How do we engage with the pressing challenges of xenophobia, radicalism and security in the current political climate? The widely felt sense of insecurity in the West is shared by Muslims both within and outside Western societies. Growing Islamic militancy and the subsequent increased security measures by Western powers have contributed to a pervasive sense among Muslims of being under attack both physically and culturally. "Islam and Political Violence" brings together current debates on the uneasy and potentially mutually destructive relationship between the Muslim world and the West and argues that we are on a dangerous trajectory, strengthening dichotomous notions of the divide between the West and the Muslim world.

The debate over gun control is a complex and compelling one that has created a deep divide between gun rights and gun control supporters. Student researchers can use this reference source to explore the issue through the lives of fifty people who have become actively involved in either supporting gun control and stricter laws, or in supporting the rights of people to own and carry guns. This unique approach to the debate provides profiles of these individuals, highlighting the different reasons for each person's deep involvement in the debate and the different elements involved in the debate as a whole.

Victims of gun violence, police officers, physicians, and Second Amendment scholars are among those who put a human face on this complicated debate. Readers can expect to experience a range of emotions and a questioning of their own views as they explore the complex issues of individual rights, the role of government and law enforcement, public health questions, and social issues such as gang violence and the need for safe communities from a variety of perspectives. A thorough introduction outlining the debate, references to additional sources, and complete lists of federal and state gun laws are additional tools this volume provides to help students understand the complexity of this divisive social issue.

Much as in other locations around the world, civil uprising, particularly rooted in the activism of young people and students, plagued France during May of 1968. Massive strikes and occupations succeeded in paralysing France's economy and bringing the country to the verge of a leftist revolution. This book studies the life trajectories of many ordinary protesters during the period, using statistics and personal narratives to analyse how this activism arose, its impact on people's personal and professional lives, and its transmission through familial generations.

This expert's view into the strategic directions, tactics, leaders, and significant attacks connected to Chechen and North Caucasus terrorists examines the network's operations as well as the success of Russia's counterterrorist responses. This authoritative account traces the emergence of terrorism in the volatile region of the North Caucasus from its origins in the early 1990s through the present day. It presents a detailed examination of local and global counterterrorism strategies-everything from military force, to diplomacy, to politicization-providing valuable insight into effective methods for fighting terrorism here and around the world. This candid work uncovers the roots of Russian terrorism and provides a historical overview of the conditions that advanced terrorism and its unprecedented warfare practices, including radioactive attacks and suicide attacks by women. Author and native Russian speaker, Elena Pokalova, analyzes prominent terrorist groups such as Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade, Riyad us-Saliheyn Martyrs' Brigade, and Special Purpose Islamic Regiment, and reveals the regional and global influence of the Caucasus Emirate on the movement. Discusses different strands of terrorist movements that emerged over time in the North Caucasus Includes tables, maps, and charts to help support content and reinforce visual learning Analyzes the significance of the jihadi ideology in the North Caucasus Examines the structural dynamics behind terrorist attacks over time

Discover how the United States can beat China, Russia, Iran, and ISIS in the coming information-technology wars from the New York Times bestselling author and veteran Washington Times columnist Bill Gertz.America is at war, but most of its citizens don't realize it. Covert information warfare is being waged by world powers, rogue states--such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea--and even terrorist groups like ISIS. This conflict has been designed to defeat and ultimately destroy the United States. This new type of warfare is part of the Information Age that has come to dominate our lives. In iWar, Bill Gertz describes how technology has completely revolutionized modern warfare, how the Obama administration failed to meet this challenge, and what we can and must do to catch up and triumph over this timely and important struggle.

