The Dred Scott suit for freedom, argues Kelly M. Kennington, was merely the most famous example of a phenomenon that was more widespread in antebellum American jurisprudence than is generally recognized. The author draws on the case files of more than three hundred enslaved individuals who, like Dred Scott and his family, sued for freedom in the local legal arena of St. Louis. Her findings open new perspectives on the legal culture of slavery and the negotiated processes involved in freedom suits. As a gateway to the American West, a major port on both the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and a focal point in the rancorous national debate over slavery's expansion, St. Louis was an ideal place for enslaved individuals to challenge the legal systems and, by extension, the social systems that held them in forced servitude. Kennington offers an in-depth look at how daily interactions, webs of relationships, and arguments presented in court shaped and reshaped legal debates and public at titudes over slavery and freedom in St. Louis. Kennington also surveys more than eight hundred state supreme court freedom suits from around the United States to situate the St. Louis example in a broader context. Although white enslavers dominated the antebellum legal system in St. Louis and throughout the slaveholding states, that fact did not mean that the system ignored the concerns of the subordinated groups who made up the bulk of the American population. By looking at a particular example of one group's encounters with the law and placing these suits into conversation with similar en counters that arose in appellate cases nationwide Kennington sheds light on the ways in which the law responded to the demands of a variety of actors.

Critical Perspectives on Human Rights provides cutting-edge interventions into contemporary perspectives on rights, ethics and global justice. The chapters, written by leading scholars in the field, make a significant and timely contribution to critical human rights scholarship by interrogating the significance of human rights for critical theory and practice. While the contributions engage sensitively yet thoroughly with the regulatory, disciplinary, and exclusionary effects of human rights, they do so without giving up on the transformative potential of human rights. By thinking productively through the exclusions, paradoxes and aporias of human rights, Critical Perspectives on Human Rights is a key reference text for students and scholars in this important area of inquiry.

There has been recent controversy in the African American community about youth and their lack of appreciation for the gains of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This stellar biography is a superb introduction to the foremost leader of the civil rights movement. The story and historical context will be eye-opening for students and a good refresher for others who are too young to have remembered the events. In a gripping narrative style, the biography traces the young Martin, the son and grandson of formidable preachers, to his calling as a minister too, but one who would take on the entrenched racism of the South, and North, through a nonviolent movement that changed the course of American history. There has been recent controversy in the African American community about youth and their lack of appreciation for the gains of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This stellar biography is a superb introduction to the foremost leader of the civil rights movement. The story and historical context will be eye-opening for students and a good refresher for others who are too young to have remembered the events. In a gripping narrative style, the biography traces the young Martin, the son and grandson of formidable preachers, to his calling as a minister too, but one who would take on the entrenched racism of the South, and North, through a nonviolent movement that changed the course of American history. King's story is compelling, starting from his early nurtured family life in an insular community of blacks in Atlanta. His education at Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University and courtship of Coretta Scott lead into the early days of the civil rights movement and King's leadership role in the major marches, demonstrations, boycotts, and sit-ins that took place, mainly in the South. Critical insight into the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations is given as King negotiates with the presidents for equal rights for blacks. The violent reactions against and hatred of many whites for those seeking racial justice are still shocking today. Against the backdrop of beatings, killings, bombings, threats, and imprisoning, King is portrayed as driven to lift up all Americans, even if it meant martyrdom.

No previous volume has collected as interesting and broad a collection of essays on Canadian discourse and culture. This volume of representative case studies reflects the Canadian experience in terms of discourse, society, and public culture, linking its discussions to larger political and social issues and theories. Topics include:

Constitutional controversies

Cultural sovereignty

Feminist voices

Globalization

Internet issues

Marginalized communities

Nationalism

Nativity

Multidisciplinary perspectives from a mix of established and emerging Canadian studies scholars converge in a highly readable, engaging, and unique book that offers a distinctive portrait of a nation not nearly as well understood as its proximity to the United States might suggest.

