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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Political control & influence > Political oppression & persecution
In 1979, aged only seven, Monica Macias was transplanted from West Africa to the unfamiliar surroundings of North Korea. She was sent by her father Francisco, the first president of post-Independence Equatorial Guinea, to be educated under the guardianship of his ally, Kim Il Sung. Within months, her father was executed in a military coup; her mother became unreachable. Effectively orphaned, she and two siblings had to make their life in Pyongyang. At military boarding school, Monica learned to mix with older children, speak fluent Korean and handle weapons on training exercises. After university, she went in search of her roots, passing through Beijing, Seoul, Madrid, Guinea, New York and finally London - forced at every step to reckon with damning perceptions of her adoptive homeland. Optimistic yet unflinching, Monica's astonishing and unique story challenges us to see the world through different eyes.
'Anyone interested in the future of autocracy should buy it' Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Demoracy **Shortlisted for the Moore Prize for Human Rights Literature** A devastating account of China's genocide of the Uyghurs, by a leading Uyghur activist and Time #100 nominee Nury Turkel was born in a 're-education' camp in China at the height of the Cultural Revolution. He spent the first several months of his life in captivity with his mother, who was beaten and starved while pregnant with him, whilst his father served a penal sentence in an agricultural labour camp. Following this traumatic start - and not without a heavy dose of good fortune - he was later able to travel to the US for his undergraduate studies in 1995 and was granted asylum in the country in 1998 where, as a lawyer, he is now a tireless and renowned activist for the plight of his people. Part memoir, part call-to-action, No Escape will be the first major book to tell the story of the Chinese government's terrible oppression of the Uyghur people from the inside, detailing the labour camps, ethnic and religious oppression, forced sterilisation of women and the surveillance tech that have made Xinjiang - in the words of one Uyghur who managed to flee - 'a police surveillance state unlike any the world has ever known'.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union a quarter of a century ago, Russia has undergone a dizzying and complex transition that has seen it transform from a communist state into a democracy before regressing back to the more authoritarian regime that exists today. Through a compelling and insightful analysis of the Russian case, this book explores the role that social welfare plays in regime transitions, specifically it examines the role that gender and social welfare has played in Russia's often chaotic post-communist political evolution, from Boris Yeltsin's assumption of the presidency in 1991 to Vladimir Putin's return for a third term as president in 2012. From 2001 to 2011, social welfare (especially pronatalist policies) was a key part of the political leadership's governance strategy. A shift from pluralism to regulation accompanied a discourse in which strong government would rein-in a wayward society. But can a hierarchical political system satisfy the aspirations of a changing citizenry? This study demonstrates that gender is at the very centre of debates over the authenticity of democracy in Russia.
One of the most crucial issues to affect national policy in the
state of Israel is that of relations between its Jewish and Arab
citizens. The confrontation of October 2000 demonstrated the
explosive potential of the unresolved dilemmas posed by these
relations.
This volume examines the causes, consequences, and dynamics of that style of governance by force that has come to be known as state terror. The collection deals with theoretical issues and examines case applications as well. The editors distinguish among the study of oppression, repression, and state terror systems. State terrorism in the form of enforcement terrorism, economic repression, military control, and the "legal" oppression of apartheid in Latin America, Argentina, the Philippines, and South Africa is discussed. One chapter explores American containment policy. Theoretical chapters on state terrorism include editor George Lopez's scheme for the analysis of government terror, editor Michael Stohl's discussion of the international dimensions of this problem, and an agenda for continued investigation.
Despite lacking any sort of military advantage over the regimes
they have confronted, the Iranian people have never been dissuaded
from rising against and challenging varying forms of injustice.
Through the successful implementation of non-violent action
Iranians have overcome the violence of successive governments by
undermining their moral and political legitimacy. But more than a
hundred years after the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, Iranians
are still in search of a social covenant through which they can
acquire and practice public freedom. The stakes are extremely high,
if Iran fails to end its culture of violence as a state and society
then it risks its future as a stable, democratic state. So how then
can the Iranian people break the cycle of violent and oppressive
regimes and start looking towards a non-violent and democratic
future? There is no magic formula that will immediately end
violence in Iran but this book argues that by shunning violence and
showing a readiness to face down persecution that the Iranian
people have a chance to secure their freedom.
Award-winning journalist Elizabeth Becker started covering Cambodia in 1973 for "The Washington Post," when the country was perceived as little more than a footnote to the Vietnam War. Then, with the rise of the Khmer Rouge in 1975 came the closing of the border and a systematic reorganization of Cambodian society. Everyone was sent from the towns and cities to the countryside, where they were forced to labor endlessly in the fields. The intelligentsia were brutally exterminated, and torture, terror, and death became routine. Ultimately, almost two million people--nearly a quarter of the population--were killed in what was one of this century's worst crimes against humanity."When the War Was Over" is Elizabeth Becker's masterful account of the Cambodian nightmare. Encompassing the era of French colonialism and the revival of Cambodian nationalism; 1950s Paris, where Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot received his political education; the killing fields of Cambodia; government chambers in Washington, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Hanoi, and Phnom Penh; and the death of Pol Pot in 1998; this is a book of epic vision and staggering power. Merging original historical research with the many voices of those who lived through the times and exclusive interviews with every Cambodian leader of the past quarter century, "When the War Was Over" illuminates the darkness of Cambodia with the intensity of a bolt of lightning.
