In this first examination of Lenin's genealogical and political connections to East European Jews, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern reveals the broad cultural meanings of indisputable evidence that Lenin's maternal grandfather was a Jew. He examines why and how Lenin's Jewish relatives converted to Christianity, explains how Lenin's vision of Russian Marxism shaped his identity, and explores Lenin's treatment of party colleagues of Jewish origin and the Jewish Question in Europe. Petrovsky-Shtern also uncovers the continuous efforts of the Soviet communists to suppress Lenin's Jewishness and the no less persistent attempts of Russian extremists to portray Lenin as a Jew. In this fascinating book, Petrovsky-Shtern expands our understanding not only of Lenin, but also of Russian and Soviet handling of the Jewish Question.

Aylan, Isis, Begum, Grenfell, Trump. Harambe, Guantanamo, Syria, Brexit, Johnson. COVID, migrants, trolling, George Floyd, Trump! Gazing over the fractured, contested territories of the current global situation, Watkin finds that all these diverse happenings have one element in common. They occur when biopolitical states, in trying to manage and protect the life rights of their citizens, habitually end up committing acts of coercion or disregard against the very people they have promised to protect. When states tasked with making us live find themselves letting us die, then they are practitioners of a particular kind of force that Watkin calls bioviolence. This book explores and exposes the many aspects of contemporary biopower and bioviolence: neglect, exclusion, surveillance, regulation, encampment, trolling, fake news, terrorism and war. As it does so, it demonstrates that the very term 'violence' is a discursive construct, an effect of language, made real by our behaviours, embodied by our institutions and disseminated by our technologies. In short, bioviolence is how the contemporary powers that be make us do what they want. Resolutely interdisciplinary, this book is suitable for all scholars, students and general readers in the fields of IR, political theory, philosophy, the humanities, sociology and journalism.

Rethinking the Cuban Revolution offers new perspectives on the political and cultural life of the Cuban Revolution based on inter-disciplinary methods. Contributions reassess the national survival of the Revolution, and propose new approaches to cultural and political identity in Cuba. * Presents original research data based on contemporary fieldwork and archival research, which rethinks the political and cultural life of the Cuban Revolution * Innovative approaches question the assumption that Cuban revolutionary policy and practice function according to top-down structure * Combines an indispensable understanding of the importance of nation in the Cuban context with an awareness of regional or transnational actors and patterns * Reassesses the national survival of the Revolution beyond the Special Period, and propose new approaches to cultural and political identity in Cuba

The apartheid state was at war. It was a conflict intended to stifle demands for freedom, subjugate Southern Africa and benefit the grip on power by the ruling elite. It was a fight for survival, which was to intensify in the two decades before South Africa’s liberation in 1994. While internal resistance grew, the United Nations imposed mandatory sanctions prohibiting the sale of strategic goods such as arms and oil to South Africa. The regime was confronted with an existential threat – isolation. A covert network of over 50 countries, including big powers and sworn enemies, was constructed to counter sanctions to illegally supply guns to Pretoria. Under the cloak of secrecy, allies in corporations, banks, governments and intelligence agencies sprung into action.

Apartheid, Guns And Money: A Tale Of Profit is an exposé of this machinery created in defence of apartheid. They include heads of states, arms dealers, aristocrats, plutocrats, senators, bankers, spies, journalists and members of secret lobby groups. Moving in the shadows, these people were complicit in a crime against humanity. The motivation for some was ideological as part of the Cold War anti-communism crusade. Others felt kinship with the last white regime in Africa. The book also addresses questions of unsolved murders and domestic complicity by South African business with the apartheid state.

This deeply researched book lifts the lid on some of the darkest secrets of apartheid’s economic crimes never before fully investigated. The stories weave together material collected in over two dozen archives in eight countries over four years, providing readers with an insight into tens of thousands of pages of newly declassified documents. Interviews with businessmen, politicians, sanctions busters and freedom fighters provide eyewitness accounts of acts of complicity and contrition.

