Studies of genocide and mass atrocity most often focus on their causes and consequences, their aims and effects, and the number of people killed. But the question remains, if the main goal is death, then why is torture necessary? This book argues that genocide and mass atrocity are committed not as an end in themselves but as a means to pursue sustained and systemic torture - the spectacle of violence - against its victims. Extermination is not the only, or even the primary, goal of genocidal campaigns. In The Macabresque, Edward Weisband looks at different episodes of mass violence (Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Holocaust, post-Ottoman Turkey, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, among other instances) to consider why different methods of violence were used in each and how they related to the particular cultural milieu in which they were perpetrated. He asserts that it is not accidental that certain images capture our memory as emblematic of specific genocides or mass atrocities (the death marches of the Armenian genocide, mass starvation in the Ukraine, the killing apparatus and laboratories of the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia) because such violence assumes a kind of style each time and place it arises. Weisband looks at these variations in terms of their aesthetic or dramaturgical style, or what he calls the macabresque. The macabresque is ever present in genocide and mass atrocity across time, place and episode. Beyond the horrors of lethality, it is the defining feature of concentration and/or death camps, detention centers, prisons, ghettos, killing fields, and the houses, schools and hospitals converted into hubs for torture. Macabresque dramaturgy also assumes many aesthetic forms, all designed to inflict hideous pain and humiliating punishments, sometimes in controlled environments, but also during frenzied moments of staged public horror. These kinds of performative violations permit perpetrators to revel in their absolute power but simultaneously to project hatred, revenge and revulsion onto victims, who embody the shame, humiliation and loss felt by their torturers. By understanding how and why mass violence occurs and the reasons for its variations, The Macabresque aims to explain why so many seemingly normal or "ordinary" people participate in mass atrocity across cultures and why such egregious violence occurs repeatedly through history.

Saying that political and social oppression is a deeply unjust and widespread condition of life is not a terribly controversial statement. Likewise, theorists of justice frequently consider our obligation to not turn a blind eye to oppression. But what is our culpability in the endurance of oppression? In this book, Mara Marin complicates the primary ways in which we make sense of human and political relationships and our obligations within them. Rather than thinking of relationships in terms of our intentions, Marin thinks of them as open-ended and subject to ongoing commitments. Commitments create open-ended expectations and vulnerabilities on the part of others, and therefore also obligations. By this rationale, our actions sustain oppressive or productive structures in virtue of their cumulative effects, not the intentions of the actors.When we violate our obligations we oppress others. Over the chapters of her book, Marin applies her model of commitment to caregivers, marriage, and bargaining power between labor and employers, and examines three types of social relations: political-legal relations, intimate relations of care, and work relations. By linking habitual action to obligation, Marin argues that we should see our responsibilities within such relationships as political and as creating norms for behavior over time. Commitment both points to the support our actions give to oppressive structures and to the ways in which our actions can weaken the same structures. Connected by Commitment examines our obligations to transform structures of oppression and offers commitment as a model for solidarity across race, gender, and class.

From the 1870s to the 1930s, American cartoonists devoted much of their ink to outlandish caricatures of immigrants and minority groups, making explicit the derogatory stereotypes that circulated at the time. Members of ethnic groups were depicted as fools, connivers, thieves, and individuals hardly fit for American citizenship, but Jews were especially singled out with visual and verbal abuse. In The Implacable Urge to Defame, Baigell examines more than sixty published cartoons from humor magazines such as Judge, Puck and Life and considers the climate of opinion that allowed such cartoons to be published. In doing so, he traces their impact on the emergence of anti-Semitism in the American Scene movement in the 1920s and 1930s.

The creation of Afghanistan in 1880, following the Second Anglo-Afghan War, gave an empowering voice to the Pashtun people, the largest ethnic group in a diverse country. In order to distil the narrative of the state's formation and early years, a Pashtun-centric version of history dominated Afghan history and the political process from 1880 to the 1970s. Alternative discourses made no appearance in the fledgling state which lacked the scholarly institutions and any sense of recognition for history, thus providing no alternatives to the narratives produced by the British, whose quasi-colonial influence in the region was supreme. Since 1970, the ongoing crises in Afghanistan have opened the space for non-Pashtuns, including Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks, to form new definitions of identity, challenge the official discourse and call for the re-writing of the long-established narrative. At the same time, the Pashtun camp, through their privileged position in the political settlements of 2001, have attempted to confront the desire for change in historical perceptions by re-emphasising the Pashtun domination of Afghan history. This crisis of hegemony has led to a deep antagonism between the Pashtun and non-Pashtun perspectives of Afghan history and threatens the stability of political process in the country.

