![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
|
Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Other warfare & defence issues
The Scourge of Genocide collects essays, reviews, and reportage on the subjects of genocide and crimes against humanity by Adam Jones, recently selected as one of "Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide." The volume includes a number of previously-unpublished essays, and explores a range of debates and approaches in comparative genocide studies, such as:
Covering a broad spectrum of theoretical perspectives, as well as case studies from the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel/Palestine, this book is essential reading for all scholars and students of genocide studies, political violence, and international relations.
Gun Crusaders is a fascinating inside look at how the four-million member National Rifle Association and its committed members come to see each and every gun control threat as a step down the path towards gun confiscation, and eventually socialism. Enlivened by a rich analysis of NRA materials, meetings, leader speeches, and unique in-depth interviews with NRA members, Gun Crusaders focuses on how the NRA constructs and perceives threats to gun rights as one more attack in a broad liberal cultural war. Scott Melzer shows that the NRA promotes a nostalgic vision of frontier masculinity, whereby gun rights defenders are seen as patriots and freedom fighters, defending not the freedom of religion, but the religion of individual rights and freedoms.
The history of Pakistan's nuclear program is the history of
Pakistan. Fascinated with the new nuclear science, the young
nation's leaders launched a nuclear energy program in 1956 and
consciously interwove nuclear developments into the broader
narrative of Pakistani nationalism. Then, impelled first by the
1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan Wars, and more urgently by India's
first nuclear weapon test in 1974, Pakistani senior officials
tapped into the country's pool of young nuclear scientists and
engineers and molded them into a motivated cadre committed to
building the 'ultimate weapon.' The tenacity of this group and the
central place of its mission in Pakistan's national identity
allowed the program to outlast the perennial political crises of
the next 20 years, culminating in the test of a nuclear device in
1998.
This book examines Japan's nuclear identity and its implications for abolition of nuclear weapons. By applying analytical eclecticism in combination with international relations theory, this book categorizes Japan's nuclear identity as a 'nuclear-bombed state' (classical liberalism), 'nuclear disarmament state' (neoliberalism), 'nuclear-threatened state' (classical realism), and a 'nuclear umbrella state' (neorealism). This research investigates whether the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 'genocide' or not, to what degree Japan has contributed to nuclear disarmament, how Japan has been threatened by ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons of North Korea, and how Japan's security policy has been embedded with the nuclear strategy of the United States. It also sheds light on theoretical factors that Japan does not support the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Finally, this book considers the future of Japan's nuclear identity and attempts to explore alternatives for Japan's nuclear disarmament diplomacy toward a world without nuclear weapons.
Robbing the Jews reveals the mechanisms by which the Nazis and their allies confiscated Jewish property; the book demonstrates the close relationship between robbery and the Holocaust. The spoliation evolved in intensifying steps. The Anschluss and Kristallnacht in 1938 reveal a dynamic tension between pressure from below and state-directed measures. In Western Europe, the economic persecution of the Jews took the form of legal decrees and administrative measures. In Eastern Europe, authoritarian governments adopted the Nazi program that excluded Jews from the economy and seized their property, based on indigenous antisemitism and plans for ethnically homogenous nation-states. In the occupied East, property was collected at the killing sites - the most valuable objects were sent to Berlin, whereas items of lesser value supported the local administration and rewarded collaborators. At several key junctures, robbery acted as a catalyst for genocide, accelerating the progression from pogrom to mass murder.
Before Rwanda and Bosnia, and before the Holocaust, the first genocide of the twentieth century happened in Turkish Armenia in 1915, when approximately one million people were killed. This volume is an account of the American response to this atrocity. The first part sets up the framework for understanding the genocide: Sir Martin Gilbert, Vahakn Dadrian and Jay Winter provide an analytical setting for nine scholarly essays examining how Americans learned of this catastrophe and how they tried to help its victims. Knowledge and compassion, though, were not enough to stop the killings. A terrible precedent was born in 1915, one which has come to haunt the United States and other Western countries throughout the twentieth century and beyond. To read the essays in this volume is chastening: the dilemmas Americans faced when confronting evil on an unprecedented scale are not very different from the dilemmas we face today.
Often lost in the discussion about the nuclear crisis are its regional dynamics. Since 2002, China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea have struggled to navigate between the unsettling belligerence of North Korea and the unilateral insistence of the United States. This book focuses on their strategic thinking over four stages of the crisis. Drawing on sources from each of the countries, it examines how the four perceived their role in the Six-Party Talks and the regional context, as they eyed each other. The book emphasizes the significance of these talks for the emerging security framework and great power cooperation in Northeast Asia.
