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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Political control & influence > Political oppression & persecution
George Soros is among the world's most prominent public figures. He is one of the history's most successful investors and his philanthropy, led by the Open Society Foundations, has donated over $14 billion to promote democracy and human rights in more than 120 countries. But in recent years, Soros has become the focus of sustained right-wing attacks in the United States and around the world based on his commitment to open society, progressive politics and his Jewish background. In this brilliant and spirited book, Soros offers a compendium of his philosophy, a clarion call-to-arms for the ideals of an open society: freedom, democracy, rule of law, human rights, social justice, and social responsibility as a universal idea. In this age of nationalism, populism, anti-Semitism, and the spread of authoritarian governments, Soros's mission to support open societies is as urgent as it is important.
Ausi Told Me: Why Cape Herstoriographies Matter provides fascinating insights into life at the Cape over several centuries, the indigenous inhabitants and their accumulated knowledge, and how attempts were made to systematically erase this knowledge during the colonial and apartheid eras. Yet the wisdom of the ages still resides with the Ausidi, the female, intergenerational knowledge-keepers who are revered for the central role they played in Rondevlei, Hardevlei and other communities on the Cape Flats before the forced removals from the 1960s onwards changed the landscape forever. The book delves into many of the untold stories of the Cape, challenging various scholarly assumptions about the origins and enduring influence of the Khoi and San in the languages and cultures of southern Africa. The meticulously well-researched text is also skilfully interwoven with stories from current and former residents of the Cape Flats who speak candidly about their childhood experiences, the vast expanses of plants and flowers that used to more than satisfy local communities’ food and medicinal requirements, and the Ausidi – the formidable yet selfless family matriarchs, many of whom refused to be cowed by the apartheid regime’s forced removal policy and fought to protect their cherished livestock and land. Ausi Told Me: Why Cape Herstoriographies Matter serves as a reminder that popular history is not unassailable; it should be regularly questioned and, where necessary, challenged. The book makes a powerful case for a decolonised approach to exploring and interpreting southern Africa’s neglected past – in which the stories, dreams, visions and rituals passed down through the generations are recognised once more as critical sources of scholarly knowledge and physical and emotional wellbeing.
Emotions underpin how political communities are formed and function. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in times of trauma. The emotions associated with suffering caused by war, terrorism, natural disasters, famine and poverty can play a pivotal role in shaping communities and orientating their politics. This book investigates how 'affective communities' emerge after trauma. Drawing on several case studies and an unusually broad set of interdisciplinary sources, it examines the role played by representations, from media images to historical narratives and political speeches. Representations of traumatic events are crucial because they generate socially embedded emotional meanings which, in turn, enable direct victims and distant witnesses to share the injury, as well as the associated loss, in a manner that affirms a particular notion of collective identity. While ensuing political orders often re-establish old patterns, traumatic events can also generate new 'emotional cultures' that genuinely transform national and transnational communities.
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.
"A lucid, innovative work of top-flight scholarship. Gross shows us
the depths of anti-Catholicism in nineteenth-century Germany; he
explains why the German Kulturkampf had such force and why
prominent liberals imagined it as a turning point not only in
Germany but in world history." An innovative study of the relationship between the two most
significant, equally powerful, andirreconcilable movements in
Germany, Catholicism and liberalism, in the decades following the
1848 Revolution.
'Soros has become a standard bearer for liberal democracy' Financial Times George Soros - universally known for his philanthropy, progressive politics and investment success, and now under sustained attack from the far right, nationalists, and anti-Semites around the world - gives an impassioned defence of his core belief in open society. George Soros is among the world's most prominent public figures. He is one of the history's most successful investors and his philanthropy, led by the Open Society Foundations, has donated over $14 billion to promote democracy and human rights in more than 120 countries. But in recent years, Soros has become the focus of sustained right-wing attacks in the United States and around the world based on his commitment to open society, progressive politics and his Jewish background. In this brilliant and spirited book, Soros offers a compendium of his philosophy, a clarion call-to-arms for the ideals of an open society: freedom, democracy, rule of law, human rights, social justice, and social responsibility as a universal idea. In this age of nationalism, populism, anti-Semitism, and the spread of authoritarian governments, Soros's mission to support open societies is as urgent as it is important.
