'Beware of Small States' wrote Mikhail Bukanin in 1870. He could have meant Lebanon: a sectarian state no bigger than Wales that has become battleground for one of the defining conflicts of twentieth-century history. Throughout its short existence, it has been attacked, invaded, occupied or interfered with to serve the political interests of foreign powers, resulting a series of devastating wars and crises. To understand Lebanon's history is to understand the history of the entire region - and, with the rise of Hizbullah, it has come to assume a disproportionate, dangerous power of its own. Iran and Israel now face each other in the hills of south Lebanon. David Hirst, author of The Gun and the Olive Branch, is a hugely respected commentator on the Arab-Israeli crisis. In a masterly narrative, he gives a much-needed, comprehensive history of the country and its conflicts, culminating with the recent war in Gaza and its fallout in Lebanon. Powerful and often moving, Beware of Small States is a magisterial book, essential reading for understanding Lebanon or the current political climate of the Middle East.

Ingrid Betancourt's story - her exemplary courage, spirit and resilience - has captured the world's imagination. A politician and presidential candidate celebrated for her determination to combat the corruption and climate of fear endemic in Colombia, in 2002 she was taken hostage by FARC, a terrorist guerrilla organisation. She was held captive in the depths of the jungle for six and a half years, chained day and night for much of that time, constantly on the move and enduring gruelling conditions. She was freed and reunited with her children and relatives in 2008. It is Betancourt's indomitable spirit that drives this important and deeply moving book, telling in her own words the extraordinary drama of her capture and eventual rescue, and describes her fight to survive, mentally and physically. As she confronts the horror of what she went through, her story also goes beyond the specifics of her own confinement to offer an intensely intelligent, thoughtful and compassionate reflection on what it means to be human.

'An indispensable account' - Sunday Times 'Moving and devastating' - The Literary Review 'An intimate, highly sensory self-portrait' - Sunday Telegraph (Five Stars) FIRST MEMOIR ABOUT CHINA'A 'RE-EDUCATION' CAMPS BY A UYGHUR WOMAN Since 2017, one million Uyghurs have been seized by the Chinese authorities and sent to 're-education' camps, in what the US Government and human rights groups describe as a genocide. Few have made it out to the West. One is Gulbahar Haitiwaji. For three years, she endured hundreds of hours of interrogations, freezing cold, forced sterilisation, and a programme of de-personalisation meant to destroy her free will and her memories. This intimate account reveals the long-suppressed truth about China's gulag. It tells the story of a woman confronted by an all-powerful state bent on crushing her spirit - and her battle for freedom and dignity. Extract 'In the camps, the 're-education' process applies the same remorseless method to destroying all its victims. It starts out by stripping you of your individuality. It takes away your name, your clothes, your hair. There is nothing now to distinguish you from anyone else. 'Then the process takes over your body by subjecting it to a hellish routine: being forced to repeatedly recite the glories of the Communist Party for eleven hours a day in a windowless classroom. Falter, and you are punished. So you keep on saying the same things over and over again until you can't feel, can't think anymore. You lose all sense of time. First the hours, then the days.' - Gulbahar Haitiwaji Reviews 'Gulbahar's memoir is an indispensable account, which makes vivid the stench of fearful sweat in the cells, the newly built prison's permanent reek of white pain. It closely corresponds with other witness statements, giving every indication of being very reliable. Most impressive is her psychological honesty.' - John Phipps, Sunday Times 'Huge efforts have been made to obfuscate the realities of life in the camps (even speaking openly in Xinjiang about them can lead to incarceration). Although their existence has been well documented abroad and grudgingly admitted by the Chinese state, relatively few first-hand accounts of what actually goes on inside them have emerged. One is Gulbahar Haitiwaji's moving and devastating How I Survived a Chinese 'Re-education' Camp.' - Roderic Wye, Literary Review 'There follows an intimate, highly sensory self-portrait, created with the help of Rozenn Morgat (a journalist with Le Figaro), of an educated woman passing through a system that appears at turns cruel, paranoid, capricious and devastatingly effective. It begins with the confiscation of Haitiwaji's passport and a police interrogation during which she is shown a photograph of her daughter attending a Uyghur demonstration in Paris. One of the interrogators starts bawling at her - "Your daughter's a terrorist!" and before long Haitiwaji is plunged into a bewildering world of shackles, bunks and beaten-earth floors; grey gruel and stale bread served up by deaf-mute cooks selected for their silence; the sounds and smells of the communal toilet-bucket; and the buzz of security camera motors as they scan the cell.' ***** - Christopher Harding, Sunday Telegraph Translated from the French book Rescapee du goulag chinois (Equateurs), How I Survived a Chinese Reeducation Camp is a riveting insight into an authoritarian world. A true story, it reads like a 21st Century version of George Orwell's 1984 set in modern China.

How were the Gestapo able to detect the smallest signs of non-compliance with Nazi doctrines, and how could they enforce their racial policies with such ease? Robert Gellately argues, controversially, that there was a three-way interaction between the Gestapo, the German people, and the implementation of policy; the key factor being the willingness of German citizens to provide the authorities with information about suspected `criminality'.