In vast swathes of America, the sacredness of the Second Amendment has become a political third rail, never to be questioned. Gun rights supporters wear tri-cornered hats, wave the stars and stripes, and ask what would have happened if the revolutionaries had been unarmed when the British were coming. They have had great success in conflating unfettered gun ownership with the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and all things American, even in an era of repeated mass shootings. Yet the all-to-familiar narrative of America's gun past, echoed in the Supreme Court's Heller gun rights decision, is not only mythologized, but historically wrong. As Robert J. Spitzer demonstrates in Guns across America, gun ownership is as old as the nation, but so is gun regulation. Drawing on a vast new dataset of early gun laws reflecting every imaginable type of regulation, Spitzer reveals that firearms were actually more strictly regulated in the country's first three centuries than in recent years. The first 'gun grabbers' were not 1960's Chablis-drinking liberals, but seventeenth century rum-guzzling pioneers, and their legacy continued through strict gun regulations in the 1920s and beyond. Spitzer examines interpretations of the Second Amendment, the assault weapons controversy, modern 'stand your ground" laws, and the so-called 'right of rebellion' to show that they play out in America's contemporary political landscape in ways that bear little resemblance to our imagined past. And as gun rights proponents seek to roll back gun laws and press as many guns into as many hands as possible, warning that gun rights are endangered, they sidestep the central question: are stricter gun laws incompatible with robust gun rights? Spitzer answers this question by examining New York State's tough gun laws, where his political analysis is complemented by his own quest for a concealed carry handgun permit and construction of a legal AR-15 assault weapon. Not only can gun rights and rules coexist, but they have throughout American history. Guns across America reveals the long-hidden truth: that gun regulations are in fact as American as apple pie.

Detailed yet highly readable, this book explores essential and illuminating primary source documents that provide insights into the history, development, and current conceptions of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The freedom to speak one's mind is a subject of great importance to most Americans but especially to students, minorities, and those who are socially or economically disadvantaged—individuals whose voices have historically been censored or marginalized in American society. Documents Decoded: Freedom of Speech offers accessible, student-friendly explanations of specific developments in freedom of speech in the United States and carefully excerpted primary documents, making it an indispensable resource for educators seeking to teach the First Amendment and for students wanting to learn more about important free-speech decisions. The chronologically ordered documents explore topics typically covered in American history and government curricula, addressing such contemporary issues as the regulation of online speech, flag desecration, parody, public school student speech, and the Supreme Court's recent decisions on the issue of corporate speech rights.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

"The New H.N.I.C. brilliantly observes pivotal moments in hip hop and black culture as a whole... provocative[ly] raises the level of the hip hop discussion."
--"Black Issues Book Review"

"It was naive for Todd Boyd to subtitle his book "The Death of Civil Rights and the Birth of Hip Hop," and not to expect people to wig out."
--"Punk Planet"

"Stand back! Todd Boyd brings the ruckus in this provocative look at how hip hop changed everything from the jailhouse to the White House--and why it truly became the voice of a new generation."
--Alan Light, Editor-in-Chief, "Spin Magazine"

aElegantly script[s] the fall of the previous generation alongside the rise of a new hip-hop ethosa]. ["The New H.N.I.C"] is built on the provocative premise that this generation's hip-hop culture has come to supersede the previous one's paradigm of civil rights. Highlighting various moments in recent rap historyathe controversy over OutKast's naming a single after Rosa Parks; the white negro-isms of EminemaBoyd offers hip-hop as the most suitable access point for understanding the social, political, and cultural experiences of African Americans born after the civil rights period.a
--"Village Voice"

"Those who are hip have always known that Black music is about more than simply nodding your head, snapping your fingers, and patting your feet. Like the proverbial Dude, back on the block, Dr. Todd Boyd, in his groundbreaking book The New H.N.I.C., tells us that like the best of this oral tradition, hip hop is a philosophy and worldview rooted in history and at the same time firmly of the moment. Dr. Boyd's improvisational flow is onpoint like be bop Stacy Adams and The New H.N.I.C., in both style and substance, breaks down how this monumental cultural shift has come to redefine the globe. With mad props and much love, Dr. Boyd's The New H.N.I.C. is the voice of a generation and stands poised at the vanguard of our future."
--Quincy Jones

"A convincing and entertaining case that hip-hop matters, Boyd's reading [of hip hop] is nothing less than inspired."
--"Mother Jones"

"If you want to understand the direction of music today, read this book. Boyd expertly chronicles the birth of Hip Hop, its impact on all music and how the language and music defines a generation."
--Tom Freston, CEO, MTV Networks