Popular music has long been used to entertain, provoke, challenge and liberate but also to oppress and control. Can popular music be political? What types of popular music work best with politics? How can songs, videos, concerts or any other musical commodity convey ideas about power, politics and identity? Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies (MCDS), this book reveals the deeply political role played by popular music. Lyndon Way demonstrates how MCDS can provide important and timely insights on the political nature of popular music, due to its focus on how communication takes place, as well as its interest in discourse and how ideologies are naturalised and legitimised. The book considers the example of contemporary Turkish society, with its complex and deep ideological divisions increasingly obvious under the stewardship of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his centre-right political party, in power since 2002. It looks at how the authorities seek to harness and control popular music and considers a wide range of popular music genres including rock, rap, protest and folk music. It shows how official promotional videos, protest cut-and-paste offerings, party-political election songs, live music events and internet discussions about popular music emerge as sites of power and resistance in certain venues and particularly across social media. Throughout the book, Lyndon Way shows that popular music is also deeply political.

How and why do people become involved in European homegrown jihadism? This book addresses this question through an in-depth study of the Dutch Hofstadgroup, infamous for containing the murderer of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was killed in November 2004 in Amsterdam, and for plotting numerous other terrorist attacks. The Hofstadgroup offers a window into the broader phenomenon of homegrown jihadism that arose in Europe in 2004 and is still with us today. Utilizing interviews with former Hofstadgroup participants and the extensive police files on the group, Becoming a European Homegrown Jihadist overcomes the scarcity of high-quality data that has hampered the study of terrorism for decades. The book advances a multicausal and multilevel understanding of involvement in European homegrown jihadism that is critical of the currently prevalent 'radicalization'-based explanatory frameworks. It stresses that the factors that initiate involvement are separate from those that sustain it, which in turn are again likely to differ from those that bring some individuals to actual acts of terrorism. This is a key resource for scholars of terrorism and all those interested in understanding the pathways that can lead to involvement in European homegrown jihadism.

This indispensable guide to the conflict in Northern Ireland during 30 years of "the Troubles", 1968 to 1999, covers the various elements at home and abroad that have had an influence on the hostilities. The A-to-Z entries discuss people, parties, organizations, and key places. Other sections cover election results (1968 to 1999), systems of government, office holders in Northern Ireland, and the security system. Enhancing this volume are a chronology of major events (1921 to 1999) and a subject index.

Religious political violence is by no means a new phenomenon, yet there are critical differences between the various historical instances of such violence and its more current permutations. Since the mid-1970s, religious fundamentalist movements have been seeking to influence world order by participating in local political systems. For example, Islamic fundamentalism is at the heart of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Christian fundamental right wing has seen a resurgence in Europe, and Jewish fundamentalism is behind the actions of Meir Kahane's Kach movement and the settler movement. The shift in recent years from secular to religious political violence necessitates a reevaluation of contemporary political violence and of the concept of religious violence. This text analyzes the evolution of religious political violence, in both historical and contemporary perspectives. Since religious political violence events are usually associated with the term "terrorism," the book first analyzes the origins of this controversial term and its religious manifestations. It then outlines and highlights the differences between secular and religious political violence, on ideological, strategic, and tactical levels, before comparing the concept of Holy War in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Lastly, it shows how modern radical monotheistic religious groups interpret and manipulate their religious sources and ideas to advocate their political agendas, including the practice of violence. A unique comparative study of religious political violence across Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, this text features many international case studies from the Crusades to the Arab Spring.

A critical look at how Bill Gates uses his wealth and power through the Gates Foundation to advance his own agenda and erode democratic institutions in the process.

From greedy to generous, from cold to kind-hearted, from rogue to hero, Bill Gates is an extraordinarily complex public figure. Yet over the last decade, we've reduced him to a flat caricature - a sweater-wearing, avuncular, well-meaning billionaire, who is adamantly giving away all of his money through the Gates Foundation in order to improve the lives of others.

This simplistic portrait perilously ignores the political influence that Gates has acquired through his charitable work, and the controversial ways through which he utilises it. The charity internally sets a policy agenda for how to fix the world - based on one man's worldview - then imposes this vision onto the developing world by funding groups that align with it.

