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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Political control & influence > Political oppression & persecution
The second instalment in a gripping memoir by Sakine Cansiz
(codenamed 'Sara') chronicles the Kurdish revolutionary's harrowing
years in a Turkish prison, following her arrest in 1979 at the age
of 21. Jailed for more than a decade for her activities as a
founder and leader of the Kurdish freedom movement, she faced
brutal conditions and was subjected to interrogation and torture.
Remarkably, the story she tells here is foremost one of resistance,
with courageous episodes of collective struggle behind bars
including hunger strikes and attempts at escape. Along the way she
also presents vivid portraits of her fellow prisoners and
militants, a snapshot of the Turkish left in the 1980s, a scathing
indictment of Turkey's war on Kurdish people - and even an unlikely
love story. The first prison memoir by a Kurdish woman to be
published in English, this is an extraordinary document of an
extraordinary life. Translated by Janet Biehl.
Since 2015, Poland's populist Law and Justice Party (PiS) has been
dismantling the major checks and balances of the Polish state and
subordinating the courts, the civil service, and the media to the
will of the executive. Political rights have been radically
restricted, and the Party has captured the entire state apparatus.
The speed and depth of these antidemocratic movements took many
observers by surprise: until now, Poland was widely regarded as an
example of a successful transitional democracy. Poland's
anti-constitutional breakdown poses three questions that this book
sets out to answer: What, exactly, has happened since 2015? Why did
it happen? And what are the prospects for a return to liberal
democracy? These answers are formulated against a backdrop of
current worldwide trends towards populism, authoritarianism, and
what is sometimes called 'illiberal democracy'. As this book
argues, the Polish variant of 'illiberal democracy' is an oxymoron.
By undermining the separation of powers, the PiS concentrates all
power in its own hands, rendering any democratic accountability
illusory. There is, however, no inevitability in these
anti-democratic trends: this book considers a number of possible
remedies and sources of hope, including intervention by the
European Union.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt used radio fireside chats to connect with
millions of ordinary Americans. The highly articulate and telegenic
John F. Kennedy was dubbed the first TV president. Ronald Reagan,
the so-called Great Communicator, had a conversational way of
speaking to the common man. Bill Clinton left his mark on media
industries by championing and signing the landmark
Telecommunications Act of 1996 into law. Barack Obama was the first
social media presidential campaigner and president. And now there
is President Donald J. Trump. Because so much of what has made
Donald Trump's candidacy and presidency unconventional has been
about communication-how he has used Twitter to convey his political
messages and how the news media and voters have interpreted and
responded to his public words and persona-21 communication and
media scholars examine the Trump phenomenon in Communication in the
Age of Trump. This collection of essays and studies, suitable for
communication and political science students and scholars, covers
the 2016 presidential campaign and the first year of the Trump
presidency.
This book provides a sophisticated investigation into the
experience of being exterminated, as felt by victims of the
Holocaust, and compares and contrasts this analysis with the
experiences of people who have been colonized or enslaved. Using
numerous victim accounts and a wide range of primary sources, the
book moves away from the 'continuity thesis', with its insistence
on colonial intent as the reason for victimization in relation to
other historical examples of mass political violence, to look at
the victim experience on its own terms. By affording each
constituent case study its own distinctive aspects, The Victims of
Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust allows for a more enriching
comparison of victim experience to be made that respects each group
of victims in their uniqueness. It is an important, innovative
volume for all students of the Holocaust, genocide and the history
of mass political violence.
According to the United Nations, Myanmar's Rohingyas are one of the
most persecuted minorities in the world. Only now has the media
turned its attention to their plight at the hands of a country led
by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Yet the signs of
this genocide have been visible for years. For generations, this
Muslim group has suffered routine discrimination, violence,
arbitrary arrest and detention, extortion, and other abuses by the
Buddhist majority. As horrifying massacres have unfolded in 2017,
international human rights groups have accused the regime of
complicity in an ethnic cleansing campaign against them.