"Boyd's main observation is simple and mostly true: "Hip-hop has rejected and now replaced the pious, sanctimonious nature of civil rights as the defining moment of Blackness."
--"Los Angeles Times"

When Lauryn Hill stepped forward to accept her fifth Grammy Award in 1999, she paused as she collected the last trophy, and seeming somewhat startled said, "This is crazy, 'cause this is hip hop music.'" Hill's astonishment at receiving mainstream acclaim for music once deemed insignificant testifies to the explosion of this truly revolutionary art form. Hip hop music and the culture that surrounds it--film, fashion, sports, and a whole way of being--has become the defining ethos for a generation. Its influence has spread from the state's capital to the nation's capital, from the Pineapple to the Big Apple, from 'Frisco to Maine, and then on to Spain.

But moving far beyond the music, hip hop has emerged as a social and cultural movement, displacing the ideas of the Civil Rights era. Todd Boydmaintains that a new generation, having grown up in the aftermath of both Civil Rights and Black Power, rejects these old school models and is instead asserting its own values and ideas. Hip hop is distinguished in this regard because it never attempted to go mainstream, but instead the mainstream came to hip hop.

The New H.N.I.C., like hip hop itself, attempts to keep it real, and challenges conventional wisdom on a range of issues, from debates over use of the "N-word," the comedy of Chris Rock, and the "get money" ethos of hip hop moguls like Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and Russell Simmons, to hip hop's impact on a diverse array of figures from Bill Clinton and Eminem to Jennifer Lopez.

Maintaining that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech is less important today than DMX's "It's Dark and Hell is Hot," Boyd argues that Civil Rights as a cultural force is dead, confined to a series of media images frozen in another time. Hip hop, on the other hand, represents the vanguard, and is the best way to grasp both our present and future.

'Soft power' is an oft-used term and commands an instinctive understanding among journalists and casual observers, who mostly interpret it as 'diplomatic' or somehow 'persuasive'. 'Hard power' is seen, by contrast, as something more tangible and usually military. But this is a superficial appreciation of a more subtle concept - and one key to Britain's future on the international stage. Britain's Persuaders is a deep exploration of this phenomenon, using new research into the instruments of soft power evident in British society and most relevant to the 2020s. Some, like the British Council or the BBC World Service, are explicitly intended to generate soft power in accordance with governmental intentions; but rather more, like the entertainment industries, sport, professional regulatory bodies, hospitality industries or education sectors have more penetrating soft power effects even as they pursue their own independent or commercial rationales. This book conducts an up-to-date 'audit' of all Britain's principal sources of soft power. Situating its analysis within the current understanding of the 'smart power' of nation states - that desire to employ the full spectrum of policy instruments and national characteristics to achieve policy outcomes, specifically in the context of 'Brexit Britain' where soft power status is certain to loom larger during the 2020s.

The exceptionality of America's Supreme Court has long been conventional wisdom. But the U.S. Supreme Court is no longer the only one changing the landscape of public rights and values. Over the past thirty years, the European Court of Human Rights has developed an ambitious, American-style body of law. Unheralded by the mass press, this obscure tribunal in Strasbourg, France, has become, in many ways, the Supreme Court of Europe. Michael D. Goldhaber introduces American audiences to the judicial arm of the Council of Europe - a group distinct from the European Union, and much larger - whose mission is centered on interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights. The council routinely confronts nations over their most culturally sensitive, hot-button issues. It has stared down France on the issue of Muslim immigration, Ireland on abortion, Greece on Greek Orthodoxy, Turkey on Kurdish separatism, Austria on Nazism, and Britain on gay rights and corporal punishment. And what is most extraordinary is that nations commonly comply. In the battle for the world's conscience, Goldhaber shows how the court in Strasbourg may be pulling ahead.

