There are a number of controversies surrounding the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Africa. Critics have charged it with neo-colonial meddling in African affairs, accusing it of undermining national sovereignty and domestic attempts to resolve armed conflict. Here, based on 650 interviews over 11 years, Phil Clark critically assesses the politics of the ICC in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, focusing particularly on the Court's multi-level impact on national politics and the lives of everyday citizens. He explores the ICC's effects on peace negotiations, national elections, domestic judicial reform, amnesty processes, combatant demobilisation and community-level accountability and reconciliation. In attempting to distance itself from African conflict zones geographically, philosophically and procedurally, Clark also reveals that the ICC has become more politicised and damaging to African polities, requiring a substantial rethink of the approaches and ideas that underpin the ICC's practice of distant justice.

From 1952 to 1981, South Africa's apartheid government ran a school for the training of African art teachers at Indaleni, in what is today KwaZulu-Natal. The Art Of Life In South Africa is about the students, teachers, art, ideas, and politics that led to the school's founding, and which circulated during the years of its existence at a remote former mission station. It is a story of creativity, beauty, and community in twentieth-century South Africa.

Daniel Magaziner radically reframes apartheid-era South African history. Against the dominant narrative of apartheid oppression and black resistance, this book focuses instead on a small group's efforts to fashion more fulfilling lives through the ironic medium of an apartheid-era school.

Lushly illustrated with almost 100 images, this book gives us fully formed lives and remarkable insights into life under segregation and apartheid.

When the U.S. Supreme Court announces a decision, reporters simplify and dramatize the complex legal issues by highlighting dissenting opinions and thus emphasizing conflict among the justices themselves. This often sensationalistic coverage fosters public controversy over specific rulings, despite polls which show that Americans strongly believe in the Court's legitimacy as an institution. In The Limits of Legitimacy, Michael A. Zilis illuminates this link between case law and public opinion. Drawing on a diverse array of sources and methods, he employs case studies of eminent domain decisions, analysis of survey data and media reporting, an experiment to test how volunteers respond to media messages, and finally the natural experiment of the controversy over the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. Zilis finds, first, that the media tends not to quote from majority opinions. However, the greater the division over a particular ruling among the justices themselves, the greater the likelihood that the media will criticize that ruling, characterize it as activist, and employ inflammatory rhetoric. Zilis then demonstrates that the media's portrayal of a decision, as much as the substance of the decision itself, influences citizens' reactions to and acceptance of it. This meticulously constructed study and its persuasively argued conclusion advance the understanding of the media, judicial politics, political institutions, and political behavior.

This book outlines how African language media is affected by politics, technology, culture, and the economy and how this media is creatively produced and appropriated by audiences across cultures and contexts. African language media can be considered as a tool for communication, socialization, and community that defines the various identities of indigenous people in Africa. This book shows how vernacular media outlets including radio and television, as well as native formats such as festivals, rituals and dance, can be used to influence all facets of local peoples' experience and understanding of community. The book also explores the relationship between African language media sources and contemporary issues including the digitalization conundrum, peace and conflict resolution, identity formation, hate speech and fake news. Furthermore, it shows how local media can be used for development communication purposes during health and environmental crises. The book includes cases studies demonstrating the uses, experiences and activities related to various forms of media available in African languages. This book will be of interest to scholars in the field of communication and media studies, health and environmental communication, journalism, African studies and anthropology.

African Truth Commissions and Transitional Justice examines the functioning of truth commissions in Africa, outlining the lessons learned, the best practices, and the successes and failures of seven African truth commissions. Its introduction and conclusion then work further to place truth commissions within the growing academic field of transitional justice. The first African truth commission was convened by the despot Idi Amin for reasons unrelated to the defense of human rights, but despite this ambiguous beginning, other African truth commissions have done important work. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1996 has become the 'gold standard' for future truth commissions not only in Africa, but throughout the world: it unearthed much truth about the Apartheid era abuse of human rights and took vital first steps towards restorative justice in the Republic. Each truth commission is distinctive. However, although much has been written about South Africa's truth commissions, much less is known about the other six studied in this book-and an attentive reader will notice the suggestive patterns which emerge.

