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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Political control & influence > Political oppression & persecution
While there are estimates of the number of people killed by Soviet authorities during particular episodes or campaigns, until now, no one has tried to calculate the complete human toll of Soviet genocides and mass murders since the revolution of 1917. Here, R. J. Rummel lists and analyzes hundreds of published estimates, presenting them in the historical context in which they occurred. His shocking conclusion is that, conservatively calculated, 61,911,000 people were systematically killed by the Communist regime from 1917 to 1987. Rummel divides the published estimates on which he bases his conclusions into eight historical periods, such as the Civil War, collectivization, and World War II. The estimates are further divided into agents of death, such as terrorism, deportations, and famine. Using statistical principles developed from more than 25 years of quantitative research on nations, he analyzes the estimates. In the collectivization period, for example, about 11,440,000 people were murdered. During World War II, while the Soviet Union had lost almost 20,000,000 in the war, the Party was killing even more of its citizens and foreigners-probably an additional 13,053,000. For each period, he defines, counts, and totals the sources of death. He shows that Soviet forced labor camps were the major engine of death, probably killing 39,464,000 prisoners overall. To give meaning and depth to these figures, Rummel compares them to the death toll from'major wars, world disasters, global genocide, deaths from cancer and other diseases, and the like. In these and other ways, Rummel goes well beyond the bare bones of statistical analysis and tries to provide understanding of this incredible toll of human lives. Why were these people killed? What was the political and social context? How can we understand it? These and other questions are addressed in a compelling historical narrative. This definitive book will be of interest to Soviet experts, those interested in the study of genocide and violence, peace researchers, and students of comparative politics and society. Written without jargon, its statistics are confined to appendixes, and the general reader can profitably read the book without losing the essence of the findings, which are selectively repeated in the narrative.
Memory of the Argentina Disappearances examines the history of the production, public circulation, and the interpretations and reinterpretations of the Nunca Mas report issued by Argentina's National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP). It was established in 1983 by constitutional president Raul Alfonsin to investigate the fate of thousands of people who had been disappeared by the state during the seventies. Upon publication in 1984, Nunca Mas became a bestseller, was translated into several languages and won greater public importance when the military juntas were brought to trial and the court accepted the report as key evidence. The report's importance was further enhanced with the adoption of CONADEP and Nunca Mas as models for truth commissions established in Latin America, and when it was postulated as a means for conveying an awareness of this past to Argentina's younger generations. This book contributes to understanding the political processes that led to Nunca Mas becoming the way in which Argentines remembered the disappearances and the country's political violence, and how its meaning is modified by new interpretations. Given the canonical nature of Nunca Mas, the book sheds light on the most substantial changes and the continuities in Argentina's social memory of its recent past.
The twenty-first century so far has seen the global rise of authoritarian populism, systematic racism, and dogmatic metaphysics. Even though these events demonstrate the growth of an age of 'unreason', in this original and compelling book John Roberts resists the assumption that such thinking displays an unthinking irrationality or loss of reason; instead he asserts that an important feature of modern reactionary politics is that it offers a supposedly convincing integration of the particular and the universal. This move is defined by what Roberts calls the 'reasoning of unreason' and has deep roots in the history of Western thought and politics. Tracing the dark history of enlightenment-disenlightenment, John Roberts explores 'the reasoning of unreason' across centuries from Aquinas, William of Ockham, the most important treatise on witchcraft Malleus Maleficarum, Locke, Kant, and Count Arthur de Gobineau, to Social Darwinism, Nazism, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Friedrich von Hayek. Roberts provides a new set of philosophical-political tools to understand the formation and denigration of the rational subject and the current reinvestment in various forms of political unreason globally. The Reasoning of Unreason is the first book to draw on the philosophy of reason, political philosophy, political theory and political history, in order to produce a dialectical account of the 'making of reason' internal to the forces of unreason and the limits of reason.
