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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > Revolutions & coups
In the last years of their existence, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) found themselves facing a similar and very grim state of affairs. After their disintegration, the former Yugoslav republics spiralled into a set of ethnic conflicts that did not leave a single one of them unscathed, and in the ex-Soviet space, conflicts were far more limited. This book offers an in-depth analysis of the difference in state collapses and ensuing conflicts in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia by focusing on their asymmetric ethnofederal structure and the different dynamics of ethnic mobilization that the federal units experienced. Moreover, it explores the links between identity politics and international relations, as the latter has been a latecomer in research on ethnonationalism and ethnic conflict. Finally, it contributes to the literature on the democratization-conflict nexus by proposing that the sequencing of ethnic mobilization and political liberalization has significant effects on the likelihood of conflict. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of Post-Soviet politics, Balkan politics, ethnic conflict, peace and conflict studies, federalism, and more broadly to comparative politics and international relations.
Revolutionary England, c. 1630-c. 1660 presents a series of cutting-edge studies by established and rising authorities in the field, providing a powerful discourse on the events, crises and changes that electrified mid-seventeenth-century England. The descent into civil war, killing of a king, creation of a republic, fits of military government, written constitutions, dominance of Oliver Cromwell, abolition of a state church, eruption into major European conflicts, conquest of Scotland and Ireland, and efflorescence of powerfully articulated political thinking dazzled, bewildered or appalled contemporaries, and has fascinated scholars ever since. Compiled in honour of one of the most respected scholars of early modern England, Clive Holmes, this volume considers themes that both reflect Clive's own concerns and stand at the centre of current approaches to seventeenth-century studies: the relations between language, ideas, and political actors; the limitations of central government; and the powerful role of religious belief in public affairs. Centred chronologically on Clive Holmes' seventeenth-century heartland, this is a focused volume of essays produced by leading scholars inspired by his scholarship and teaching. Investigative and analytical, it is valuable reading for all scholars of England's revolutionary period.
On March 17, 2011, many Syrians rose up against the authoritarian Asad regime that had ruled them with an iron fist for forty years. Initial successes were quickly quashed, and the revolution seemed to devolve into a civil war pitting the government against its citizens and extremist mercenaries. As of late 2015, almost 300,000 Syrians have been killed and over half of a total population of 23 million forced out of their homes. Nine million are internally displaced and over four million are wandering the world, many on foot or in leaky boats. Countless numbers have been disappeared. These shocking statistics and the unstoppable violence notwithstanding, the revolution goes on. The story of the attempted crushing of the revolution is known. Less well covered has been the role of artists and intellectuals in representing to the world and to their people the resilience of revolutionary resistance and defiance. How is it possible that artists, filmmakers and writers have not been cowed into numbed silence but are becoming more and more creative? How can we make sense of their insistence that despite the apocalypse engulfing the country their revolution is ongoing and that their works participate in its persistence? With smartphones, pens, voices and brushes, these artists registered their determination to keep the idea of the revolution alive. Dancing in Damascus traces the first four years of the Syrian revolution and the activists' creative responses to physical and emotional violence.
In 2011 the world watched as Egyptians rose up against a dictator. Observers marveled at this sudden rupture, and honed in on the heroes of Tahrir Square. Revolutionary Egypt analyzes this tumultuous period from multiple perspectives, bringing together experts on the Middle East from disciplines as diverse as political economy, comparative politics and social anthropology. Drawing on primary research conducted in Egypt and across the world, this book analyzes the foundations and future of Egypt's revolution. Considering the revolution as a process, it looks back over decades of popular resistance to state practices and predicts the waves still to come. It also confidently places Egypt's revolutionary process in its regional and international contexts, considering popular contestation of foreign policy trends as well as the reactions of external actors. It draws connections between Egyptians' struggles against domestic despotism and their reactions to regional and international processes such as economic liberalization, Euro-American interventionism and similar struggles further afield. Revolutionary Egypt is an essential resource for scholars and students of social movements and revolution, comparative politics, and Middle East politics, in particular Middle East foreign policy and international relations.
The traditional narrative of the Russian Civil War is one of revolution against counterrevolution, Bolshevik Reds against Tsarist Whites. Liudmila Novikova convincingly demonstrates, however, that the struggle was not between a Communist future and a Tsarist past; instead, it was a bloody fight among diverse factions of a modernizing postrevolutionary state. Focusing on the sparsely populated Arkhangelsk region in northern Russia, she shows that the anti-Bolshevik government there, which held out from 1918 to early 1920, was a revolutionary alternative bolstered by broad popular support. Novikova draws on declassified archives and sources in both Russia and the West to reveal the White movement in the north as a complex social and political phenomenon with a distinct regional context. She documents the politics of the Northern Government and its relations with the British and American forces who had occupied the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk at the end of World War I. As the civil war continued, the increasing involvement of the local population transformed the conflict into a ferocious ""people's war"" until remaining White forces under General Yevgeny Miller evacuated the region in February 1920.
