James B. Given analyzes the inquisition in one French region in order to develop a sociology of medieval politics. Established in the early thirteenth century to combat widespread popular heresy, inquisitorial tribunals identified, prosecuted, and punished heretics and their supporters. The inquisition in Languedoc was the best documented of these tribunals because the inquisitors aggressively used the developing techniques of writing and record keeping to build cases and extract confessions.

Using a Marxist and Foucauldian approach, Given focuses on three inquiries: what techniques of investigation, interrogation, and punishment the inquisitors worked out in the course of their struggle against heresy; how the people of Languedoc responded to the activities of the inquisitors; and what aspects of social organization in Languedoc either facilitated or constrained the work of the inquisitors. Punishments not only inflicted suffering and humiliation on those condemned, he argues, but also served as theatrical instruction for the rest of society about the terrible price of transgression. Through a careful pursuit of these inquires, Given elucidates medieval society's contribution to the modern apparatus of power.

The twenty-first century so far has seen the global rise of authoritarian populism, systematic racism, and dogmatic metaphysics. Even though these events demonstrate the growth of an age of 'unreason', in this original and compelling book John Roberts resists the assumption that such thinking displays an unthinking irrationality or loss of reason; instead he asserts that an important feature of modern reactionary politics is that it offers a supposedly convincing integration of the particular and the universal. This move is defined by what Roberts calls the 'reasoning of unreason' and has deep roots in the history of Western thought and politics. Tracing the dark history of enlightenment-disenlightenment, John Roberts explores 'the reasoning of unreason' across centuries from Aquinas, William of Ockham, the most important treatise on witchcraft Malleus Maleficarum, Locke, Kant, and Count Arthur de Gobineau, to Social Darwinism, Nazism, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Friedrich von Hayek. Roberts provides a new set of philosophical-political tools to understand the formation and denigration of the rational subject and the current reinvestment in various forms of political unreason globally. The Reasoning of Unreason is the first book to draw on the philosophy of reason, political philosophy, political theory and political history, in order to produce a dialectical account of the 'making of reason' internal to the forces of unreason and the limits of reason.

Fueled by the explosion of the world's population, the quest for asylum is one of the most pressing problems of our age. Refugee receiving nations--located frequently, but by no means exclusively, in the Western world--have to respond to masses of humanity searching for new livable homes. Human compassion for these refugees can be found everywhere, but so can xenophobia and the desire to preserve one's nation, economic well being, and cultural integrity. The clash between these impulses represents one of the great dilemmas of our time and is the subject of Plaut's study. In exploring it, he provides a far-ranging inquiry into the human condition. The book presents political, ethnic, philosophical, religious, and sociological arguments, and deals with some of the most troublesome and heartbreaking conflicts in the news.

In this innovative and revelatory work, Igal Halfin exposes the inner struggles of Soviet Communists to identify themselves with the Bolshevik Party during the decisive decades of the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolsheviks preached the moral transformation of Russians into model Communists for their political and personal salvation. To screen the population for moral and political deviance, the Bolsheviks enlisted natural scientists, doctors, psychologists, sexologists, writers, and Party prophets to establish criteria for judging people. Self-inspection became a central Bolshevik practice. Communists were expected to write autobiographies in which they reconfigured their life experience in line with the demands of the Party.

Halfin traces the intellectual contortions of this project. Initially, the Party denounced deviant Communists, especially the Trotskyists, as degenerate, but innocuous, souls; but in a chilling turn in the mid-1930s, the Party came to demonize the unreformed as virulent, malicious counterrevolutionaries. The insistence that the good society could not triumph unless every wicked individual was destroyed led to the increasing condemnation of Party members as helplessly flawed.

Combining the analysis of autobiography with the study of Communist psychology and sociology and the politics of Bolshevik self-fashioning, Halfin gives us powerful new insight into the preconditions of the bloodbath that was the Great Purge.

An updated and expanded revision of a popular book published in 1981, American Political Trials examines the role of politicized criminal trials and impeachments in U.S. history from the early colonial era to the late twentieth century. Each chapter focuses on a trial representative of a particular era in the American past. The emphasis is on cases that resulted from political persecution, but the book also shows how defendants have exploited the judicial process to advance their political objectives. All of the chapters appearing in the earlier book have been updated. In addition, the volume includes new chapters on the 1637 trial of Anne Hutchinson and the 1989 trial of Lt. Col. Oliver North for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. The book also includes an updated bibliographical essay.

