![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
|
Books > History > World history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945
Sicker provides a synthesis from a wide range of sources that have not previously been integrated to present an unromanticized recapitulation of the events and personalities that led to the troubled birth of modern Israel. Much historical writing on modern Israel, Sicker asserts, is apologetic and editorially filtered in conformity with a traditional Zionist historiography that tends to obscure as much as it reveals. As a result, the emergence of modern Israel is shrouded in a mythology that has little or no place for inconvenient facts or dissonant voices. Sicker examines the nature of the struggles within the Zionist community over the national idea and its implications, and the evolving interactions of that community with the external political environment. This leads him to assign a far more significant role to the so- called right-wing movements than is usually allotted to them in the traditional left-oriented historiography and a more critical assessment of the Zionist leadership. He shows that virtually every major problem faced by contemporary Israel, a half-century after it came into existence, was foreshadowed by the events and circumstances that precipitated and conditioned its emergence. Sicker examines the seemingly irreconcilable differences between the left and right extremes of the political spectrum; between the religious community and the secular; and between the Zionists and the anti-Zionists. Today, a half-century later, these same issues are causing an increasing polarization of Israeli society, with uncertain ramifications for the future.
The first account of the secret police in Eastern Europe after 1989, this book uses a wide range of sources, including archives, to identify what has and has not changed since the end of Communism. After explaining the structure and workings of two of the area's most feared services, Czechoslovakia's StB and Romania's Securitate, the authors detail the creation of new security intelligence institutions, the development of contacts with the West, and forms of democratic control.
The Chronicle of a People's War: The Military and Strategic History of the Cambodian Civil War, 1979-1991 narrates the military and strategic history of the Cambodian Civil War, especially the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), from when it deposed the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 until the political settlement in 1991. The PRK survived in the face of a fierce insurgency due to three factors: an appealing and reasonably well-implemented political program, extensive political indoctrination, and the use of a hybrid army. In this hybrid organization, the PRK relied on both its professional, conventional army, and the militia-like, "territorial army." This latter type was lightly equipped and most soldiers were not professional. Yet the militia made up for these weaknesses with its intimate knowledge of the local terrain and its political affinity with the local people. These two advantages are keys to victory in the context of counterinsurgency warfare. The narrative and critical analysis is driven by extensive interviews and primary source archives that have never been accessed before by any scholar, including interviews with former veterans (battalion commanders, brigade commanders, division commanders, commanders of provincial military commands, commanders of military regions, and deputy chiefs of staff), articles in the People's Army from 1979 to 1991, battlefield footage, battlefield video reports, newsreel, propaganda video, and official publications of the Cambodian Institute of Military History.
Burning the veil draws upon sources from newly-opened archives, exploring the 'emancipation' of Muslim women from the veil, seclusion and perceived male oppression during the Algerian War of decolonisation. The claimed French liberation was contradicted by the violence inflicted on women through rape, torture and destruction of villages. This book examines the roots of this contradiction in the theory of 'revolutionary warfare', and the attempt to defeat the National Liberation Front by penetrating the Muslim family, seen as a bastion of resistance. Striking parallels with contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, French 'emancipation' produced a backlash that led to deterioration in the social and political position of Muslim women. This analysis of how and why attempts to Westernise Muslim women ended in catastrophe has contemporary relevance and will be important to students and academics engaged in the study of French and colonial history, feminism and contemporary Islam. -- .
This book offers a guide to the modern history of Afghanistan. This remote land, made up of many tribes and ethnic peoples, on the borders of Central Asia became a focus of Superpower rivalry and international intrigue after the Soviet invasion in 1979. This book shows how Afghanistan's traditional society has been profoundly shaken up in a cruelly destructive war, causing the world's biggest refugee problem and a chronic instability which threatens the wider region. Books by this author include The Sherley Legend, Conflict Studies on Pakistan and Muslim Fundamentalism and Kurdistan.
When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, he found America's economy, defense, and global position weakened to the point of collapse. The previous seven years of attempted detente with the Soviet Union had resulted in the worst foreign policy failures in American history. As the distinguished diplomatic historian Richard C. Thornton shows in this thorough reassessment of Reagan's presidency, written for the 40th anniversary of his election, the new president was determined to rebuild American economic and military power and to restore the Western Alliance. Reagan's "Victory Program" supported anti-Soviet resistance movements in communist countries, attacked the financial underpinnings of the Soviet economy, and boldly challenged the Soviet Union's forward positions around the world. The deployment of Pershing II missiles to Europe in 1983 restored the balance of power in Europe and, combined with the U.S. military buildup, reestablished strategic equilibrium between the United States and the Soviet Union by the end of Reagan's first term. As America faces a host of new challenges in the world today, this reexamination will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners alike.