Prison on Wheels is a remarkable diary kept by a young Hungarian woman, Eva Danos, during sixteen horror-filled days and nights of deportation by the Nazis in 1945. It is an eyewitness report of a 700-kilometer rail journey from Ravensbruck, north of Berlin, to Burgau, near Munich, one of the countless such operations that took place within Nazi Germany's vast network of labor- and concentration camps. What makes this account of particular interest is the fact that the author had been a member of a small, underground group in Budapest led by Gitta Mallasz (Talking with Angels), and her fellow-prisoners included some of these same comrades. Their humanity helped to sustain them.
Strikes, protests, and riots by Chinese workers have been rising over the past decade. The state has addressed a number of grievances, yet has also come down increasingly hard on civil society groups pushing for reform. Why are these two seemingly clashing developments occurring simultaneously? Manfred Elfstrom uses extensive fieldwork and statistical analysis to examine both the causes and consequences of protest. The book adopts a holistic approach, encompassing national trends in worker-state relations, local policymaking processes and the dilemmas of individual officials and activists. Instead of taking sides in the old debate over whether non-democracies like China's are on the verge of collapse or have instead found ways of maintaining their power indefinitely, it explores the daily evolution of autocratic rule. While providing a uniquely comprehensive picture of change in China, this important study proposes a new model of bottom-up change within authoritarian systems more generally.
"Stalin's Police" offers a new interpretation of the mass repressions associated with the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s. This pioneering study traces the development of professional policing from its pre-revolutionary origins through the late 1930s and early 1940s. Paul Hagenloh argues that the policing methods employed in the late 1930s were the culmination of a set of ideologically driven policies dating back to the previous decade. Hagenloh's vivid and monumental account is the first to show how Stalin's peculiar brand of policing--in which criminals, juvenile delinquents, and other marginalized population groups were seen increasingly as threats to the political and social order--supplied the core mechanism of the Great Terror.
Dachau was the first among Nazi camps, and it served as a model for the others. Situated in West Germany after World War II, it was the one former concentration camp most subject to the push and pull of the many groups wishing to eradicate, ignore, preserve and present it. Thus its postwar history is an illuminating case study of the contested process by which past events are propagated into the present, both as part of the historical record, and within the collectively shared memories of different social groups. How has Dachau been used--and abused--to serve the present? What effects have those uses had on the contemporary world? Drawing on a wide array of sources, from government documents and published histories to newspaper reports and interviews with visitors, Legacies of Dachau offers answers to these questions. It is one of the first books to develop an overarching interpretation of West German history since 1945. Harold Marcuse examines the myth of victimization, ignorance, and resistance and offers a model with which the cultural trajectories of other post-genocidal societies can be compared. With its exacting research, attention to nuance, and cogent argumentation, Legacies of Dachau raises the bar for future studies of the complex relationship between history and memory. Harold Marcuse is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches modern German history. The grandson of German emigré philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Harold Marcuse returned to Germany in 1977 to rediscover family roots. After several years, he became interested in West Germany's relationship to its Nazi past. In 1985, shortly before Ronald Reagan and Helmut Kohl visited Bitburg, he organized and coproduced an exhibition "Stones of Contention" about monuments and memorials commemorating the Nazi era. That exhibition, which marks the beginning of Marcuse's involvement in German memory debates, toured nearly thirty German cities, including Dachau. This is his first book.
'The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 was ground-breaking in the UK and this book marks the fiftieth anniversary of its successful path to the statute book. The act was not without controversy and was fiercely fought over by the likes of Mary Whitehouse and right-wing reactionary Tories who in typical style fought to impose their narrow-minded blue-rinse views. Now, in 2017, Western Europe leads the way in LGBT rights. Thirteen out of the twenty one countries that have legalised same-sex marriage worldwide are situated in Europe; a further thirteen European countries have legalised civil unions or other forms of recognition for same-sex couples. This civilised state of affairs was not always the case and in Politics, Society and Homosexuality in Post-War Britain: The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 and its Significance Keith Dockray charts in a short and pithy manner the difficult path the Bill followed and records those who supported it and were against it.
