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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Political control & influence > Political oppression & persecution
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.
1970s South Korea is characterized by many as the "dark age for democracy." Most scholarship on South Korea's democracy movement and civil society has focused on the "student revolution" in 1960 and the large protest cycles in the 1980s which were followed by Korea's transition to democracy in 1987. But in his groundbreaking work of political and social history of 1970s South Korea, Paul Chang highlights the importance of understanding the emergence and evolution of the democracy movement in this oft-ignored decade. Protest Dialectics journeys back to 1970s South Korea and provides readers with an in-depth understanding of the numerous events in the 1970s that laid the groundwork for the 1980s democracy movement and the formation of civil society today. Chang shows how the narrative of the 1970s as democracy's "dark age" obfuscates the important material and discursive developments that became the foundations for the movement in the 1980s which, in turn, paved the way for the institutionalization of civil society after transition in 1987. To correct for these oversights in the literature and to better understand the origins of South Korea's vibrant social movement sector this book presents a comprehensive analysis of the emergence and evolution of the democracy movement in the 1970s.
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.
The 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel also resulted in the destruction of Palestinian society when some 80 per cent of the Palestinians who lived in the major part of Palestine upon which Israel was established became refugees. Israelis call the 1948 war their 'War of Independence' and the Palestinians their 'Nakba', or catastrophe. After many years of Nakba denial, land appropriation, political discrimination against the Palestinians within Israel and the denial of rights to Palestinian refugees, in recent years the Nakba is beginning to penetrate Israeli public discourse. This book, available at last in paperback, explores the construction of collective memory in Israeli society, where the memory of the trauma of the Holocaust and of Israel's war dead competes with the memory claims of the dispossessed Palestinians. Against a background of the Israeli resistance movement, Lentin's central argument is that co-memorating the Nakba by Israeli Jews is motivated by an unresolved melancholia about the disappearance of Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinians, a melancholia that shifts mourning from the lost object to the grieving subject. Lentin theorises Nakba co-memory as a politics of resistance, counterpoising co-memorative practices by internally displaced Israeli Palestinians with Israeli Jewish discourses of the Palestinian right of return, and questions whether return narratives by Israeli Jews, courageous as they may seem, are ultimately about Israeli Jewish self-healing rather than justice for Palestine. -- .
For years the rumours persisted: the apartheid state was responsible for the continual disappearance and assassination of anti-apartheid activists. Then, in November 1989, former security policeman Captain Dirk Coetzee made the announcement: ‘I was the commander of the South African police death squad. I was in the heart of the whore.’ Despite official denials and cover-ups, the rumours of apartheid’s death squads have now been proved to be all too real. Hundreds of anti-apartheid activists were killed and thousands tortured by a group of bizarre assassins, the foot soldiers of apartheid’s secret war. Jacques Pauw has been more closely involved with apartheid’s killers than any other journalist. For more than seven years, he has hunted them down and become a witness to their secret and forbidden world. Into The Heart of Darkness is Jacques Pauw's follow-up to In The Heart Of The Whore will take you on a journey into the minds and lives of the men who went out to kill and kill again. What caused these souls to become so dark and guided them to so much evil? Jacques Pauw is the author of the bestselling book The President’s Keepers. He is an award-winning journalist, television documentary producer and author. This is NOT an updated edition, just a re-release of the original 1997 book.
All roads lead to Johannesburg, remarks the narrator of Alan Paton's novel Cry, The Beloved Country. Taking this quote as her impetus, Loren Kruger guides readers into the heart of South Africa's largest city. Exploring a wide range of fiction, film, architecture, performance, and urban practices from trading to parades, Imagining the Edgy City traverses Johannesburg's rich cultural terrain over the last century. The "edgy city" in Kruger's exploration refers not only to persistent boundaries between the haves and have-nots but also to the cosmopolitan diversity and innovation that has emerged from Johannesburg. The book begins with the building boom, performances and uneven but noteworthy inter-racial exchange that marked the city's fiftieth-anniversary celebration at the Empire Exhibition in 1936. This celebration rapidly gave way to the political repression and civil unrest that characterized South Africa from 1950 to 1990. Yet poetry, drama, fiction, and photography continued to thrive, bearing witness not only against apartheid but to alternatives beyond it. In the late twentieth century, the not quite post-apartheid condition fired the artistic imaginations of film makers as well as novelists. Urban neglect, rising crime, and the influx of migrants inspired noir cinema-like Michael Hammon's Wheels and Deals-and fiction about migration from Achmat Dangor to Phaswane Mpe, and in the twenty-first, urban renewal has produced public art that incorporates the desire lines of newcomers as well as natives. Alongside well-known artists such as Nadine Gordimer, William Kentridge, and David Goldblatt, the book introduces many artists, architects, writers, and other chroniclers who have hitherto received little attention abroad. Ultimately, Johannesburg emerges as a city whose negotiation of the tensions between incivility and innovation invites comparisons with modern conurbations across the world, not only African cities such as Dakar, or other cities of the "south" such as Bogota, but also with major metropolises in North America and Europe from Chicago to Paris. A multi-faceted work that speaks to scholars in urban studies, literature, and history, Imagining the Edgy City is a rich example of interdisciplinary scholarship at its best.
