'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.

El Salvador's civil war, which left at least 75,000 people dead and displaced more than a million, ended in 1992. The accord between the government and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) has been lauded as a model post-Cold War peace agreement. But after the conflict stopped, crime rates shot up. The number of murder victims surpassed wartime death tolls. Those who once feared the police and the state became frustrated by their lack of action. Peace was not what Salvadorans had hoped it would be. Citizens began saying to each other, "It's worse than the war.""El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy" challenges the pronouncements of policy analysts and politicians by examining Salvadoran daily life as told by ordinary people who have limited influence or affluence. Anthropologist Ellen Moodie spent much of the decade after the war gathering crime stories from various neighborhoods in the capital city of San Salvador. True accounts of theft, assaults, and murders were shared across kitchen tables, on street corners, and in the news media. This postconflict storytelling reframed violent acts, rendering them as driven by common criminality rather than political ideology. Moodie shows how public dangers narrated in terms of private experience shaped a new interpretation of individual risk. These narratives of postwar violence--occurring at the intersection of self and other, citizen and state, the powerful and the powerless--offered ways of coping with uncertainty during a stunted transition to democracy.

In the South African House of Assembly, on 6 September 1966, Dimitri Tsafendas stabbed to death Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd. Afterwards, Tsafendas was declared to be a schizophrenic who believed a tapeworm lived inside him which controlled his actions, and that he had no political motive for assassinating Verwoerd. Pronounced unfit to stand trial, Tsafendas went down in history as a deranged parliamentary messenger. For fifty years, this story prevailed. However, this book now reveals the truth about Tsafendas; that he was deeply political from an early age.

He was arrested numerous times, starting in Mozambique, the country of his birth. In Portugal, the security police opened a file on him in 1938, when he was aged only twenty. After the assassination, Tsafendas volunteered a series of incontestable political reasons for killing Verwoerd, but these, along with details of his political past, were never allowed to see the light of day. This book reveals the extent of the cover-up by South Africa’s authorities and the desperate lengths they went to conceal the existence of Tsafendas’s opposition to apartheid. The book exposes one of the great lies in South African history, that Verwoerd was murdered by a mad man. It also offers for the first time a complete biography of this extraordinary man.

Advocate George Bizos characterised Dousemetzis’s work on Tsafendas and Verwoerd’s assassination as ‘monumental’ and of being ‘of major historical importance for South Africa and as to our understanding of Verwoerd’s assassination’. Professor John Dugard said ‘South African history should know the truth about Tsafendas. Dousemetzis has done South Africa a service by correcting the historical record.’

The Ba'th Party came to power in 1968 and remained for thirty-five years, until the 2003 US invasion. Under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, who became president of Iraq in 1979, a powerful authoritarian regime was created based on a system of violence and an extraordinary surveillance network, as well as reward schemes and incentives for supporters of the party. The true horrors of this regime have been exposed for the first time through a massive archive of government documents captured by the United States after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It is these documents that form the basis of this extraordinarily revealing book and that have been translated and analyzed by Joseph Sassoon, an Iraqi-born scholar and seasoned commentator on the Middle East. They uncover the secrets of the innermost workings of Hussein's Revolutionary Command Council, how the party was structured, how it operated via its network of informers and how the system of rewards functioned.

This fourth volume in the Hidden Voices Series is about Oukasie, a township in the Madibeng municipality. At various times in its history, its inhabitants have struggled against problems such as forced removals, terrible living conditions and corrupt officials.

Bonds of Justice: The Struggle for Oukasie tells the story of a dedicated young group of people who were motivated by their belief that accountable and responsible leadership was needed to improve the situation of their community and its members. Before and after apartheid, they worked together to bring much-needed change to their community. This book tells the stories of those struggles in the 1980s and 1990s, and goes on to describe the problems faced by Oukasie and the wider community when the ethics of accountability were forgotten.

The book has many lessons for South Africa today – the benefits that accountable governance can achieve, and what the costs are when a more selfish approach takes root.