O'Shaughnessy, Henneberg, and their contributors examine how the theory and practice of marketing has been and can be applied to politics. Particular attention was paid to the theory of political marketing, with conceptual definitions developed to better facilitate communication between marketing professionals and political science researchers. Political marketing is about the making and unmaking of governments in a democracy. Despite its growing importance, the marketing academic profession has shown very little interest in the political ramificaitons of their discipline, while political scientists often come to political marketing with the view that it is cosmetic, if not trivial. O'Shaughnessy, Henneberg, and their contributors examine how the theory and practice of marketing has been and can be applied to politics. As they show, elections are a persuasion task writ large, most especially with the demise of inherited class loyalties. Following elections, governments can employ marketing techniques to build support for their actions, while opposition parties can press the government and its supporters through similar marketing approaches. Of particular interest to scholars, researchers, and policy makers involved with politics, political communication, and the making of public policy.

This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recenters our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did it mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Some of the essays disrupt the traditional story and time-frame of emancipation.

"This is a thought-provoking and well-written book."
-- "American Political Science Association"

"Passavant's argument depends on stablising a paradoxical tension between two principles conventionally involved in an adversary relationship."
--"Journal of American Studies"

"Passavant challenges the dichotomous approach to the relationship between liberalism and communitarianism. Overall, "No Escape" offers new insight on the relationship by critcally delving into historical events, sociopolitics, and legal developments. It challenges the conventional wisdom regarding the inherent confloict between expanding liberal rights while embracing communitarian values. Some readers will find considerable value in his judiciously documented and forceful argument."
--"The law and Politics Book Review"

Conventional legal and political scholarship places liberalism, which promotes and defends individual legal rights, in direct opposition to communitarianism, which focuses on the greater good of the social group. According to this mode of thought, liberals value legal rights for precisely the same resason that communitarians seek to limit their scope: they privilege the individual over the community. However, could it be that liberalism is not antithetical to social group identities like nationalism as is traditionally understood? Is it possible that those who assert liberal rights might even strengthen aspects of nationalism?

No Escape argues that this is exactly the case, beginning with the observation that, paradoxical as it might seem, liberalism and nationalism have historically coincided in the United States. No Escape proves that liberal government and nationalism canmutually reinforce each other, taking as its example a preeminent and seemingly universal liberal legal right, freedom of speech, and illustrating how it can function in a way that actually reproduces nationally exclusive conditions of power.

No Escape boldly re-evaluates the relationship between liberal rights and the community at a time when the call has gone out for the nation to defend the freedom to live our way of life. Passavant challenges us to reconsider traditional modes of thought, providing a fresh perspective on seemingly intransigent political and legal debates.

Press and Politics offers a new interpretation of the fate of Germany's first democracy and the advent of Hitler's Third Reich. It is the first study to explore the role of the press in the politics of the Weimar Republic, and to ask how influential it really was in undermining democratic values.
Anyone who seeks to understand the relationship between the press and politics in Germany at this time has to confront a central problem. Newspapers certainly told their readers how to vote, especially at election time. It was widely accepted that the press wielded immense political power. And yet power ultimately fell to Adolf Hitler, a radical politician whose party press had been strikingly unsuccessful.
Press and Politics unravels this apparent paradox by focusing on Berlin, the political centre of the Weimar Republic and the capital of the German press. The book examines the complex relationship between media presentation, popular reception, and political attitudes in this period. What was the relationship between newspaper circulation and electoral behavior? Which papers did well, and why? What was the nature of political coverage in the press? Who was most influenced by it? Bernhard Fulda addresses all these questions and more, looking at the nature and impact of newspaper reporting on German politics, politicians, and voters. He shows how the press personalized politics, how politicians were turned into celebrities or hate figures, and how - through deliberate distortions - individual newspapers succeeded in building up a plausible, partisan counter-reality.

This book investigates how political parties from 12 European countries used Facebook to inform, interact with and mobilise voters at the 2019 European Parliament election. Following a joint theoretical framework and method, the results of a content analysis of more than 14,000 Facebook posts are presented. Country specific chapters are followed by analyses of European parties' Facebook campaigning, the spread of populism and the use of Facebook ads by the parties. The final chapter compares all countries showing that campaigns are more strongly shaped by the national than by the European political context. Facebook is used for campaigning as usual; parties inform and persuade but neglect the platform's mobilisation and particularly interactive affordances.

Illegal migrants who evade detection, creators of value in insecure and precarious working conditions and those who refuse the constraints of sexual and biomedical classifications: these are the people who manage to subvert power and to craft unexpected sociabilities and experiences. Escape Routes shows how people can escape control and create social change by becoming imperceptible to the political system of Global North Atlantic societies.