A prescient book that looks at how we have, over the centuries, inflicted oppression on others for our own advantage over history, right up to the present day. An eye-opening book about how societies are designed to support the status of those in power at the destructive expense of those without it. Read it and take responsibility.
ECOLOGICAL OPPRESSION
ECONOMIC OPPRESSION
EDUCATIONAL OPPRESSION These are just some of the stories in this remarkable book that illustrate the key factors that allow societies to create and sustain oppressive systems. Some are historical. Others have played out right before our eyes over the last decade. All are rooted in the systems in which we all participate. Together they represent the layers of systematic, often insidious oppression that make up the world today.
When the Cradock Four's Fort Calata was murdered by agents of the apartheid state in 1985, his son Lukhanyo was only three years old. Thirty-one years later Lukhanyo, now a journalist, becomes one of the SABC Eight when he defies Hlaudi Motsoeneng's reign of censorship at the public broadcaster by writing an open letter that declares: "my father didn't die for this". Now, with his wife Abigail, Lukhanyo brings to life the father he never knew and investigates the mystery that surrounds his death despite two high-profile inquests. Join them in a poignant and inspiring journey into the history of a remarkable family that traces the struggle against apartheid beginning with Fort's grandfather, Rivonia trialist and ANC Secretary-General Rev James Calata.
Scrutinises the political strategies and ideological evolution of Islamist actors and forces following the Arab uprisingsWhat role does political Islam play in the genealogy of protests as an instrument to resist neo-liberalism and authoritarian rule? How can we account for the internal conflicts among Islamist players after the 2011/2012 Arab uprisings? How can we assess the performance of Islamist parties in power? What geopolitical reconfigurations have the uprisings created, and what opportunities have arisen for Islamists to claim a stronger political role in domestic and regional politics? These questions are addressed in this book, which looks at the dynamics in place during the aftermath of the Arab uprisings in a wide range of countries across the Middle East and North Africa.Key features22 case studies explain the diverse trajectories of political Islam since 2011 in Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Qatar, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey and YemenProvides a comprehensive analysis of political Islam covering intra-Islamist pluralisation and conflict, governance and accountability issues, 'secular-Islamist' contention, responses to neo-liberal development and the resurgence of sectarianism and militancyOffers a set of innovative approaches to the study of political Islam in the post-Arab spring era that open new possibilities for theory development in the fieldContributorsIbrahim Al-Marashi, California State University San MarcosNazli Cagin Bilgili, Istanbul Kultur UniversitySouhail Belhadj, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in GenevaFrancesco Cavatorta, Laval University, QuebecCherine Chams El-Dine, Cairo UniversityKaterina Dalacoura, London School of Economics and Political Science Jerome Drevon, University of Oxford Vincent Durac, University College Dublin and Bethlehem UniversityLaura Ruiz de Elvira Carrascal, French Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement (IRD), ParisMelissa Finn, University of WaterlooCourtney Freer, London School of Economics and Political Science Angela Joya, University of OregonWanda Krause, Royal Roads UniversityMohammed Masbah, Chatham House and Brandeis UniversityAlam Saleh, Lancaster UniversityJillian Schwedler, City University of New York's Hunter College Mariz Tadros, University of Sussex Truls Tonnessen, Georgetown UniversityMarc Valeri, University of Exeter Anne Wolf, University of CambridgeLuciano Zaccara, Qatar UniversityBarbara Zollner, Birkbeck College
Over much of its rule, the regime of Hafez al-Asad and his successor Bashar al-Asad deployed violence on a massive scale to maintain its grip on political power. In this book, Salwa Ismail examines the rationalities and mechanisms of governing through violence. In a detailed and compelling account, Ismail shows how the political prison and the massacre, in particular, developed as apparatuses of government, shaping Syrians' political subjectivities, defining their understanding of the terms of rule and structuring their relations and interactions with the regime and with one another. Examining ordinary citizens' everyday life experiences and memories of violence across diverse sites, from the internment camp and the massacre to the family and school, The Rule of Violence demonstrates how practices of violence, both in their routine and spectacular forms, fashioned Syrians' affective life, inciting in them feelings of humiliation and abjection, and infusing their lived environment with dread and horror. This form of rule is revealed to be constraining of citizens' political engagement, while also demanding of their action.