"The Geopolitics of the Cold War and Narratives of Inclusion" develops alternative accounts of feminist field formation, contrasting the explanatory possibilities of approaches drawn from the history of ideas, the sociology of knowledge, and Foucauldian archaeology. These accounts illuminate intricate and unexpected connections between a prominent feminist journal and geopolitical forces, such as the Cold War, increased federal funding for higher education, changing priorities within philanthropic foundations, and the emergence of development studies and subfields such as Women in Development. By complicating the history of academic feminism, the book offers new insights into the contours of transnational feminist scholarship in relation to key concepts advanced by U.S. scholars of color.
In July 1995, the Bosnian Serb Army commanded by General Ratko Mladic attacked the enclave of Srebrenica, a UN "safe area" since 1993, and massacred about 8,000 Bosniac men. While the responsibility for the massacre itself lays clearly with the Serb political and military leadership, the question of the responsibility of various international organizations and national authorities for the fall of the enclave is still passionately discussed, and has given rise to various rumors and conspiracy theories. Follow-up investigations by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and by several commissions have dissipated most of these rumors and contributed to a better knowledge of the Srebrenica events and the part played by the main local and international actors. This volume represents the first systematic, comparative analysis of those investigations. It brings together analyses from both the external standpoint of academics and the inside perspective of various professionals who participated directly in the inquiries, including police officers, members of parliament, high-ranking civil servants, and other experts. Evaluating how institutions establish facts and ascribe responsibilities, this volume presents a historiographical and epistemological reflection on the very possibility of writing a history of the present time. Isabelle Delpla is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University Montpellier III. Her research focuses on international ethics and justice and the relationships between philosophy and anthropology. She has conducted fieldwork in Bosnia with victim associations, Hague witnesses, and convicted war criminals. Xavier Bougarel is Researcher at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. He is currently researching the wars of the 1990s and their aftermath in the former Yugoslavia and the transformations of Islam in the post-Communist Balkans. Jean-Louis Fournel is Professor at the University of Paris VIII. His research focuses on the history of warfare, political thought, and the rhetoric of the Italian Renaissance. Between 1997 and 2001, he directed several European cooperation programs with universities in Bosnia- Herzegovina. In 1994, while the city was under siege, he co-organized the initiative for a sister relationship between his university and that of Sarajevo.
The civil rights movement occupies a prominent place in popular thinking and scholarly work on post-1945 U.S. history. Yet the dominant narrative of the movement remains that of a nonviolent movement born in the South during the 1950s that emerged triumphant in the early 1960s, only to be derailed by the twin forces of Black Power and white backlash when it sought to move outside the South after 1965. African American protest and political movements outside the South appear as ancillary and subsequent to the “real” movement in the South, despite the fact that black activism existed in the North, Midwest, and West in the 1940s, and persisted well into the 1970s. This book brings together new scholarship on black social movements outside the South to rethink the civil rights narrative and the place of race in recent history. Each chapter focuses on a different location and movement outside the South, revealing distinctive forms of U.S. racism according to place and the varieties of tactics and ideologies that community members used to attack these inequalities, to show that the civil rights movement was indeed a national movement for racial justice and liberation.
Here Singapore's President S.R. Nathan tells his own story, taking the reader back with him to his childhood, to modest beginnings and life as a runaway in Singapore and Malaya, and then the experience of renewed hope during the Japanese occupation. After a belated and limited university education, as well as a short spell as a social worker dealing with seafarers, he witnessed from inside the Labour Reserch Unit the birth of Singapore's modern trade union movement. Shortly after Singapore achieved full independence, he joined the staff of the newly established Ministry of Foreign Affairs, retiring - as he thought - as Permanent Secretary. However, he did not retire. After being asked to run the Straits Times newspaper for a time, he served as High Commissioner in Malaysia and Ambassador in the United States. Few people have packed so much into a life. And then, at an age when most people are well beyond the end of their working lives, he was elected President of Singapore, in which role he has won the hearts of many people in Singapore and abroad.
"Spain Transformed" addresses the sweeping social and cultural changes that characterized the late Franco regime. Essential to explaining the dictatorship's extraordinary longevity, the strikingly successful transition to democracy following Franco's death in 1975. and the peace and prosperity enjoyed by Spain since then, this watershed period has received scant attention from scholars until now. This wide-ranging collection reassesses the dictatorship's latter years by drawing on a wealth of new material and ideas, using an interdisciplinary approach.
