Just as Latin American countries began to transition to democracy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the region also saw gains in social, cultural and economic gender equality. In accordance with modernization theories, women in the region have also made significant inroads into elected office. However, these gains vary a great deal between countries in Latin America. They also vary significantly at different levels of government even within the same country. Inside government arenas, representation is highly gendered with rules and norms that advantage men and disadvantage women, limiting women's access to full political power. While one might expect these variations to map onto socioeconomic and cultural conditions within each country, they don't correlate. This book makes, for the first time, a comprehensive comparison of gender and representation across the region - in seven countries - and at five different levels: the presidency, cabinets, national legislatures, political parties, and subnational governments. Overall, it argues that gender inequality in political representation in Latin America is rooted in democratic institutions and the democratic challenges and political crises facing the region. Institutions and political context not only influence the number of women and men elected to office, but also what they do once in office, the degree of power to which they gain access, and how their presence and actions influence democracy and society, more broadly. Drawing on the expertise of scholars of women, gender, and political institutions, this book is the most comprehensive analysis of women's representation in Latin America to date, and an important resource for research on women's representation worldwide. The causes, consequences, and challenges to women's representation in Latin America are not unique to that region, and the book uses Latin American patterns to draw broad conclusions about gendered representation in other areas of the world.

When a blonde who had walked out on her Botswana-based wildlife smuggling kingpin partner arrived at the offices of the Sunday Times in the last 1980’s, the lid would be blown off a criminal network bent on killing off two of the world’s most iconic species – the elephant and the rhino.

Using trucks to transport contraband across borders to curio shops fronting as legitimate operate operations, the syndicate operated with free abandon, until their nefarious activities were revealed through investigations by journalist De Wet Potgieter. It was because of the information supplied by Brenda Voue that De Wet was inundated with so much information about the involvement of local and foreign criminal networks, senior military officials propping up the Jonas Savimbi’s war in Angola, and senior National Party officials that he authored not only several more newspaper articles on the plight of rhino and elephant, but also produced the first edition of Contraband in 1995. Since then, a plethora of information continues to come to light about the involvement of government officials, international spies, British undercover operatives, businesspeople, and criminal elements.

This is an exposure of the depths to which certain people would go to literally enjoy a piece of the pie. The commercial international rhino horn trade has been banned by the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) for more than 45 years. In South Africa, the domestic trade in rhino horn has been legal since 2017 opening loopholes from criminal syndicates to “legally” purchase rhino horn, but then still smuggle it out of the country for traditional uses in the Far East. The involvement of criminal operations such as the Triads cannot be ignored, nor can the pressure pre- and post-apartheid on the South African police’s highly successful Endangered Species Protection Unit under Colonel Piet Lategan, which resulted it its eventual demise. It’s an inescapable fact that the onslaught on South Africa’s rhino, and on other wildlife within the Southern African region, will continue despite the commitment and tenacity of several individuals and nongovernment organisations.

The onus has now shifted to the custodians of rhino – national parks, game reserves, private game ranchers and private rhino owners – to protect these prehistoric beasts from extinction.

The acclaimed author of The Power Worshippers exposes the inner workings of the “engine of unreason” roiling American culture and politics.

Why have so many Americans turned against democracy? In this deeply reported book, Katherine Stewart takes us to conferences of conspiracy-mongers, backroom strategy gatherings, and services at extremist churches, and profiles the people who want to tear it all down. She introduces us to reactionary Catholic activists, atheist billionaires, pseudo-Platonist intellectuals, self-appointed apostles of Jesus, disciples of Ayn Rand, women-hating opponents of “the gynocracy,” pronatalists preoccupied with the dearth of white babies, Covid truthers, militia members masquerading as “concerned moms” and battalions of spirit warriors who appear to be inventing a new style of religion even as they set about attacking democracy at its foundations.

Along the way, she provides a compelling analysis of the authoritarian reaction in the United States. She demonstrates that the movement relies on several distinct constituencies, with very different and often conflicting agendas. Stewart's reporting and comprehensive political analysis helps reframe the conversation about the moral collapse of conservatism in America and points the way forward toward a democratic future.