Naomi Mitchison's account of the life and work of the Afrikaner lawyer and political activist Bram Fischer (1908-1975) was first published in 1973, two years before his death. She writes from the perspective of her own experience - gained during regular visits and a commitment to Southern Africa, particularly Botswana, from the 1960s onwards - to present the key elements and actors in the story of the country and the peoples of South Africa. Above all, of Bram Fischer, who gave up a life of privilege to oppose, professionally and underground, the Government's 'monstrous policy' of apartheid.
Set in the larger context of the evolution of international human rights, this cogent book examines the tragic development and ultimate resolution of Latin America's human rights crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Thomas Wright focuses especially on state terrorism in Chile under General Augusto Pinochet (1973 1990) and in Argentina during the Dirty War (1976 1983). The author probes the background of these regimes, the methodology of state terrorism, and the human rights movements that emerged in urgent response to the brutality of institutionalized torture, murder, and disappearance. He also discusses the legacies of state terrorism in the post-dictatorial period, particularly the bitter battle between demands for justice and the military's claim of impunity. Central to this struggle was the politics of memory as two radically different versions of the countries' recent history clashed: had the militaries conducted legitimate wars against subversion or had they exercised terrorism based on a misguided concept of national security? The book offers a nuanced exploration of the reciprocal relationship between state terrorism and its legacies, on one hand, and international human rights on the other. When the Chilean and Argentine militaries seized power, the international human rights lobby was too weak to prevent the massive toll of state terrorism. But the powerful worldwide response to these regimes ultimately strengthened international human rights treaties, institutions, and jurisprudence, paving the way for the Rwanda and Yugoslavia genocide tribunals and the International Criminal Court. Indeed, Chile and Argentina today routinely try and convict former repressors in their own courts. This compelling history demonstrates that the experiences of Chile and Argentina contributed to strengthening the international human rights movement, which in turn gave it the influence to affect the outcome in these two South American countries. Ironically, the brutal regimes of Chile and Argentina played the major role in transforming a largely dormant international lobby into a powerful force that today is capable of bringing major repressors from anywhere in the world to justice. These intertwined themes make this book important reading not only for Latin Americanists but for students of human rights and of international relations as well."
Emotions underpin how political communities are formed and function. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in times of trauma. The emotions associated with suffering caused by war, terrorism, natural disasters, famine and poverty can play a pivotal role in shaping communities and orientating their politics. This book investigates how 'affective communities' emerge after trauma. Drawing on several case studies and an unusually broad set of interdisciplinary sources, it examines the role played by representations, from media images to historical narratives and political speeches. Representations of traumatic events are crucial because they generate socially embedded emotional meanings which, in turn, enable direct victims and distant witnesses to share the injury, as well as the associated loss, in a manner that affirms a particular notion of collective identity. While ensuing political orders often re-establish old patterns, traumatic events can also generate new 'emotional cultures' that genuinely transform national and transnational communities.
Toleration is one of the most studied concepts in contemporary political theory and philosophy, yet the range of contemporary normative prescriptions concerning how to do toleration or how to be tolerant is remarkably narrow and limited. The literature is largely dominated by a neo-Kantian moral-juridical frame, in which toleration is a matter to be decided in terms of constitutional rights. According to this framework, cooperation equates to public reasonableness and willingness to engage in certain types of civil moral dialogue. Crucially, this vision of politics makes no claims about how to cultivate and secure the conditions required to make cooperation possible in the first place. It also has little to say about how to motivate one to become a tolerant person. Instead it offers highly abstract ideas that do not by themselves suggest what political activity is required to negotiate overlapping values and interests in which cooperation is not already assured. Contemporary thinking about toleration indicates, paradoxically, an intolerance of politics. Montaigne and the Tolerance of Politics argues for toleration as a practice of negotiation, looking to a philosopher not usually considered political: Michel de Montaigne. For Montaigne, toleration is an expansive, active practice of political endurance in negotiating public goods across lines of value difference. In other words, to be tolerant means to possess a particular set of political capacities for negotiation. What matters most is not how we talk to our political opponents, but that we talk to each other across lines of disagreement. Douglas I. Thompson draws on Montaigne's Essais to recover the idea that political negotiation grows out of genuine care for public goods and the establishment of political trust. He argues that we need a Montaignian conception of toleration today if we are to negotiate effectively the circumstances of increasing political polarization and ongoing value conflict, and he applies this notion to current debates in political theory as well as contemporary issues, including the problem of migration and refugee asylum. Additionally, for Montaigne scholars, he reads the Essais principally as a work of public political education, and resituates the work as an extension of Montaigne's political activity as a high-level negotiator between Catholic and Huguenot parties during the French Wars of Religion. Ultimately, this book argues that Montaigne's view of tolerance is worth recovering and reconsidering in contemporary democratic societies where political leaders and ordinary citizens are becoming less able to talk to each other to resolve political conflicts and work for shared public goods.