"A profound and brilliant examination of the power of exodus to create radical interventions in perhaps the three most important and contested fields of society today: life, migration and precarious labour. It is in these fields that the present and future of multitude is at stake. "Escape Routes" is a toolbox in the hands of multitude."
---Antonio Negri, author of "Insurgencies" and co-author of "Empire and Multitude"

"Another world is here So announce the authors in their preface to a stirring and intellectually inspiring book about the possibility, the necessity and the potency of escape. Rather than seeing social transformation in terms of revolt, event and abrupt shifts, the authors trace escape routes through the ordinary and through everyday practices. "Escape Routes" is required reading for anyone who believes in the alternative worlds produced alongside neoliberal capitalism."
---Judith Halberstam, University of Southern California, author of "In a Queer Time and Place"

"A rich variety of work starts with some version of the autonomous thesis, that the everyday actions or resistances of people precede power; they are in fact what constitute and drive power forward. "Escape Routes" is one of the most original and interesting efforts to build a fuller understanding of the contemporary world, by focussing on processes and mapping out some of the history of modern power and resistance."
---Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of "Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America's Future"

"This is one of the most original treatments of some of the big questions we confront today. Even familiar subjects gain a new kind of traction as they are repositioned in the authors' sharply defined lens of control and subversion. This is conceptualisation at its best - "Escape Routes" allows us to see what might otherwise be illegible and it continuously executes reversals of standard interpretations of the present."
---Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, author of "Territory, Authority, Rights"

Dimitris Papadopoulos teaches social theory at Cardiff University, UK. He is co-editor of the journal "Subjectivity" and his work has appeared in various journals including "Boundary 2"; "Culture, Theory & Critique"; "Darkmatter"; and "Ephemera."

Niamh Stephenson teaches social science at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her most recent book, "Analysing Everyday Experience: Social Research and Political Change" (2006), was co-authored with Dimitris Papadopoulos.

Vassilis Tsianos teaches sociology at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He is co-editor of "Empire and the Biopolitical Turn" (2007) and "Turbulent Margins: New Perspectives of Migration in Europe" (2007).

Taking an innovative approach to the subject, this book looks at how U.S. presidents and their administrations' policies from the late 1960s to 2017 have led to rampant over-imprisonment and a public policy catastrophe in the United States. Mandatory minimum sentencing; "three-strikes-and-you're-out" legislation; harsher sentences and less parole and probation. The result of draconian criminal justice policies in the last six decades is that the United States is the largest incarcerator in the world, surpassing Russia and China, with significant overrepresentation of African Americans and Latinos in U.S. prisons, especially for low-level, nonviolent drug offenses. Presidents and Mass Incarceration: Choices at the Top, Repercussions at the Bottom shows how American presidents from Lyndon B. Johnson to Donald J. Trump have operated as significant political criminal justice entrepreneurs and how the leadership choices made at the top by these chief executives continue to have severe repercussions for the citizens at the lowest levels of our communities. Author Linda K. Mancillas references State of the Union Addresses, presidential initiatives, laws passed by Congress, Supreme Court decisions, and public opinion on high-profile crime events to assemble a cohesive framework of data that supports each president's impact on the incarceration explosion. Readers will come away with a greater appreciation for the complexity and magnitude of the political, economic, and societal issue of over-imprisonment that both the federal and state governments are attempting to address. Explains how presidential "tough-on-crime" rhetoric fueled by the public's fear of crime led to the war on crime, the war on drugs, and the war on gangs, resulting in the nation becoming known as "Prison America" Presents undeniable evidence that U.S. presidents have played a major role in America's imprisonment tragedy Provides a careful analysis of mass incarceration through presidential leadership to document how seemingly well-intentioned choices made at the top have had devastating repercussions on the bottom realm of our society