Combining rich storytelling and ground-breaking reporting, The Bill Gates Problem offers readers a provocative and timely counter-narrative about one of the world's most famous figures. But more than that, this book speaks to a vital political question around economic inequality and the erosion of democratic institutions - why should the super-rich be able to transform their wealth into political power, and just how far can they go?

The on-going struggle in New Poland is not confined to the daunting questions of economic transformation, though these certainly have been seized center stage. Most troubling to the dreams of Polish democracy is the recent splintering of Solidarnosc, the party, and its estrangement from Lech Walesa, the man who led it to institutional power. This book affords the opportunity to ponder this paradox of change. By discussing social change and movements in general, as well as the situation in Poland in particular, the reader gains insight into how a social movement is born, how it achieves its goals, and how it is transformed.

Centenary Subjects examines the ideological debates and didactic exercises in subject formation during the centenary era of independence (the decade of the 1910s)-the peak of arielismo-and proposes a new reading of the arielista archive that brings into focus the racial anxieties, epistemological and spiritual fissures, and iconoclastic agendas that structure, and at times smother, the ethos of that era. Arielismo takes its name from JosE Enrique RodO's foundational essay, "Ariel" (1900), a wide-ranging gospel dedicated to Latin American youth that incited a cultural awakening under the banner of the spirit throughout the Americas at an ominous juncture-when the US co-opted the Cuban War of Independence in 1898, effectively rebranding it as the Spanish-American War. RodO's optimistic message of transcendence as an antidote to the encroaching empire quickly became one of the most pervasive and malleable paradigms of regional empowerment, reverberating throughout a range of Latin Americanist projects in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Centenary Subjects recovers a series of important but understudied essays penned by arielista writers, radicals, pedagogues, prophets, and politicians of diverse stripes in the early twentieth century, and analyzes how, under the auspices of the arielista platform, young people emerged as historical subjects invested with unprecedented cultural capital, increasing political power, and an urgent mandate to break with the past and transform the sociopolitical and cultural landscape of their countries. But their respective designs harbor racial, epistemological, aesthetic, and anarchistic strains that bring into sharper relief the conflicting signals that the centenary subject had to parse with respect to race, reason, and rupture.

This is an examination of how embassies work and cope during wartime, with a focus on the experiences of the British, American, and Indian embassies. During wartime, embassies assume different roles and face various situations. An embassy might represent a belligerent state while being situated in an enemy, an allied, or a neutral state. Conversely, it might represent a neutral state, while having to function in a belligerent state. How does an embassy's situation affect its priorities? How does it affect its staff and mission? The work and risks they face may vary greatly, but embassies play a key role in war, a time when they are required to give higher priority to military and political intelligence while facing daily risks of attacks and managing media and high-ranking visitors. "Embassies in Armed Conflict" examines these issues and the problems wartime embassies encounter by looking primarily at the experiences of American, British, and Indian embassies. Written by a leading expert, the book aims to both examine the role of wartime embassies and to provide guidance for those who serve - or wish to serve - in the Foreign Service. The volumes in the series are relatively short handbooks aimed at beginning practitioners and advanced university students. The volumes highlight the ways foreign policy is implemented through the apparatus of diplomacy, the diplomatic system, and diplomats and will discuss: specific aspects of diplomacy, such as the concept of diplomatic relations, the consequences of cutting off diplomatic relations, diplomatic immunity, etc., and key diplomatic activities and events, such as an international crisis, or a summit meeting. Such books will focus on the conduct of diplomacy rather than its politics. The focus will be on the contemporary practice of diplomacy, not on foreign policy or the theoretical direction of diplomacy.