While policy makers and scholars have long devoted considerable
attention to strategies like deterrence, which threaten others with
unacceptable consequences, such threat-based strategies are not
always the best option. In some cases, a state may be better off
seeking to give others a greater sense of security, rather than by
holding their security at risk. The most prominent use of these
security assurances has been in conjunction with efforts to prevent
the spread of nuclear weapons.
In April 1863 after the U.S. Dakota War of 1862, after the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men in the largest mass execution in U.S. History some 270 Dakota men were moved from Mankato, Minnesota, to a prison at camp McClellan in Davenport, Iowa. Separated from their wives, children, and elder relatives, with inadequate shelter, they lived there for three long, wretched years. More than 120 men died. Desperate to connect with their families, many of these prisoners of war learned to write. Their letters, mostly addressed to the missionaries Stephen R Riggs and Thomas S. Williamson, asked for information, for assistance, and for help sending and receiving news of their loved ones. Dakota elders Clifford Canku and Michael Simon, fluent Dakota speakers, provide both the Dakota transcription and the first published English translation of fifty of these letters, culled from Riggs's papers at the Minnesota historical society. They are a precious resource for Dakota people learning about the travails their ancestors faced, important primary source documents for historians, and a vital tool for Dakota language learners and linguists. These haunting documents present a history that has long been unrecognised in this country, in the words of the Dakota people who lived it. The dedication written by the authors, both of whom are descendants of Dakota prisoners of war, declares: "Our relatives are watching over us. / We are humbled as we honour our ancestors. / Woecon kin de unyakupi do / We accept this responsibility you gave us".
The history of Pakistan's nuclear program is the history of Pakistan. Fascinated with the new nuclear science, the young nation's leaders launched a nuclear energy program in 1956 and consciously interwove nuclear developments into the broader narrative of Pakistani nationalism. Then, impelled first by the 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan Wars, and more urgently by India's first nuclear weapon test in 1974, Pakistani senior officials tapped into the country's pool of young nuclear scientists and engineers and molded them into a motivated cadre committed to building the 'ultimate weapon.' The tenacity of this group and the central place of its mission in Pakistan's national identity allowed the program to outlast the perennial political crises of the next 20 years, culminating in the test of a nuclear device in 1998. Written by a 30-year professional in the Pakistani Army who played a senior role formulating and advocating Pakistan's security policy on nuclear and conventional arms control, this book tells the compelling story of how and why Pakistan's government, scientists, and military, persevered in the face of a wide array of obstacles to acquire nuclear weapons. It lays out the conditions that sparked the shift from a peaceful quest to acquire nuclear energy into a full-fledged weapons program, details how the nuclear program was organized, reveals the role played by outside powers in nuclear decisions, and explains how Pakistani scientists overcome the many technical hurdles they encountered. Thanks to General Khan's unique insider perspective, it unveils and unravels the fascinating and turbulent interplay of personalities and organizations that took place and reveals how international opposition to the program only made it an even more significant issue of national resolve. Listen to a podcast of a related presentation by Feroz Khan at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation.
Applying advances in game theory to the study of nuclear deterrence, Robert Powell examines the foundations of deterrence theory. Game-theoretic analysis allows the author to explore some of the most complex and problematic issues in deterrence theory, including the effects of first-strike advantages, limited retaliation, and the number of nuclear powers in the international system on the dynamics of escalation. With the formalizations he develops, the author is able to demonstrate the fundamental similarity of the two seemingly disparate deterrrent strategies that have evolved in response to the nuclear revolution and the condition of mutually assured destruction: the strategy of limited retaliation. The author argues that the logic underlying both strategies centres on a search for ways to make the use of force or the threat of its use credible when any use of force might escalate to mutual devastation.
Genocide has tragically claimed the lives of over 262 million victims in the last century. Jews, Armenians, Cambodians, Darfurians, Kosovons, Rwandans, the list seems endless. Clinical psychologist Steven K. Baum sets out to examine the psychological patterns to these atrocities. Building on trait theory as well as social psychology he reanalyzes key conformity studies (including the famous experiments of Ash, Millgram and Zimbardo) to bring forth a new understanding of identity and emotional development during genocide. Baum presents a model that demonstrates how people's actions during genocide actually mirror their behaviour in everyday life: there are those who destruct (perpetrators), those who help (rescuers) and those who remain uninvolved, positioning themselves between the two extremes (bystanders). Combining eyewitness accounts with Baum's own analysis, this book reveals the common mental and emotional traits among perpetrators, bystanders and rescuers and how a war between personal and social identity accounts for these divisions.