The book argues that networks of state capture have been with us for decades. These must be confronted to deal with the corrupt networks in our democratic political system. In forging the country’s future a new generation needs to grapple with the baffling silence of apartheid-era economic crime and ask difficult questions of those who benefitted from it. This book provides the evidence and the motivation to do so.

A Maoist revolution has been raging in Nepal since 1996. In 1999, Li Onesto became the first foreign journalist to travel deep into the guerrilla zones of this Himalayan country. Allowed unprecedented access, she interviewed political and military leaders, guerrilla fighters, villagers in areas under Maoist control, and relatives of those killed by government forces. Dispatches provides invaluable analysis of the roots of an insurgency that is now on the threshold of seizing power. As journal and photo-essay, the book gives a vivid, first-hand look at the social and economic conditions that have fueled this revolution and allows readers to meet some of the key people involved. desperate measures. Women recount how they defied relatives, fled arranged marriages, and broke with social taboos to join the people's army. Guerrilla commanders and fighters fresh from military encounters discuss strategy and tactics. Millions of people now live in areas in Nepal under guerrilla control, where peasants are running grass-roots institutions, exercising what they call new 'people's power'. Dispatches describes these transformations -- the establishment of new governing committees and courts, the confiscation and re-division of land, new cultural and social practices, and the emergence of a new outlook. military support to the counter-insurgency efforts of the Nepalese regime and Onesto analyzes this developing in the larger international situation and the US 'war on terrorism'.

This is the story of the decline and fall of an empire, a region devastated by war, and a world stage fundamentally transformed by the Russian Revolution. Bauer's magisterial work - available in English for the first time in full - charts the evolution of three simultaneous, overlapping revolutionary waves: a national revolution for self-determination, which brought down imperial Austro-Hungary; a bourgeois revolution for parliamentary republics and universal suffrage; and a social revolution for workers' control, factory councils, and industrial democracy. The brief but crowning achievement of Red Vienna, alongside Bauer's unique theorization of an "integral socialism" - an attempted synthesis of revolutionary communism and social democracy - is a vital part of the left's intellectual and historical heritage. Today, as movements once again struggle with questions of reform or revolution, political strategy, and state power, this is a crucial resource. Bauer tells the story of the Austrian Revolution with all the immediacy of a central participant, and all the insight of a brilliant and original theorist.

"From the cry of a tiny insect, one can hear the sound of a vast world. . . ."

So begins Zhang Daye's preface to "The World of a Tiny Insect," his haunting memoir of war and its aftermath. In 1861, when China's devastating Taiping rebellion began, Zhang was seven years old. The Taiping rebel army occupied Shaoxing, his hometown, and for the next two years, he hid from Taiping soldiers, local bandits, and imperial troops and witnessed gruesome scenes of violence and death. He lost friends and family and nearly died himself from starvation, illness, and encounters with soldiers on rampages.

Written thirty years later, "The World of a Tiny Insect" gives voice to this history. A rare premodern Chinese literary work depicting a child's perspective, Zhang's sophisticated text captures the macabre images, paranoia, and emotional excess that defined his wartime experience and echoed throughout his adult life. The structure, content, and imagery of "The World of a Tiny Insect" reveals a carefully crafted, fragmented narrative that skips in time and probes the relationships between trauma and memory, revealing both history and its psychic impact. Xiaofei Tian's annotated translation includes an introduction that situates "The World of a Tiny Insect" in Chinese history and literature and explores the relevance of the book to the workings of traumatic memory.

Zhang Daye (b. 1854) is known only as the author of "The World of a Tiny Insect." Xiaofei Tian is professor of Chinese literature at Harvard University. Among her recent publications is "Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China."