More than just an expression of religious authority or an instrument of social control, the Inquisition was an arena where cultures met and clashed on both shores of the Atlantic. This pioneering volume examines how cultural identities were maintained despite oppression. Persecuted groups were able to survive the Inquisition by means of diverse strategies-whether Christianized Jews in Spain preserving their experiences in literature, or native American folk healers practicing medical care. These investigations of social resistance and cultural persistence will reinforce the cultural significance of the Inquisition. Contributors: Jaime Contreras, Anne J. Cruz, Jesus M. De Bujanda, Richard E. Greenleaf, Stephen Haliczer, Stanley M. Hordes, Richard L. Kagan, J. Jorge Klor de Alva, Moshe Lazar, Angus I. K. MacKay, Geraldine McKendrick, Roberto Moreno de los Arcos, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Noemi Quezada, Maria Helena Sanchez Ortega, Joseph H. Silverman This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

The "unwritten" final chapter of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl tells the story of the time between Anne Frank's arrest and her death through the testimony of six Jewish women who survived the hell from which Anne Frank never retumed.

Why, during the Holocaust, did some ordinary people risk their lives and the lives of their families to help others--even total strangers--while others stood passively by? Samuel Oliner, a Holocaust survivor who has interviewed more than 700 European rescuers and nonrescuers, provides some surprising answers in this compelling work.

The moving story of Sheila Cassidy, who as a young doctor went to work in Chile and became caught in the terrible injustice of the country - injustice which led to her own arrest, imprisonment, torture and expulsion.

Wole Soyinka provides a foreword to this visceral account of a prominent newspaper editor's arrest, interrogation and imprisonment between 1995 and 1998 under the regime of Nigeria's military dictator Sanni Abacha. The author captures the loneliness and betrayal of political imprisonment and calls for collective responsibility to guard against tyrannical rulership. Both contemporary political, and journalistic issues are taken.

Between the summer of 1937 and November 1938, the Stalinist regime arrested over 1.5 million people for "counterrevolutionary" and "anti-Soviet" activity and either summarily executed or exiled them to the Gulag. While we now know a great deal about the experience of victims of the Great Terror, we know almost nothing about the lower- and middle-level Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD), or secret police, cadres who carried out Stalin's murderous policies. Unlike the postwar, public trials of Nazi war criminals, NKVD operatives were tried secretly. And what exactly happened in those courtrooms was unknown until now. In what has been dubbed "the purge of the purgers," almost one thousand NKVD officers were prosecuted by Soviet military courts. Scapegoated for violating Soviet law, they were charged with multiple counts of fabrication of evidence, falsification of interrogation protocols, use of torture to secure "confessions," and murder during pre-trial detention of "suspects" - and many were sentenced to execution themselves. The documentation generated by these trials, including verbatim interrogation records and written confessions signed by perpetrators; testimony by victims, witnesses, and experts; and transcripts of court sessions, provides a glimpse behind the curtains of the terror. It depicts how the terror was implemented, what happened, and who was responsible, demonstrating that orders from above worked in conjunction with a series of situational factors to shape the contours of state violence. Based on chilling and revelatory new archival documents from the Ukrainian secret police archives, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial illuminates the darkest recesses of Soviet repression - the interrogation room, the prison cell, and the place of execution - and sheds new light on those who carried out the Great Terror.

In 1945, remnants of the Polish Home Army re-formed to counter brutal Soviet repressions. In July of that year, more than 7,000 HA freedom fighters were arrested in the northeastern Augustow region and held in barns, pigsties and warehouses where they were beaten and tortured. Two thousand of them were never seen again-their whereabouts remain a mystery. Seventy-five years later, their relatives still search for answers and the location of their mass burial. This book examines the fateful events of the Augustow Roundup (a.k.a. "little Katyn") through eyewitness testimonies.

No other organization for religious persecution ever equaled the Spanish Inquisition in intensity, scope, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. From its establishment in 1478 until its abolishment in 1834, no one expected its tribunals, which relentlessly sought to destroy everyone who was not a Roman Catholic Christian.

