Since George Bush declared his war on drugs in 1989, cocaine addiction in America has increased 15%, and narcotics have emerged as major commodities from the Third World. Focusing on US narcotics policy, Latin America's cocaine traffic and Asia's heroin trade, the essays in this book offer evidence indicating that the war is not working.

Since George Bush declared his war on drugs in 1989, cocaine addiction in America has increased 15%, and narcotics have emerged as major commodities from the Third World. Focusing on US narcotics policy, Latin America's cocaine traffic and Asia's heroin trade, the essays in this book offer evidence indicating that the war is not working.

For a decade America’s share of the global economy has been in decline. Its diplomatic alliances are under immense strain, and any claim of moral leadership has been abandoned. America is still a colossus, possessing half the world’s manufacturing capacity, nearly half its military forces, and a formidable system of global surveillance and covert operations. But even at its peak it may have been sowing the seeds of its own destruction.

Is it realistic to rely on the global order established after World War II, or are we witnessing the changing of the guard, with China emerging as the world’s economic and military powerhouse? America clings to its superpower status, but for how much longer?

In a tempestuous narrative that sweeps across five continents and seven centuries, this book explains how a succession of catastrophes-from the devastating Black Death of 1350 through the coming climate crisis of 2050-has produced a relentless succession of rising empires and fading world orders. During the long centuries of Iberian and British imperial rule, the quest for new forms of energy led to the development of the colonial sugar plantation as a uniquely profitable kind of commerce. In a time when issues of race and social justice have arisen with pressing urgency, the book explains how the plantation's extraordinary profitability relied on a production system that literally worked the slaves to death, creating an insatiable appetite for new captives that made the African slave trade a central feature of modern capitalism for over four centuries. After surveying past centuries roiled by imperial wars, national revolutions, and the struggle for human rights, the closing chapters use those hard-won insights to peer through the present and into the future. By rendering often-opaque environmental science in lucid prose, the book explains how climate change and changing world orders will shape the life opportunities for younger generations, born at the start of this century, during the coming decades that will serve as the signposts of their lives-2030, 2050, 2070, and beyond.

Labeled "Amazons" by the national press, women played a central role in the Huk rebellion, one of the most significant peasant-based revolutions in modern Philippine history. As spies, organizers, nurses, couriers, soldiers, and even military commanders, women worked closely with men to resist first Japanese occupation and later, after WWII, to challenge the new Philippine republic. But in the midst of the uncertainty and violence of rebellion, these women also pursued personal lives, falling in love, becoming pregnant, and raising families, often with their male comrades-in-arms.
Drawing on interviews with over one hundred veterans of the movement, Vina A. Lanzona explores the Huk rebellion from the intimate and collective experiences of its female participants, demonstrating how their presence, and the complex questions of gender, family, and sexuality they provoked, ultimately shaped the nature of the revolutionary struggle. Winner, Kenneth W. Baldridge Prize for the best history book written by a resident of Hawaii, sponsored by Brigham Young University-Hawaii

"From Rebellion to Riots" is a critical analysis of the roots of contemporary violence in one of Indonesia's most ethnically heterogeneous provinces, West Kalimantan. Since the late 1960s, this province has suffered periodic outbreaks of ethnic violence among its Dayak, Malay, Madurese, and ethnic Chinese populations. Citing evidence from his research, internal military documents, and ethnographic accounts, Jamie S. Davidson refutes popular explanations for these flare-ups. The recurrent violence has less to do with a clash of cultures, the ills of New Order-led development, or indigenous marginalization than with the ongoing politicization of ethnic and indigenous identity in the region. Looking at key historical moments, markedly different in their particulars, Davidson reveals the important links between ethnic violence and subnational politics. In one case, army officers in Soeharto's recently established New Order regime encouraged anti-Chinese sentiments. To move against communist-inspired rebellion, they recruited indigenous Dayaks to expunge tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese from interior towns and villages. This counter-insurgent bloodshed inadvertently initiated a series of clashes between Dayaks and Madurese, another migrant community. Driven by an indigenous empowerment movement and efforts by local elites to control benefits provided by decentralization and democratization, these low-intensity riots rose to immense proportions in the late 1990s. "From Rebellion to Riots" demonstrates that the endemic violence in this vast region is not the inevitable outcome of its ethnic diversity, and reveals that the initial impetus for collective bloodshed is not necessarily the sameas the forces that sustain it.

In this innovative book, Alfred W. McCoy takes a new approach to the military and political history of the Philippines. Comparing two generations of graduates from the Philippine Military Academy (PMA)-the classes of 1940 and 1971-McCoy uncovers fundamental differences in their academic socialization and subsequent ascent to power. Viewed through this comparative lens, the story of these two classes becomes the history of the entire Philippine army, offering important insights into the complexities of Filipino involvement in war and peace from the 1930s to the 1990s. Drawing on extensive interviews with these officers, as well as on diaries and memoirs, the book details for the first time activities of the secretive brotherhood that is the Filipino officer corps. Members of the class of 1940, who bonded to one another in PMA training modeled after West Point's, emerged from heroic battles against Japanese invaders with their belief in civil supremacy over the military affirmed. In postwar decades, they actively blocked coup attempts. By contrast, the class of '71 emerged from the academy to become the fist of the Marcos dictatorship. Their involvement in torture ruptured the academy's socialization and inspired them to launch six coup attempts in the late 1980s. The collective biographies of these officers offer insights not only into Philippine history but also into topics of wider global import-the influence of male gender on a distinctly gendered institution, the causes of coup d'etat, and the collective trauma of torture.

"An indispensable and riveting account" of the CIA's development and use of torture, from the cold war to Abu Ghraib and beyond (Naomi Klein, "The Nation")
In this revelatory account of the CIA's fifty-year effort to develop new forms of torture, historian Alfred W. McCoy locates the deep roots of recent scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in a long-standing, covert program of interrogation. "A Question of Torture" investigates the CIA's practice of "sensory deprivation" and "self-inflicted pain," in which techniques including isolation, hooding, hours of standing, and manipulation of time assault the victim's senses and destroy the basis of personal identity. McCoy traces the spread of these practices across the globe, from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, and argues that after 9/11, psychological torture became the weapon of choice in the CIA's global prisons, reinforced by "rendition" of detainees to "torture-friendly" countries. Finally, McCoy shows that information extracted by coercion is worthless, making a strong case for the FBI's legal methods of interrogation. Scrupulously documented and grippingly told, "A Question of Torture" is a devastating indictment of inhumane practices that have damaged America's laws, military, and international standing.