"The author and narrator recounts his terrible experiences and miraculous survivals with a child's curiosity and in a vivid, straightforward way. But he also embeds what happened to him in a larger historical, philosophical, moral, and aesthetic context. No comparable primary source available in English does anything like this for the Taiping Rebellion." --Judith Zeitlin, University of Chicago

This book interprets Puerto Rico's first and most significant attempt to end its colonial dependence on Spain. Looking at the imperial policies and conditions within Puerto Rico that led to the 1868 rebellion known as El Grito de Lares, the author compares the colonization of Puerto Rico with that of Spanish America and explores why the island's independence movement began decades after Spain's other colonies of the region had revolted. Through the extensive use of previously unresearched archival materials of the rebel movement, she corrects many errors found in earlier accounts of the revolt, and offers new interpretations of the movement's impact on Spanish-Puerto Rican relations.

How the Irish Revolution was shaped by international actors and events The Irish War of Independence is often understood as the culmination of centuries of political unrest between Ireland and the English. However, the conflict also has a vitally important yet vastly understudied international dimension. The Irish Revolution: A Global History reassesses the conflict as an inherently transnational event, examining how circumstances and individuals abroad shaped the course Ireland's struggle for independence. Bringing together leading international scholars of modern Ireland, its diaspora, and the British Empire, this volume discusses the Irish revolution in a truly global sense. The text situates the conflict in the wider context of the international flourishing of anti-colonial movements following World War I. Despite the differences between these movements, their proponents communicated extensively with each other, learning from and engaging with other revolutionaries in anti-imperial metropoles such as Paris, London, and New York. The contributors to this volume argue that Irish nationalists at home and abroad were intimately involved in this exchange, from mobilizing Ireland's vast diaspora in support of Irish independence to engaging directly with radical causes elsewhere. The Irish Revolution is a vital work for all those interested in Irish history, providing a new understanding of Ireland's place in the evolving postwar world.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Why the conventional wisdom about the Arab Spring is wrong The Arab Spring promised to end dictatorship and bring self-government to people across the Middle East. Yet everywhere except Tunisia it led to either renewed dictatorship, civil war, extremist terror, or all three. In The Arab Winter, Noah Feldman argues that the Arab Spring was nevertheless not an unmitigated failure, much less an inevitable one. Rather, it was a noble, tragic series of events in which, for the first time in recent Middle Eastern history, Arabic-speaking peoples took free, collective political action as they sought to achieve self-determination. Focusing on the Egyptian revolution and counterrevolution, the Syrian civil war, the rise and fall of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and the Tunisian struggle toward Islamic constitutionalism, Feldman provides an original account of the political consequences of the Arab Spring, including the reaffirmation of pan-Arab identity, the devastation of Arab nationalisms, and the death of political Islam with the collapse of ISIS. He also challenges commentators who say that the Arab Spring was never truly transformative, that Arab popular self-determination was a mirage, and even that Arabs or Muslims are less capable of democracy than other peoples. Above all, The Arab Winter shows that we must not let the tragic outcome of the Arab Spring disguise its inherent human worth. People whose political lives had been determined from the outside tried, and for a time succeeded, in making politics for themselves. That this did not result in constitutional democracy or a better life for most of those affected doesn't mean the effort didn't matter. To the contrary, it matters for history-and it matters for the future.

Containing a wealth of new scholarship and rare primary documents, The Black Jacobins Reader provides a comprehensive analysis of C. L. R. James's classic history of the Haitian Revolution. In addition to considering the book's literary qualities and its role in James's emergence as a writer and thinker, the contributors discuss its production, context, and enduring importance in relation to debates about decolonization, globalization, postcolonialism, and the emergence of neocolonial modernity. The Reader also includes the reflections of activists and novelists on the book's influence and a transcript of James's 1970 interview with Studs Terkel. Contributors. Mumia Abu-Jamal, David Austin, Madison Smartt Bell, Anthony Bogues, John H. Bracey Jr., Rachel Douglas, Laurent Dubois, Claudius K. Fergus, Carolyn E. Fick, Charles Forsdick, Dan Georgakas, Robert A. Hill, Christian Hogsbjerg, Selma James, Pierre Naville, Nick Nesbitt, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Matthew Quest, David M. Rudder, Bill Schwarz, David Scott, Russell Maroon Shoatz, Matthew J. Smith, Studs Terkel