Urban agriculture is increasingly considered an important part of creating just and sustainable cities. Yet the benefits that many people attribute to urban agriculture-fresh food, green space, educational opportunities-can mask structural inequities,thereby making political transformation harder to achieve. Realizing social and environmental justice requires moving beyond food production to address deeper issues such as structural racism, gender inequity, and economic disparities. Beyond the Kale argues that urban agricultural projects focused explicitly on dismantling oppressive systems have the greatest potential to achieve substantive social change. Through in-depth interviews and public forums with some of New York City's most prominent urban agriculture activists and supporters, Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen illustrate how some urban farmers and gardeners not only grow healthy food for their communities but also use their activities and spaces to disrupt the dynamics of power and privilege that perpetuate inequity. Addressing a significant gap in the urban agriculture literature, Beyond the Kale prioritizes the voices of people of colour and women-activists and leaders whose strategies have often been underrepresented within the urban agriculture movement-and it examines the roles of scholarship in advancing social justice initiatives.

How do educators and activists in today's struggles for change use historical materials from earlier periods of organizing for political education? How do they create and engage with independent and often informal archives and debates? How do they ultimately connect this historical knowledge with contemporary struggles? History's Schools aims to advance the understanding of relationships between learning, knowledge production, history and social change. This unique collection explores engagement with activist/movement archives; learning and teaching militant histories; lessons from liberatory and anti-imperialist struggles; and learning from student, youth and education struggles. Six chapters foreground insights from the breadth and diversity of South Africa's rich progressive social movements; while others explore connections between ideas and practices of historical and contemporary struggles in other parts of the world including Argentina, Iran, Britain, Palestine, and the US. Besides its great relevance to scholars and students of Education, Sociology, and History, this innovative title will be of particular interest to adult educators, labour educators, archivists, community workers and others concerned with education for social change.

This is the compelling story of a former Jesuit who traveled to Ireland in order to better understand the IRA, its widespread support among Irish Catholics, and the country's continuing civil unrest. Author Douglass McFerran, an American, made many key contacts in Northern Ireland, enabling him to gain unprecedented access to republican groups. He met with members of the Orange Lodge and the heavily armed Royal Ulster Constabulary; he had tea with leaders of Sinn Fein; and he participated in the annual Internment March on the streets of Belfast. In this book he provides a history of the conflict in Northern Ireland and goes beyond the propaganda on both sides to understand the causes of today's violence and explore what would be necessary to end it.

McFerran wrote this book at the suggestion of individuals within the Irish republican community. During its writing he had the cooperation of several Sinn Fein leaders and past and present members of the IRA. McFerran came to believe that the violent situation in Northern Ireland can best be explained by considering the manner in which the English government, through genocide and civil repression, attempted to eliminate Irish resistance to English rule. The failure of the Anglo-Irish War to achieve a united Irish government brought on a republican movement with a political expression in Sinn Fein and a military expression in the guerrilla activities of the Irish Republican Army. The continued failure of the English government to negotiate with Irish nationalists can be attributed to a desire to maintain the political support of predominantly Protestant unionists, who since 1913 have pledged armed resistance to any effort to allow a Catholic-led government to rule over them.

Relying principally on Ian Saberton's edition of The Cornwallis Papers: The Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the Southern Theatre of the American Revolutionary War, 6 vols (Uckfield UK: The Naval & Military Press Ltd, 2010), this work opens with an essay containing a groundbreaking critique of Cornwallis's decision in 1781 to march from Wilmington, North Carolina, into Virginia, a decision that was critical in a series of events that cost Britain the southern colonies and lost it the entire war. Together, this and the remaining essays comprise a comprehensive re-evaluation of the momentous and decisive campaigns that terminated in Cornwallis's capitulation at Yorktown and the consolidation of American independence.

This study describes the diverse experiences and political opinions of the colonial Anglican clergy during the American Revolution. As an intercolonial study, it depicts regional variations, but also the full range of ministerial responses including loyalism, neutrality, and patriotism. Rhoden explores the extraordinary dilemmas which tested these members of the King's church, from the 1760s controversy over a proposed episcopate to the 1780s formation of the Episcopal Church, and thoroughly demonstrates the impact of the Revolution on their lives and their church.