From the National Review to Breitbart, from Fox News to Rush Limbaugh, conservative news is an inescapable feature of modern politics. Since the early days of mass communication, right-wing media producers have blended reporting with commentary, narrating the news of the day from a perspective informed by conservative worldviews and partisanship. News on the Right seeks to initiate a new interdisciplinary field of scholarly research focused on the study of right-wing media and conservative news. Editors Anthony Nadler and A.J. Bauer gather a range of voices, presenting an interdisciplinary investigation into the practices and patterns of meaning-making in the production, circulation, and consumption of conservative news. Traversing journalism, media and communication studies, cultural studies, history, political science, and sociology, this volume utilizes a variety of qualitative and quantitative research methods to elucidate case studies of conservative news cultures in the US and UK. Together, these perspectives show that a fuller understanding of right-wing media and its effects can be reached by treating these phenomena as deeply interwoven into many conservatives' lives and political sensibilities.

In surrealist artist Paul Klee's The Twittering Machine, the bird-song of a diabolical machine acts as bait to lure humankind into a pit of damnation. Leading political writer and broadcaster Richard Seymour argues that this is a chilling metaphor for our relationship with social media. Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we're getting out of it, and what we're getting into.

This collection of prison writings straddles two continents, and compares and contrasts the political struggles that gave birth to two vibrant new democracies of the twenty-first century: South Africa and the Czech Republic. The triumph over decades of suffering endured by the ordinary citizens of these two countries is symbolized by their leaders, Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel.

While the moral stature of these two men continues to act as a beacon for other political aspirants in a new century, they call upon us all to acknowledge the role played by ordinary men and women in effecting freedom and justice. For this reason, Fallen Walls focuses on the experiences of ordinary prisoners of conscience. It records three voices from the apartheid-era cells of Robben Island--Joseph Mati, Johnson Mgabela, Monde Mkunqwana--and three voices from communist-era prisons in Czechoslovakia--Jiri Mesicki, Lola Skodova, and Jiri Stransky. There are striking similarities as well as differences between the two sets of stories. On a personal level, the tales from Robben Island are characterized by an absence of bitterness and thoughts of revenge, while a sense of bleak isolation and lingering bitterness pervades accounts from the Czechoslovakian prisons and labor camps. The buoyant tone of triumph of the South Africans is balanced by the darker, more skeptical mood of the Czechs. In an age that teeters so precariously between hope and despair, the narratives of these six prisoners of conscience remind us not only of what we are, but also of what we may become.

In a timely warning against complacency, Vaclav Havel notes in his foreword that "the authors remind us anew of the price that is so often paid for freedom and democracy." Fallen Walls will be of interest to historians, sociologists, human rights activists, and political scientists.

The English civil wars radically altered many aspects of mid-seventeenth century life, simultaneously creating a period of intense uncertainty and unheralded opportunity. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the printing and publishing industry, which between 1640 and 1660 produced a vast number of tracts and pamphlets on a bewildering variety of subjects. Many of these where of a highly political nature, the publication of which would have been unthinkable just a few years before. Whilst scholars have long recognised the importance of these publications, and have studied in depth what was written in them, much less work has been done on why they were produced. In this book Dr Peacey first highlights the different dynamics at work in the conception, publication and distribution of polemical works, and then pulls the strands together to study them against the wider political context. In so doing he provides a more complete understanding of the relationship between political events and literary and intellectual prose in an era of unrest and upheaval. By incorporating into the political history of the period some of the approaches utilized by scholars of book history, this study reveals the heightened importance of print in both the lives of members of the political nation and the minds of the political elite in the civil wars and Interregnum. Furthermore, it demonstrates both the existence and prevalence of print propaganda with which politicians became associated, and traces the processes by which it came to be produced, the means of detecting its existence, the ways in which politicians involved themselves in its production, the uses to which it was put, and the relationships between politicians and propagandists.

