Публицистика: прочее
Различные книги в жанре Публицистика: прочееGender, Violence, and Human Security
The nature of human security is changing globally: interstate conflict and even intrastate conflict may be diminishing worldwide, yet threats to individuals and communities persist. Large-scale violence by formal and informal armed forces intersects with interpersonal and domestic forms of violence in mutually reinforcing ways. Gender, Violence, and Human Security takes a critical look at notions of human security and violence through a feminist lens, drawing on both theoretical perspectives and empirical examinations through case studies from a variety of contexts around the globe. This fascinating volume goes beyond existing feminist international relations engagements with security studies to identify not only limitations of the human security approach, but also possible synergies between feminist and human security approaches. Noted scholars Aili Mari Tripp, Myra Marx Ferree, and Christina Ewig, along with their distinguished group of contributors, analyze specific case studies from around the globe, ranging from post-conflict security in Croatia to the relationship between state policy and gender-based crime in the United States. Shifting the focus of the term “human security” from its defensive emphasis to a more proactive notion of peace, the book ultimately calls for addressing the structural issues that give rise to violence. A hard-hitting critique of the ways in which global inequalities are often overlooked by human security theorists, Gender, Violence, and Human Security presents a much-needed intervention into the study of power relations throughout the world.
Female Soldiers in Sierra Leone
The eleven-year civil war in Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002was incomprehensibly brutal—it is estimated that half of allfemale refugees were raped and many thousands were killed.While the publicity surrounding sexual violence helped tocreate a general picture of women and girls as victims of theconflict, there has been little effort to understand female soldiers’involvement in, and experience of, the conflict. FemaleSoldiers in Sierra Leone draws on interviews with 75 formerfemale soldiers and over 20 local experts, providing a rareperspective on both the civil war and post-conflict developmentefforts in the country. Megan MacKenzie argues thatpost-conflict reconstruction is a highly gendered process,demonstrating that a clear recognition and understandingof the roles and experiences of female soldiers are centralto both understanding the conflict and to crafting effectivepolicy for the future.
Electric Dreams
Electric Dreams turns to the past to trace the cultural history of computers. Ted Friedman charts the struggles to define the meanings of these powerful machines over more than a century, from the failure of Charles Babbage’s “difference engine” in the nineteenth century to contemporary struggles over file swapping, open source software, and the future of online journalism. To reveal the hopes and fears inspired by computers, Electric Dreams examines a wide range of texts, including films, advertisements, novels, magazines, computer games, blogs, and even operating systems. Electric Dreams argues that the debates over computers are critically important because they are how Americans talk about the future. In a society that in so many ways has given up on imagining anything better than multinational capitalism, cyberculture offers room to dream of different kinds of tomorrow.
E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left
E. P. Thompson is a towering fi gure in the fi eld of labor history,best known for his monumental and path-breaking work, TheMaking of the English Working Class. But as this collection shows,Thompson was much more than a historian: he was a dedicatededucator of workers, a brilliant polemicist, a skilled political theorist,and a tireless agitator for peace, against nuclear weapons,and for a rebirth of the socialist project. The essays in this book, many of which are either out-of-print ordiffi cult to obtain, were written between 1955 and 1963 duringone of the most fertile periods of Thompson’s intellectual andpolitical life, when he wrote his two great works, The Making ofthe English Working Class and William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary.They reveal Thompson’s insistence on the vitality of ahumanistic and democratic socialism along with the value of utopianthinking in radical politics. Throughout, Thompson strugglesto open a space independent of offi cial Communist Parties andreformist Social Democratic Parties, opposing them with a vision ofsocialism built from the bottom up. Editor Cal Winslow, who studiedwith Thompson, provides context for the essays in a detailedintroduction and reminds us why this eloquent and inspiring voiceremains so relevant to us today.
Divide and Deal
Why are democracies so unequal? Despite the widespread expectation that democracy, via expansion of the franchise, would lead to redistribution in favor of the masses, in reality majorities regularly lose out in democracies. Taking a broad view of inequality as encompassing the distribution of wealth, risk, status, and well-being, this volume explores how institutions, individuals, and coalitions contribute to the often surprising twists and turns of distributive politics.The contributors hail from a range of disciplines and employ an array of methodologies to illuminate the central questions of democratic distributive politics: What explains the variety of welfare state systems, and what are their prospects for survival and change? How do religious beliefs influence people’s demand for redistribution? When does redistributive politics reflect public opinion? How can different and seemingly opposed groups successfully coalesce to push through policy changes that produce new winners and losers?The authors identify a variety of psychological and institutional factors that influence distributive outcomes. Taken together, the chapters highlight a common theme: politics matters. In seeking to understand the often puzzling contours of distribution and redistribution, we cannot ignore the processes of competition, bargaining, building, and destroying the political alliances that serve as bridges between individual preferences, institutions, and policy outcomes.