Conquered in 1492 and colonized by invading Castilians, the city and kingdom of Granada faced radical changes imposed by its occupiers throughout the first half of the sixteenth century - including the forced conversion of its native Muslim population. Written by Francisco Nunez Muley, one of Granada's New Christians, this extraordinary letter lodges a clear-sighted, impassioned protest against the unreasonable and strongly assimilationist laws that required all Granadans to dress, speak, eat, marry, celebrate festivals, and bury their dead exactly as the Castilian settler population did. Rendered into faithful English prose by Vincent Barletta, Nunez Muley's account is an invaluable example of how Granada's former Muslims made active use of the written word to challenge and openly resist the progressively intolerant policies of the Spanish Crown. Timely and resonant - given current debates concerning Islam, minorities, and cultural and linguistic assimilation - this edition provides scholars in a range of fields with a vivid and early example of resistance in the face of oppression.

A unique anthology of Gulag memoirs, edited and annotated by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum Anne Applebaum wields her considerable knowledge of a dark chapter in human history and presents a collection of the writings of survivors of the Gulag, the Soviet concentration camps. Although the opening of the Soviet archives to scholars has made it possible to write the history of this notorious concentration camp system, documents tell only one side of the story. Gulag Voices now fills in the other half. The backgrounds of the writers reflect the extraordinary diversity of the Gulag itself. Here are the personal stories of such figures as Dmitri Likhachev, a renowned literary scholar; Anatoly Marchenko, the son of illiterate laborers; and Alexander Dolgun, an American citizen. These remembrances-many of them appearing in English for the first time, each chosen for both literary and historical value-collectively spotlight the strange moral universe of the camps, as well as the relationships that prisoners had with one another, with their guards, and with professional criminals who lived beside them. A vital addition to the literature of this era,annotated for a generation that no longer remembers the Soviet Union, Gulag Voices will inform, interest, and inspire, offering a source for reflection on human nature itself.

The abolition of slavery and similar institutions of servitude was an important global experience of the nineteenth century. Considering how tightly bonded into each local society and economy were these institutions, why and how did people decide to abolish them? This collection of essays examines the ways this globally shared experience appeared and developed. Chapters cover a variety of different settings, from West Africa to East Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, with close consideration of the British, French and Dutch colonial contexts, as well as internal developments in Russia and Japan. What elements of the abolition decision were due to international pressure, and which to local factors? Furthermore, this collection does not solely focus on the moment of formal abolition, but looks hard at the aftermath of abolition, and also at the ways abolition was commemorated and remembered in later years. This book complicates the conventional story that global abilition was essentially a British moralizing effort, "among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations". Using comparison and connection, this book tells a story of dynamic encounters between local and global contexts, of which the local efforts of British abolition campaigns were a part. Looking at abolitions as a globally shared experience provides an important perspective, not only to the field of slavery and abolition studies, but also the field of global or world history.

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.

Discover unrelenting spirit and strength in the extraordinary true story of Franci: a woman who survived the holocaust against all of the odds 'Achingly moving, gives much-needed hope. Deserves the status both as a valuable historical source and as a stand-out memoir' Daily Express 'A story that needs to be heard' 5***** Reader Review ______ In 1942 Franci Epstein, a young Jewish woman, was imprisoned in Terezin, a concentration camp close to her home in Prague. Few could expect anything other than death. But for Franci it was the start of a journey that would take her into the very heart of Nazi genocide. Through a combination of guile, ingenuity, endurance and sheer bloody mindedness, Franci survived not one but five death camps, including Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. In this astonishing memoir, unpublished for 50 years, Franci lays bare the appalling sacrifices she and other women had to make to survive. It is a story of hope in the face of suffering; of one woman's determination to live. ______ 'First-hand accounts of life in Nazi Death camps never lose their terrible power but few are as extraordinary as Franci's War' Mail on Sunday 'Inspiring . . . Franci is someone many women today will be able to identify with' 5***** Reader Review 'Remarkable' Eva Fogelman 'A heartbreaking story of survival . . . fascinating' 5***** Reader Review 'Deeply moving and extraordinary' Helen Fremont 'Extremely moving, demonstrated amazing strength of will and determination to survive' 5***** Reader Review 'Incredible' Susannah Sirkin 'Devastating' Booklist

"The times Kakar writes about have . . . pervasively influenced every life in Afghanistan. . . . He was continuously faced with different versions of the Afghan experience as his country went through one of the great cataclysms of its history. We are fortunate to have his account."--Robert Canfield, editor of "Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective

"This is the first history of recent events in Afghanistan by a native historian trained in London. Kakar writes objectively about the Soviets, the Afghan government, and the Mujahideen. With personal observations, including years spent in Kabul's notorious Pul-i Charkhi prison, this book is unique in revealing many events hitherto not known or recorded. It will remain a standard work on the tragic years of contemporary Afghanistan."--Richard N. Frye, Harvard University