The entry of foreign capital and the adoption of free trade provoked fierce conflicts in many countries of South America during the twenty-first century. In Colombia and Peru, people engaged in clashes, sometimes violent, to defend their livelihood against the encroachments of the free market and the impositions of Wall Street. Farmers organized to save their lands from foreign mining corporations, and cities fought to save their water from toxic contamination. Indian tribes blocked highways to preserve their ancestral lands, and students paralyzed universities to save higher education. In Venezuela the shift toward socialism mobilized those groups previously enjoying privileges. The lightning rod for the clashes in Venezuela was President Hugo Chavez, whose political career spanned most of the period covered in this book. Governments in the three countries tried to quell the turmoil through a combination of corruption, repression, political maneuvering, and propaganda campaigns. Clear and brief chapters offer dramatic accounts of the struggles raging in these three countries. Both thought-provoking and exciting, the text exposes the worst characteristics of the political systems and the growing income inequality in Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela.
In March 1968 Palestinian guerrillas and Jordanian troops combined forces to respond to Israeli raids into Jordan, provoking visions of new unity and future military success. Yet by September 1970 mounting friction between the Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan and King Hussein's regime came to a head with the hijackings at Dawson's Field and the defeat by Jordan's forces of the Palestinians. The savagery of the fighting and the bitter consequences for the Palestinian guerrillas gave this month the name Black September: a name that was to reappear ominously in months to come. Who are the Palestinians? Many people only became aware of their existence because of terrorism, particularly the Black September operation at the Munich Olympics. Yet the Palestinians are at the very heart of the Middle East problem, and this book, first published in 1973, tells their story. The core of the book describes the emergence of the various guerrilla groups, joined by Palestinians hopeful of regaining lost land and lost dignity, and the ideologies and differences of the groups. There are personal interviews with some of the main leaders, and other chapters examine the relationships and interaction between the Palestinian groups and the Soviet bloc, the Chinese, the Third World, the West, and most important, the Israelis themselves.
Egyptians in Revolt investigates the political economy of the Egyptian labor and student movements. Using elements of social movement theory within a broad political economy framework, it assesses labor and student mobilizations in four eras of contemporary Egyptian history: the pre-1952 era, the Nasser era, the Sadat era and the Mubarak era. Egyptians in Revolt examines how both student and labor groups responded to the political economy pressures of the respective eras. Within the context of social movement theory, the book argues that political opportunities and threats have had a significant impact on both student and labor mobilizations. In addition, the book explores how the movements have, at times, been able to affect government policies. However, the argument is made that the inability of both groups to sustain momentum in the long term is due to cooptation efforts by established political forces and the absence of viable and enduring organizational structures that are autonomous of state control. By combining analysis to include both labor and student movements, Egyptians in Revolt is a valuable resource for understanding the Egyptian political economy and its impact on mobilizations. It will therefore be of interest to students and scholars of Middle East Studies, as well as those interested in social movement more broadly.
This book is based on the Fifth Annual Military History Symposium held at the Royal Military College of Canada on 30 and 31 March 1978. It explores the effects of factors such as politics, culture, and economics as well as military considerations for regular armies when dealing with insurgency.
The recent Arab uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East have attracted scholarly attention as popular movements with novel transnational and religious dimensions. What became known as the Arab Spring can be read as part of a broader politics of normative defiance of predominant political and economic orders. From religious conflicts and indigenous sovereign claims to mobilizations of refugees and migrants in camps and urban settings, it may be possible to speak of contemporary insurrectional politics as social movements that emanate from normative positions which pose significant challenges to systemic orders. The purpose of this book is: to identify the material shifts giving rise to insurrectional politics; to reflect on key arenas of insurrection; to map/chart the impact of insurrectional movements on institutions and relations of political governance at national and global levels; and to explore analytics that will advance theorization of insurrectional politics. This volume generates new knowledge on systemic institutional transformations spanning the national and global, by bringing together scholars whose work combines theoretical inquiry with empirical analysis of contemporary insurrectional politics. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Globalizations.