Democracy in Modern Iran
New perspectives on Iran's relationship to democracy Can Islamic societies embrace democracy? In Democracy in Modern Iran , Ali Mirsepassi maintains that it is possible, demonstrating that Islam is not inherently hostile to the idea of democracy. Rather, he provides new perspective on how such a political and social transformation could take place, arguing that the key to understanding the integration of Islam and democracy lies in concrete social institutions rather than pre-conceived ideas, the every day experiences rather than abstract theories. Mirsepassi, an Iranian native, provides a rare inside look into the country, offering a deep understanding of how Islamic countries like Iran and Iraq can and will embrace democracy. Democracy in Modern Iran challenges readers to think about Islam and democracy critically and in a far more nuanced way than is done in black-and-white dichotomies of Islam vs. Democracy, or Iran vs. the West. This essential volume contributes important insights to current discussions, creating a more complex conception of modernity in the Eastern world and, with it, Mirsepassi offers to a broad Western audience a more accurate, less clichéd vision of Iran’s political reality.
Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality
In this concise and detailed work, Salim Lamrani addresses questions of media concentration and corporate bias by examining a perennially controversial topic: Cuba. Lamrani argues that the tiny island nation is forced to contend not only with economic isolation and a U.S. blockade, but with misleading or downright hostile media coverage. He takes as his case study El País, the most widely distributed Spanish daily. El País (a property of Grupo Prisa, the largest Spanish media conglomerate), has editions aimed at Europe, Latin America, and the U.S., making it is a global opinion leader. Lamrani wades through a swamp of reporting and uses the paper as an example of how media conglomerates distort and misrepresent life in Cuba and the activities of its government. By focusing on eight key areas, including human development, internal opposition, and migration, Lamrani shows how the media systematically shapes our understanding of Cuban reality. This book, with a preface by Eduardo Galeano, provides an alternative view, combining a scholar’s eye for complexity with a journalist’s hunger for the facts.
Crimes of Dissent
From animal rights to anti-abortion, from tax resistance to anti-poverty, activists from across the political spectrum often deliberately break the law to further their causes. While not behaviors common to hardened or self-seeking criminals, the staging of civil disobedience, non-violent resistance, and direct action can nevertheless trigger a harsh response from law enforcement, with those arrested risking jail time and criminal records. Crimes of Dissent features the voices of these activists, presenting a fascinating insider’s look at the motivations, costs and consequences of deliberately violating the law as a strategy of social change. Crimes of Dissent provides readers with an in-depth understanding of why activists break the law, and what happens to them when they do. Using dynamic examples, both historic and recent, Jarret Lovell explores how seasoned protesters are handled and treated by the criminal justice system, shedding light on the intersection between the political and the criminal. By adopting the unique vantage of the street-level activist, Crimes of Dissent provides a fascinating view of protest from the ground, giving voice to those who refuse to remain silent by risking punishment for their political actions.
Caring Democracy
Americansnow face a caring deficit: there are simply too many demands on people’s timefor us to care adequately for our children, elderly people, and ourselves.At the same time, political involvement inthe United States is at an all-time low, and although political life shouldhelp us to care better, people see caring as unsupported by public life anddeem the concerns of politics as remote from their lives. Caring Democracy argues that we need to rethink American democracy,as well as our fundamental values and commitments, from a caring perspective. Whatit means to be a citizen is to be someone who takes up the challenge: howshould we best allocate care responsibilities in society? Joan Tronto argues that we need tolook again at how gender, race, class, and market forces misallocate caringresponsibilities and think about freedom and equality from the standpoint of makingcaring more just.The idea thatproduction and economic life are the most important political and humanconcerns ignores the reality that caring, for ourselves and others, should bethe highest value that shapes how we view the economy, politics, andinstitutions such as schools and the family. Care is at the center of our humanlives, but Tronto argues it is currently too far removed from the concerns ofpolitics. Caring Democracy traces the reasons for this disconnection andargues for the need to make care, not economics, the central concern ofdemocratic political life.
Capitalist Globalization
“Globalization,” surely one of the most used and abused buzzwordsof recent decades, describes a phenomenon that is typicallyconsidered to be a neutral and inevitable expansion of marketforces across the planet. Nearly all economists, politicians, businessleaders, and mainstream journalists view globalization as thenatural result of economic development, and a beneficial one atthat. But, as noted economist Martin Hart-Landsberg argues, thisperception does not match the reality of globalization. The rise oftransnational corporations and their global production chains wasthe result of intentional and political acts, decisions made at thehighest levels of power. Their aim – to increase profits by seekingthe cheapest sources of labor and raw materials – was facilitatedthrough policy-making at the national and international levels, andwas largely successful. But workers in every nation have paid thecosts, in the form of increased inequality and poverty, the destructionof social welfare provisions and labor unions, and an erraticglobal economy prone to bubbles, busts, and crises.This book examines the historical record of globalization and restoresagency to the capitalists, policy-makers, and politicians whoworked to craft a regime of world-wide exploitation. It demolishestheir neoliberal ideology – already on shaky ground after the 2008financial crisis – and picks apart the record of trade agreementslike NAFTA and institutions like the WTO. But, crucially, Hart-Landsberg also discusses alternatives to capitalist globalization,looking to examples such as South America’s Bolivarian Alliancefor the Americas (ALBA) for clues on how to build an internationaleconomy based on solidarity, social development, and shared prosperity.