Anti-Jewish pogroms rocked the Russian Empire in 1881-2, plunging both the Jewish community and the imperial authorities into crisis. Focusing on a wide range of responses to the pogroms, this book offers the most comprehensive, balanced, and complex study of the crisis to date. It presents a nuanced account of the diversity of Jewish political reactions and introduces a wealth of new sources covering Russian and other non-Jewish reactions to these events. Seeking to answer the question of what caused the pogroms' outbreak and spread, the book provides a fuller picture of how officials at every level responded to the national emergency and irrevocably lays to rest the myth that the authorities instigated or tolerated the pogroms. This is essential reading not only for Russian and Jewish historians but also for those interested in the study of ethnic violence more generally.

Does democracy decrease state repression in line with the expectations of governments, international organizations, NGOs, social movements, academics and ordinary citizens around the world? Most believe that a 'domestic democratic peace' exists, rivalling that found in the realm of interstate conflict. Investigating 137 countries from 1976 to 1996, this book seeks to shed light on this question. Specifically, three results emerge. First, while different aspects of democracy decrease repressive behaviour, not all do so to the same degree. Human rights violations are especially responsive to electoral participation and competition. Second, while different types of repression are reduced, not all are limited at comparable levels. Personal integrity violations are decreased more than civil liberties restrictions. Third, the domestic democratic peace is not bulletproof; the negative influence of democracy on repression can be overwhelmed by political conflict. This research alters our conception of repression, its analysis and its resolution.

It is commonly assumed that the issue of religion declines in political significance as societies modernise. However, the upheaval associated with the shift from authoritarian to more open regimes can be accompanied by a revitalisation of religion. Individuals within these societies are struggling to find meaning in the seeming chaos of political change; religious elites are seeking to define their own role within the new order; and political elites are looking for new ways of ensuring legitimacy and building national unity. In this book John Anderson constructs a theoretical framework where he compares and contrasts the politics of religious liberty in two Southern European countries, two Central-Eastern European countries and the evolution of the former USSR, particularly Russia. Exploring these issues of religious 'recognition' and religious diversity, Anderson attempts to expose the wider problem of creating a democratic mentality in such transitional societies, through extensive original research and interviews.

Bearing Witness While Black tells the story of this century's most powerful Black social movement through the eyes of 15 activists who documented it. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters in dozens of US cities-using little more than the device in their pockets. Their urgent dispatches from the frontlines spurred a global debate on excessive police force, which claimed the lives of African American men, women, and children at disproportionate rates. This groundbreaking book reveals how the perfect storm of smartphones, social media, and social justice empowered Black activists to create their own news outlets, which continued a centuries-long, African American tradition of using the news to challenge racism. Bearing Witness While Black is the first book of its kind to identify three overlapping eras of domestic terror against African American people-slavery, lynching, and police brutality-and explain how storytellers during each period documented its atrocities through journalism. What results is a stunning genealogy-of how the slave narratives of the 1700s inspired the Abolitionist movement; how the black newspapers of the 1800s galvanized the anti-lynching and Civil Rights movements; and how the smartphones of today have powered the anti-police brutality movement. This lineage of black witnessing, Allissa V. Richardson argues, is formidable and forever evolving. Richardson's own activism, as an award-winning pioneer of smartphone journalism, informs this text. Weaving in personal accounts of her teaching in the US and Africa, and of her own brushes with police brutality, Richardson shares how she has inspired black youth to use mobile devices, to speak up from the margins. It is from this vantage point, as participant-observer, that she urges us not to become numb to the tragic imagery that African Americans have documented. Instead, Bearing Witness While Black conveys a crucial need to protect our right to look into the forbidden space of violence against black bodies, and to continue to regard the smartphone as an instrument of moral suasion and social change.

The young people of the Cameroon Grassfields have been subject to a long history of violence and political marginalization. For centuries, the main victims of the slave trade, they became prime targets for forced labor campaigns under a series of colonial rulers. Today's youth remain at the bottom of the fiercely hierarchical and polarized societies of the Grassfields, and it is their response to centuries of exploitation that Nicolas Pandely Argenti takes up in this absorbing and original book. Beginning his study with a political analysis of youth in the Grassfields from the eighteenth century to the present, Argenti pays special attention to the repeated violent revolts staged by young victims of political oppression. He then combines this history with extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Oku chiefdom, discovering that the specter of past violence lives on in the masked dance performances that have earned intense devotion from today's youth. Argenti contends that by evoking the imagery of past cataclysmic events, these masquerades allow young Oku men and women to address the inequities they face in their relations with elders and state authorities today.

Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin is the first book devoted exclusively to popular participation in the 'Great Terror', a period in which millions of people were arrested, interrogated, shot, and sent to labor camps. The book shifts attention from the machinations of top Party leaders to the mechanisms by which repression engulfed Soviet society. In the unions and the factories, repression was accompanied by a mass campaign for democracy. Party leaders urged workers to criticize and remove corrupt and negligent officials. Workers, shop foremen, local Party members, and union leaders adopted the slogans of repression and used them, often against each other, to redress long-standing grievances, shift blame for intractable problems in production, and advance personal agendas. Repression quickly became a mass phenomenon; not only in the number of victims it claimed, but in the number of perpetrators it spawned. Using new, formerly secret archival sources, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin takes us into the unions and the factories to observe how ordinary people moved through clear stages toward madness and self-destruction.

This international history uncovers an American security program in which Washington reached into fifteen Latin American countries to seize more than 4,000 German expatriates and intern them in the Texas desert. The crowd of Nazi Party members, antifascist exiles, and even Jewish refugees were lumped together in camps riven by strife. The book, first published in 2003, examines the evolution of governmental policy, its impact on individuals and emigrant communities, and the ideological assumptions that blinded officials in both Washington and Berlin to Latin American realities. Franklin Roosevelt's vaunted Good Neighbor policy was a victim of this effort to force reluctant Latin American governments to hand over their German residents, while the operation ruined an opportunity to rescue victims of the Holocaust. This study makes a very contemporary argument: that security measures based on group affiliation rather than individual actions are as unjust and ineffective in foreign policy as they are in law enforcement.

Individuals struggle to find meaning within the chaos of states undergoing political change. Religious elites seek to define their role within the new order while political elites search for new ways to ensure legitimacy and develop national unity. Contrasting the politics of religious liberty in a number of Southern and Eastern European countries, John Anderson explores the broader issue of creating a democratic mentality in such transitional societies. In the process he exposes the use of privilege and discrimination practiced by religious and political elites in these societies.

Revelations about U.S policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world's leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America's most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI's "most wanted" list. She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners.
Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.

LEAD TITLE PUBLISHING FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE UK THE LANDMARK, CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED BOOK HAILED BY ARIEL DORFMAN AND EDUARDO GALEANO, PUBLISHED TO COINCIDE WITH THE FIRST ARGENTINE WAR CRIMES TRIALS. News hook: Trials of high-level military officials, including the subject of this book, began in July 2004 in Spain. New introduction by the judge who declared the Argentine impunity laws null and void; the new epilogue is by the author Torrid aftermath of hardcover publication: The New York Times reported on its front page that the Argentine Navy captain whose story is at the heart of this book had had his face slashed by four attackers and was warned to stop speaking with journalists about military crimes - violent retribution for his breaking of the military's code of silence about the atrocities. Author's reputation: Verbitsky is Argentina's leading investigative journalist. He won a major award from the Latin American Studies Association when this book was first published in America in 1996. Author visit at the beginning of August for publicity and promotion. Argentine military's code of silence, stunning his compatriots and the world by openly confessing his participation in the hideous practice of pushing live political dissidents out of airplanes during Argentina's dirty war. Available for the first time in the UK, with a new introduction by Judge Gabriel Cavallo on the upcoming military trials and a new epilogue by the author, Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior includes the complete text of Scilingo's confession in the form of interviews given to Argentina's best-known investigative journalist, Horacio Verbitsky. The afterword by Juan Mendez, General Consel of Human Rights Watch, puts Adolfo Scilingo confession of atrocities committed during the 'dirty war' into a historical and international context.

Brian Keenan went to Beirut in 1985 for a change of scene from his native Belfast. He became headline news when he was kidnapped by fundamentalist Shi’ite militiamen and held in the suburbs of Beirut for the next four and a half years. For much of that time he was shut off from all news and contact with anyone other than his jailers and, later, his fellow hostages, amongst them John McCarthy.

Zionism in Arab discourses presents a ground-breaking study of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Through analyses of hundreds of texts written by Arab Islamists and liberals from the late-nineteenth century to the 'Arab Spring', the book demonstrates that the Zionist enterprise has played a dual function of an enemy and a mentor. Islamists and liberals alike discovered, respectively, in Zionism and in Israeli society qualities they sought to implement in their sown homelands. Focusing on Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian political discourses, this study uncovers fascinating and unexpected Arab points of views on different aspects of Zionism; from the first Zionist Congress to the First Lebanon War; from gardening in the early years of Tel Aviv to women's service in the Israeli Defence Forces; from the role of religion in the creation of the state to the role of democracy in its preservation. -- .