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is the site of the largest mass repression of an ethnic and/or religious minority in the world today. Researchers estimate that since 2016 one million people have been detained there without trial. In the detention centres individuals are exposed to deeply invasive forms of surveillance and psychological stress, while outside them more than ten million Turkic Muslim minorities are subjected to a network of hi-tech surveillance systems, checkpoints and interpersonal monitoring. Existing reportage and commentary on the crisis tend to address these issues in isolation, but this ground-breaking volume brings them together, exploring the interconnections between the core strands of the Xinjiang emergency in order to generate a more accurate understanding of the mass detentions' significance for the future of President Xi Jinping's China. -- .
First Published in 1998. Initially written in the period between 1942 and 44, with additional notes in the appendices of 1945, this volume looks at the areas of the secret Police, the secret control as developed by Fascism and National Socialism as laid on the Third Reich and the relationship between the law and the Political Police and their co-ordination with propaganda and the impact of the instrument of terror on the people.
Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin is the first book devoted exclusively to popular participation in the 'Great Terror', a period in which millions of people were arrested, interrogated, shot, and sent to labor camps. The book shifts attention from the machinations of top Party leaders to the mechanisms by which repression engulfed Soviet society. In the unions and the factories, repression was accompanied by a mass campaign for democracy. Party leaders urged workers to criticize and remove corrupt and negligent officials. Workers, shop foremen, local Party members, and union leaders adopted the slogans of repression and used them, often against each other, to redress long-standing grievances, shift blame for intractable problems in production, and advance personal agendas. Repression quickly became a mass phenomenon; not only in the number of victims it claimed, but in the number of perpetrators it spawned. Using new, formerly secret archival sources, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin takes us into the unions and the factories to observe how ordinary people moved through clear stages toward madness and self-destruction.
Infrastructure development projects are set to continue into the next century as developing country governments seek to manage population growth, urbanization and industrialization. The contributions in this volume raise many questions about 'development' and 'progress' in the late twentieth century. What is revealed are the enormous problems and disastrous affects which continue to accompany displacement operations in many countries, which raise the ever more urgent question of whether the benefits of infrastructure development justify or outweigh the pain of the radical disruption of peoples lives, exacerbated by the fact that, with some notable exceptions, there has been a lack of official recognition on the part of governments and international agencies that development-induced displacement is a problem at all. This important volume addresses the issues and shows just how serious the situation is.
Solidarity Road tells the story of Jan Theron’s involvement in the Food and Canning Workers Union (FCWU) during apartheid South Africa. Part memoir, part history this fascinating tale will reveal what working conditions were like in the 1970’s. It outlines the very beginnings of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Theron states, ‘Solidarity in a trade union does not simply mean standing by your members, or by organised workers. It means solidarity with your class. At the time, in 1976, the working class was fragmented. Working for a trade union was part of a project to unite a fragmented class, and to give it a voice. This was the historical project to which a number of people from a certain intellectual background were drawn. This would be our contribution to the struggle: what we did to end apartheid. It was a struggle for democracy, but democracy did not just mean everyone getting to vote every so often in national elections. People also had to eat. The most obvious way in which the working class was then fragmented was in terms of race. The Union put its commitment to solidarity into practice by uniting workers of different races in factories manufacturing food. To do so it had to overcome divisions among workers created by the ways in which government had structured employment, in terms of the law, which the bosses were able to exploit. Nowadays ‘bosses’ seems like a dated term, yet this is the term workers used to refer to the people for whom they actually worked. It is also no less important today than it was then to differentiate between those who control the factories and mines and those who operate at their behest.
The concentrations camps that existed in the colonised world at the turn of the 20th Century are a vivid reminder of the atrocities committed by imperial powers on indigenous populations. This study explores British, American and Spanish camp cultures, analysing debates over their legitimacy and current discussions on retributive justice.
The British, Irish, Russian, American, German, and Austrian contributors examine the intricate nature of the mass repression unleashed by the Stalinist leader of the USSR during 1937-38. The first part of the collection deals with annihilation policies against the Soviet elite and the Communist International. The second section of the volume looks at mass operations of the secret police (NKVD) against social outcasts, Poles and other 'hostile' ethnic groups. The final section comprises micro-studies about targeted victim groups among the general population.
This book analyzes the development of the Stalinist state of the 1930s from the perspective of the changing nature of center-local relations. It examines the trend toward greater central state control over the formation and implementation of economic policy and the shift toward increased state repression through a series of archive-based case studies of the center's interactions with its republican and regional bodies. The book provides the basis for a new conceptualization of the Stalinist state.
