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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > Revolutions & coups
The work focuses on a subaltern local sovereignty movement called "Telangana" in India. Over the last ten years, this movement has engaged in a massive political mobilization, including strikes, rallies, work stoppages, occupation of public spaces, electoral contests, 200 and more political suicides and media battles. But, interestingly enough, notwithstanding a political mobilization that has brought day-to-day life to a halt on a number of occasions, it has remained largely invisible in international media and global politics. Fascinated by the social movement's international invisibility as well as the causes and conditions of its eruption around a city/region that has become a showcase of new capitalist development, Muppidi seeks to unpack this issue, showing that this invisibility is not just intrinsically puzzling, but also represents the operation of power on a global scale. Investigating the conditions of invisibility in this instance can therefore tell us something important about the way global power works to produce visibility and invisibility in the 21st century world. This book provides a unique resource for students of Postcolonalism, International relations and South East Asian studies.
Written from the perspective of the factory worker and peasant at the ground level, this study of Russia during the Revolution 1917-21 aims to shed light on the realities of living through and participating in these tumultuous events. The book is intended for undergraduate courses in history, Soviet studies, and politics.
From Bullets to Ballots considers non-state Muslim organizations at different stages of abandoning violence and pursuing their goals through a political process. Some have successfully made the transition. Others are in mid-stream. Some have tried but backtracked, splintered, or simply abandoned such efforts, reverting to pathological violence. Many groups could be case studies, but Phillips has selected the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Kurdistan Workers Party, the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, and the Free Aceh Movement, because they cover the spectrum.This book deals with political strategies for moderating violent Muslim movements by engaging them in the political process. In strong criticism of the Bush administration, Phillips notes that the push for democracy may have increased conflict by giving violent groups "the ballot" which they use to gain power. Focusing on non-state Muslim organizations, From Bullets to Ballots considers the relationship between ideology and policy. Phillips discusses their origin, ideology, structure, and leadership and examines financing, activities, and communications. He assesses the groups' commitment to elections and its acceptance of the responsibility that comes with governance.From Bullets to Ballots draws on twenty years of Phillips' experience working democratization and conflict prevention in the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and South Asia. His recommendations are primarily directed to the United States because he believes the United States should be a leader in promoting democracy around the world. At the same time, he is convinced that the United States must tread softly, or run the risk of fomenting further violence, undermining future democratic development, and setting back its own national interests. This is a provocative, informed, and balanced analysis of the theories behind current policies.
In the mid-twentieth century, a grassroots movement of women-mostly white, middle-class, and conservative-sought to shape the political, cultural, and social ideologies of the baby boomers in what they perceived was a quickly changing world poisoned by communism. In Challenge and Change, June Melby Benowitz draws on a wide variety of primary sources to highlight the connections between the women of the Old Right, the New Right, and today's Tea Party. Through interviews, as well as through their letters to presidents, editors, and one another, Benowitz allows these women to speak for themselves. She examines the issues that stirred them to action-education, health, desegregation, moral corruption, war, patriotism, and the Equal Rights Amendment-and explores the development of the right-wing women's movement and its growth from the mid-twentieth into the twenty-first century.
Concentrating on the turbulent months from February 1917 to November 1918, Geoffrey Swain explores the origins of the Civil War against the wider background of revolutionary Russia. He examines the aims of the anti-Bolshevik insurgents themselves; but he also shows how far the fear of civil war governed the action of the Provisional Government, and even the plans of the Bolsheviks. If the war itself can seem a fairly straightforward line-up of revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, this study reveals how complex were the motives of the people who precipitated it.
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.
This first volume in a new series comprises nine contributions originally presented at a workshop supported by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin in August, 1994. Topics range from right-wing violence in North America to the development, patterns, and causes of violence against fore
In defining Action Directe's mixture of millenarianism, workerism and nihilism, this study explains why the group turned to a strategy of murderous strikes and how a revolutionary political faction emerged in a stable western society.
Originally published in the early 1970s, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China has proved to be one of the most significant and enduring books published in the field. In this new critical edition of that seminal work, Mark Selden revisits the central themes therein and reconsiders them in light of major new theoretical and documentary understandings of the Chinese communist revolution.
Originally published in the early 1970s, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China has proved to be one of the most significant and enduring books published in the field. In this new critical edition of that seminal work, Mark Selden revisits the central themes therein and reconsiders them in light of major new theoretical and documentary understandings of the Chinese communist revolution.
New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution brings together the work of a new, international generation of students of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history. Exploiting new sources made available in China in the 1980s, some chapters in this book bring new events and areas into the study of the CCP. Other chapters provide detailed analyses on the basis of new evidence of long-standing problems in the history of the CCP, such as the rise of Mao Zedong. Yet others are significant because they offer new explanatory frameworks for understanding CCP history, such as the importance of Yanan as symbolic capital. New issues are brought up, such as the role of women, internal CCP terror, the use of opium sales to sustain the Yanan economy, and the great difficulty of controlling mass peasant movements once mobilized. The most important contribution of the volume is to show that the old explanations of the CCP's success - peasant support, organizational strength, the supply of administrative services - are incomplete and do not account for the diverse and heterogeneous nature of the CCP and the great difficulties it had in building up mass support. This volume makes clear that the question of the CCP's success remains one of the most elusive but also most important that historians of China face today.