Since the emergence of Western philosophy and science among the classical Greeks, debates have raged over the relative significance of biology and culture on an individual's behavior. Today, recent advances in genetics and biological science have pushed most scholars past the tired nature vs. nurture debate to examine the ways in which the natural and the social interact to influence human behavior. In What's Normal?, Allan Horwitz brings a fresh approach to this emerging perspective. Rather than try to solve these issues universally, Horwitz demonstrates that both social and biological mechanisms have varying degrees of influence in different situations. Through case studies of human universals such as incest aversion, fear, appetite, grief, and sex, Horwitz first discusses the extreme instances where biology determines behavior, where culture dominates, and where culture overrides basic biological instincts. He then details the variety of ways in which genes and environments interact; for instance, the primal drive to eat and store calories when food supplies were scarce and behavioral patterns in a society where food is abundant and obesity stigmatized. Now that it's often easier to change our biology rather than our culture, an understanding of which behaviors and traits are simply normal or abnormal, and which are pathological or necesitate treatment is more important than ever. Wide-ranging and accessible, What's Normal? provides a crucial guide to the biological and social bases of human behavior at the heart of these matters.

Every weekday, the wildly popular Tom Joyner Morning Show reaches more than eight million radio listeners. The show offers broadly progressive political talk, adult-oriented soul music, humor, advice, and celebrity gossip for largely older, largely working-class black audience. But it's not just an old-school show: it's an activist political forum and a key site reflecting on popular aesthetics. It focuses on issues affecting African Americans today, from the denigration of hard-working single mothers, to employment discrimination and sexual abuse, to the racism and violence endemic to the U.S. criminal justice system, to international tragedies. In Black Radio/Black Resistance, author Micaela di Leonardo dives deep into the Tom Joyner Morning Show's 25 year history inside larger U.S. broadcast history. From its rise in the Clinton era and its responses to key events-9/11, Hurricane Katrina, President Obama's elections and presidency, police murders of unarmed black Americans and the rise of Black Lives Matter, and Donald Trump's ascendancy-it has broadcast the varied, defiant, and darkly comic voices of its anchors, guests, and audience members. di Leonardo also investigates the new synergistic set of cross-medium ties and political connections that have affected print, broadcast, and online reporting and commentary in antiracist directions. This new multiracial progressive public sphere has extraordinary potential for shaping America's future. Thus Black Radio/Black Resistance does far more than simply shed light on a major counterpublic institution unjustly ignored for reasons of color, class, generation, and medium. It demonstrates an alternative understanding of the shifting black public sphere in the digital age. Like the show itself, Black Radio/Black Resistance is politically progressive, music-drenched, and blisteringly funny.

Children's rights and human development is a new and uncharted domain in human rights and psychology research. This multidisciplinary children's rights reader is a first attempt to introduce this domain to students and researchers of children's rights, child development, child maltreatment, family and child studies, and related fields. For many lawyers, children's rights are limited to their legal dimension: the norms and institutions of international human rights law, often with an exclusive focus on the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its monitoring treaty body, the Committee on the Rights of the Child. However, there are three more dimensions to children's rights. Children's rights share a moral and a political dimension with all human rights, which most non-international lawyers all too often overlook. And children's rights have a fourth dimension: the time dimension of child and human development. This time dimension is multidisciplinary in itself. Human development begins nine months before childbirth. When we are four years of age, our brain is 90% adult size. The infrastructure of our personality, health, and resilience is formed in our first years of life, determined by the quality and sheer quantity of parent-child interaction and secure attachment formation. Yet, more than one third of children are not securely attached. According to research published in The Lancet in 2009, one in ten children in high income countries is maltreated. Violence against children is a worldwide plague. Socio-economic and socio-emotional deprivation are still transmitted from generation to generation in both rich and poor states. Investing in early childhood development, positive parenting, and child rights education makes sense. This book brings together substantial and fascinating texts from many fields and disciplines that illustrate and elaborate this point. Arranged in ten chapters titled according to pertinent child rights principles and concepts, these texts offer a state-of-the-art view of the enormous progress made in the past decades in several fields of human knowledge. In between these texts, several news and factual items inform the reader on the huge gap that still exists between what we know and what we do to make this world a better place for children, to promote human development, and to protect human rights better. Child rights violations are still met with more rhetoric than leadership. But change is on its way. The book's contents may be used both as background readings and as tasks for group discussion in problem-based learning or other educational settings in child rights law and psychology courses. It is also aimed at a broader academic and public audience interested in the many aspects and ramifications of children's rights and human development.

For two decades before a railway system linked southern Africa’s principal cities in the mid-1890’s, the world’s richest supplies of diamonds and gold were transported by coach and horses to distant ports for export. For Irish soldiers based at Fort Napier, Pietermaritzburg, the temptation of this fabulous wealth proved irresistible: they deserted by the score and, as members of the ciminal ‘Irish Brigade’, embarked on a spree of bank, safe and highway robberies.

