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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism
For forty years the Cuban Revolution has been at the forefront of
American public opinion, yet few are knowledgeable about the
history of its enemies and the responsibility of the U.S.
government in organizing and sustaining the Cuban
counterrevolution. Available in English for the first time, this
outstanding study by Cuban historian and former diplomat Jesus
Arboleya traces the evolution of the counterrevolutionary movement
from its beginnings before 1959, to its transformation into the
Cuban-American groups that today dominate U.S. policy toward Cuba.
Arboleya also analyzes the role played by Cuban immigrants to the
U.S. and the perspectives for improvement in relations between the
two nations as a result of the generational and social changes that
have been occurring in the Cuban-American community.
A "Washington Post Book World" Best Book of the Year
When her carriage first crossed over from her native Austria into
France, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette was taken out, stripped
naked before an entourage, and dressed in French attire to please
the court of her new king. For a short while, the young girl played
the part.
But by the time she took the throne, everything had changed. In
"Queen of Fashion, " Caroline Weber tells of the radical restyling
that transformed the young queen into an icon and shaped the future
of the nation. With her riding gear, her white furs, her pouf
hairstyles, and her intricate ballroom disguises, Marie Antoinette
came to embody--gloriously and tragically--all the extravagance of
the monarchy.
Terroredia is a newly coined term by the editor, Dr. Mahmoud Eid,
to explain the phenomenal, yet under-researched relationship
between terrorists and media professionals in which acts of
terrorism and media coverage are exchanged, influenced, and fueled
by one another. Exchanging Terrorism Oxygen for Media Airwaves: The
Age of Terroredia provides a timely and thorough discussion on a
wide range of issues surrounding terrorism in relation to both
traditional and new media. Comprised of insights and research from
leading experts in the fields of terrorism and media studies, this
publication presents various topics relating to Terroredia:
understanding of terrorism and the role of the media, terrorism
manifestations and media representations of terrorism, types of
terrorism and media stereotypes of terrorism, terrorism tactics and
media strategies, the war on terrorism, the function of terrorism
and the employment of the media, new terrorism and new media,
contemporary cases of terrorist-media interactions, the rationality
behind terrorism and counterterrorism, as well as the
responsibility of the media. This publication is of interest to
government officials, media professionals, researchers, and
upper-level students interested in learning more about the complex
relationship between terrorism and the media.
In The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution,
Dan Robinson presents a new history of politics in colonial America
and the imperial crisis, tracing how ideas of Europe and
Europeanness shaped British-American political culture.
Reconstructing colonial debates about the European states system,
European civilisation, and Britain's position within both, Robinson
shows how these concerns informed colonial attitudes towards
American identity and America's place inside - and, ultimately,
outside - the emerging British Empire. Taking in more than two
centuries of Atlantic history, he explores the way in which
colonists inherited and adapted Anglo-British traditions of
thinking about international politics, how they navigated imperial
politics during the European wars of 1740-1763, and how the
burgeoning patriot movement negotiated the dual crisis of Europe
and Empire in the between 1763 and 1775. In the process, Robinson
sheds new light on the development of public politics in colonial
America, the Anglicisation/Americanisation debate, the political
economy of empire, early American art and poetry,
eighteenth-century geopolitical thinking, and the relationship
between international affairs, nationalism, and revolution. What
emerges from this story is an American Revolution that seems both
decidedly arcane and strikingly relevant to the political
challenges of the twenty-first century.
Lloyd Sachikonye traces the roots of Zimbabwe's contemporary
violence to the actions of the Rhodesian armed forces, and the
inter-party conflicts that occurred during the liberation war. His
focus, however, is the period since 2000, which has seen
state-sponsored violence erupting in election campaigns and
throughout the programme of fast-track land reform. The
consequences of this violence run wide and deep. Aside from
inflicting trauma and fear on its victims, the impunity enjoyed by
its perpetrators has helped to mould a culture within which
personal freedoms and dreams are strangled. At a broader social
level, it is responsible - both directly and indirectly - for
millions of Zimbabweans voting with their feet and heading for the
diaspora. Such a migration 'cannot simply be explained in terms of
the search for greener economic pastures. Escape from
authoritarianism, violence, trauma and fear is a large factor
behind the exodus.' Sachikonye concludes that any future quest for
justice and reconciliation will depend on the country facing up to
the truth about the violence and hatred that have infected its past
and present.