An investigation into how indigenous rights are conceived in legal language and doctrine In the twenty-first century, it is politically and legally commonplace that indigenous communities go to court to assert their rights against the postcolonial nation-state in which they reside. But upon closer examination, this constellation is far from straightforward. Indigenous communities make their claims as independent entities, governed by their own laws. And yet, they bring a case before the court of another sovereign, subjecting themselves to its foreign rule of law. According to Jonas Bens, when native communities enter into legal relationships with postcolonial nation-states, they "become indigenous." Indigenous communities define themselves as separated from the settler nation-state and insist that their rights originate from within their own system of laws. At the same time, indigenous communities must argue that they are incorporated in the settler nation-state to be able to use its judiciary to enforce these rights. As such, they are simultaneously included into and excluded from the state. Tracing how the indigenous paradox is inscribed into the law by investigating several indigenous rights cases in the Americas, from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, Bens illustrates how indigenous communities have managed-and continue to manage-to navigate this paradox by developing lines of legal reasoning that mobilize the concepts of sovereignty and culture. Bens argues that understanding indigeneity as a paradoxical formation sheds light on pressing questions concerning the role of legal pluralism and shared sovereignty in contemporary multicultural societies.
One night in April 2014, members of the terrorist organization Boko Haram raided the small town of Chibok in northeast Nigeria and abducted 276 young girls from the local boarding school. The event caused massive, international outrage. Some of the girls were able to escape and award-winning journalist Wolfgang Bauer spent several weeks with them as they recounted their ordeal. In Stolen Girls, he gives voice to these girls, allowing them to speak for themselves - about their lives before the abduction, about the horrors during their captivity, and their dreams of a better future.
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.
'This elegantly written, erudite book is essential reading for all of us, whatever our identifications' - Lynne Segal Antisemitism is one of the most controversial topics of our time. The public, academics, journalists, activists and Jewish people themselves are divided over its meaning. Antony Lerman shows that this is a result of a 30-year process of redefinition of the phenomenon, casting Israel, problematically defined as the 'persecuted collective Jew', as one of its main targets. This political project has taken the notion of the 'new antisemitism' and codified it in the flawed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's 'working definition' of antisemitism. This text is the glue holding together an international network comprising the Israeli government, pro-Israel advocacy groups, Zionist organisations, Jewish communal defence bodies and sympathetic governments fighting a war against those who would criticise Israel. The consequences of this redefinition have been alarming, supressing free speech on Palestine/Israel, legitimising Islamophobic right-wing forces, and politicising principled opposition to antisemitism.
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.
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.
The creation of Afghanistan in 1880, following the Second Anglo-Afghan War, gave an empowering voice to the Pashtun people, the largest ethnic group in a diverse country. In order to distil the narrative of the state's formation and early years, a Pashtun-centric version of history dominated Afghan history and the political process from 1880 to the 1970s. Alternative discourses made no appearance in the fledgling state which lacked the scholarly institutions and any sense of recognition for history, thus providing no alternatives to the narratives produced by the British, whose quasi-colonial influence in the region was supreme. Since 1970, the ongoing crises in Afghanistan have opened the space for non-Pashtuns, including Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks, to form new definitions of identity, challenge the official discourse and call for the re-writing of the long-established narrative. At the same time, the Pashtun camp, through their privileged position in the political settlements of 2001, have attempted to confront the desire for change in historical perceptions by re-emphasising the Pashtun domination of Afghan history. This crisis of hegemony has led to a deep antagonism between the Pashtun and non-Pashtun perspectives of Afghan history and threatens the stability of political process in the country.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile. It is both a thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power. This edition has been abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation.
Exploring the way urbicide is used to un/re-make Palestine, as well as how it is employed as a tool of spatial dispossession and control, this book examines contemporary political violence and destruction in the context of colonial projects in Palestine. The broader framework of the book is colonial and post- urban destruction urbanism; with a working hypothesis that there are links, gaps and blind spots in the understanding of urbicide discourse. Drawing on several examples from the Palestinian history of destruction and transformations, such as; Jenin Refugee Camp, Hebron Old Town, and Nablus Old Town, a methodological framework to identify urbicidal episodes is also generated. Advancing knowledge on one historical moment of the urban condition, the moment of its destruction, and enhancing the understanding of the Palestinian Israeli conflict from urbanistic/ architectonic and Urbicide / Spacio-cide perspectives through the use of case studies, this book will be essential reading for scholars and researchers with an interest in Urban Geography and Middle East Politics more broadly.