Masked Raiders follows the wild exploits of legendary brigands like the McKeone brothers and ‘One Armed Jack’ McLoughlin, who ravaged the subcontinent, from the mining towns of Barberton, Kimberley and Johannesburg, to the borders of Basotholand, Bechuanaland, Mozambique and Rhodesia. With tales of heists, safe-cracking, illegal gold dealings, prison breaks and hidden roadside treasure, the book reveals the potency of the highveld’s ‘criminal heroes’.

Startling insights also reveal how the hidden grammar of brigandage informed political actions of the day, such as the Jameson Raid, and how the movement of bandits across the interior helped shape the borders of what was to become modern South Africa.

On 24 February 2022, the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, armoured vehicles approached the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine. It was the most direct way for them to reach the capital - and an extraordinarily reckless plan after the disaster that had taken place there three decades earlier. Russian occupation of the plant had begun. It would last thirty-five days.

Closely reported and narrated from multiple perspectives, this is the story of the Ukrainians who were held hostage and worked shifts for weeks instead of days to spare the world a new nuclear accident. We meet Valentyn Heiko, the foreman who had also been there for the clean-up of the Chernobyl accident in 1986 and turned sixty during the occupation; plant workers who found a way to celebrate International Women’s Day despite all odds; Russian officers who had no knowledge of nuclear reactors; and four stalkers who were caught in the middle and stood in for the overworked cook.

Gripping and unforgettable, Chernobyl Roulette sounds the alarm about the dangers of nuclear sites in an unprecedented time, when plant workers are left to fight on their own while the world holds its breath. In a book that reads like a thriller, Serhii Plokhy tells a remarkable story about human nature, uncertainty and courage.

Before he was a civil rights leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a man of the church. His father was a pastor, and much of young Martin's time was spent in Baptist churches. He went on to seminary and received a Ph.D. in theology. In 1953, he took over leadership of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Atlanta. The church was his home. But, as he began working for civil rights, King became a fierce critic of the churches, both black and white. He railed against white Christian leaders who urged him to be patient in the struggle-or even opposed civil rights altogether. And, while the black church was the platform from which King launched the struggle for civil rights, he was deeply ambivalent toward the church as an institution, and saw it as in constant need of reform. In this book, Lewis Baldwin explores King's complex relationship with the Christian church, from his days growing up at Ebenezer Baptist, to his work as a pastor, to his battles with American churches over civil rights, to his vision for the global church. King, Baldwin argues, had a robust and multifaceted view of the nature and purpose of the church that serves as a model for the church in the 21st century.

Making it National argues that we need to rethink the way national identity is constructed in Australia today. Graeme Turner takes a series of recent instances - the mythologising of Bond and the larrikin entrepreneurs, the Spycatcher trials, Maralinga and the Bicentenary - showing how popular images of national identity are used to serve specific rather than national interests.'Graeme Turner's writing has a remarkable power to engage its readers with all the immediacy, vividness and drama of our very best journalism, while putting cultural theory to work in new and creative ways.' - Meaghan Morris'Making it National could be to the 1990s what Richard White's Inventing Australia was to the 1980s.' - Tony Bennett, Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith University

The United States is considered the world's foremost refuge for foreigners, and no place in the nation symbolizes this better than Ellis Island. Through Ellis Island's halls and corridors more than twelve million immigrants-of nearly every nationality and race-entered the country on their way to new experiences in North America. With an astonishing array of nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographs, Ellis Island leads the reader through the fascinating history of this small island in New York harbor from its pre-immigration days as one of the harbor's oyster islands to its spectacular years as the flagship station of the U.S. Bureau of Immigration to its current incarnation as the National Park Service's largest museum.

Prepare to be surprised and unnerved as the dark side of Charlotte is brought to life by native and longtime writer David Aaron Moore. Learn about Nellie Freeman, who nearly decapitated her husband with a straight razor in 1926. Discover how the ghosts of Camp Green infantrymen, the doughboys of World War I, still scream in the Southern night. Read about the seventy-one passengers who lost their lives as Eastern Airlines Flight 212 fell to the earth one foggy night in 1974. Come along and experience the grisly past of the City of Churches.