Written by a former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
nuclear inspector and nuclear security expert, this book provides a
comprehensive and authentic overview of current global nuclear
developments. The author provides detailed insights into current
and past nuclear crises and reveals the technical capabilities,
political strategies and motives of nuclear weapon owners. By
analyzing the nuclear programs and strategies of various countries,
including the USA, Russia, China, Great Britain and France, this
book highlights the existing global nuclear threat and the risks it
entails for humanity. It also describes the current blockades and
suggests possible ways out. Given its scope, the book will appeal
to scholars and policymakers interested in gaining new insights
into sensitive or complex nuclear programs in various countries.
A century on, scholars can achieve a certain balance in views of
what Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin's government meant for Russia and
for the world. In Roberto Echeverran synthesizes all that we know
about Lenin and his government by taking data from new and original
sources. With auxiliary chapters on the evolution of land tenancy
in Russia, the collectivization of land under Stalin, and the
suppression of sexual minorities under Soviet rule, this book adds
breadth and scope to our understanding of Lenin's government and
legacy.
This book examines the intersecting forces of nationalism,
terrorism, and patriotism that normalize an acceptance of the
global war on terror as essential to maintaining freedom and
democracy as defined by white nation-states. Readers are introduced
to speculative ethnography: an experimental methodology that bends
time and space through the practice of avant-garde poetics. This
study conceptualizes terrorism as a place of colonial encounters
between soldiers, insurgents, civilians, and leaders of
nation-states. The tactics of suicide bombings employed by the
Tamil nationalist movement, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam,
are juxtaposed with drone strikes in asymmetric warfare where
violence becomes a means of dialogue. Each chapter weaves seemingly
disparate narratives from multiple experiences and sites of war,
inviting readers to witness the condition of getting lost in that
willful attachment to killing and being killed in service of
patriotic pride and national belonging.
This book seeks to investigate not only the causes of
radicalization but also how radicalization has unfolded since 2009
based on an exhaustive review of the relevant literature and two
stints of fieldwork in Bangladesh involving 71 in depth interviews
of highly credentialed individuals. This book looks at both local
and global factors that have served to provoke young Bangladeshis,
many of whom are from relatively well-educated backgrounds, to
become religiously belligerent and eventually to turn into
terrorists. Ideology, it is argued, plays a pivotal role in the
radicalization process, and justifies violence. Most importantly,
ideology proffers solutions to the micro and macrocauses of
commonly identifiable youth disaffection. This book mainly focuses
on the Islamic State and Al Qaeda's exploitation of religious
beliefs and their construction of a mobilizing, apocalyptic
narrative that strikes a chord with the young, middle-class
Muslims. Both organizations target them for recruitment. The book
ends by proffering what is called a 'Pyramid Root Cause model,'
which attempts to tie all the causative variables of radicalization
into a connected explanation of what has been happening in
Bangladesh over the last decade. This book is of interest to
scholars of political Islam, international politics, and security
studies, including terrorism and the politics of South Asia.
'Methinks I am like a man, who having narrowly escap'd shipwreck',
David Hume writes in A Treatise of Human Nature, 'has yet the
temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel,
and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the
globe'. With these words, Hume begins a memorable depiction of the
crisis of philosophy and his turn to moral and political philosophy
as the path forward. In this groundbreaking work, Thomas W. Merrill
shows how Hume's turn is the core of his thought, linking Hume's
metaphysical and philosophical crisis to the moral-political
inquiries of his mature thought. Merrill shows how Hume's
comparison of himself to Socrates in the introduction to the
Treatise illuminates the dramatic structure and argument of the
book as a whole, and he traces Hume's underappreciated argument
about the political role of philosophy in the Essays.