This book examines the political career of Hua Guofeng, Mao's successor as paramount leader in 1976. Hua emerged seemingly out of nowhere following an unexceptional career as a young revolutionary in Shanxi and a provincial official in Hunan. It was in Hunan that Hua became well-known to Mao and Hua's loyalty to Mao while he was there, just when Mao needed it most, helped to facilitate Hua's later ascent to power. On emerging as paramount leader, Hua moved quickly to arrest his opponents, the Gang of Four. As head of party, state and military, Hua looked well set to remain in power indefinitely. Just over two years later Hua had been eclipsed by Deng Xiaoping, a more politically shrewd, progressive and charismatic figure, with a political legacy that far outweighed Hua's modest beginnings. If Hua's rise to power was remarkable, then this fall was even more so.
Focusing on socialism as it has been practised in recent years, this text examines the serious set-backs that face its existence, particularly following events in Eastern Europe. The author argues that it is totalitarianism which is being rejected and not socialism as it was originally conceived. Instead of providing ordinary people, "the workers", with a larger share in economic decision-making, the socialist models have concentrated both economic and political power in the hands of the State, developing a form of state socialism. This second edition re-considers the arguments of the first text, and assesses the decisive swing to the right which has marked the political arena of the 1980s.;The author, Evan Luard, has published a number of titles, many for Macmillan. These include "Conflict and Peace in the Modern International System", "The United Nations: How It Works and What It Does", "The Management of the World Economy", "International Agencies: The Emerging Framework of Interdependence" and "International Society".
Charismatic and committed, John F. Kennedy remains one of the most revered, and most disliked, of US Presidents. Dedicated to changing 'the look' of the American Presidency, Kennedy was also pledged to changing the nature of US foreign policy-making. Victory in the Cold War was possible, he said, and the greatest challenge to that victory was in the Asian/Pacific region. Success there would signal the end of the communist versus capitalist confrontation. America 'can do it', he vowed. This book describes the Kennedy administration's desperate efforts to achieve the impossible dream: an American Cold War victory throughout Asia and the Pacific.
This is the first in-depth reconstruction of a major British decolonization based fully on original documentation. Robert Holland's unique case-study is essential reading for anybody interested in the response of policy makers to the challenge of 'terrorism' overseas after 1945, the liquidation of the British Empire, the breakdown of ethnic co-existence under intense pressure, and the effects of regional destabilization on the wider international system.
The 1973 military coup which overthrew the democratically elected left wing government of Salvador Allende gave previously peripheral elements of the right the opportunity to exercise almost unlimited political and economic power. However, with the return to democracy in 1990, the right had to adapt to electoral politics. This book examines whether it is conforming to the rules of the electoral game or still harking back to the golden age of military politics, a question of paramount importance to the future of Chile's still nascent democracy.
In the period after World War II, the United States under the Truman administration provided Turkey with military assistance under the Truman Doctrine and gained admission for Turkey into the NATO alliance in 1952, which blocked Soviet entry to the Middle East.;In this text the author describes, for the viewpoint of a particpant, how this process took place. In this memoir, McGhee concentrates on Turkey during the period 1947-53, from the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine through the initiation of the massive US aid that enabled Turkey to build militarily and economically to meet its NATO responsibilities. Much of the source material used includes memorandums of conversations with the President, Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Turkey during successive diplomatic roles as well as documents released by the Department of State archives. George McGhee has also written "At the Creation of a New Germany" and "Envoy to the Middle World" and edited "Diplomacy for the Future".
One of our most celebrated historians shows how we can use the lessons of the past to build a new post-covid society in Britain The 'duty of care' which the state owes to its citizens is a phrase much used, but what has it actually meant in Britain historically? And what should it mean in the future, once the immediate Covid crisis has passed? In A Duty of Care, Peter Hennessy divides post-war British history into BC (before covid) and AC (after covid). He looks back to Sir William Beveridge's classic identification of the 'five giants' against which society had to battle - want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness - and laid the foundations for the modern welfare state in his wartime report. He examines the steady assault on the giants by successive post-war governments and asks what the comparable giants are now. He lays out the 'road to 2045' with 'a new Beveridge' to build a consensus for post-covid Britain with the ambition and on the scale that was achieved by the first.
Told for the first time, the riveting story of how common people-miners, cooks, former soldiers-shook off the intimidation of Serbian strongman Slobadan Milosevic and overthrew, peacefully, his tyrannical regime. Based on numerous interviews with participants, from the man in the street to top officials in the Serbian regime, The Fall of Milosevicrecounts the exhilaration, fear and chaos of a population rising in opposition to a tyrant, the “Butcher of the Balkans.” As the people gather in protest, behind the scenes the pillars of Milosevic’s regime crumble as politicians, military officers, and the police desert a leader no longer legitimate in the eyes of the people. This is the story of individuals facing down fear and rising up for democracy.