Authorities refuse to recognise the Rohingyas as one of Myanmar's
135 'national races', denying them citizenship rights in the
country of their birth and severely restricting many aspects of
ordinary life, from marriage to free movement. In this updated
edition, Azeem Ibrahim chronicles the events leading up to the
current, final cleansing of the Rohingya population, and issues a
clarion call to protect a vulnerable, little known Muslim minority.
He makes a powerful appeal to use the lessons of the twentieth
century to stop this genocide in the twenty-first.
There Are No Dead Here is the untold story of three brave
Colombians who stood up to the paramilitary groups that, starting
in the mid-1990s, decimated the country in the name of
counterinsurgency and drug profits. With the complicity of much of
Colombia's military and political establishment and in a climate of
widespread fear and denial, the paramilitaries massacred, raped,
and tortured thousands, and seized the land of millions of peasants
forced to flee their homes. The United States, more interested in
the appearance of success in its own War on Drugs, largely ignored
them. Few dared to confront them. Drawing on hundreds of hours of
interviews and five years on the ground in Colombia, Maria
McFarland Sanchez-Moreno takes readers from the sweltering Medellin
streets where criminal investigators constantly looked over their
shoulders for assassins on motorcycles, through the countryside
where paramilitaries wiped out entire towns in gruesome massacres,
and into the corridors of the presidential palace in Colombia's
capital, Bogota. Throughout, she tells the interconnected stories
of three very different Colombians bound by their commitment to the
truth. The first is the gregarious Jesus Maria Valle, whose
prophetic warnings about the military's complicity with the
paramilitaries got him killed in 1998. A decade later, Valle's
friend, the shy prosecutor Ivan Velasquez, became an unlikely hero
when his groundbreaking investigations landed a third of the
country's congress in prison for conspiring with paramilitaries,
and put him in the crosshairs of Colombia's then wildly popular
president, US protege Alvaro Uribe. When Uribe's smear campaign
against Velasquez threatened to bury the truth, the scrawny
investigative journalist Ricardo Calderon exposed the lies,
revealing that the paramilitaries' reach extended all the way into
the presidency. Thanks to the efforts of Valle, Velasquez, and
Calderon, Colombians now know the truth about the brutality and
corruption that swept like a lethal virus through the country's
society and political system. And slowly, the country is breaking
free from the paramilitaries' grip.
They arrive from around the world for countless reasons. Many come
simply to make a living. Others are fleeing persecution in their
native countries. Millions of immigrants risk deportation and
imprisonment by living in the U.S. without legal status. They are
living underground, with little protection from exploitation at the
hands of human smugglers, employers, or law enforcement.
Underground America, from the Voice of Witness series, presents the
remarkable oral histories of women and men struggling to carve a
life for themselves in the U.S.
"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm," wrote
RalphWaldo Emerson in 1841. While this statement may read like an
innocuoustruism today, the claim would have been controversial in
the antebellumUnited States when enthusiasm was a hotly contested
term associated withreligious fanaticism and poetic inspiration,
revolutionary politics and imaginativeexcess. In analysing the
language of enthusiasm in philosophy, religion,politics, and
literature, John Mac Kilgore uncovers a tradition of
enthusiasmlinked to a politics of emancipation. The dissenting
voices chronicledhere fought against what they viewed as tyranny
while using their writings toforge international or
antinationalistic political affiliations. Pushing his analysis
across national boundaries, Kilgore contends thatAmerican
enthusiastic literature, unlike the era's concurrent
sentimentalcounterpart, stressed democratic resistance over
domestic reform as it navigatedthe global political sphere. By
analysing a range of canonical Americanauthors-including William
Apess, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Beecher Stowe,and Walt
Whitman-Kilgore places their works in context with the causes,wars,
and revolutions that directly or indirectly engendered them. In
doingso, he makes a unique and compelling case for enthusiasm's
centrality in theshaping of American literary history.