Moscow, 1937: the soviet metropolis at the zenith of Stalin s dictatorship. A society utterly wrecked by a hurricane of violence. In this compelling book, the renowned historian Karl Schlogel reconstructs with meticulous care the process through which, month by month, the terrorism of a state-of-emergency regime spiraled into the Great Terror during which 1 1/2 million human beings lost their lives within a single year. He revisits the sites of show trials and executions and, by also consulting numerous sources from the time, he provides a masterful panorama of these key events in Russian history. He shows how, in the shadow of the reign of terror, the regime around Stalin also aimed to construct a new society. Based on countless documents, Schlogel s historical masterpiece vividly presents an age in which the boundaries separating the dream and the terror dissolve, and enables us to experience the fear that was felt by people subjected to totalitarian rule. This rich and absorbing account of the Soviet purges will be essential reading for all students of Russia and for any readers interested in one of the most dramatic and disturbing events of modern history.
Since the Gezi uprisings in June 2013 and AKP's temporary loss of parliamentary supremacy after the June 2015 general elections, sharp political clashes, ascending police operations, extra-judicial executions, suppression of the media and political opposition, systematic violation of the constitution and fundamental human rights, and the one-man-rule of President Erdogan have become the identifying characteristics of Turkish politics. The failed coup attempt on 15th July 2016 further impaired the situation as the government declared emergency rule at the end of which a political regime defined as the "Presidential Government System" was established in July 2018. Turkey's New State in the Making examines the historical specificities of the ongoing AKP-led radical state transformation in Turkey within a global, legal, financial, ideological, and coercive neoliberal context. Arguing that rather than being an exception, the new Turkish state has the potential to be a model for political transformations elsewhere, problematizing how specific policies the AKP adapted to refract social dispositions have been radically redefining the republican, democratic and secular features of the modern Turkish state.
This Scholastic Classics edition of George Orwell's classic satire novel is perfect for students and Orwell enthusiasts alike. All animals are equal - but some are more equal than others. When the ill-treated animals of Manor Farm rebel against their master Mr Jones and take over the farm, they start to believe in a life of freedom and equality for all. But slowly, the egocentric and ruthless Napoleon takes control and the animals are subjected to force and violence from the corrupt elite - the pigs. As one dictator is replaced with another, the idea of fairness and equality for all becomes a distant memory. Class, equality, power and control are some of the themes that run throughout this novel. Studying this for GSCE? - check out Scholastic's revision flashcards (9781407190198), study guide (9781407183435) and guidebook for writing the best answers possible (9781407183992). SCHOLASTIC "INK DOT" CLASSICS - Collect them all! A Christmas Carol Black Beauty Five Children and It Frankenstein Jane Eyre Macbeth Oliver Twist Romeo and Juliet Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Treasure Island What Katy Did
What was it like to be a freedom fighter in the 1980s? Eighteen members of the ANC’s military underground tell their stories, describing their backgrounds, their roles in the armed struggle and their lives since the fall of apartheid. In 1987, the apartheid minister of law and order boasted that the security forces had crushed Umkhonto we Sizwe in the Western Cape. He could not have been more wrong. The Ashley Kriel Detachment, named after one of their slain comrades, conducted over thirty operations between late 1987 and early 1990, playing a crucial role in the defeat of an unjust system. In Voices from the Underground, eighteen members of the AKD give accounts of their involvement in the armed struggle. The book traces their varying journeys into MK, via student activism, trade unions, religious organisations and UDF politics. It details their training in Angola, Botswana, Tanzania, Cuba and South Africa, and their experiences of detention and interrogation. Members recall the stresses of couriering arms and explosives across police roadblocks, hiding in safe houses and evading capture. They talk about the operations they executed, the measures they took to avoid civilian casualties, and their responses to security breaches and the deaths of comrades in the line of duty. Above all, this is a book about people, showing the effects of apartheid on their lives, their reasons for joining the armed struggle, the challenges of surviving in the underground while raising children, and their experiences of returning to civilian life or, in some cases, integrating into the SANDF. Voices from the Underground gives a human face to ordinary people who took up arms to fight a violent state for the freedom of all South Africans.