Prior to the 1980s Honduras was an obscure backwater, of little public or policy concern in the United States. With the advent of the Reagan administration, however, Hondurans found themselves at the center of the US-Central American imbroglio, a launching pad for the administration's contra war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and for counterinsurgency operations against guerrillas in El Salvador. Placing events in the context of Honduran history, the authors provide penetrating insights into the causes of revolution in Central America and the sources of stability that enabled Honduras to escape the civil strife that consumed its neighbors. At the same time, the work offers a fascinating account of Honduran domestic politics and of the personalities, motives, and maneuvers of policymakers on both sides of the U.S.-Honduras relationship-too often a tale of intrigue, violence, and corruption.

Mary S. Barton explores counterterrorism in the years between World War I and World War II, starting with the attempted assassination of French Prime Minister George Clemenceau in 1919, and taking the story up to and beyond the double assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Jean Louis Barthou in 1934. In telling the story of counterterrorism over this period, Barton gives particular emphasis to Britain's attempts to quell revolutionary nationalist movements in India and throughout its empire, and to the Great Powers' combined efforts to counter the activities of the Communist International. Further to this, Barton discusses the establishment of the tools and infrastructure of modern intelligence, including the cooperation between the United Kingdom and United States which would evolve into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. She gives weight to forgotten terrorism and arms traffic conventions, and explores the facilitating role which the Paris Peace Conference and the League of Nations played in this context. The stories told in Counterterrorism Between the Wars play out across the world, from the remains of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires, to the Northwest Frontier and the Bengal Province of British India. A century after the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Counterterrorism Between the Wars is the first comprehensive study to fit together the mass production of weapons during the Great War with the diplomacy of the interwar era and the rise of state-sponsored terrorism during the 1920s and 1930s.

On Easter Monday, 1916, Irish rebels poured into Dublin's streets to proclaim an independent republic. Ireland's long struggle for self-government had suddenly become a radical and bloody fight for independence from Great Britain. Irish nationalists mounted a week-long insurrection, occupying public buildings and creating mayhem before the British army regained control. The Easter Rising provided the spark for the Irish revolution, a turning point in the violent history of Irish independence. In this highly original history, acclaimed scholar R. F. Foster explores the human dimension of this pivotal event. He focuses on the ordinary men and women, Yeats's "vivid faces," who rose "from counter or desk among grey / Eighteenth-century houses" and took to the streets. A generation made, not born, they rejected the inherited ways of the Church, their bourgeois families, and British rule. They found inspiration in the ideals of socialism and feminism, in new approaches to love, art, and belief. Drawing on fresh sources, including personal letters and diaries, Foster summons his characters to life. We meet Rosamond Jacob, who escaped provincial Waterford for bustling Dublin. On a jaunt through the city she might visit a modern art gallery, buy cigarettes, or read a radical feminist newspaper. She could practice the Irish language, attend a lecture on Freud, or flirt with a man who would later be executed for his radical activity. These became the roots of a rich life of activism in Irish and women's causes. Vivid Faces shows how Rosamond and her peers were galvanized to action by a vertiginous sense of transformation: as one confided to his diary, "I am changing and things around me change." Politics had fused with the intimacies of love and belief, making the Rising an event not only of the streets but also of the hearts and minds of a generation.