A shocking depiction of one of the world's most ruthless regimes - and the story of one woman's fight to survive. I will never forget the camp. I cannot forget the eyes of the prisoners, expecting me to do something for them. They are innocent. I have to tell their story, to tell about the darkness they are in. It is so easy to suffocate us with the demons of powerlessness, shame, and guilt. But we aren't the ones who should feel ashamed. Born in China's north-western province, Sayragul Sauytbay trained as a doctor before being appointed a senior civil servant. But her life was upended when the Chinese authorities incarcerated her. Her crime: being Kazakh, one of China's ethnic minorities. The north-western province borders the largest number of foreign nations and is the point in China that is the closest to Europe. In recent years it has become home to over 1,200 penal camps - modern-day gulags that are estimated to house three million members of the Kazakh and Uyghur minorities. Imprisoned solely due to their ethnicity, inmates are subjected to relentless punishment and torture, including being beaten, raped, and used as subjects for medical experiments. The camps represent the greatest systematic incarceration of an entire people since the Third Reich. In prison, Sauytbay was put to work teaching Chinese language, culture, and politics, in the course of which she gained access to secret information that revealed Beijing's long-term plans to undermine not only its minorities, but democracies around the world. Upon her escape to Europe she was reunited with her family, but still lives under the constant threat of reprisal. This rare testimony from the biggest surveillance state in the world reveals not only the full, frightening scope of China's tyrannical ambitions, but also the resilience and courage of its author.

A revelatory historical indictment of the long afterlife of slavery in the Atlantic world To fully understand why the shadow of slavery haunts us today, we must confront the flawed way that it ended. We celebrate abolition - in Haiti after the revolution, in the British Empire in 1833, in the United States during the Civil War. Yet in Black Ghost of Empire, acclaimed historian Kris Manjapra argues that during each of these supposed emancipations, Black people were dispossessed by the moves that were meant to free them. Emancipation, in other words, simply codified the existing racial caste system - rather than obliterating it. Ranging across the Americas, Europe and Africa, Manjapra unearths disturbing truths about the Age of Emancipations, 1780-1880. In Britain, reparations were given to wealthy slaveowners, not the enslaved, a vast debt that was only paid off in 2015, and the crucial role of Black abolitionists and rebellions in bringing an end to slavery has been overlooked. In Jamaica, Black people were liberated only to enter into an apprenticeship period harsher than slavery itself. In the American South, the formerly enslaved were 'freed' into a system of white supremacy and racial terror. Across Africa, emancipation served as an alibi for colonization. None of these emancipations involved atonement by the enslavers and their governments for wrongs committed, or reparative justice for the formerly enslaved-an omission that grassroots Black organizers and activists are rightly seeking to address today. Black Ghost of Empire will rewire readers' understanding of the world in which we live. Paradigm-shifting, lucid and courageous, this book shines a light into the enigma of slavery's supposed death, and its afterlives.

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.

"When the plane landed, they untied my blindfold. I found there were women and children on one side and men on the other side of the plane. They were saying, 'They are talking us to Mogadishu.' The Kenyans who brought me there were still here. I was crying and screaming and telling them to let me go as I had my passport and that I was from Dubai and they should send me back. One man tried to keep me quiet by saying, 'You are coming with us.' In total there were twenty-two women and children. Apart from me and another lady, everyone else was three to eight months pregnant."--2007 statement to Cageprisoners

Following the 2005 bombing of London's transportation infrastructure, Tony Blair declared that "the rules of the game have changed." Few anticipated the extent to which global counterterrorism would circumvent cherished laws, but profiling, incommunicado detention, rendition, and torture have become the accepted protocols of national security. In this book, Asim Qureshi travels to East Africa, Sudan, Pakistan, Bosnia, and the United States to record the testimonies of victims caught in counterterrorism's new game. Qureshi's exhaustive efforts reveal the larger phenomenon that has changed the way governments view justice. He focuses on the profiling of Muslims by security services and concurrent mass arrests, detaining individuals without filing charges, domestic detention policies in North America, and the effect of Guant?namo on global perceptions of law and imprisonment.

In providing a counterweight to the notion that political violence has irrevocably changed in a globalised world, Violence and the state offers an original and innovative way in which to understand political violence across a range of discipline areas. It explores the complex relationship between the state and its continued use of violence through a variety of historical and contemporary case studies, including the Napoleonic Wars, Nazi and Soviet 'eliticide', the consolidation of authority in modern China, post-Soviet Russia, and international criminal tribunals. It also looks at humanitarian intervention in cases of organised violence, and the willingness of elites to alter their attitude to violence if it is an instrument to achieve their own ends. The interdisciplinary approach, which spans history, sociology, international law and International Relations, ensures that this book will be invaluable to a broad cross-section of scholars and politically engaged readers alike. -- .