When Lidia Maksymowicz was just a young girl, her partisan family went into hiding in the forest of Belorussia. It was there that they were arrested and taken to Auschwitz. Lidia was branded 70072, sent to the infamous ‘children’s block’ and subjected to the experiments of Dr Josef Mengele. Having survived Auschwitz, Lidia was adopted and grew up in the industrial town of Oswiecim. She never gave up trying to find her family. In 1962, seventeen years after the liberation, she discovered that her parents were still alive and that her mother had never stopped searching for her. In Moscow, early-1960s, they were finally reunited. Lidia has since made it her mission to share her story. In 2021, she made headlines around the world when Pope Francis kissed the tattoo that, once a symbol of separation, led her back to her mother. The Little Girl Who Could Not Cry is a moving memoir of survival but, above all, the prevailing power of love and hope.
A powerful and revelatory history book about the bloodlands - the lands that lie between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany - where 14 million people were killed during the years 1933 - 1944. In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in the bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow. In a twelve-year-period, in these killing fields - today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Western Russia and the eastern Baltic coast - an average of more than one million citizens were slaughtered every year, as a result of deliberate policies unrelated to combat. In this book Timothy Snyder offers a ground-breaking investigation into the motives and methods of Stalin and Hitler and, using scholarly literature and primary sources, pays special attention to the testimony of the victims, including the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries on corpses. The result is a brilliantly researched, profoundly humane, authoritative and original book that forces us to re-examine one of the greatest tragedies in European history and re-think our past.
Excessive military spending reduces the available financial reserves for health, education, and other human needs. For poor countries, it increases poverty, unemployment, and destitution. It also strengthens dictatorial tendencies in politics and acts against democratic values. If we want to achieve peace, eliminate poverty, decrease inequality, and achieve social justice, we should devote all our energies to reducing military spending and using the released resources for economic development. For that, we need a concerted effort to encourage disarmament. This new volume provides reflections and insights from leading public figures and activists who oppose military expenditure in any form. Many of the contributions to this volume were presented as speeches at the 'Disarm! For a Climate of Peace' meeting held in Berlin in 2016, organized by the International Peace Bureau. The volume also includes additional research-oriented chapters to complement the transcripts from the International Peace Bureau meeting.
As the nuclear arms race exploded in the 1980s, a group of U.S. religious pacifists used radical nonviolence to intervene. Armed with hammers, they broke into military facilities to pound on missiles and pour blood on bombers, enacting the prophet Isaiah's vision: 'Nations shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.' Calling themselves the Plowshares movement, these controversial activists received long prison sentences; nonetheless, their movement grew and expanded to Europe and Australia. In this book, Sharon Erickson Nepstad documents the emergence and international diffusion of this unique form of high-risk collective action. Drawing on interviews, original survey research, and archival data, Nepstad explains why some Plowshares groups have persisted over time while others have struggled or collapsed. Comparing the U.S. movement with less successful Plowshares groups overseas, Nepstad reveals how decisions about leadership, organization, retention, and cultural adaptations influence movements' long-term trajectories.
Visualizing Atrocity takes Hannah Arendt's provocative and polarizing account of the 1961 trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann as its point of departure for reassessing some of the serviceable myths that have come to shape and limit our understanding both of the Nazi genocide and totalitarianism's broader, constitutive, and recurrent features. These myths are inextricably tied to and reinforced viscerally by the atrocity imagery that emerged with the liberation of the concentration camps at the war's end and played an especially important, evidentiary role in the postwar trials of perpetrators. At the 1945 Nuremberg Tribunal, particular practices of looking and seeing were first established with respect to these images that were later reinforced and institutionalized through Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem as simply part of the fabric of historical fact. They have come to constitute a certain visual rhetoric that now circumscribes the moral and political fields and powerfully assists in contemporary mythmaking about how we know genocide and what is permitted to count as such. In contrast, Arendt's claims about the "banality of evil" work to disrupt this visual rhetoric. More significantly still, they direct our attention well beyond the figure of Eichmann to a world organized now as then by practices and processes that while designed to sustain and even enhance life work as well to efface it.