In August 1914, Russia entered the First World War, and with it, the Imperial family of Tsar Nicholas II was thrust into a conflict from which they would not emerge. His eldest child, Olga Nikolaevna, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, had begun a diary in 1905 when she was 10 years old and kept writing her thoughts and impressions of day-to-day life as a Grand Duchess until abruptly ending her entries when her father abdicated his throne in March 1917. Held at the State Archives of the Russian Federation in Moscow, Olga's diaries during the wartime period have never been translated into English until this volume. At the outset of the war, Olga and her sister, Tatiana, worked as nurses in a military hospital along with their mother, Tsarina Alexandra. Olga's younger sisters, Maria and Anastasia, visited their own infirmaries to help raise the morale of the wounded and sick soldiers. The strain was indeed great as Olga records her impressions of tending to the officers who had been injured and maimed in the fighting on the Russian front. Concerns about her sickly brother, Aleksei abound, as well those for her father who is seen attempting to manage the ongoing war.Gregori Rasputin appears in entries, too, in an affectionate manner as one would expect of a family friend. While the diaries reflect the interests of a young woman, her tone increases in seriousness as the Russian army suffers setbacks, Rasputin is ultimately murdered, and a popular movement against her family begins to grow. At the point Olga ends her writing in 1917, the author continues the story by translating letters and impressions from family intimates, such as Anna Vyrubova, as well as the diary kept by Nicholas II himself. Finally, once the Imperial family has been put under house arrest by the revolutionaries, observations by Alexander Kerensky, head of the initial Provisional Government, are provided, these too in English translation for the first time. Olga would offer no further personal writings as she and the rest of her family were crowded into the basement of a house in the Urals and shot to death in July 1918.The Diary of Olga Romanov: Royal Witness to the Russian Revolution, translated and introduced by scientist and librarian Helen Azar, and supplemented with additional primary source material, is a remarkable document of a young woman who did not choose to be part of a royal family and never exploited her own position, but lost her life simply because of what her family represented.

The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution brings together a sweeping range of expert and innovative contributions to offer engaging and thought-provoking insights into the history and historiography of this epochal event. Each chapter presents the foremost summations of academic thinking on key topics, along with stimulating and provocative interpretations and suggestions for future research directions. Placing core dimensions of the history of the French Revolution in their transnational and global contexts, the contributors demonstrate that revolutionary times demand close analysis of sometimes tiny groups of key political actors - whether the king and his ministers or the besieged leaders of the Jacobin republic - and attention to the deeply local politics of both rural and urban populations. Identities of class, gender and ethnicity are interrogated, but so too are conceptions and practices linked to citizenship, community, order, security, and freedom: each in their way just as central to revolutionary experiences, and equally amenable to critical analysis and reflection. This volume covers the structural and political contexts that build up to give new views on the classic question of the 'origins of revolution'; the different dimensions of personal and social experience that illuminate the political moment of 1789 itself; the goals and dilemmas of the period of constitutional monarchy; the processes of destabilisation and ongoing conflict that ended that experiment; the key issues surrounding the emergence and experience of 'terror'; and the short- and long-term legacies, for both good and ill, of the revolutionary trauma - for France, and for global politics.

'A wonderful, inspiring story told with scholarship, passion and wit' - Miriam Margolyes 'A must-read' - Independent on Sunday With an introduction by Dr Helen Pankhurst. An illuminating and riveting exploration of the women's movement in Britain, and the extraordinary women behind it. From the passing of the Marriage and Divorce Act in 1857 to all women attaining the vote in 1928, the struggle for suffrage in the United Kingdom was to be fought using the weapons of intellect, searing rhetoric, and violence in the streets. Ordinary women rose up to defy the roles prescribed by their society to become heroes in the battle for equality. Using anecdotes and accounts by both famous and hitherto lesser-known suffragettes and suffragists, March, Women, March explores how the voices of women came to be heard throughout the land in the pursuit of equal voting rights for all women. Lucinda Hawksley brings the main protagonists of the women's movement to life, sharing diary extracts and letters that show the true voices of these women, while their portrayals in literature and art - as well as the media reports of the day - show just how much of an impact these trailblazers made. 'An accessible and engaging guide to the original women's movement' - Daily Telegraph