Kim Yong shares his harrowing account of life in a labor camp--a singularly despairing form of torture carried out by the secret state. Although it is known that gulags exist in North Korea, little information is available about their organization and conduct, for prisoners rarely escape both incarceration and the country alive. Long Road Home shares the remarkable story of one such survivor, a former military official who spent six years in a gulag and experienced firsthand the brutality of an unconscionable regime. As a lieutenant colonel in the North Korean army, Kim Yong enjoyed unprecedented privilege in a society that closely monitored its citizens. He owned an imported car and drove it freely throughout the country. He also encountered corruption at all levels, whether among party officials or Japanese trade partners, and took note of the illicit benefits that were awarded to some and cruelly denied to others. When accusations of treason stripped Kim Yong of his position, the loose distinction between those who prosper and those who suffer under Kim Jong-il became painfully clear. Kim Yong was thrown into a world of violence and terror, condemned to camp No. 14 in Hamkyeong province, North Korea's most notorious labor camp. As he worked a constant shift 2,400 feet underground, daylight became Kim's new luxury; as the months wore on, he became intimately acquainted with political prisoners, subhuman camp guards, and an apocalyptic famine that killed millions. After years of meticulous planning, and with the help of old friends, Kim escaped and came to the United States via China, Mongolia, and South Korea. Presented here for the first time in its entirety, his story not only testifies to the atrocities being committed behind North Korea's wall of silence but also illuminates the daily struggle to maintain dignity and integrity in the face of unbelievable hardship. Like the work of Solzhenitsyn, this rare portrait tells a story of resilience as it reveals the dark forms of oppression, torture, and ideological terror at work in our world today.
Bangladesh: A Suffering People Under State Terrorism explores the destructive political situation in Bangladesh under the one-party and one-person rule of the despotic Sheikh Hasina. The contributors to this edited collection examine the catastrophic political environment of the country in view of the Hasina regime's relentless oppression and repression since 2009, the authoritarian rule of her father in the early 1970s as well as the topic of Indian political, cultural and economic hegemony to which this dictatorial regime is increasingly surrendering Bangladesh's national interest, integrity and sovereignty. The contributors also attempt to expose the wholesale corruption and unprecedented vote-rigging that have rendered the regime completely illegal and illegitimate. They also highlight how the regime has been clinging to power by systemically unleashing terror and tyranny through its widespread networks of state machinery.
The LGBTI community in Turkey face real dangers. In 2015, the Turkish police interrupted the LGBTI Pride march in Istanbul, using tear gas and rubber bullets against the marchers. This marked the first attempt by the authorities to stop the parade by force, and similar actions occurred the following year. Here, Fait Muedini examines these levels of discrimination in Turkey, as well as exploring how activists are working to improve human rights for LGBTI individuals living in this hostile environment. Muedini bases his analysis on interviews taken with a number of NGO leaders and activists of leading LGBTI organisations in the region, including Lambda Istanbul, Kaos GL, Pembe Hayat, Social Policies, Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Studies Association (SPoD), and Families of LGBT's in Istanbul (LISTAG). The original information provided by these interviews illuminate the challenges facing the LGBTI community, and the brave actions taken by activists in their attempts to challenge the state and secure sexual equality. |
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