These essays present fresh insights into the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), from its founding in 1920 to its assumption of state power in 1949. They draw upon considerable archival resources which have recently become available.
In The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzburg does more than introduce his readers to a novel group of supposed witches - the Benandanti, from the northern Italian province of Friulia. He also invents and deploys new and creative ways of tackling his source material that allow him to move beyond their limitations. Witchcraft documents are notoriously tricky sources - produced by elites with fixed views, they are products of questioning designed to prove or disprove guilt, rather than understand the subtleties of belief, and are very often the products of torture. Ginzburg placed great stress on variations in the evidence of the Benandanti over time to reveal changing patterns of belief, and also focused on the concept of 'reading against the text' - essentially looking as much at what is absent from the record as at what is present in it, and attempting to understand what the absences mean. His work not only pioneered the creation of a new school of historical study - 'microhistory' - it is also a great example of the creative thinking skills of connecting things together in an original way, producing novel explanations for existing evidence, and redefining an issue so as to see it in a new light.
The Age of Revolution is the first of four works by Eric Hobsbawm that collectively synthesize the ideas he developed over a lifetime spent studying the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hobsbawm's vision is important - he was a lifelong Marxist whose view of history was shaped by a fascination with social and economic history, yet who privileged evidence over political theory - but the real power of these works, and especially The Age of Revolution, emanates from the wide range of the author's reading and his mastery of the critical thinking skill of evaluation. It is this skill that allows Hobsbawm to combine insights drawn from decades of reading into an original thesis that sees the crucial "long 19th century" as a period shaped by "dual revolution" - the twin impacts of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and the French Revolution on the continent. Hobsbawm supplemented his evaluative excellence with a firm grasp of reasoning, crafting a volume that contains brilliant, clearly-structured arguments which explain complicated ideas via well-chosen examples in ways that make his work accessible to intelligent general readers and scholars alike.
Perhaps no work of history written in the 20th century has done more to undermine an existing consensus and cause its readers to re-evaluate their own preconceptions than has Jonathan Riley-Smith's revisionist account of the motives of the first crusaders. Riley-Smith's thesis - based on extensive original research and firmly rooted in his refusal to uncritically accept the evidence or reasoning of earlier historians - is that the majority of the men who travelled to the east on crusade in the years 1098-1100 were primarily motivated by faith. This finding, which ran directly counter to at least four centuries of consensus that other motives, not least greed for land, were more important, has helped to stimulate exciting reappraisals of the whole crusading movement. Riley-Smith backed it up with forensic examination of the key crusader-inspiring speech delivered by Pope Urban II, looking to clarify the meanings of five competing contemporary accounts in order to understand how an initially simple, and rather confused, appeal for help became a sophisticated rationale for the concept of 'just war.'
Many people want to understand what revolutions are and - especially - how they come about, from the academics who study them to the states that wish to prevent (or, in some cases, provoke) them. But it is arguably the US scholar Theda Skocpol who has done most to create a viable model of revolution, and States and Social Revolutions is the work in which she sets out her intellectual stall. Skocpol's magnum opus can be considered a classic product of the critical thinking skill of problem-solving. She assesses several different revolutions - those of France, Russia and China - and asks new, productive questions about their causes and outcomes. The answers, collectively, allow her to move beyond existing theories such as the 'voluntarist' school (which suggests that revolutionaries have agency) and the Marxist school (which sees state institutions as nothing more than a front for class interests). Skocpol's model assumes that states are autonomous bureaucratic institutions, which act in their own interests - a fundamental re-imagining based on fresh interpretations of the evidence. Her analysis extends beyond the causes of revolution to their consequences, and her argument that the revolutionary state that survives is the one that successfully implements a far-reaching program of reform helps to explain not only why the three revolutions she studied have proved enduringly influential, but also why hundreds of others, less successful, are barely remembered today.
On August 19, 1991, eight high-ranking Soviet officials took over the government of the USSR and proclaimed themselves its new rulers. Less than seventy-two hours later, their coup had collapsed, but it would change the course of history in a way that no one - certainly not the plotters themselves - could have foreseen. The editor of this volume, who witnessed these momentous events, have assembled firsthand accounts of the attempted coup. They include testimonies from "junta" members and military officers, resistance leaders and ordinary citizens, Muscovites and residents of other locales, Russian and foreign journalists, foreign visitors and returning emigres, as well as Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Key documents and photographs complement the individual accounts. The provocative introduction to the volume places the August events in the larger context - from the early days of perestroika and glasnost to the second confrontation at the White House, in October 1993.