With the Israeli-Palestinian Peace process still unresolved, the man who led the emerging Palestinian state through the turbulent post-Arafat era, former Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie, unveils for the first time his record of the 1993 Oslo negotiations which led to this point. The charismatic Qurie, also known as Abu Ala, was pivotal to the Oslo and post-Oslo talks, and the real, if volatile, friendships he formed with his Israeli counterparts Uri Savir and Shimon Peres helped create a fundamental shift in both sides' perception of the other. Qurie's story offers a longawaited perspective on the protracted and often nail-biting negotiations which changed the Middle East forever. The issues which the Oslo talks came so close to, but ultimately failed in, resolving -namely, refugees, borders, security, Jerusalem, are now once again on the negotiating table. In this context, Qurie's candid account of secret deals, hoarsely-argued compromises and astonishing volte-faces assumes huge importance for historians and for those shaping the future of Palestine and the peace process. From Oslo to Jerusalem is not only an indispensable record, but also a compelling narrative of the drama, emotion and personalities behind a turning-point in the history of the modern Middle East.
The importance of oil for national military-industrial complexes appeared more clearly than ever in the Cold War. This volume argues that the confidential acquisition of geoscientific knowledge was paramount for states, not only to provide for their own energy needs, but also to buttress national economic and geostrategic interests and protect energy security. By investigating the postwar rebuilding and expansion of French and Italian oil industries from the second half of the 1940s to the early 1960s, this book shows how successive administrations in those countries devised strategies of oil exploration and transport, aiming at achieving a higher degree of energy autonomy and setting up powerful oil agencies that could implement those strategies. However, both within and outside their national territories, these two European countries had to confront the new Cold War balances and the interests of the two superpowers.
Even 35 years after Harold Macmillan's resignation in 1963, opinions are sharply divided over his achievements as a politician and prime minister. This volume contributes to the debate about Macmillan's political role, his successes and his failures, by examining key aspects of his political life. Biographers, historians, and contemporaries present facets of Macmillan's life, his political visions, his skills, successes and failures in his personal life as well as in his domestic and foreign policies. With most official papers covering his active political life until his resignation now in the public domain, a more considered judgement about his party political and his governmental activities is possible. Taking account of this newly available documentary evidence, there is much yet to be written on Harold Macmillan's career, but this collection bears witness to the fact that his was a magnificent life.
A general history of the critical first year of the Korean War, this study deals primarily with relations between General Douglas MacArthur and President Harry S. Truman from June 1950 to April 1951, a period that defined the war's direction until General Mark Clark, the final U.N. Commander, signed the Armistice two years later. Although the ever-changing military situation is outlined, the main focus is on policymaking and the developing friction between Truman and MacArthur. Wainstock contradicts the common view that MacArthur and Truman were constantly at odds on the basic aims of the war. In the matter of carrying the fight to Communist China, MacArthur and the Joint Chiefs differed only on timing, not on the need for such action. The end of the Cold War has provided historians with a better opportunity to study the forces that shaped the thinking of America's leaders at the time of the Korean War. The sheer quantity of material now available, while daunting, is filled with colorful and outstanding personalities, dramatic action, and momentous actions that have had an impact on world events even to the present day. Wainstock ultimately concludes that Washington placed too much emphasis on anti-Communist ideology, rather than long-term national interest, in the decision first to intervene in the war and later to cross the crucial 38th Parallel. He also emphasizes the important contributions of General Matthew B. Ridgway in stopping the Chinese offensive and in influencing Washington's decision not to carry the war to Communist China.
From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s West German foreign policy underwent substantial transformations: from bilateral to multilateral, from reactive to proactive. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was an ideal setting for this evolution, enabling the Federal Republic to take the lead early on in Western preparations for the conference and to play a decisive role in the actual East-West negotiations leading to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. Based on extensive original research of recently released documents, spanning more than fifteen archives in eight countries, this study is a substantial contribution to scholarly discussions on the history of detente, the CSCE and West German foreign policy. The author stresses the importance of looking beyond the bipolarity of the Cold War decades and emphasizes the interconnectedness of European integration and European detente. He highlights the need to place the genesis of the CSCE conference in its historical context rather than looking at it through the prism of the events of 1989, and shows that the bilateral and multilateral elements (Ostpolitik and the CSCE) were parallel rather than successive phenomena, parts of the same complex process and in constant interaction with each other. |
You may like...
Air Pollution and Health
Anthony K. Barbour, N.A. Burdett, …
Paperback
R1,056
Discovery Miles 10 560
The Egyptian Heaven and Hell: Volume III…
E. A. Wallis Budge
Hardcover
R4,357
Discovery Miles 43 570
Lead Poisoning - Exposure, Abatement…
Joseph J. Breen, Cindy R. Stroup
Hardcover
R4,648
Discovery Miles 46 480
|