These original essays show how the US government repeatedly aided
certain regimes as they planned and then carried out crimes against
humanity and genocide. What makes the collection unique-and
chilling-is the inclusion of declassified documents generated by
the US government at the time: memoranda, telegrams, letters,
talking points, cables, discussion papers, and situation reports.
In his introduction, Totten offers a critical assessment of US
foreign policy as it pertains to genocide and crimes against
humanity, and discusses the differences between those two terms. In
the chapters that follow, each author presents a detailed analysis
of a particular case of crimes against humanity or genocide by a
foreign government against its own citizens, and discusses why and
how the United States government was complicit.
"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm," wrote
RalphWaldo Emerson in 1841. While this statement may read like an
innocuoustruism today, the claim would have been controversial in
the antebellumUnited States when enthusiasm was a hotly contested
term associated withreligious fanaticism and poetic inspiration,
revolutionary politics and imaginativeexcess. In analysing the
language of enthusiasm in philosophy, religion,politics, and
literature, John Mac Kilgore uncovers a tradition of
enthusiasmlinked to a politics of emancipation. The dissenting
voices chronicledhere fought against what they viewed as tyranny
while using their writings toforge international or
antinationalistic political affiliations. Pushing his analysis
across national boundaries, Kilgore contends thatAmerican
enthusiastic literature, unlike the era's concurrent
sentimentalcounterpart, stressed democratic resistance over
domestic reform as it navigatedthe global political sphere. By
analysing a range of canonical Americanauthors-including William
Apess, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Beecher Stowe,and Walt
Whitman-Kilgore places their works in context with the causes,wars,
and revolutions that directly or indirectly engendered them. In
doingso, he makes a unique and compelling case for enthusiasm's
centrality in theshaping of American literary history.
Citizen Killings: Liberalism, State Policy and Moral Risk offers a
ground breaking systematic approach to formulating ethical public
policy on all forms of 'citizen killings', which include killing in
self-defence, abortion, infanticide, assisted suicide, euthanasia
and killings carried out by private military contractors and
so-called 'foreign fighters'. Where most approaches to these issues
begin with the assumptions of some or other general approach to
ethics, Deane-Peter Baker argues that life-or-death policy
decisions of this kind should be driven first and foremost by a
recognition of the key limitations that a commitment to political
liberalism places on the state, particularly the requirement to
respect citizens' right to life and the principle of liberal
neutrality. Where these principles come into tension Baker shows
that they can in some cases be defused by way of a reasonableness
test, and in other cases addressed through the application of what
he calls the 'risk of harm principle'. The book also explores the
question of what measures citizens and other states might
legitimately take in response to states that fail to implement
morally appropriate policies regarding citizen killings.
Citizen Killings: Liberalism, State Policy and Moral Risk offers a
ground breaking systematic approach to formulating ethical public
policy on all forms of 'citizen killings', which include killing in
self-defence, abortion, infanticide, assisted suicide, euthanasia
and killings carried out by private military contractors and
so-called 'foreign fighters'. Where most approaches to these issues
begin with the assumptions of some or other general approach to
ethics, Deane-Peter Baker argues that life-or-death policy
decisions of this kind should be driven first and foremost by a
recognition of the key limitations that a commitment to political
liberalism places on the state, particularly the requirement to
respect citizens' right to life and the principle of liberal
neutrality. Where these principles come into tension Baker shows
that they can in some cases be defused by way of a reasonableness
test, and in other cases addressed through the application of what
he calls the 'risk of harm principle'. The book also explores the
question of what measures citizens and other states might
legitimately take in response to states that fail to implement
morally appropriate policies regarding citizen killings.
