accountability."--Kenneth Roth, Executive Director, Human Rights Watch "With terrifying lucidity, Ron uses the experiences of Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Israel, and Palestine to examine how a state's definition of the boundary separating its favored population from a different people authorizes, channels, or inhibits its use of force. This veteran participant-observer uses first-hand observation tellingly."--Charles Tilly, author of "Durable Inequality ""Frontiers and Ghettos represents a major step forward in social science's effort to understand state violence. James Ron shows that while all states use violence, they do so differently in their well-policed interiors and at their margins. This book is powerful, timely, and importantfor both scholars, policy-makers, and those who would advance respect for human rights."--Craig Calhoun, President, Social Science Research Council "James Ron has written a strikingly clear and convincing study of the factors affecting controlled and uncontrolled state-directed violence in the current period, with an analysis that adds substantially to the sociology of the state. His book will be important for all those concerned--for scholarly reasons and for broader ones--with modern confrontations of world norms, state power and human rights. And its gripping accounts will be important for those concerned with the specific violent conflicts it examines, in Serbia and Israel."--John W. Meyer, Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, Stanford University "This ingenious and courageous comparison of the types of violence used by nationalist regimes should transform the way we think about borders and state sovereignty. In demonstrating that even the most unsavory governments can be sensitive to international norms and the appearance of legality, Ron also strikes a serious blow at standard policy prescriptions -- from imposing sanctions and isolation on offending regimes to offering autonomy packages and soft borders for ethnic minorities. This book deserves wide circulation and serious reflection."--Susan L. Woodward, author of "Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War "As the horrific escalation of violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories grips international headlines, the inability of commentators to locate these tragic events in a comparative analytical frame is striking. This book is an impressive exception. Ron's elegant comparative analysis of Serbia andearlier periods of Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes the dynamics of the present conflict and its future possibilities comprehensible in a way that few others have managed to do. It is a signal contribution to our understanding of modern state violence."--Peter Evans, Eliaser Chair of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Attempting to indoctrinate the public into a new society, the
Bolsheviks staged show trials--legal trials that incorporated
theatrical elements such as coached defendants, memorized scripts
for confession, and grueling interrogatory rehearsals. The genre of
legal spectacle, whose origins lay in Soviet theater and cinema of
the 1920s, moved from mass public spectacles to the courtroom, as
the Bolsheviks sought to effect ever- greater social change.
Paul Lendvai, born a Hungarian Jew, was arrested by the Nazis as a teenager, became a young communist activist in post-war Budapest, was arrested by the communists, again survived as one of the country's youngest political prisoners, and on his release was blacklisted as a journalist by the communist regime. After fleeing to Vienna following the 1956 Revolution, Lendvai was to become a leading journalist and commentator on eastern Europe. In this prize-winning memoir, he paints a picture of ethnic hatred, political turbulence and murderous anti-Semitism, as well as the swings between treachery and compromise which have characterized the history of 20th-century central Europe. There are descriptions of encounters with killers, torturers, onlookers and victims, traitors and heroes. In preparing the book, Lendvai had access to many previously unseen secret police files of Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Hungary.
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.
'I have lived, alone, in a cell, 157,852,800 seconds of solitude and fear. Cause for screaming! They sentence me to live yet another 220,838,400 seconds! To live them or to die from them' - from "The Silent Escape". Victim of Stalinist-era terror, Lena Constante was arrested on trumped-up charges of 'espionage' and sentenced to twelve years in Romanian prisons. "The Silent Escape" is the extraordinary account of the first eight years of her incarceration - years of solitary confinement during which she was tortured, starved, and daily humiliated. The only woman to have endured isolation so long in Romanian jails, Constante is also one of the few women political prisoners to have written about her ordeal. Unlike other more political prison diaries, this book draws us into the practical and emotional experiences of everyday prison life. Candidly, eloquently, Constante describes the physical and psychological abuses that were the common lot of communist-state political prisoners. She also recounts the particular humiliations she suffered as a woman, including that of male guards watching her in the bathroom. Constante survived by escaping into her mind - and finally by discovering the 'language of the walls', which enabled her to communicate with other female inmates. A powerful story of totalitarianism and human endurance, this work makes an important contribution to the literature of 'prison notebooks'.
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.
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.
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.
Post-1994, South Africa’s traditional leaders have fought for recognition, and positioned themselves as major players in our political landscape. Yet their role in a democracy is contested, with leaders often accused of abusing power, disregarding human rights, expropriating resources and promoting tribalism. Some argue that democracy and traditional leadership are irredeemably opposed and cannot co-exist. Meanwhile, shifts in the political economy of the former bantustans - the introduction of platinum mining in particular - have attracted new interests and conflicts to these areas, with chiefs often designated as custodians of community interests. This edited volume explores how chieftaincy is practised, experienced and contested in contemporary South Africa. It explores how those living under the authority of chiefs, in a modern democracy, negotiate or resist these politics in their respective areas. Chapters in this book are organised around three major sites of contest in the area of traditional leadership: leadership, land and law.
Women throughout the world have always played their part in struggles against colonialism, imperialism and other forms of oppression. However, there are few books on Arab political prisoners, fewer still on the Palestinians who have been detained in their thousands for their political activism and resistance. Nahla Abdo's Captive Revolution seeks to break the silence on Palestinian women political detainees, providing a vital contribution to research on women, revolutions, national liberation and anti-colonial resistance. Based on stories of the women themselves, as well as her own experiences as a former political prisoner, Abdo draws on a wealth of oral history and primary research in order to analyse their anti-colonial struggle, their agency and their appalling treatment as political detainees. Making crucial comparisons with the experiences of female political detainees in other conflicts, and emphasising the vital role Palestinian political culture and memorialisation of the 'Nakba' have had on their resilience and resistance, Captive Revolution is a rich and revealing addition to our knowledge of this little-studied phenomenon.
Globalization is lauded by some as a tool for spreading peace and prosperity, and decried by others as a harbinger of conflict and war. This book challenges both views. Narrowing down globalization to the more manageable notion of neoliberalism, "Economic Liberalization and Political Violence" studies the effect of neoliberalism on violent conflict and war-making. The sophisticated analysis includes statistical work and a set of qualitative case studies from Latin America (Colombia, Peru, El Salvador, and Guatemala) and sub-Saharan Africa (Cote d'Ivoire, Sudan, and Uganda). The findings demonstrate that the shift to neoliberal policies has produced widely diverging outcomes in different contexts. An invaluable source for students of political economy, development studies and international relations this book shows that neoliberalism can help to end violent conflict as well as bringing about new, criminal forms of violence.
One of the most crucial issues to affect national policy in the
state of Israel is that of relations between its Jewish and Arab
citizens. The confrontation of October 2000 demonstrated the
explosive potential of the unresolved dilemmas posed by these
relations. |
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