According to newspaper headlines and television pundits, the cold war ended many months ago; the age of Big Two confrontation is over. But forty years ago, Americans were experiencing the beginnings of another era--of the fevered anti-communism that came to be known as McCarthyism. During this period, the Cincinnati Reds felt compelled to rename themselves briefly the "Redlegs" to avoid confusion with the other reds, and one citizen in Indiana campaigned to have The Adventures of Robin Hood removed from library shelves because the story's subversive message encouraged robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. These developments grew out of a far-reaching anxiety over communism that characterized the McCarthy Era.
Richard Fried's Nightmare in Red offers a riveting and comprehensive account of this crucial time. He traces the second Red Scare's antecedents back to the 1930s, and presents an engaging narrative about the many different people who became involved in the drama of the anti-communist fervor, from the New Deal era and World War II, through the early years of the cold war, to the peak of McCarthyism, and beyond McCarthy's censure to the decline of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1960s. Along the way, we meet the familiar figures of the period--Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, the young Richard Nixon, and, of course, the Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. But more importantly, Fried reveals the wholesale effect of McCarthyism on the lives of thousands of ordinary people, from teachers and lawyers to college students, factory workers, and janitors. Together with coverage of such famous incidents as the ordeal of the Hollywood Ten (which led to the entertainment world's notorious blacklist) and the Alger Hiss case, Fried also portrays a wealth of little-known but telling episodes involving victims and victimizers of anti-communist politics at the state and local levels.
Providing the most complete history of the rise and fall of the phenomenon known as McCarthyism, Nightmare in Red shows that it involved far more than just Joe McCarthy.

A FAMILY STORY AND THE TALE OF A NATION. Ai Weiwei - one of the world's most famous artists and activists - weaves a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own life and that of his father, Ai Qing, the nation's most celebrated poet. 'Engrossing...a remarkable story' Sunday Times Here, through the sweeping lens of his own and his father's life, Ai Weiwei tells an epic tale of China over the last 100 years, from the Cultural Revolution to the modern-day Chinese Communist Party. Here is the story of a childhood spent in desolate exile after his father, Ai Qing, once China's most celebrated poet, fell foul of the authorities. Here is his move to America as a young man and his return to China, his rise from unknown to art-world superstar and international rights activist. Here is his extraordinary account of how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime. It's the story of a father and a son, of exceptional creativity and passionate belief, and of how two indomitable spirits enabled the world to understand their country. 'A story of inherited resilience and self-determination' Observer 'A majestic and exquisitely serious masterpiece about his China... One of the great voices of our time' Andrew Solomon 'Intimate, unflinching...an instant classic' Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition

At the heart of racist attitudes and behaviors is anti-Black racism, which simply put, is the disregard and disdain of Black life. Anti-Black racism negatively impacts every aspect of the lives of Black people. Edited by renowned scholar and psychologist Kevin Cokley, Making Black Lives Matter: Confronting Anti-Black Racism explores the history and contemporary circumstances of anti-Black racism, offers powerful personal anecdotes, and provides recommendations and solutions to challenging anti-Black racism in its various expressions. The book features chapters written by scholars, practitioners, activists, and students. The chapters reflect diverse perspectives from the Black community and writing styles that range from scholarly text supported by cited research to personal narratives that highlight the lived experiences of the contributors. The book focuses on the ways that anti-Black racism manifests and has been confronted across various domains of Black life using research, activism, social media, and therapy. In the words of Cokley: "It is my hope that the book will provide a blueprint for readers that will empower them to actively confront anti-Blackness wherever it exists, because this is the only way we will progress toward making Black lives matter." Making Black Lives Matter is a book that is meant to be shared! The goal for Cognella for publishing this book is to amplify the voices of those who need to be heard and to provide readers free access to critical scholarship on topics that affect our everyday lives. We're proud to provide free digital copies of the book to anyone who wants to read it. So, we encourage you to spread the word and share the book with everyone you know.

Everyday life after the Irish conflict is the first book to address the specific topic of the intersection of the processes of conflict transformation and devolution with daily life in Northern Ireland in a rigorous and systematic fashion. Bringing together new research from established academics, new voices and civil society actors, this book documents the changes that have occurred in people's everyday lives as the region moves away from a violent past. Supported with a wealth of new empirical material, the book charts the impact of devolution and conflict transformation in four parts: an overview of the changes is followed by chapters that explore the areas of space, place and human relations. The third part looks at economic and social life while a concluding chapter takes a comparative approach by addressing the differences and similarities between the Northern Irish and Scottish experiences of devolution. -- .

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.

How was it possible to write history in the Soviet Union, under strict state control and without access to archives? What methods of research did these 'historians' - be they academic, that is based at formal institutions, or independent - rely on? And how was their work influenced by their complex and shifting relationships with the state? To answer these questions, Barbara Martin here tracks the careers of four bold and important dissidents: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Roy Medvedev, Aleksandr Nekrich and Anton Antonov-Ovseenko. Based on extensive archival research and interviews (with some of the authors themselves, as well as those close to them), the result is a nuanced and very necessary history of Soviet dissident history writing, from the relative liberalisation of de-Stalinisation through increasing repression and persecution in the Brezhnev era to liberalisation once more during perestroika. In the process Martin sheds light onto late Soviet society and its relationship with the state, as well as the ways in which this dissidence participated in weakening the Soviet regime during Perestroika. This is important reading for all scholars working on late Soviet history and society.