This book gives a thorough account of the electoral process at all levels and in all branches of American government. The book is particularly effective in placing current issues in the American political arena in context, illustrated with much needed and otherwise difficult to find information. In addition to a thorough coverage of recent elections the book gives substantial account to other important related themes. An examination of the historical development of political campaigning over 200 years leads into a study of the genealogy and current status of America's political parties.

This important new study is an inquiry into the origins and purposes of downwardly directed violence by economic and political elites in Brazil-violence that has led to the invention and tacit approval of contemporary death squads.

Slavoj Zizek's prolific comments on anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, scapegoating, popular nationalism, the refugee crisis, Eurocentrism, the War on Terror, neocolonialism, global justice, and rioting comprise a dizzying array of thinking. But what can we pull out of his various writings and commentaries on race in the contemporary world? Is there anything approaching a Zizekian philosophy of race? Zahi Zalloua argues here that there is and that the often polemical style of Zizek's pronouncements shouldn't undermine the importance and urgency of his work in this area. Zalloua not only examines Zizek's philosophy of race but addresses the misconceptions that have arisen and some of the perceived shortcomings in his work to date. Zizek on Race also puts Zizek in dialogue with critical race and anti-colonial studies, dwelling on the sparks struck up by this dialogue and the differences, gaps, and absences it points up. Engaging Zizek's singular contribution to the analysis of race and racism, Zizek on Race both patiently interrogates and critically extends his direct comments on the topic, developing more fully the potential of his thought. In a response to the book, Zizek boldly reaffirms his theoretical stance, clarifying further his often difficult-to-work-out positions on some of his more controversial pronouncements.

With unparalleled reporting, a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter chronicles the clash between a president and the officials of his own government who tried to stop him.

Donald Trump v. The United States tells the dramatic, high-stakes story of those who felt compelled to confront and try to contain the most powerful man in the world as he shredded norms and sought to expand his power. Michael S. Schmidt takes readers inside the defining events of the presidency, chronicles them up close, and records the clash between an increasingly emboldened president and those around him, who find themselves trying to thwart the president they had pledged to serve, unsure whether he is acting in the interest of the country, his ego, his family business, or Russia. Through their eyes and ears, we observe an epic struggle.

Drawing on secret FBI and White House documents and confidential sources inside federal law enforcement and the West Wing, Donald Trump v. The United States is vital journalism from a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter that records the shocking reality of a presidency like no other. It is a riveting contemporary history and a lasting account of just how fragile and vulnerable the institutions of American democracy really are.

An in-depth investigation of the Romanian secret police's file on Muller, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, re-creating a "file story" of her surveillance. "Herta Muller should share her Nobel with the Securitate." This comment by a former officer in the Romanian secret police, or Securitate, was in reaction to hearing that Muller, a German writer originally from Romania, had won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Communist Romania's infamous secret police was indeed a protagonist in Muller's work, though an undesired and dreaded one: most of her writings are deeply and explicitly anchored in Ceausescu's Romania and her own traumatic experiences with the Securitate. Muller's file traces her surveillance from 1983 until after she emigrated to West Germany in 1987. She has written extensively in reaction to reading her file, but primarily addresses its gaps, begging the question what information the file does in fact contain. This book is an in-depth investigation of Muller's file, and engages with other related files, including that of her then-husband, the writer Richard Wagner. Valentina Glajar treats the files as primary sources in order to re-create the story of Muller's surveillance by the Securitate. In such an intrusive culture of surveillance, surviving the system often meant a certain degree of entanglement: for victims, collaborators, and implicated subjects alike. Veiled in secrecy for decades, these compelling and complex documents shed light on a boundary between victims and perpetrators as porous as the Iron Curtain itself.

Each of the past few election cycles has featured at least one instance of "primarying," a challenge to an incumbent on the grounds that he or she is not sufficiently partisan. For many observers, such races signify an increasingly polarized electorate and an increasing threat to moderates of both parties.