This groundbreaking work challenges modernist military science and
explores how a more open design epistemology is becoming an
attractive alternative to a military staff culture rooted in a
monistic scientific paradigm. The author offers fresh sociological
avenues to become more institutionally reflexive - to offer a
variety of design frames of reference, beyond those typified by
modern military doctrine. Modernist military knowledge has been
institutionalized to the point that blinds militaries to
alternative designs organizationally and in their interventions.
This book seeks to reconstruct strategy and operations in
"designing ways" and develops theories of action through
multifaceted contextualizations and recontextualizations of
situations, showing that Military Design does not have to rely on
set rational-analytic decision-making schemes, but on seeking
alternative meanings in- and on-action. The work offers an
alternative philosophy of practice that embraces the
unpredictability of tasks to be accomplished. Written by Colonel
Paparone (U.S. Army, Ret., PhD) with a special chapter by two
active duty officers, it will appeal to all in military and
security studies, including professionals and policymakers.
The revolutionary year of 1958 epitomizes the height of the social
uprisings, military coups, and civil wars that erupted across the
Middle East and North Africa in the mid-twentieth century. Amidst
waning Anglo-French influence, growing US-USSR rivalry, and
competition and alignments between Arab and non-Arab regimes and
domestic struggles, this year was a turning point in the modern
history of the Middle East. This multi and interdisciplinary book
explores this pivotal year in its global, regional and local
contexts and from a wide range of linguistic, geographic, academic
specialties. The contributors draw on declassified and multilingual
archives, reports, memoirs, and newspapers in thirteen
country-specific chapters, shedding new light on topics such as the
extent of Anglo-American competition after the Suez War, Turkey's
efforts to stand as a key pillar in the regional Cold War, the
internationalization of the Algerian War of Independence, and Iran
and Saudi Arabia's abilities to weather the revolutionary storm
that swept across the region. The book includes a foreword from
Salim Yaqub which highlights the importance of Jeffrey G. Karam's
collection to the scholarship on this vital moment in the political
history of the modern middle east.
This book offers broad-gauged analyses of the causes, nature, and
changing patterns of armed conflict in Africa as well as the
reasons for these patterns. It also situates conflicts that have
been haunting the African continent since the time of
decolonization within the various theoretical schools such as "new
war," "economic war," "neo-patrimonial," and "globalization." It
begins with the premise that conflict constitutes one of the major
impediments to Africa's socio-economic development and has made the
continent's future looks relatively bleak. At the dawn of the
twenty-first century, the international community has, once again,
treated Africa as a hopeless continent. This is due, in part, to a
number of political, military, and socio-economic problems, which
have made the continent miss the path towards sustainable
development. From the period of political independence in the 1960s
to the immediate post-Cold War period, the African political
landscape was dotted with many conflicts of different natures and
intensity (low-intensity conflicts, civil wars, mass killings, and
large-scale political violence). During the first four decades of
political independence, there were about 80 forceful changes of
government in Sub-Saharan Africa, while a large number of countries
in that region witnessed various forms of conflicts. This
collection assembles the work of distinguished African scholars who
offer valuable new insights into the problem of political
instability.
From their earliest meetings, activist David Graeber knew that the
Occupy Wall Street movement was something different. From small
beginnings its demonstrations spread across the world to cities
like Cairo, Athens, Barcelona and London and gave a glimpse of a
new way. This provocative look at the actions of the 99% asks: why
was it so effective? What went right? And what can we all do now to
make our world democratic once again? Both a treatise on power and
protest and an energetic account of contemporary events, The
Democracy Project will change the way you think about politics, and
the world.
Education and NGOs discusses the role of sectors outside the
mainstream in relation to improving access to education, with
particular focus on the underprivileged. International case study
examples offer insights into the work of non-governmental
organizations, which play a crucial role in UNESCO's global
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) effort, by providing
alternative forms of education and improving educational access.