Keeping doctors happy and productive requires a thorough understanding of the systemic causes and consequences of physician stress, as well as the role of resilience in maintaining a healthy mental state. The pressure of making life-or-death decisions along with those associated with the day-to-day challenges of doctoring can lead to poor patient care and communication, patient dissatisfaction, absenteeism, reductions in productivity, job dissatisfaction, and lowered retention. This edited volume will provide a comprehensive tool for understanding and promoting physician stress resilience. Specifically, the book has six interrelated objectives that, collectively, would advance the evidence-based understanding of (1) the extent to which physicians experience and suffer from work-related stress; (2) the various manifestations, syndromes, and reaction patterns directly caused by work-related stress; (3) the degree to which physicians are resilient in that they are successful or not successful in coping with these stressors; (4) the theories and direct evidence that account for the resilience; (5) the programs during and following medical school which help to promote resilience; and (6) the agenda for future theory, research, and intervention efforts for the next generation of physicians.

'An alluvial goldfield of social theorists - nuggets lying around all over the place.'Bob ConnellWho's who in the social theory zoo? This book introduces some of the leading social theorists in short, lively entries by leading Australian scholars. Social Theory covers thinkers from Althusser to Williams, by locals from Alexander to Yeatman.For beginner and enthusiast alike, it gives a sense of the state of the art in classical and modern social theory. Social Theory is an indispensable reference for undergraduates, postgraduates, academics and anyone else interested in the ideas behind social and political theory and cultural studies today.

Cognisant of the globalising context in which we find ourselves, as intellectuals we ought to ensure relevance in what we teach. This orientation, that prizes pedagogic relevance, has been raised as an objection to the decolonial call, being – at times – used to resist democratic change in the South African University. The contributions in this volume highlight the implications of the global relevance discourse through revealing the impact of decontextualised curricula.

Similarly, institutional democratisation and decolonisation ought not to be a turn to fundamentalist positions that recreate the essentialisms resisted through calls for decolonisation. As a critical response to such resistance to democratisation, this book showcases how decolonisation protects the constitutionally enshrined ideal of academic freedom and the freedom of scientific research. We argue that this framing of decoloniality should not be used to protect interests that seek to undermine the transformation of higher education. Concurrently, however, it is critical of decolonial positions that are essentialist and narrow in their manifestation and articulation.

Decolonisation as Democratisation suggests what is intended by a curriculum revisionist agenda that prizes decolonisation through bringing together academics working in South Africa and the global academy. This collaborative approach aims to facilitate critical reflexivity in our curriculum reform strategies while developing pragmatic solutions to current calls for decolonisation.

An astonishingly brave and moving book from Caroline Darian, daughter of infamous Dominique Pelicot, detailing how her mother rebuilt her life as the world follows a trial that will go down in history.

The trial of Dominique Pelicot, which began on 2 September 2024, has captured the world's attention. Behind the haunting details of Pelicot's unthinkable crimes are a mother and daughter who were forced to rebuild their lives. This is their story.

In November 2020, Caroline Darian received a call from the police in Carpentras. Her father was in police custody. The seizure of his computer equipment revealed the unthinkable: since 2013, he had drugged his wife before handing her over, in a state of unconsciousness, to men, from all ages and stages of life.

With exceptional courage, Darian recounts the earth-shattering discovery that a loved one, her own father, is capable of the worst. But more importantly, she shares the remarkable story of her mother Gisèle and how she carried on living, without self-pity, while learning to manage all of the things her husband once took care of. She shares how her mother managed to maintain her joie de vivre in circumstances none of us could imagine.

Gisèle has won acclaim around the world after she gave up her right to anonymity and opted for a public trial, a trial in which Caroline herself has testified, turning the tables: the shame no longer borne by the victims in silence but directed, at last, to the abusers. Together, mother and daughter reveal another side to the violence committed against women, as they bravely transform their private trauma into a collective fight.

When it comes to Irish America, certain names spring to mind Kennedy, O'Neill and Curley testify to the proverbial footsteps of the Gael in Boston. However, few people know of Sister Mary Anthony O'Connell, whose medical prowess carried her from the convent to the Civil War battlefields, earning her the nickname the Boston Irish Florence Nightingale, or of Barney McGinniskin, Boston's first Irish cop, who proudly roared at every roll call, McGinniskin from the bogs of Ireland present! Along with acclaim or notoriety, many forgotten Irish Americans garnered numerous historical firsts. In "Hidden History of the Boston Irish," Peter F. Stevens offers an entertaining and compelling portrait of the Irish immigrant saga and pays homage to the overlooked, yet significant, episodes of the Boston Irish experience.