Through mapping the rights discourse and the transformations in transnational finance capitalism since the world wars, and interrogating the connections between the two, Radha D'Souza examines contemporary rights in theory and practice through the lens of the struggles of the people of the Third World, their experiences of national liberation and socialism and their aspirations for emancipation and freedom. Social movements demand rights to remedy wrongs and injustices in society. But why do organisations like the World Bank and IMF, the G7 states and the World Economic Forum want to promote rights? Activists and activist scholars are critical of human rights in their diagnosis of problems. But in their prognosis, they reinstate human rights and bring back through the backdoor what they dismiss through the front. Why are activists and activist scholars unable to 'let go' of human rights? Why do indigenous peoples find the need to invoke the UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous People to make their claims sound reasonable? Are rights in the 20th and 21st centuries the same as rights in the 17th and 18th centuries? This book examines what is entailed in reducing rights to 'human' rights and in the argument 'our understandings of rights are better than theirs' that is popular within social movements and in critical scholarship.
Terrorism is often mistakenly thought of as a modern phenomenon, but it goes back quite some time. A History of Terrorism charts the history of political terror from nineteenth-century Europe to the multinational operations of Arab and other groups today. The question is: What is its true impact today and in the future? Laqueur addresses long-neglected psychological issues concerning the origins of and motivations behind terrorism, and examines the sociology of terrorism in depth: funding, intelligence gathering, weapons and tactics, informers and countermeasures, and the crucial role of the media depiction of the "terrorist personality". Systematic terrorism and current interpretations of terrorism, its common patterns, motives, and aims, are unflinchingly faced and clearly explicated. Laqueur ultimately considers the effectiveness of terrorism and examines the ominous possibility of nuclear blackmail. Originally published in 1977, this book is one of the two most quoted works on terrorism. This expanded edition features a new preface and important contributions by distinguished security expert Bruce Hoffman that apply Laqueur's classic and seemingly timeless work to contemporary terrorism issues.
First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This book comes at a time when the Egyptian nation is facing deep divisions about the notion and definition of 'revolution'. The articles here aim to look at the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and the central role of women within it from a critical perspective. Our objective is not to glorify the revolution or inflate the role of Egyptian women within its parameters, but to analyse and critique both the achievements and setbacks of this revolution and the contributions of various strata of women to the revolutionary process, which is still unfolding. Women's participation is part of a broader picture and needs to be considered as an essential element of the ongoing struggle for freedom and social justice, not in isolation of it. The reader will soon realise that the authors in this book, perhaps, agree on one profound aspect of the 2011 Revolution: the struggle is ongoing, and the revolutionary process is still being shaped and recreated. The story of the Egyptian Revolution still resists any kind of closure despite the ascendance of the military regime once again to power. The years to come will no doubt witness an expansion of the political and cultural archive of the Egyptian and Arab uprisings, accompanied by much academic work on their impact and significance. Women's roles and contributions need to occupy a central position in these academic analyses. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research.
First Published in 1965. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Through extensive archival research in eight different languages, Revolutionary Social Democracy introduces readers to the politics and practices of socialists in Tsarist Russia's imperial borderlands. These parties fought for democracy and workers' power across the entire span of the Russian Empire-from the factories of Warsaw, to the oil fields of Baku, to the autonomous parliament of Finland. Eric Blanc's incisive study of these parties shows that the Russian Revolution was far less Russian than is commonly assumed. And the implications of this discovery challenge the long-held assumptions of historians, sociologists, and activists about the dynamics of revolutionary change under both autocratic and democratic conditions.
This is the first biography in English of an extraordinary polymath whose great genius was stifled and finally extinguished by the Soviet Union. "Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius" is the first biography in English of an extraordinary polymath whose genius was stifled and finally extinguished by the Soviet Union. Today Pavel Florensky is often referred to as the Russian da Vinci. Florensky was, at one and the same time, a supremely gifted philosopher, mathematician, physicist, inventor, engineer and theologian. He was also a poet and wrote studies of history, language and art. Although he taught philosophy for most of his working life, his interests were wide-ranging and profound and included the study of time and space, the theory of relativity, aspects of language, and the properties of materials and geology. His book "The Pillar and the Ground of Truth" is widely seen as a masterpiece of Russian Orthodox theology. Eminent Russian scholar Avril Pyman looks at Florensky's life, from his childhood as the son of a railroad engineer to his mysterious death, and provides a populist perspective on his achievements. "Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius" celebrates the life of this unjustly forgotten victim of the Soviet Union.
In 1848 the continent of Europe was rocked by revolutions: only Great Britain and Russia remained relatively immune to the upheaval. Most spectacularly, the Revolutions swept across the German-speaking lands of central Europe, with the newly-released forces of nationalism and mass popular protest smashing the reactionary Metternich regimes which had held sway since the defeat of Napoleon. The Metternich system was dead: nationalism and national self-determination asserted themselves as the dominant dynamic forces of continental Europe in the later nineteenth century. This impressive history examines the political and social implications of the 1848 Revolutions for the future destiny and shape of Europe as a whole, and explores the wider forces at play in the German lands of nineteenth-century Europe.