A concise account of the life and career of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881 - 1938), the formidable "founder of modern Turkey", who turned the ruins of the old and ramshackle Ottoman Empire into a modern, westernised and secularised nation state. It also provides an introduction to the Turkish Republic itself. Key features: The study of Ataturk is essential to those studying the history of Modern Turkey and also useful for the study of nationalism Turkey has recently become very important to the western powers e.g. during the Gulf War, and its recent history is now of general, not specialist, concern a topical subject - Ataturk's achievements are currently being challenged, particularly by Islamic fundamentalists, and the collapse of the Soviet Union has reopened questions about Turkey's role which Ataturk originally seemed to have settled for good. Readership: Level: Undergraduate and postgraduate, suitable for general reader. Courses: European history in the period of WWl and it's reader aftermath, Near and Middle Eastern History, Age of Dictators.
Originally published in 1931 this volume is a level-headed account of the Bolshevik Revolution and Bolshevist Russia which covers the whole ground of the Revolution, the early history of Bolshevism and the state of Russia in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Based on two visits by the author to Russia, the book presents a picture in which real problems are set against an historical background, examining life under Bolshevism and examining it as a working system.
Originally published in 1928, this book is a result of a visit to Russia by the author who stayed in a remote village and mixed with the local population. A crusader for social justice, Dorothy Buxton in theory saw Bolshevism as a fairer system and went to Russia to see the effects of the Revolution. With an intellectual honesty rarely seen by critics of Soviet Russia, the author examines fundamental questions of sociology and religion with some unexpected conclusions.
A collection of essays first published in Moscow in 1909. Writing from various points of view, the authors reflect the diverse experiences of Russia's failed 1905 revolution. Condemned by Lenin and rediscoverd by dissidents, this translation has relevance for discussions on contemporary Russia.
Children of the Broken Treaty exposes a system of apartheid in Canada that led to the largest youth-driven human rights movement in the country's history. The movement was inspired by Shannen Koostachin, a young Cree woman whom George Stroumboulopoulos named as one of "five teenage girls who kicked ass in history". All Shannen wanted was a decent education. She found an ally in Charlie Angus, who had no idea she was going to change his life and inspire others to change the country. Based on extensive documentation assembled from Freedom of Information requests, Angus establishes a dark, unbroken line that extends from Sir John A. Macdonald's time to today. He provides chilling insight into how Canada -- through breaches of treaties, broken promises, and callous neglect -- deliberately denied Indigenous children their basic human rights. In this new edition of Charlie Angus's award-winning and bestselling book, he brings us up-to-date on the unrelenting epidemic of youth suicides in Indigenous communities, the Thunder Bay inquiry into the shocking deaths of young people there, the powerful impact of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final report, and how the Trudeau government's commitment to Indigenous communities continues to be stymied by decades-old policy roadblocks.
In a time of renewed interest in insurrectionary movements, urban protest, and anti-austerity indignation, the idea of resistance is regaining its relevance in social theory. De-Pathologizing Resistance re-examines resistance as a concept that can aid social analysis, highlighting the dangers of pathologising resistance as illogical and abnormal, or exoticising it in romanticised but patronising terms. Taking a de-pathologising and de-exoticising perspective, this book brings together insights from older and newer studies, the intellectual biographies of its contributing authors, and case studies of resistance in diverse settings, such as Egypt, Greece, Israel, and Mexico. From feminist studies to plaza occupations and anti-systemic uprisings, there is an emerging need to connect the analysis of contemporary protest movements under a broader theoretical re-examination. The idea of resistance-with all of its contradictions and its dynamism-provides such a challenging opportunity. This book was originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.
Over the fifty years between 1940 and 1990, the countries of eastern Africa were embroiled in a range of debilitating and destructive conflicts, starting with the wars of independence, but then incorporating rebellion, secession and local insurrection as the Cold War replaced colonialism. The articles gathered here illustrate how significant, widespread, and dramatic this violence was. In these years, violence was used as a principal instrument in the creation and consolidation of the authority of the state; and it was also regularly and readily utilised by those who wished to challenge state authority through insurrection and secession. Why was it that eastern Africa should have experienced such extensive and intensive violence in the fifty years before 1990? Was this resort to violence a consequence of imperial rule, the legacy of oppressive colonial domination under a coercive and non-representative state system? Did essential contingencies such as the Cold War provoke and promote the use of violence? Or, was it a choice made by Africans themselves and their leaders, a product of their own agency? This book focuses on these turbulent decades, exploring the principal conflicts in six key countries - Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Tanzania. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.
Georgian Portraits chronicles everyday life in the Republic of Georgia in the decade that followed the Rose Revolution of 2003. Recent anthropological developments argue for the use of "afterlives" as an analytical notion through which to understand processes of socio-political change. Based on a series of portraits, Martin Demant Frederiksen and Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen employ the theory of social afterlives to examine the role of revolution in the formation of a modern Georgia. The book contributes to a deeper understanding of life in the aftermath of political reform, depicting the hopefulness of the Georgian population, but also the subsequent return to political disillusionment which lead them to a revolution in the first place. |
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