Bobby Sands was twenty-seven years old when he died. He spent almost nine years of his life in prison because of his Irish republican activities. He died, in prison, on 5 May 1981, on the sixty-sixth day of his hunger strike at Long Kesh, outside Belfast. This book documents a day in the life of Bobby Sands. It is a tale of human bravery, endurance and courage against a backdrop of suffering, terror and harassment. It will live on as a constant reminder of events that should never have happened -- and will hopefully never happen again.
Social work is often presented as a benevolent and politically neutral profession, avoiding discussion about its sometimes troubling political histories. This book rethinks social work's legacy and history of both political resistance and complicity with oppressive and punitive practices. Using a comparative approach with international case studies, the book uncovers the role of social workers in politically tense episodes of recent history including the anti-racist struggle in the US and the impact of colonialism in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. As the de-colonisation of curricula and Black Lives Matter movement gain momentum, the fascinating book skilfully navigates social work's collective political past while considering its future.
Since 1989, when the movement for Kashmiri independence took the form of an armed insurgency, it has been one of the most highly militarized regions in the world. This book is based on the idea that preserving memory is central to the struggle for justice and to someday rebuild a society shattered by two decades of armed conflict.
North Korea is Orwell's 1984 made reality: it is the only country in the world not connected to the internet; Gone with the Wind is a dangerous, banned book; during political rallies, spies study your expression to check your sincerity. After the death of the country's great leader Kim Il Sung in 1994, famine descended: people stumbled over dead bodies in the street and ate tree bark to survive. Nothing to Envy weaves together the stories of adversity and resilience of six residents of Chongin, North Korea's third largest city. From extensive interviews and with tenacious investigative work, Barbara Demick has recreated the concerns, culture and lifestyles of North Korean citizens in a gripping narrative, and vividly reconstructed the inner workings of this extraordinary and secretive country.
This bibliography includes English-language first-person accounts of individuals who survived or witnessed, as bystanders, journalists, diplomats, or liberators, genocidal acts in this century. The primary focus is on diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies, oral histories, interviews and statements in newspaper articles or other texts. A secondary focus is on reports, films, microfilm collections, and archives that contain first-person accounts, essays about first-person accounts, and bibliographies that list first-person accounts. Although there are bibliographies devoted to specific genocidal acts and one general bibliography on genocide, this volume is the first to cover first-person accounts. The volume opens with a lengthy introductory essay on genocide. It then devotes chapters to specific genocidal acts, including German extermination of the Hereros, Ottoman genocide of the Armenians, Soviet-induced famine in the Ukraine, the Soviet's Great Purge, the Soviet deportation of whole nations, the Holocaust, Gypsies during the Holocaust, Indonesian genocide of Communists and suspected Communists, Ugandan genocides, Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh, Burundi genocide of the Hutus, Indonesian genocide in East Timor, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, threatened genocide of the Baha'is, and genocide of various indigenous peoples. The chapters are subdivided by type of account, and all entries are annotated. The work includes subject and author indexes. The book will be a useful resource for historians, political scientists, and sociologists interested in genocide and international human relations.
Death camps are the most enduring image of the Holocaust, but they were only the final expression of a destruction process that began in 1933. In that year the Nazi regime mobilized members of an entire society to destroy their neighbors. Lawmakers, judges, attorneys, and the rest of the legal system played a crucial role in reassuring good Germans that a war on Jews was legitimate. Nazi Justiz emphasizes the prewar years of a robust Western European nation at peace with all countries. Such emphasis demonstrates that a Holocaust can happen in any country sharing the heritage of Western civilization, and warns of the inevitable outcome once ordinary people are targeted in a destruction process. Using original decrees, court decisions, and first-hand recollections of participants, Nazi Justiz documents how the German legal system transformed itself into a criminal organization. We see not only how the legal system shaped everyday life, but how good Germans and the business community benefited from the Holocaust. Germany in the 1930s-before the war-is emphasized. Such emphasis demonstrates that a Holocaust can happen in any country sharing the heritage of Western civilization, and warns of the inevitable outcome once ordinary people are targeted in a process of destruction. No other book has so much information on the Holocaust in peacetime Germany; indeed, the chapters on property confiscation and residential concentration are unique. With a richness of detail evoking an immediacy normally found in novels, Nazi Justiz offers a chilling portrayal of persons filled with so much goodness that they become oblivious to horrors they cause.
The South African Truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) could do no more than make a contribution to political reconciliation and nation-building - requiring government, business, civil society and South Africans generally to take this process forward. Truth & Reconciliation In South Africa: 10 Years On provides a realistic assessment of what a TRC can reasonably accomplish and provides an audit of the response of government and other agencies to the unfinished business of the Commission. This title features an edited transcript of a public symposium chaired by Tim Modise with participation from Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, Yasmin Sooka and several participants in the TRC's victim hearings. It also contains articles by leading researchers, activists and government officials tasked with implementing the TRC recommendations. It examines the complexities of translation and interpretation of personal testimonies in TRC sessions. It also reflects on the role of media, art and cultural exponents who grappled with South Africa's past. |
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