"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.

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.

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

A vast network of prison camps was an essential part of the Stalinist system. Conditions in the camps were brutal, life expectancy short. At their peak, they housed millions, and hardly an individual in the Soviet Union remained untouched by their tentacles. Michael Jakobson's is the first study to examine the most crucial period in the history of the camps: from the October Revolution of 1917, when the tsarist prison system was destroyed to October 1934, when all places of confinement were consolidated under one agency -- the infamous GULAG. The prison camps served the Soviet government in many ways: to isolate opponents and frighten the population into submission, to increase labor productivity through the arrest of "inefficient" workers, and to provide labor for factories, mines, lumbering, and construction projects. Jakobson focuses on the structure and interrelations of prison agencies, the Bolshevik views of crime and punishment and inmate reeducation, and prison self-sufficiency. He also describes how political conditions and competition among prison agencies contributed to an unprecedented expansion of the system. Finally, he disputes the official claim of 1931 that the system was profitable -- a claim long accepted by former inmates and Western researchers and used to explain the proliferation of the camps and their population. Did Marxism or the Bolshevik Revolution or Leninism inexorably lead to the GULAG system? Were its origins truly evil or merely banal? Jakobson's important book probes the official record to cast new light on a system that for a time supported but ultimately helped destroy the now fallen Soviet colossus.

The arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of the Yukos oil company, on 25 October 2003, was a key turning point in modern Russian history. At that time Khodorkovsky was one of the world's richest and most powerful men, while Yukos had been transformed into a vast and lucrative oil company that was set to go global. On all counts, this looked like a success story, but it was precisely at this moment that the Russian authorities struck. After two controversial trials, attracting widespread international condemnation, Khodorkovsky was sentenced to fourteen years in jail. In this book, Richard Sakwa examines the rise and fall of Yukos, and the development of the Russian oil industry more generally. Sakwa analyses Russia's emergence as an energy superpower, and considers the question of the 'natural resource curse' and the use of energy rents to bolster Russia as a great power and to maintain the autonomy of the regime. Crucially this book also examines the relationship between Putin's state and big business during Russia's traumatic shift from the Soviet planned economy to the market system.It is a detailed analysis of one of the most dramatic confrontations between economic and political power in our era, full of human drama and moral dilemmas. It is also a study of political economy, with the market and state coming into confrontation. Above all, the 'Yukos affair' continues to shape contemporary Russian politics, with a weakened judiciary and insecure property rights. It traces the struggles of the Putin era as two visions of society came into conflict. The attack on Khodorkovsky had - and continues to have - far-reaching political and economic consequences but it also raises fundamental questions about the quality of freedom in Putin's Russia as well as in the world at large.

When Nada Prouty came to the United States as a young woman, she fell in love with the democracy and freedom of her new home.Following a childhood in war-torn Lebanon with an abusive father, and facing the prospect of an arranged marriage, she jumped at the chance to forge her own path in America - a path that led to exciting undercover work in the FBI, then the CIA. But all this changed in the wake of 9/11, at the height of anti-Arab fervor, when federal investigators charged Prouty with passing intelligence to Hezbollah. Though the CIA and federal judge eventually exonerated Prouty of all charges, she was dismissed from the agency and stripped of her citizenship. In Uncompromised, Prouty tells her whole story in a bid to restore her name and reputation in the country that she loves. Beyond a thrilling story of espionage and betrayal, this is a sobering commentary on cultural alienation, the power of fear, and what it means to truly love America.

From a gay man secretly mourning his lover's suicide in Morocco to a young woman denied schooling because of religious discrimination in Iran, Arab Spring Dreams spotlights some of the Middle East's most outspoken young dissidents. The essayists cover a wide range of experiences, including premarital sex, the lack of educational opportunities, teenage marriage, and the fight for political freedom. They also highlight how repressive laws and cultural mores snuff out liberty and stifle growth and consider how previous movements - particularly the American civil rights struggle - might be channeled to effect change in their own countries. Beautifully written and profoundly moving, these stories present a decisive call for change at a crucial point in the evolution of the Middle East.