Gultan Kisanak, a Kurdish journalist and former MP, was elected co-mayor of Diyarbakir in 2014. Two years later, the Turkish state arrested and imprisoned her. Her story is remarkable, but not unique. While behind bars, she wrote about her own experiences and collected similar accounts from other Kurdish women, all co-chairs, co-mayors and MPs in Turkey; all incarcerated on political grounds. The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics is a one-of-a-kind collection of prison writings from more than 20 Kurdish women politicians. Here they reflect on their personal and collective struggles against patriarchy and anti-Kurdish repression in Turkey; on the radical feminist principles and practices through which they transformed the political structures and state offices in which they operated. They discuss what worked and what didn't, and the ways in which Turkey's anti-capitalist and socialist movements closely informed their political stances and practices. Demonstrating Kurdish women's ceaseless political determination and refusal to be silenced - even when behind bars - the book ultimately hopes to inspire women living under even the most unjust conditions to engage in collective resistance.
The book reveals how everyday people survived political persecution and oppression, and champions human resilience in the face of unrelenting political terror. In Life in War, the reader accompanies Shannon Woodcock, the author and historian, through intimate interviews with six Albanian men and women. We hear how everyday people survived shocking living conditions, political persecution and oppression dependent on ethnicity, political status, gender and sexuality. This is a thorough and vivid history of lived communism in Albania, charting political and ideological shifts through the experiences of those who survived. Life is War stands as remarkable and profound testimony to the resilience of humanity in the face of unrelenting political terror. An accurate and precise historical work, engagingly rendered from life narratives, it plunges the reader into the difficult emotional truths that are at the core of remembering Albania's communist past. Life is War is a valuable contribution to studies of everyday life under communism and dictatorship. Eloquently written and expertly researched, it will appeal to readers interested in life histories, war, communism, European history and trauma studies.
While the genre of testimonio has deep roots in oral cultures and in Latin American human rights struggles, the publication and subsequent adoption of This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga & Anzaldua, 1983) and, more recently, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Latina Feminist Group, 2001), have demonstrated the power of testimonio as a genre that exposes brutality, disrupts silencing, and builds solidarity among women of colour. Within the field of education, scholars are increasingly taking up testimonio as a pedagogical, methodological, and activist approach to social justice, which transgresses traditional paradigms in academia. Unlike the more usual approach of researchers producing unbiased knowledge, the testimonio challenges objectivity by situating the individual in communion with a collective experience marked by marginalization, oppression, or resistance. This approach has resulted in new understandings about how marginalized communities build solidarity, and respond to and resist dominant culture, laws, and policies that perpetuate inequity. This book contributes to our understanding of testimonio as it relates to methodology, pedagogy, research, and reflection in pursuit of social justice. A common thread among the chapters is a sense of political urgency to address inequities within Chicana/o and Latina/o communities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Equity & Excellence in Education.
Popular protests are on the rise in China. However, since protesters rely on existing channels of participation and on patronage by elite backers, the state has been able to stymie attempts to generalize resistance and no large scale political movements have significantly challenged party rule. Yet the Chinese state is not monolithic. Decentralization has increased the power of local authorities, creating space for policy innovations and opening up the political opportunity structure. Popular protest in China - particularly in urban realm- not only benefits from the political fragmentation of the state, but also from the political communications revolution. The question of how and to what extent the internet can be used for mobilizing popular resistance in China is hotly debated. The government, virtual social organizations, and individual netizens both cooperate and compete with each other on the web. New media both increases the scope of the mobilizers and the mobilized (thereby creating new social capital), and provides the government with new means of social control (thereby limiting the political impact of the growing social capital). This volume is the first of its kind to assess the ways new media influence the mobilization of popular resistance and its possible effects in China today.
This book provides the reader with a ground-breaking understanding of disability and social movements. By describing how disability is philosophically, historically, and theoretically positioned, Carling-Jenkins is able to then examine disability relationally through an evaluation of the contributions of groups engaged in similar human rights struggles. The book locates disability rights as a new social movement and provides an explanation for why disability has been divided rather than united in Australia. Finally, it investigates whether the recent campaign to implement a national disability insurance scheme represents a re-emergence of the movement. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of both disability studies and social movements.