A Financial Times Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year "A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events." -Times Literary Supplement "Brilliantly researched and written...casts a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects...Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews." -Jacob Heilbrun, The Spectator Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region's Christian minorities. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, once nearly a quarter of the population, had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that all three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia's Christian population. Despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post-World War I period, the nation's annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, and mass rape. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation. "A subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering." -Bruce Clark, New York Times Book Review
Blocking out, turning a blind eye, shutting off, not wanting to
know, wearing blinkers, seeing what we want to see ... these are
all expressions of 'denial'. Alcoholics who refuse to recognize
their condition, people who brush aside suspicions of their
partner's infidelity, the wife who doesn't notice that her husband
is abusing their daughter - are supposedly 'in denial'. Governments
deny their responsibility for atrocities, and plan them to achieve
'maximum deniability'. Truth Commissions try to overcome the
suppression and denial of past horrors. Bystander nations deny
their responsibility to intervene. Do these phenomena have anything in common? When we deny, are we
aware of what we are doing or is this an unconscious defence
mechanism to protect us from unwelcome truths? Can there be
cultures of denial? How do organizations like Amnesty and Oxfam try
to overcome the public's apparent indifference to distant suffering
and cruelty? Is denial always so bad - or do we need positive
illusions to retain our sanity? "States of Denial" is the first comprehensive study of both the personal and political ways in which uncomfortable realities are avoided and evaded. It ranges from clinical studies of depression, to media images of suffering, to explanations of the 'passive bystander' and 'compassion fatigue'. The book shows how organized atrocities - the Holocaust and other genocides, torture, and political massacres - are denied by perpetrators and by bystanders, those who stand by and do nothing.
The intimate and personal story behind the man who tried to kill Verwoerd but didn’t succeed. “The raucous wail of sirens pierced the quiet Saturday afternoon, making me drop my book and rush outside to see what drama was taking place. A fleet of cars, their sirens screaming, roared along Oxford Road two hundred yards from our house. I stood on the lawn wondering what on earth it was because sirens were rarely heard near our home. I went back inside; the commotion was over. But within half an hour our telephone started ringing non-stop . . .” 9 April 1960 was the day that changed Susie Cazenove’s life – the day her father, David Pratt, shot the Prime Minister of South Africa, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd. Verwoerd, commonly known as the architect of apartheid, didn’t die, but Pratt’s family lived with the legacy of his action. A chance encounter with the late David Rattray of Fugitive’s Drift led Cazenove to revisit the memories of that terrible day. With Rattray’s encouragement she put pen to paper to describe the extraordinary events of that day and its consequences. Part family memoir, part ode to the settlement of Johannesburg, Cazenove skilfully weaves her family history and the mood in South Africa in the 1950s and 60s as a background to what may have led her father, a farmer and gentle man, to commit a treasonous act.
In July 2010, Wikileaks published Cablegate, one of the biggest leaks in the history of the US military, including evidence for war crimes and torture. In the aftermath Julian Assange, the founder and spokesman of Wikileaks, found himself at the centre of a media storm, accused of hacking and later sexual assault. He spent the next seven years in asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, fearful that he would be extradited to Sweden to face the accusations of assault and then sent to US. In 2019, Assange was handed over to the British police and, on the same day, the U.S. demanded his extradition. They threatened him with up to 175 years in prison for alleged espionage and computer fraud. At this point, Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, started his investigation into how the US and UK governments were working together to ensure a conviction. His findings are explosive, revealing that Assange has faced grave and systematic due process violations, judicial bias, collusion and manipulated evidence. He has been the victim of constant surveillance, defamation and threats. Melzer also gathered together consolidated medical evidence that proves that the prison has suffered prolonged psychological torture. Melzer's compelling investigation puts the UK state into the dock, showing how, through secrecy, impunity and, crucially, public indifference, unchecked power reveals a deeply undemocratic system. Furthermore, the Assange case sets a dangerous precedent: once telling the truth becomes a crime, censorship and tyranny will inevitably follow.
This book sheds light on the phenomenon of white rage, and maps out the uneasy relationship between white anxiety, religious fervour, American identity and perceived black racial progress. Contributors to the volume examine the sociological construct of the "white labourer", whose concerns and beliefs can be understood as religious in foundation, and uncover that white religious fervor correlates to notions of perceived white loss and perceived black progress. In discussions ranging from the Constitution to the Charlottesville riots to the evangelical community's uncritical support for Trump, the authors of this collection argue that it is not economics but religion and race that stand as the primary motivating factors for the rise of white rage and white supremacist sentiment in the United States. |
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