The voices of dozens of innocent victims, silenced during Stalin's
Terror and since forgotten, can yet be heard in secret police
archives Swept up in the maelstrom of Stalin's Great Terror of
1937-1938, nearly a million people died. Most were ordinary
citizens who left no records and as a result have been completely
forgotten. This book is the first to attempt to retrieve their
stories and reconstruct their lives, drawing upon recently
declassified archives of the former Soviet Secret Police in Kiev.
Hiroaki Kuromiya uncovers in the archives the hushed voices of the
condemned, and he chronicles the lives of dozens of individuals who
shared the same dehumanizing fate: all were falsely arrested,
executed, and dumped in mass graves. Kuromiya investigates the
truth behind the fabricated records, filling in at least some of
the details of the lives and deaths of ballerinas, priests,
beggars, teachers, peasants, workers, soldiers, pensioners,
homemakers, fugitives, peddlers, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians,
Poles, Germans, Koreans, Jews, and others. In recounting the
extraordinary stories gleaned from the secret files, Kuromiya not
only commemorates the dead and forgotten but also proposes a new
interpretation of Soviet society that provides useful insights into
the enigma of Stalinist terror.
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.
The Republic of Sudan's former Culture Minister and a leading
architect in the movement to gain independence for South Sudan,
Bona Malwal, provides a factual and personal account of the break
up of Sudan. He explores its troubled history post-colonialism and
offers a frank account of the many challenges that both nations
face in the coming years.
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.
A well-balanced and detailed look at the East German Ministry for
State Security, the secret police force more commonly known as the
Stasi. "This is an excellent book, full of careful, balanced
judgements and a wealth of concisely-communicated knowledge. It is
also well written. Indeed, it is the best book yet published on the
MfS."-German History The Stasi stood for Stalinist oppression and
all-encompassing surveillance. The "shield and sword of the party,"
it secured the rule of the Communist Party for more than forty
years, and by the 1980s it had become the largest secret-police
apparatus in the world, per capita. Jens Gieseke tells the story of
the Stasi, a feared secret-police force and a highly professional
intelligence service. He inquires into the mechanisms of
dictatorship and the day-to-day effects of surveillance and
suspicion. Masterful and thorough at once, he takes the reader
through this dark chapter of German postwar history, supplying key
information on perpetrators, informers, and victims. In an
assessment of post-communist memory politics, he critically
discusses the consequences of opening the files and the outcomes of
the Stasi debate in reunified Germany. A major guide for research
on communist secret-police forces, this book is considered the
standard reference work on the Stasi.
Examining the complex nature of state apologies for past
injustices, this title probes the various functions they fulfil
within contemporary democracies. Cutting-edge theoretical and
empirical research and insightful philosophical analyses are
supplemented by real-life case studies, providing a normative and
balanced account of states saying 'sorry'.
Truth commissions, official apologies and reparations are just some
of the transitional justice mechanisms embraced by established
democracies. This groundbreaking work of political theory explains
how these forms of state redress repair the damage state wrongdoing
inflicts upon political legitimacy. Richly illustrated with
real-life examples, the book's 'legitimating theory' explains the
connections, and the conflicts, between the transitional practice
of administrative, corrective and restorative justice. The book
shows how political responses to state wrongdoing are part of a
larger transitional history of the post-War 'rights revolution' in
the settler democracies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the
United States. The result is an incisive theoretical exploration
that not only explains the rectificatory work of established
democracies but also provides new ways to think about the broader
field of transitional justice.
The twentieth century witnessed genocides, ethnic cleansing, forced
population expulsions, shifting borders, and other disruptions on
an unprecedented scale. This book examines the work of memory and
the ethics of healing in post authoritarian societies that have
experienced state-perpetrated violence. Focusing on global
memorialization practices and local specificities, the contributors
explore trans-generational encounters, performances, rituals, and
diverse forms of remembrance and reconciliation in the aftermath of
violent historical events: WWII, the Holocaust and the fall of the
Berlin Wall, Stalinism in post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe,
collaboration in Vichy France, the Civil War in Spain, and
apartheid in South Africa.
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