This is the first full-length, modern study of the Diggers or 'True Levellers', who were among the most remarkable of the radical groups to emerge during the English Revolution of 1640-60. It was in April 1649 that the Diggers, inspired by the teachings and writings of Gerrard Winstanley, began their occupation of waste land at St George's Hill in Surrey and called on all poor people to join them or follow their example. Acting at a time of unparalleled political change and heightened millenarian expectation, the Diggers believed that the establishment of an egalitarian, property-less society was imminent. The book establishes the local origins of the Digger movement, and sets out to examine pre-civil war social relations and social tensions in the parish of Cobham - from where significant numbers of the Diggers came - and the impact of civil war in the local community. It provides a detailed account of the Surrey Digger settlements and of local reactions to the Diggers, and it explores the spread of Digger activities beyond Surrey. In chapters on the writings and career of Gerrard Winstanley, it seeks to offer a reinterpretation of one of the major thinkers of the English Revolution. This book should be of interest to all those interested in England's mid-seventeenth-century revolution and in the history of radical movements. -- .
As with other terrorist and extremist organizations, religion forms the basis of the Ku Klux Klan's dogmatic philosophy, providing justification for its beliefs and actions. The Klan represents a link to America's cultural past. While America has undergone tremendous social change, the secretive order has since the end of the Civil War kept alive the antiquated values-predicated on racism and religion-of white supremacism. Covering nearly a century of Klan ideology, this book examines the group's religious rhetoric in their songs and literature, from its heyday during the 1920s to 2014.
Three Scottish weavers, James Wilson, Andrew Hardie and John Baird, were hanged and beheaded for high treason in the summer of 1820. Nineteen more men were transported to the penal colony of Botany Bay. Their crime? To have taken up arms against a corrupt and nepotistic parliament, and the aristocratic government that refused to reform it. This 'Radical War' was the culmination of five years of unsuccessful mass petitioning of Westminster by working people in Scotland and England. The contempt and intransigence of the Tory government forced an escalation in tactics, and on Easter Monday of 1820, the call for a general strike was answered throughout the western counties of Scotland. Their demands were threefold: the vote for all men, annual parliaments and equal constituencies. Coupled with an armed rebellion, the strike was met by the full military might of the British state; hundreds were arrested and imprisoned without trial, while hundreds more fled the country. This Scottish general strike and insurrection is a little-known chapter of British history and yet remains an immensely important one in the long fight for democracy. In The Fight for Scottish Democracy, Murray Armstrong brings these events dramatically to life.
The Arab Uprisings that began in 2010 removed four presidents and made more mobilized mass publics an increased factor in the politics of regional states. The main initial problematic of the Arab Uprising was how to translate mass protest into democratization and ultimately democratic consolidation; yet four years later, there was little democratization. This book explores various aspects of this question while, comparing outcomes in three states, Egypt, Syria and Tunisia. The introduction by Raymond Hinnebusch explores how far different starting points -the features of the regime and of the uprising--explain these pathways. Morten Valbjorn then considers the consequences of the Arab uprisings for the credibility of rival democratization and post-democratization paradigms. Vincent Durac examines the efficacy of anti-system social movements in challenging regimes but their inability to steer a democratic transition. Joshua Stacher examines the increased violence deployed by more conercive authoritarian regimes to prevent such a transition. Frederic Volpi and Ewan Stein examine the conseuences of the relative balance between different kinds of Islamists for outcomes. James Allison then examines the impact of workers' movements on democratic potentials. Adham Saouli assesses the mobilization of communal identities by ruling elites and counter-elites. Raymond Hinnebusch focuses on the negative impact on democratization of competitive external interference inside the uprising states. In Hinnebusch's conclusion, the combined effects of the agency of these forces and the political, cultural, and economic contexts in which they operate are summarized. This book was previously published as a special issue of Democratization.
The book offers an analysis of the "Belarusian Maidan" protest movement that emerged in Minsk at the October Square as a result of the falsification of the presidential elections in March 2006. In particular, the author analyses the virtual dimension of the movement and its creativity by applying the New Social Movement approach elaborated by Melucci. He also presents an in-depth analysis through the use of Deleuzian concepts. The "Belarusian Maidan" is inscribed into the historical context of Belarusian social activism of 1990-2006, amid the increasing influence of new ICTs and the Internet.
First published in 1984, this book provides the first full study of the carefully planned rising of south Wales miners and ironworkers in 1839 and of its collapse at the confrontation with soldiers of the 45th regiment of Newport. It examines not only the rising itself, but the factors that made it, if not inevitable, then likely. It argues that while the workers' movement was an immediate response to the grim circumstances of the workplace, it was also deeply rooted in the centuries-old Welsh experience of repression. This title will be of particular interest to students of Victorian political and social history and well as the history of Wales. |
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