In "Getting Primaried," Robert G. Boatright shows that primary challenges are not becoming more frequent; they wax and wane in accordance with partisan turnover in Congress. The recent rise of primarying corresponds to the rise of national fundraising bases and new types of partisan organizations supporting candidates around the country. National fundraising efforts and interest group-supported primary challenges have garnered media attention disproportionate to their success in winning elections. Such challenges can work only if groups focus on a small number of incumbents.

"Getting Primaried" makes several key contributions to congressional scholarship. It presents a history of congressional primary challenges over the past forty years, measuring the frequency of competitive challenges and distinguishing among types of challenges. It provides a correction to accounts of the link between primary competition and political polarization. Further, this study offers a new theoretical understanding of the role of interest groups in congressional elections.

Illustrated with prints from a unique archive of glass and celluloid negatives from the Aegean island of Anafi, this book deals with the life of people who were sent into internal exile under the Metaxas dictatorship (1936-1942). Like others before and after, this regime used imprisonment, internal deportation and exile as a means of containing and isolating a wide variety of people who were thought to be 'public dangers'. Drawing on published and unpublished memoirs and on firsthand accounts of former exiles, it gives a vivid picture of a by no means unified collection of people, facing a common set of problems on an island at the borders of the Greek State. During the Occupation, the Anafi exiles faced privation, hunger and finally the dissolution of the commune. This is a human drama which will interest a wide range of readers.

The summer of 2014--when the Islamic State seized Mosul, Iraq's second city; captured vast swathes of eastern Syria; and declared itself a latter-day Caliphate--marked a turning point in the history of photography, one that pushed its already contested relationship with reality to its very limits. Uniquely obsessed with narrative, image management and branding, the Islamic State used cameras as weapons in its formative years as a Caliphate. The tens of thousands of propaganda photographs captured during this time were used to denote policy, to navigate through defeat and, perhaps most importantly, to construct an impossible reality: a totalising image-world of Salafi-Jihadist symbols and myths. Based on a deep examination of the 20,000 photographs Charlie Winter collected from the Islamic State's covert networks online in 2017, this book explores the process by which the Caliphate shook the foundations of modern war photography. Focusing on the period in which it was at its strongest, Winter identifies the implicit value systems that underpinned the Caliphate's ideological appeal, and evaluates its uniquely malign contribution to the history of the photographic image. The Terrorist Image travels to the heart of what made the Islamic State tick during its prime, providing unique insights into its global appeal and mobilisation successes.

Covering 10 years of post-communist political change in eastern Europe, this work examines the capacity of the former ruling parties to attract contemporary voters and their role in contributing to the consolidation of the new democratic regimes. Attention is paid to the comparative processes of party development in terms of party activity becoming more professional, aspects of party system institutionalization, major dimensions of institutional and electoral development, and party finances. A range of countries are surveyed to throw light on these processes, and broad analysis conducted on the nature of conservatism in post-communist Europe and the role of transnational party cooperation in fostering processes of Europeanization.

During and after World War II, millions of people in Central and Eastern Europe were uprooted and deported from their ancestral homelands in an unprecedented series of ethnic cleansings. The expulsion of minorities created more homogenous states than had previously existed in the region but caused massive social and psychological problems that lasted for generations. These nine case studies, written by Russian, German and Austrian scholars and based on archival findings, should shed new light on deportations and resettlement in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Germany. The introduction places forced migration throughout the region in a broad historical context.

President Vladimir Putin is a figure of both fear and fascination in the Western imagination. In the minds of media pundits and commentators, he personifies Russia itself - a country riven with contradictions, enthralling and yet always a threat to world peace. But recent propaganda images that define public debate around growing tensions with Russia are not new or arbitrary. Russia and the Media asks, what is the role of Western journalism in constructing a new kind of Cold War with Russia? Focusing on British and US media coverage of moments of crisis and of co-operation between the West and Russia, McLaughlin exposes how such a Cold War framework shapes public perceptions of a major, hostile power reasserting itself on the world stage. Scrutinising events such as the Ukraine/Crimea crisis, the Skripal Poisoning and Russia's military intervention in Syria - as well as analysing media coverage of the 2018 Russian presidential election and build up to the 2018 World Cup - Russia and the Media makes a landmark intervention at the intersection of media studies and international relations.