In this magisterial history of Lebanon, from the end of Ottoman rule to the Hezbollah and Hamas wars of today, acclaimed and fiercely independent Middle East journalist and historian David Hirst charts the interplay between a uniquely complex country and the broader struggles of the modern Middle East. Lebanon is the battleground on which the region's greater states pursue their strategic, political, and ideological conflicts--conflicts that sometimes escalate into full-scale proxy wars. Hirst warns that only serious diplomatic action from the Obama administration can prevent the next such action from engulfing the entire region.

Houshang Asadi's Letters to My Torturer is one of the most harrowing accounts of human suffering to emerge from Iran and is now available for the first time in paperback. Kept in solitary confinement for over two years in an infamous Tehran prison, Asadi suffered inhuman degradations and brutal torture: suspended from the ceiling, beaten, and forced to bark like a dog, Asadi became a spy for the Russians, for the British - for anyone. Narrowly escaping execution as the government unleashed a bloody pogrom against political prisoners, Asadi was hauled before a sham court and sentenced to fifteen years. Here he confronts his torturer, speaking for those who will never be heard, and provides a glimpse into the heart of Iran and the practice of state-sponsored justice.

Two enduring challenges in South African historiography are addressed by this group of committed scholars from SADET. The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 4 [1980-1990] firstly addresses the muted voices of largely unpublished black scholars, and secondly, ensures that the voices of the majority of our population are at the centre of the historic narrative. Comprising of 32 chapters, Volume 4 in the series focuses on the 1980s and `further fortifies the intellectual traditions set by the earlier volumes'. Included in the volume are chapters by Bernard Magubane on the apartheid state; Sifiso Ndlovu on the ANC and negotiations; Bhekizizwe Peterson on the arts; Zine Magubane on women's struggles; Gregory Houston on the ANC's underground and armed struggle; Thami ka Plaatjie on the PAC; Mbulelo Mzamane and Brown Maaba on the BCM and AZAPO; Eddy Maloka on the SACP; Christopher Saunders on the above-the-ground struggles conducted by white activists; and Jabulani Sithole on the trade union movement.

In November 2004, Mulrunji Doomadgee's tragic death triggered civil unrest within the Indigenous community of Palm Island. This led to the first prosecution of a Queensland police officer in relation to a death in custody. Despite prolonged media attention, much of it negative and full of stereotypes, few Australians know the turbulent history of 'Australia's Alcatraz', a political prison set up to exile Queensland's 'troublesome blacks'. In Palm Island, Joanne Watson gives the first substantial history of the island from pre contact to the present, set against a background of some of the most explosive episodes in Queensland history. Palm Island, often heart wrenching and at times uplifting, is a study in the dynamics of power and privilege, and how it is resisted.

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.

On the 'long list' for the inaugural John Button Prize for Australian politics and social policy. This profoundly moving book reveals the untold story of the people who struggled to get asylum seekers out of detention and change government policy. "Lateline" journalist Margot O'Neill, who covered many of these stories while they were happening, paints a compelling and heartbreaking picture through an extraordinary cast of characters. Some, like Petro Georgiou, Julian Burnside and Phillip Ruddock, are very well-known. Others are not famous but simply felt compelled to follow their consciences and act to help desperate people in desperate situations, often to the detriment of their personal well-being.

This book explores a century of business development of The South African Life Assurance Company, from a specific local focus to a national conglomerate expanding into global insurance markets. Established as a strategic vehicle to address Afrikaner economic marginalization and abject poverty at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sanlam has displayed both path dependence and a dynamic adaptability to complex changing contexts to become a global player. The strategic convergence of economic empowerment through the mobilization of savings into insurance products, as well as Afrikaner nationalism, assisted this growth. Sanlam has played an a-typical role in the economic empowerment of an ethnic entity through extensive investments into the industrializing South African economy. This strategic diversion created operational limitations that were only resolved early in the twenty-first century. As globalization, financial deregulation, and weakened Afrikaner political and social hegemony manifested, strategic change management relied on the path dependence of empowerment strategies to address new markets with similar needs to those of the early stakeholder market of 1918. The former mutual life office demutualized operations to become a diversified financial services group of companies operating across almost the entire African continent, as well as in India, Malaysia, and the UK. This volume presents a business history of strategic management of an insurance enterprise, and its transformation from a defined cultural context into an international empowerment strategy through innovation on all levels of business operation and organization. This book is an Open Access publication, available online under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