"Kakar, one of Afghanistan's most distinguished scholars, has provided an outstanding account of a complex and interesting phase of modern Afghanistan history. . . . A fascinating and absorbing analysis . . . exhaustive and most valuable."--Vartan Gregorian, President, Brown University

In The Rise and Fall of Repression in Chile, Pablo Policzer tackles the difficult task of analyzing how authoritarian regimes utilize coercion. Even in relatively open societies, coercive institutions such as the police and military tend to be secretive and mistrustful of efforts by outsiders to oversee their operations. In more closed societies, secrecy is the norm, making coercion that much more difficult to observe and understand. Drawing on organization theory to develop a comparative typology of coercive regimes, Policzer analyzes the structures and mechanisms of coercion in general and then shifts his focus to the early part of the military dictatorship in Chile, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. Policzer's book sheds new light on a fundamental, yet little-examined, period during the Chilean dictatorship. Between 1977 and 1978, the governing junta in Chile quietly replaced the secret police organization known as the Direccion de Informaciones Nacional (DINA) with a different institution, the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI). Policzer provides the first systematic account of why the DINA was created in the first place, how it became the most powerful repressive institution in the country, and why it was suddenly replaced with a different organization, one that carried out repression in a markedly more restrained manner. Policzer shows how the dictatorship's reorganization of its security forces intersected in surprising ways with efforts by human rights watchdogs to monitor and resist the regime's coercive practices. He concludes by comparing these struggles with how dictatorships in Argentina, East Germany, and South Africa organized coercion.

Greta Thunberg. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Anita Sarkeesian. Emma Gonzalez. When women are vocal about political and social issues, too-often they are flogged with attacks via social networking sites, comment sections, discussion boards, email, and direct message. Rather than targeting their ideas, the abuse targets their identities, pummeling them with rape threats, attacks on their appearance and presumed sexual behavior, and a cacophony of misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, and homophobic stereotypes and epithets. Like street harassment and sexual harassment in the workplace, digital harassment rejects women's implicit claims to be taken seriously as interlocutors, colleagues, and peers. Sarah Sobieraj shows that this online abuse is more than interpersonal bullying-it is a visceral response to the threat of equality in digital conversations and arenas that men would prefer to control. Thus identity-based attacks are particularly severe for those women who are seen as most out of line, such as those from racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups or who work in domains dominated by men, such as gaming, technology, politics, and sports. Feminists and women who don't conform to traditional gender norms are also frequently targeted. Drawing on interviews with over fifty women who have been on the receiving end of identity-based abuse online, Credible Threat explains why all of us should be concerned about the hostile climate women navigate online. This toxicity comes with economic, professional, and psychological costs for those targeted, but it also exacts societal-level costs that are rarely recognized: it erodes our civil liberties, diminishes our public discourse, thins the knowledge available to inform policy and electoral decision-making, and teaches all women that activism and public service are unappealing, high-risk endeavors to be avoided. Sobieraj traces these underexplored effects, showing that when identity-based attacks succeed in constraining women's use of digital publics, there are democratic consequences that cannot be ignored.

'A lively and learned guide to the politics, personalities and conflicts that are shaping a dynamic group of countries' FINANCIAL TIMES 'A fascinating and many-layered portrait of Southeast Asia' THANT MYINT-U Why are the region's richest countries such as Malaysia riddled with corruption? Why do Myanmar, Thailand and the Philippines harbour unresolved violent insurgencies? How do deepening religious divisions in Indonesia and Malaysia and China's growing influence affect the region and the rest of the world? Thought-provoking and eye-opening, Blood and Silk is an accessible, personal look at modern Southeast Asia, written by one of the region's most experienced outside observers. This is a first-hand account of what it's like to sit at the table with deadly Thai Muslim insurgents, mediate between warring clans in the Southern Philippines and console the victims of political violence in Indonesia - all in an effort to negotiate peace, and understand the reasons behind endemic violence.

Examines refugees' own strategies for return that do not always relate to formal repatriation schemes. It is well known that there are millions of refugees in Africa. It is less well known that there are milions of refugees who have returned home. This book puts these 'returnees' on the map, documenting some of what happens to people when they go back to their countries of origin and start to pick up the pieces of their lives. Published in association with UNRISD; North America: Africa World Press