In every decade of the nuclear era, one or two states have developed nuclear weapons despite the international community's opposition to proliferation. In the coming years, the breakdown of security arrangements, especially in the Middle East and Northeast Asia, could drive additional countries to seek their own nuclear, biological, or chemical (NBC) weapons and missiles. This likely would produce greater instability, more insecure states, and further proliferation. Are there steps concerned countries can take to anticipate, prevent, or dissuade the next generation of proliferators? Are there countries that might reassess their decision to forgo a nuclear arsenal? This volume brings together top international security experts to examine the issues affecting a dozen or so countries' nuclear weapons policies over the next decade. In Part I, National Decisions in Perspective, the work describes the domestic political consideration and international pressures that shape national nuclear policies of several key states. In Part II, Fostering Nonproliferation, the contributors discuss the factors that shape the future motivations and capabilities of various states to acquire nuclear weapons, and assess what the world community can do to counter this process. The future utility of bilateral and multilateral security assurances, treaty-based nonproliferation regimes, and other policy instruments are covered thoroughly.
In every decade of the nuclear era, one or two states have developed nuclear weapons despite the international community's opposition to proliferation. In the coming years, the breakdown of security arrangements, especially in the Middle East and Northeast Asia, could drive additional countries to seek their own nuclear, biological, or chemical (NBC) weapons and missiles. This likely would produce greater instability, more insecure states, and further proliferation. Are there steps concerned countries can take to anticipate, prevent, or dissuade the next generation of proliferators? Are there countries that might reassess their decision to forgo a nuclear arsenal? This volume brings together top international security experts to examine the issues affecting a dozen or so countries' nuclear weapons policies over the next decade. In Part I, National Decisions in Perspective, the work describes the domestic political consideration and international pressures that shape national nuclear policies of several key states. In Part II, Fostering Nonproliferation, the contributors discuss the factors that shape the future motivations and capabilities of various states to acquire nuclear weapons, and assess what the world community can do to counter this process. The future utility of bilateral and multilateral security assurances, treaty-based nonproliferation regimes, and other policy instruments are covered thoroughly.
Genocide, Ethnonationalism, and the United Nations examines a series of related crises in human civilization growing out of conflicts between powerful states or empires and indigenous or stateless peoples. This is the first book to attempt to explore the causes of genocide and other mass killing by a detailed exploration of UN archives covering the period spanning from 1945 through 2011. Hannibal Travis argues that large states and empires disproportionately committed or facilitated genocide and other mass killings between 1945 and 2011. His research incorporates data concerning factors linked to the scale of mass killing, and recent findings in human rights, political science, and legal theory. Turning to potential solutions, he argues that the concept of genocide imagines a future system of global governance under which the nation-state itself is made subject to law. The United Nations, however, has deflected the possibility of such a cosmopolitical law. It selectively condemns genocide and has established an institutional structure that denies most peoples subjected to genocide of a realistic possibility of global justice, lacks a robust international criminal tribunal or UN army, and even encourages "security" cooperation among states that have proven to be destructive of peoples in the past. Questions raised include: What have been the causes of mass killing during the period since the United Nations Charter entered into force in 1945? How does mass killing spread across international borders, and what is the role of resource wealth, the arms trade, and external interference in this process? Have the United Nations or the International Criminal Court faced up to the problem of genocide and other forms of mass killing, as is their mandate?
The establishment in British India produced an impressive number of scholars and scholarly amateurs who pursued historical and other studies and wrote books and articles of distinction. Mr Palmer has produced a work in this tradition. His subject is the outbreak of the Mutiny (as the Raj considered it) among the native regiments (as the Raj called them) at Meerut on the evening of Sunday 10 May 1857. Was the outbreak planned in advance or did it arise through chance circumstances on that fateful evening? How badly was the situation handled?
Tom Hicks story begins when he joins the LMS straight from school and follows his early life on the railways in the 1930s, through enlistment, training as a paratrooper, wartime service, imprisonment and his return to the LMS as an engine driver. Tom volunteered for war service in 1939 and was initially placed in the military railway of the Royal Engineers. In search of adventure, he successfully applied to join the newly formed 1st Parachute Squadron of the Royal Engineers. The intensity and rigours of parachute training are described in detail, as are the comradeship and humour that came to the fore as this small 150-man unit fought throughout the Second World War as part of the 1st Parachute Brigade. The excitement of the first parachute jumps are relived together with the parachute operations in North Africa, Sicily and the Battle of Arnhem. It was here after nine days fighting with his mates falling around him that Tom was wounded and taken prisoner. Following the battle, Tom was transported in a cattle truck to Germany where he was used as forced labour in a lead mine until being liberated by the Americans in 1945. With insightful commentary from Toms son Norman, this is the story of an ordinary soldier, who was motivated by pride in his unit. It was this that would not let him leave the army when he was twice given the opportunity to return home to support the struggling railway system. Tom has recounted his experiences with a keen eye and the sense of humour that has always enabled him to triumph in the face of adversity.