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.
A shocking depiction of one of the world's most ruthless regimes - and the story of one woman's fight to survive. I will never forget the camp. I cannot forget the eyes of the prisoners, expecting me to do something for them. They are innocent. I have to tell their story, to tell about the darkness they are in. It is so easy to suffocate us with the demons of powerlessness, shame, and guilt. But we aren't the ones who should feel ashamed. Born in China's north-western province, Sayragul Sauytbay trained as a doctor before being appointed a senior civil servant. But her life was upended when the Chinese authorities incarcerated her. Her crime: being Kazakh, one of China's ethnic minorities. The north-western province borders the largest number of foreign nations and is the point in China that is the closest to Europe. In recent years it has become home to over 1,200 penal camps - modern-day gulags that are estimated to house three million members of the Kazakh and Uyghur minorities. Imprisoned solely due to their ethnicity, inmates are subjected to relentless punishment and torture, including being beaten, raped, and used as subjects for medical experiments. The camps represent the greatest systematic incarceration of an entire people since the Third Reich. In prison, Sauytbay was put to work teaching Chinese language, culture, and politics, in the course of which she gained access to secret information that revealed Beijing's long-term plans to undermine not only its minorities, but democracies around the world. Upon her escape to Europe she was reunited with her family, but still lives under the constant threat of reprisal. This rare testimony from the biggest surveillance state in the world reveals not only the full, frightening scope of China's tyrannical ambitions, but also the resilience and courage of its author.
How racism and discrimination have been central to democracies from the classical period to today As right-wing nationalism and authoritarian populism gain momentum across the world, liberals, and even some conservatives, worry that democratic principles are under threat. In The Spectre of Race, Michael Hanchard argues that the current rise in xenophobia and racist rhetoric is nothing new and that exclusionary policies have always been central to democratic practices since their beginnings in classical times. Contending that democracy has never been for all people, Hanchard discusses how marginalization is reinforced in modern politics, and why these contradictions need to be fully examined if the dynamics of democracy are to be truly understood. Hanchard identifies continuities of discriminatory citizenship from classical Athens to the present and looks at how democratic institutions have promoted undemocratic ideas and practices. The longest-standing modern democracies -France, Britain, and the United States-profited from slave labor, empire, and colonialism, much like their Athenian predecessor. Hanchard follows these patterns through the Enlightenment and to the states and political thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he examines how early political scientists, including Woodrow Wilson and his contemporaries, devised what Hanchard has characterized as "racial regimes" to maintain the political and economic privileges of dominant groups at the expense of subordinated ones. Exploring how democracies reconcile political inequality and equality, Hanchard debates the thorny question of the conditions under which democracies have created and maintained barriers to political membership. Showing the ways that race, gender, nationality, and other criteria have determined a person's status in political life, The Spectre ofRace offers important historical context for how democracy generates political difference and inequality.
‘This is Antjie Samuel reporting from Ladybrand …’ For more than two years, Antjie Krog worked in acute engagement with the many voices that arose in and around South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. From the legislative genesis of the Commission, through the testimonies of victims of abuse and violence, the revelations from apartheid’s operatives, the appearance of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and former president PW Botha’s courthouse press conference, to the Commission’s meeting with the media on Robben Island early in 1998 – this award-winning poet leads us on an extraordinary odyssey. Country of My Skull captures the complexity of the Truth Commission’s work in a uniquely personal narrative which is harrowing, illuminating and provocative. Krog’s powerful prose lures the reader actively and inventively through a mosaic of insights, impressions and secret themes, taking us beneath the big movements of the Truth Commission – and beyond … into the very heart of what it means to be a South African today.