On April 28, 2004, the Abu Ghraib photos of prisoner torture and humiliation appeared on 60 Minutes, setting off an international scandal. Less than seven weeks later, Susan L. Burke, a Philadelphia attorney, field a landmark lawsuit on behalf of the detainees, presenting a case against two private contractors, CACI International and Titan Inc. Burke set out to prove that contractors, soldiers, and officers worked together, or conspired, to torture and kill detainees. McKelvey examines how it is that many of the abusers can never be brought to justice, operating as they do outside the US system of criminal laws. Along the way she has tea with Saddam Hussein's mistress, meets with suspected terrorists, including a ghost detainee, and interviews victims from American detention centers, all the while uncovering vital sources touched upon by no other journalist. Following Burke's lawsuit through the courts, and drawing on interviews with current and former military personnel, translators, and interrogators, as well as listening to the harrowing personal stories of numerous detainee plaintiffs, McKelvey examines the many underreported, under-investigated crimes of Abu Ghraib.

Toyo Suyemoto is known informally by literary scholars and the media as ""Japanese America's poet laureate."" But Suyemoto has always described herself in much more humble terms. A first-generation Japanese American, she has identified herself as a storyteller, a teacher, a mother whose only child died from illness, and an internment camp survivor. Before Suyemoto passed away in 2003, she wrote a moving and illuminating memoir of her internment camp experiences with her family and infant son at Tanforan Race Track and, later, at the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, from 1942 to 1945. A uniquely poetic contribution to the small body of internment memoirs, Suyemoto's account includes information about policies and wartime decisions that are not widely known, and recounts in detail the way in which internees adjusted their notions of selfhood and citizenship, lending insight to the complicated and controversial questions of citizenship, accountability, and resistance of first- and second-generation Japanese Americans. Suyemoto's poems, many written during internment, are interwoven throughout the text and serve as counterpoints to the contextualizing narrative. A small collection of poems written in the years following her incarceration further reveal the psychological effects of her experience.

George W. Bush calls them an 'alternative set of procedures', vital tools needed 'to protect the American people and our allies'. These 'tools' include forced standing for up to forty hours, sleep deprivation for weeks on end, dousing naked prisoners with ice water in rooms chilled to ten degrees, and strapping prisoners to inclined boards then flooding their mouths with water. These techniques are torture, and they are used by the United States of America. American Torture reveals how torture became standard practice in today's War on Terror. Long before Abu Ghraib became a household name, the US military and CIA used torture with impunity at home and abroad. Billions of dollars were spent during the Cold War studying, refining, then teaching these techniques to American interrogators and to foreign officers charged with keeping Communism at bay. As the Cold War ended, these tortures were legalised using the very laws designed to eradicate their use.

In the spring and summer of 1952, fifteen Soviet Jews, including five prominent Yiddish writers and poets, were secretly tried and convicted; multiple executions soon followed in the basement of Moscow's Lubyanka prison. The defendants were falsely charged with treason and espionage because of their involvement in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and because of their heartfelt response as Jews to Nazi atrocities on occupied Soviet territory. Stalin had created the committee to rally support for the Soviet Union during World War II, but he then disbanded it after the war as his paranoia mounted about Soviet Jews. For many years, a host of myths surrounded the case against the committee. Now this book, which presents an abridged version of the long-suppressed transcript of the trial, reveals the Kremlin's machinery of destruction. Joshua Rubenstein provides annotations about the players and events surrounding the case. In a long introduction, drawing on newly released documents in Moscow archives and on interviews with relatives of the defendants in Israel, Russia, and the United States, Rubenstein also sets the trial in historical and political context and offers a vivid account of Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

This is Henri Nouwen's personal account of a pilgrimage to Santiago Atitlan, a Mayan town in the highlands of Guatemala. It was there that an American priest, Father Stanley Rother, was murdered by a death squad in the parish where he served. In traveling to Santiago Nouwen hoped to learn more about this modern martyr about the faith that drew him there, and the love that held him in place, even when his life was threatened.