A concise and accessible history of decolonization in the twentieth century The end of colonial rule in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean was one of the most important and dramatic developments of the twentieth century. In the decades after World War II, dozens of new states emerged as actors in global politics. Long-established imperial regimes collapsed, some more or less peacefully, others amid mass violence. This book takes an incisive look at decolonization and its long-term consequences, revealing it to be a coherent yet multidimensional process at the heart of modern history. Jan Jansen and Jurgen Osterhammel trace the decline of European, American, and Japanese colonial supremacy from World War I to the 1990s. Providing a comparative perspective on the decolonization process, they shed light on its key aspects while taking into account the unique regional and imperial contexts in which it unfolded. Jansen and Osterhammel show how the seeds of decolonization were sown during the interwar period and argue that the geopolitical restructuring of the world was intrinsically connected to a sea change in the global normative order. They examine the economic repercussions of decolonization and its impact on international power structures, its consequences for envisioning world order, and the long shadow it continues to cast over new states and former colonial powers alike. Concise and authoritative, Decolonization is the essential introduction to this momentous chapter in history, the aftershocks of which are still being felt today.

To most Westerners, the Iranian revolution was a shocking spectacle, a distant mass upheaval suddenly breaking into the daily news. It was, in fact, a revolution of the television era, as this book demonstrates. This account of the role of culture and communication in the Iranian revolution also considers revolution as communication in the modern world. Co-authored by participants in the revolutionary upheaval, this study reflects a wide perspective. Drawing on ten years of research, the authors vividly show how the processes and products of modernization actually helped to undermine the very foundation of modernity in Iran. Their work reveals how deeply embedded cultural modes of communication coupled with crucial media technologies were able to mobilize a population within a repressive political context. Tracing the use of small media (audio and video cassettes) to disseminate the revolution, the authors challenge much of the theory that has dominated international communication studies and, in doing so, question the credibility of the established media. Their book also examines the dilemmas of cultural policymaking based on Islamic principles in a media-saturated domestic and international environment. Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi are co-editors of "Questioning the Media".

The first comprehensive account to record and analyze all deaths arising from the Irish revolution between 1916 and 1921 "A monumental new book [and] an incredible piece of research. . . . Formidable, authoritative and handsomely produced, The Dead of the Irish Revolution is a fitting memorial."-Andrew Lynch, Irish Independent "Will surely serve as the indispensable reference work on this topic for the foreseeable future. . . . A truly remarkable feat of close scholarship and calm exposition."-Gearoid O Tuathaigh, Irish Times Weekend This account covers the turbulent period from the 1916 Rising to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921-a period which saw the achievement of independence for most of nationalist Ireland and the establishment of Northern Ireland as a self-governing province of the United Kingdom. Separatists fought for independence against government forces and, in North East Ulster, armed loyalists. Civilians suffered violence from all combatants, sometimes as collateral damage, often as targets. Eunan O'Halpin and Daithi O Corrain catalogue and analyze the deaths of all men, women, and children who died during the revolutionary years-505 in 1916; 2,344 between 1917 and 1921. This study provides a unique and comprehensive picture of everyone who died: in what manner, by whose hands, and why. Through their stories we obtain original insight into the Irish revolution itself.

The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 is a new history of Russia's revolutionary era as a story of experience-of people making sense of history as it unfolded in their own lives and as they took part in making history themselves. The major events, trends, and explanations, reaching from Bloody Sunday in 1905 to the final shots of the civil war in 1921, are viewed through the doubled perspective of the professional historian looking backward and the contemporary journalist reporting and interpreting history as it happened. The volume then turns toward particular places and people: city streets, peasant villages, the margins of empire (Central Asia, Ukraine, the Jewish Pale), women and men, workers and intellectuals, artists and activists, utopian visionaries, and discontents of all kinds. We spend time with the famous (Vladimir Lenin, Lev Trotsky, Alexandra Kollontai, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Isaac Babel) and with those whose names we don't even know. Key themes include difference and inequality (social, economic, gendered, ethnic), power and resistance, violence, and ideas about justice and freedom. Written especially for students and general readers, this history relies extensively on contemporary texts and voices in order to bring the past and its meanings to life. This is a history about dramatic and uncertain times and especially about the interpretations, values, emotions, desires, and disappointments that made history matter to those who lived it.