Deep friendship may express profound loyalty, but so too may virulent nationalism. What can and should we say about this Janus-faced virtue of the will? This volume explores at length the contours of an important and troubling virtue - its cognates, contrasts, and perversions; its strengths and weaknesses; its awkward relations with universal morality; its oppositional form and limits; as well as the ways in which it functions in various associative connections, such as friendship and familial relations, organizations and professions, nations, countries, and religious tradition.

Understanding and explaining the causes and consequences of social change has been an important concern of social theorists throughout the history of sociology. This wide ranging text focuses on a rich and diverse body of theoretical work, from Adam Smith and Comte to Lyotard and Baudrillard, in order to demonstrate the relevance of both classical and contemporary social theory to the wider social world and to show that, while social theory may not deliver all the answers we might like, it does improve the quality of the questions we can ask about how social change comes about, what its effects are and where it is leading us.

An interesting resource for learning about the cultural differences and characteristics of people across the globe, this encyclopedia covers the "do's" and "don'ts" of a breadth of countries and major ethnic groups. Readers of this one-volume reference will gain useful knowledge of what travelers should and shouldn't do when in countries outside of the United States. After a general introduction, approximately 100 alphabetically arranged entries cover topics such as greeting and meeting, appearance and dress, table manners, body language, social situations and hospitality, verbal communications, business etiquette, religious etiquette, gift-giving, and even "netiquette" regarding social media. Sidebars and images throughout make the text more accessible and engaging, and additional readings at the end of each entry as well as the bibliography offer opportunities for further research on the subject. The content also directly supports the National Geography Standards and the AP Human Geography curriculum for high school students as they learn about the cultural differences and characteristics of people in major ethnic groups across the globe. Provides comprehensive coverage of many of the world's countries and cultures that enables readers to make insightful cross-cultural comparisons Directly supports the National Geography Standards by examining cultural mosaics Provides relevant and useful information for readers preparing for study-abroad excursions or other international travel

Eran Eyal had it all: a trendy New York apartment, a jet-set lifestyle and investors lining up to get in on his million-dollar cryptocurrency start-up, Shopin. He had come a long way from an ordinary middle-class childhood in Durban and the burgeoning tech start-up world of Cape Town.

But the New York authorities pounced in 2018, charged him with fraud and packed him off to Rikers Island. There began the gobsmacking unravelling of a scam that spanned investors across the globe and revealed that Eyal had built a house of cards involving fictitious products, clients and advisors for Shopin and his previous company, Springleap. As more than $40 million went up in smoke, the South African entrepreneur was exposed as an audacious fraudster determined to succeed at any cost – even if it meant spinning a web of  lies to do so.

“An age-old narrative about ego and flying too close to the sun as well as a modern version of greed in the tech world.” Michael Jordaan

“Eyal proves definitively that a thousand white lies can get you convicted of fraud. This book meticulously walks the reader though the start-up lies that ended in tears.” Nic Haralambous

5.4 million Americans--1 in every 40 voting age adults-- are denied the right to participate in democratic elections because of a past or current felony conviction. In several American states, 1 in 4 black men cannot vote due to a felony conviction. In a country that prides itself on
universal suffrage, how did the United States come to deny a voice to such a large percentage of its citizenry? What are the consequences of large-scale disenfranchisement--both for election outcomes, and for public policy more generally? Locked Out exposes one of the most important, yet little
known, threats to the health of American democracy today. It reveals the centrality of racial factors in the origins of these laws, and their impact on politics today. Marshalling the first real empirical evidence on the issue to make a case for reform, the authors' path-breaking analysis will
inform all future policy and political debates on the laws governing the political rights of criminals.

Ethnicity, Class and Gender in Australia is a major study of the impact of immigration on Australian society, and of the fragmentation that has developed along ethnic, class and gender lines. Rather than thumbnail sketches of ethnic groups or celebrations of multiculturalism, it offers detailed critiques of policy and practice, backed up by evidence from the experiences and research of the authors.This book confronts issues crucial to all Australians: the increasing fragmentation of the workforce; the class, gender and origin-based inequalities present in an 'egalitarian' country; and the ideologies, from racism to multiculturalism, designed to mask these inequalities.The authors also point to evidence of growing resistance to the status quo, and strategies for working towards a more genuine equality - to more positive education programmes, to political action at the workplace and beyond. The aim is to broaden readers' understanding of Australian society by including those who are so often omitted from analysis of that society.