Gultan Kisanak, a Kurdish journalist and former MP, was elected co-mayor of Diyarbakir in 2014. Two years later, the Turkish state arrested and imprisoned her. Her story is remarkable, but not unique. While behind bars, she wrote about her own experiences and collected similar accounts from other Kurdish women, all co-chairs, co-mayors and MPs in Turkey; all incarcerated on political grounds. The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics is a one-of-a-kind collection of prison writings from more than 20 Kurdish women politicians. Here they reflect on their personal and collective struggles against patriarchy and anti-Kurdish repression in Turkey; on the radical feminist principles and practices through which they transformed the political structures and state offices in which they operated. They discuss what worked and what didn't, and the ways in which Turkey's anti-capitalist and socialist movements closely informed their political stances and practices. Demonstrating Kurdish women's ceaseless political determination and refusal to be silenced - even when behind bars - the book ultimately hopes to inspire women living under even the most unjust conditions to engage in collective resistance.
This book examines the relationship between total war, state-organized genocide, and the emergence of modern identity. The Holocaust, Bartov argues, can only be understood within the context of the century's predilection to apply systematic and destructive methods to resolve conflicts over identity.
State-sponsored torture and peacebuilding encapsulate the essence of many of the current conflicts in Indonesia. Papua in particular provides a thought-provoking example of the intricacy and complexity of building peace amidst enduring conflict and violence. This book examines the complex power relations that have constructed the gruesome picture of the fifty-year practice of torture in Papua, as well as the ongoing Papuan peacebuilding movements that resist the domineering power of the Indonesian state over Papuans. Conceptualising 'theatres of torture and peace', the book argues that torture in Papua is performed in public by the Indonesian state in order to communicate its policy of terror towards Papuans - it is not meant for extracting information, gaining confessions or exacting punishment. A Torture Dataset is provided, codifying evidence from a broad range of cases, collected through sensitive interviews. In examining the data, the author crafts a new, more holistic framework for analyzing cases of torture and employs an interdisciplinary approach integrating three different theories: Foucault's theory of governmentality and sovereignty, Kristeva's theory of abjection and Metz's theory of memoria passionis (the memory of suffering). The book successfully establishes a new understanding of torture as 'public theatre' and offers a new perspective of strengthening the existing Papuan peacebuilding framework of Papua Land of Peace. It will be of interest to academics working on Southeast Asian Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Transitional Justice, Peacebuilding, Human Rights and Anthropology of Violence.
James Leatt was nine when the Nationalist Party came to power, and eleven when he saw a documentary of the Allied forces liberating Nazi death camps. For most of his life the shadows of apartheid and the Holocaust have dogged his beliefs about faith, the meaning of life and the moral challenges humankind faces. Conjectures is a philosophical reflection on his life and times as he grapples with the realities of parish work in black communities, teaching ethics in a business school under apartheid, managing a university in the dying days of the Nationalist regime, and eventually working in higher education in post-apartheid South Africa. Weaving strands of his personal life with the questions of theodicy and modernity as well as drawing upon the Western philosophical tradition and the wisdom of East Asian traditions such as Taoism and Buddhism, he comes to terms with a disenchanted reality which has no need for supernatural or magical thought and practice. He has learned to live with questions. If you no longer believe in God and a sacred text, what are your sources of meaning? What kind of moral GPS allows you to find your way? Is what might be called a secular spirituality even possible? Conjectures traces the author’s search for a secular way of being that is meaningful, mindful and reverent.
An innovative study that examines how peaceful, domestic tactics by individual human rights activists and organizational activists, with public support, can force an authoritarian regime to make key concessions. Robert Press explores the creation and impact of a culture of resistance. He examines how domestic pressure can be more important than foreign pressure for political reform, especially in underdeveloped, authoritarian states. This study of contemporary Kenya fills a gap in traditional social movement theory to show how a resistance movement actually starts. Contrary to long-dominant theory, the book shows how the initiative for such a movement can come from activists themselves in the face of severe obstacles in society. With its unique findings on the effects of individual activism and peaceful resistance, this book will attract a broad audience in the study and practice of international relations, comparative politics, sociology, interest groups, peace and conflict, and human rights.
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. |
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