Including a discussion of the work of organizations such as Africa
Educational Trust, Kids Company, FIDAL Foundation and many others,
the volume explores the role of NGOs in the UK, the USA, India,
Nepal, the Gaza Strip, Ecuador, Philippines and South Africa. Each
chapter contains contemporary questions to encourage active
engagement with the material and an annotated list of suggested
reading to support further exploration.
Guy Standing's immensely influential 2011 book introduced the
Precariat as an emerging mass class, characterized by inequality
and insecurity. Standing outlined the increasingly global nature of
the Precariat as a social phenomenon, especially in the light of
the social unrest characterized by the Occupy movements. He
outlined the political risks they might pose, and at what might be
done to diminish inequality and allow such workers to find a more
stable labour identity.His concept and his conclusions have been
widely taken up by thinkers from Noam Chomsky to Zygmunt Bauman, by
political activists and by policy-makers. This new book takes the
debate a stage further-looking in more detail at the kind of
progressive politics that might form the vision of a Good Society
in which such inequality, and the instability it produces is
reduced. "A Precariat Charter "discusses how rights - political,
civil, social and economic - have been denied to the Precariat, and
at the importance of redefining our social contract around notions
of associational freedom, agency and the commons. The ecological
imperative is also discussed - something that was only hinted at in
Standing's original book but has been widely discussed in relation
to the Precariat by theorists and activists alike.
In this groundbreaking work, leading scholars and experts set out
to explore the utility of the concept of affordance in the study
and understanding of terrorism and political violence.
Affordance is a concept used in a variety of fields, from
psychology to artificial intelligence, which refers to how the
quality of an environment or object allows an individual to perform
a specific action. This concept can represent an important element
in the process of choice involved in behavior, and is closely
related to situational analyses of criminal behavior. In this book,
the contributors set out to explore how this concept can be used to
study terrorism and, as a result, develop management strategies.
Essays discuss such topics as affordance in relation to
counterterrorism, technology, cyber-jihad, ideology, and political
ecologies.
By importing the concept of affordance and a new set of research to
the study of terrorism, the authors offer an innovative and
original work that challenges and adds to various aspects of
situational crime prevention and counterterrorism.
"Negotiating Memories of Protest in Western Europe" explores the
transmission of memories of European protest movements in the late
1960s and 1970s. Focusing on the specific case of Italy, the book
examines the ways in which different memory agents negotiate
memories of violence against left-wing activists, perpetrated by
representatives of the state. It does so through a discussion of
commemorative rituals, memory sites and other forms of 'memory
work' performed by various social groups within the local setting
of Bologna, where a left-wing student and protester was shot dead
by police in 1977. By drawing on this fascinating case study,
Andrea Hajek lays bare the dynamic relation between official and
unofficial memories of conflict and and explores the challenges of
historical research into social movements.
This book applies a multiparadigmatic philosophical frame of
analysis to the topic of social revolution. Crossing two
disciplines and lines of literature-social philosophy and social
revolution-this book considers different aspects of social
revolution and discusses each aspect from four diverse paradigmatic
viewpoints: functionalist, interpretive, radical humanist, and
radical structuralist. The four paradigms are founded upon
different assumptions about the nature of social science and the
nature of society. Each paradigm generates theories, concepts, and
analytical tools that are different from those of other paradigms.
An understanding of different paradigms leads to a more balanced
understanding of the multi-faceted nature of the subject matter. In
this book, the first chapter reviews the four paradigms. Using the
Iranian Revolution as exemplar, the next few chapters provide
paradigmatic explanations for a particular aspect of revolution:
culture, religion, ideology. With this background, the book
introduces a comprehensive approach to the understanding of
revolution. The final chapter concludes by recommending further
paradigmatic diversity. This book will be of particular interest to
students and researchers interested in social revolution, political
sociology, and political theory.
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