Activated by injustice, members of over-policed communities lead the current movement for civil rights in the United States. Responding to decades of abuse by law enforcement and an excessive criminal justice system, activists protested police brutality in Ferguson, organized against stop-and-frisk in New York City, and fueled the rise of Black Lives Matter. Yet, scholars did not anticipate this resistance, instead anticipating the political withdrawal of marginalized citizens. In Mobilized by Injustice, Hannah L. Walker excavates the power of criminal justice to inspire political action. Mobilization results from the belief that one's experiences are a consequence of policies that target people like one's self on the basis of group affiliation like race, ethnicity and class. In order to identify how individuals connect their experiences to a collective struggle, Walker centralizes the voices of those most impacted by criminal justice, pairing personal narratives with analysis of several surveys. She finds that the mobilizing power of the criminal justice system is broad, crosses racial boundaries and extends to the loved ones of custodial citizens. Mobilized by Injustice offers a compelling account of the criminal justice system as a spark for the formation of a movement with the potential to remake American politics.

Famine is an age-old scourge that almost disappeared in our lifetime. Between 2000 and 2011 there were no famines and deaths in humanitarian emergencies were much reduced. The humanitarian agenda was ascendant. Then, in 2017, the United Nations identified four situations that threatened famine or breached that threshold in north-eastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen. Today, this list is longer. Each of these famines is the result of military actions and exclusionary, authoritarian politics conducted without regard to the wellbeing or even the survival of people. Violations of international law including blockading ports, attacks on health facilities, violence against humanitarian workers, and obstruction of relief aid are carried out with renewed impunity. Yet there is an array of legal offenses, ranging from war crimes and crimes against humanity to genocide, available to a prosecutor to hold individuals to account for the deliberate starvation of civilians. However, there has been a dearth of investigations and accountability for those violating international law. The reasons for this neglect and the gaps between the black-letter law and practice are explored in this timely volume. It provides a comprehensive overview of the key themes and cases required to catalyze a new approach to understanding the law as it relates to starvation. It also illustrates the complications of historical and ongoing situations where starvation is used as a weapon of war, and provides expert analysis on defining starvation, early warning systems, gender and mass starvation, the use of sanctions, journalistic reporting, and memorialization of famine.

The genocide in Myanmar has drawn global attention as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi appears to be presiding over human rights violations, forced migrations and extra-judicial killings on an enormous scale. This unique study draws on thousands of hours of interviews and testimony from the Rohingya themselves to assess and outline the full scale of the disaster. Casting new light on Rohingya identity, history and culture, this will be an essential contribution to the study of the Rohingya people and to the study of the early stages of genocide. This book adds convincingly to the body of evidence that the government of Myanmar has enabled a genocide in Rakhine State and the surrounding areas.

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.

Published in Poland after World War II, this collection of concentration camp stories shows atrocious crimes becoming an unremarkable part of a daily routine. Prisoners eat, work, sleep, and fall in love a few yards from where other prisoners are systematically slaughtered. The will to survive overrides compassion, and the line between the normal and the abnormal wavers, then vanishes. Borowski, a concentration camp victim himself, understood what human beings will do to endure the unendurable. Together, these stories constitute not only a masterpiece of Polish - and world - literature but stand as cruel testimony to the level of inhumanity of which man is capable.

The book is a sociological analysis of immigration in Ireland. It is the first major comprehensive study of labour and asylum immigration into Irish society. From the Great Irish Famine until the 1990s Ireland was historically a country of entrenched emigration like no other. In 1996 it became the last of the old EU 15 states to become a country of net immigration. From a relatively homogenous country characterised by Catholicism and rural development it has become one of the most globalised countries in the world containing over 188 different nationalities in the space of a decade. This book blends theoretical and empirical analysis to examine both the process of immigration and how it has been interpreted by various social actors. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data as well as sociology and political economy it provides a broad and insightful evaluation of the transformations wrought by immigration on Irish society. The book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates and those readers who want both an introduction to immigration and an in-depth analysis of its repercussions for Irish society. -- .