When Slobodan Milosevic died in the United Nations Detention Unit in The Hague over four years after his trial had begun, many feared - and some hoped - that international criminal justice was experiencing some sort of death itself. Yet the Milosevic case, the first trial of a former head of state by a truly international criminal tribunal and one of the most complex and lengthy war crimes trials in history, stands for much in the development and the future of international criminal justice, both politically and legally. This book, written by the senior legal advisor working for the Trial Chamber, analyses the trial to determine what lessons can be learnt that will improve the fair and expeditious conduct of complex international criminal proceedings brought against former heads of state and senior political and military officials, and develops reforms for the future achievement of best practice in international criminal law.
Arms control and nonproliferation treaties are among the fingers in
the dike preventing the unthinkable nuclear, biological, and
chemical catastrophe. For decades the ability to ascertain whether
states are hiding germ weapons programs has been nonexistent
because the 1975 bioweapons ban has no inspection measures. Yet, in
1995 a small United Nations inspection corps pulled off a
spectacular verification feat in the face of concerted resistance
from Iraq's Saddam Hussein and popular skepticism that it was even
possible to conduct effective biological inspections. Working from
sketchy intelligence--and hampered by the Iraqis' extensive
concealment and deception measures--the inspectors busted open
Iraq's cover stories and wrested a confession of biowarfare agent
production from Baghdad. This rigorously researched book tells that
compelling story through the firsthand accounts of the inspectors
who, with a combination of intrepidness, ingenuity, and a couple of
lucky breaks, took the lid off Iraq's bioweapons program and pulled
off an improbable victory for peace and international security. The
book concludes by drawing lessons from this experience that should
be applied to help arrest future bioweapons programs, by placing
the Iraq bioweapons saga in the context of other manmade biological
risks, and by making recommendations to reduce those risks.
Waging a counterinsurgency war and justified by claims of 'an agreement between Guatemala and God,' Guatemala's Evangelical Protestant military dictator General Rios Montt incited a Mayan holocaust: over just 17 months, some 86,000 mostly Mayan civilians were murdered. Virginia Garrard-Burnett dives into the horrifying, bewildering murk of this episode, the Western hemisphere's worst twentieth-century human rights atrocity. She has delivered the most lucid historical account and analysis we yet possess of what happened and how, of the cultural complexities, personalities, and local and international politics that made this tragedy. Garrard-Burnett asks the hard questions and never flinches from the least comforting answers. Beautifully, movingly, and clearly written and argued, this is a necessary and indispensable book. - Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? "Virginia Garrard-Burnett's Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit is impressively researched and argued, providing the first full examination of the religious dimensions of la violencia - a period of extreme political repression that overwhelmed Guatemala in the 1980s. Garrard-Burnett excavates the myriad ways Christian evangelical imagery and ideals saturated political and ethical discourse that scholars usually treat as secular. This book is one of the finest contributions to our understanding of the violence of the late Cold War period, not just in Guatemala but throughout Latin America." -Greg Grandin, Professor of History, New York University Drawing on newly-available primary sources including guerrilla documents, evangelical pamphlets, speech transcripts, and declassified US government records, Virginia Garrard-Burnett provides aa fine-grained picture of what happened during the rule of Guatelaman president-by-coup Efrain Rios Montt. She suggests that three decades of war engendered an ideology of violence that cut not only vertically, but also horizontally, across class, cultures, communities, religions, and even families. The book examines the causality and effects of the ideology of violence, but it also explores the long duree of Guatemalan history between 1954 and the late 1970s that made such an ideology possible. More significantly, she contends that self-interest, willful ignorance, and distraction permitted the human rights tragedies within Guatemala to take place without challenge from the outside world. |
You may like...
A Spectrum of Solutions for Clients with…
Rachel Bedard, Lorna Hecker
Hardcover
R4,223
Discovery Miles 42 230
Land, Memory, Reconstruction and Justice…
Anna Bohlin, Ruth Hall, …
Paperback
|