How to persuade citizens to enlist? How to convince them to fight in a war which was, for many, distant in terms of kilometres as well as interest? Modern persuasion techniques, both political and commercial, were used to motivate enlistment and financial support to build a "factory of consensus". The propagandists manipulated the public, guiding their thoughts and actions according to the wishes of those in power and were therefore the forerunners of spin doctors and marketing and advertising professionals. Their posters caught the attention of members of the public with images of children and beautiful women, involving them, nourishing their inner needs for well-being and social prestige, motivating them by showing them testimonials in amusing and adventurous situations, and inspiring their way of perceiving the enemy and the war itself, whose objective was to "make the world safe for democracy". In the discourse of this strategy we find storytelling, humour, satire and fear, but also the language of gestures, recognized as important for the completeness of messages. Were the propagandists "hidden persuaders" who knew the characteristics of the human mind? We do not know for certain. However, their posters have a personal and consistent motivation which this book intends to demonstrate.

In this trailblazing book, social movements, the mainstream news media and public policy are tackled in order to arm readers with an "intellectual self-defense" of the reign of trillion-dollar-valued platform conglomerates, reality TV presidencies of the past and present, the pandemic and the Biden administration. Firmly situated at the intersection of journalism, activism and the deployment of power, the author places his analysis within an international context that further develops a critical paradigm, called the media dependence model (MDM). Featuring a foreword by Daniel and Noam Chomsky and a preface by Robert W. McChesney, the book offers a cutting-edge overview of the news media landscape both within the United States and globally. The MDM critically analyzes dichotomous patterns of mainstream press coverage of the #ClimateStrike, #FamiliesBelongTogether, #EvasionMasiva (Chile), #FightForHongKong, #RickyRenuncia (Puerto Rico) and #CancelRent movements and the pro-Trump #liberate resistance, contrasting them with social media and other historic movements. "Evergreen" topics such as immigration, climate change and net neutrality are explored in depth, along with media reforms and concrete policy solutions. The book straddles disciplines including media, policy and journalism studies, political economy and international and political communication. It is a must-read for scholars, students, policy advisers, media makers, social media enthusiasts, grassroots activists, NGOs and concerned citizens alike.

What are stereotypes and why do we use them? Are all stereotypes bad? Can we stop people from using them? Questions such as these have fascinated social psychologists for many years.Perry Hinton provides an accessible introduction to this key area, giving a critical and concise overview of the influential theories and approaches, as well as insights into recent work on the role of language and culture in stereotyping.

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In this trailblazing book, social movements, the mainstream news media and public policy are tackled in order to arm readers with an "intellectual self-defense" of the reign of trillion-dollar-valued platform conglomerates, reality TV presidencies of the past and present, the pandemic and the Biden administration. Firmly situated at the intersection of journalism, activism and the deployment of power, the author places his analysis within an international context that further develops a critical paradigm, called the media dependence model (MDM). Featuring a foreword by Daniel and Noam Chomsky and a preface by Robert W. McChesney, the book offers a cutting-edge overview of the news media landscape both within the United States and globally. The MDM critically analyzes dichotomous patterns of mainstream press coverage of the #ClimateStrike, #FamiliesBelongTogether, #EvasionMasiva (Chile), #FightForHongKong, #RickyRenuncia (Puerto Rico) and #CancelRent movements and the pro-Trump #liberate resistance, contrasting them with social media and other historic movements. "Evergreen" topics such as immigration, climate change and net neutrality are explored in depth, along with media reforms and concrete policy solutions. The book straddles disciplines including media, policy and journalism studies, political economy and international and political communication. It is a must-read for scholars, students, policy advisers, media makers, social media enthusiasts, grassroots activists, NGOs and concerned citizens alike.