"Ending violent conflict requires societies to take leaps of political imagination. Artistic communities are often uniquely placed to help promote new thinking by enabling people to see things differently. In place of conflict's binary divisions, artists are often charged with exploring the ambiguities and possibilities of the excluded middle. Yet, their role in peacebuilding remains little explored. This excellent and agenda-setting volume provides a ground-breaking look at a range of artistic practices, and the ways in which they have attempted to support peacebuilding - a must-read for all practitioners and policy-makers, and indeed other peacemakers looking for inspiration."Professor Christine Bell, FBA, Professor of Constitutional Law, Assistant Principal (Global Justice), and co-director of the Global Justice Academy, The University of Edinburgh, UK "Peacebuilding and the Arts offers an impressive and impressively comprehensive engagement with the role that visual art, music, literature, film and theatre play in building peaceful and just societies. Without idealizing the role of the arts, the authors explore their potential and limits in a wide range of cases, from Korea, Cambodia, Colombia and Northern Ireland to Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa and Israel-Palestine."Roland Bleiker, Professor of International Relations, University of Queensland, Australia, and author of Aesthetics and World Politics and Visual Global Politics "Peacebuilding and the Arts is the first publication to focus critically and comprehensively on the relations between the creative arts and peacebuilding, expanding the conventional boundaries of peacebuilding and conflict transformation to include the artist, actor, poet, novelist, dramatist, musician, dancer and film director. The sections on the visual arts, music, literature, film and theatre, include case studies from very different cultures, contexts and settings but a central theme is that the creative arts can play a unique and crucial role in the building of peaceful and just societies, with the power to transform relationships, heal wounds, and nurture compassion and empathy. Peacebuilding and the Arts is a vital and unique resource which will stimulate critical discussion and further research, but it will also help to refine and reframe our understanding of peacebuilding. While it will undoubtedly become mandatory reading for students of peacebuilding and the arts, its original approach and dynamic exploratory style should attract a much wider interdisciplinary audience."Professor Anna King, Professor of Religious Studies and Social Anthropology and Director of Research, Centre of Religion, Reconciliation and Peace (WCRRP), University of Winchester, UK This volume explores the relationship between peacebuilding and the arts. Through a series of original essays, authors consider some of the ways that different art forms (including film, theatre, music, literature, dance, and other forms of visual art) can contribute to the processes and practices of building peace. This book breaks new ground, by setting out fresh ways of analysing the relationship between peacebuilding and the arts. Divided into five sections on the Visual Arts, Music, Literature, Film and Theatre/Dance, over 20 authors offer conceptual overviews of each art form as well as new case studies from around the globe and critical reflections on how the arts can contribute to peacebuilding. As interest in the topic increases, no other book approaches this complex relationship in the way that Peacebuilding and the Arts does. By bringing together the insights of scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of the arts and peacebuilding, this book develops a series of unique, critical perspectives on the interaction of diverse art forms with a range of peacebuilding endeavours.

"Scalawag" tells the surprising story of a white working-class boy who became an unlikely civil rights activist. Born in 1935 in Richmond, where he was sent to segregated churches and schools, Ed Peeples was taught the ethos and lore of white supremacy by every adult in his young life. That message came with an equally cruel one--that, as the child of a wage-earning single mother, he was destined for failure.

But by age nineteen Peeples became what the whites in his world called a "traitor to the race." Pushed by a lone teacher to think critically, Peeples found his way to the black freedom struggle and began a long life of activism. He challenged racism in his U.S. Navy unit and engaged in sit-ins and community organizing. Later, as a university professor, he agitated for good jobs, health care, and decent housing for all, pushed for the creation of African American studies courses at his university, and worked toward equal treatment for women, prison reform, and more. Peeples did most of his human rights work in his native Virginia, and his story reveals how institutional racism pervaded the Upper South as much as the Deep South.

Covering fifty years' participation in the long civil rights movement, Peeples's gripping story brings to life an unsung activist culture to which countless forgotten individuals contributed, over time expanding their commitment from civil rights to other causes. This engrossing, witty tale of escape from what once seemed certain fate invites readers to reflect on how moral courage can transform a life.

This work profiles the appalling human rights record of modern Indonesia, against a history of the country. Brutal repression, the unjust legal system and corrupt nepotism are described, with attention to the independence struggles of the East Timorese and West Papuans. The historical survey includes the anti colonialist campaign, the role of Sukarno as first president, the Suharto decades, the 1998 appointment of Habibie as third president and the social chaos caused by economic collapse. It also describes also how the United States and Britain plotted anti Sukarno coups, supported 1960s massacres and protected the despotic Suharto regime.