Download or read book Extremely Violent Societies written by Christian Gerlach and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-14 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking book Christian Gerlach traces the social roots of the extraordinary processes of human destruction involved in mass violence throughout the twentieth century. He argues that terms such as 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' are too narrow to explain the diverse motives and interests that cause violence to spread in varying forms and intensities. From killings and expulsions to enforced hunger, collective rape, strategic bombing, forced labour and imprisonment he explores what happened before, during, and after periods of widespread bloodshed in countries such as Armenia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nazi-occupied Greece and in anti-guerilla wars worldwide in order to highlight the crucial role of socio-economic pressures in the generation of group conflicts. By focussing on why so many different people participated in or supported mass violence, and why different groups were victimized, he offers us a new way of understanding one of the most disturbing phenomena of our times.
Download or read book A Savage Order written by Rachel Kleinfeld and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most violent places in the world today are not at war. More people have died in Mexico in recent years than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. These parts of the world are instead buckling under a maelstrom of gangs, organized crime, political conflict, corruption, and state brutality. Such devastating violence can feel hopeless, yet some places—from Colombia to the Republic of Georgia—have been able to recover. In this powerfully argued and urgent book, Rachel Kleinfeld examines why some democracies, including our own, are crippled by extreme violence and how they can regain security. Drawing on fifteen years of study and firsthand field research—interviewing generals, former guerrillas, activists, politicians, mobsters, and law enforcement in countries around the world—Kleinfeld tells the stories of societies that successfully fought seemingly ingrained violence and offers penetrating conclusions about what must be done to build governments that are able to protect the lives of their citizens. Taking on existing literature and popular theories about war, crime, and foreign intervention, A Savage Order is a blistering yet inspiring investigation into what makes some countries peaceful and others war zones, and a blueprint for what we can do to help.
Download or read book The Better Angels of Our Nature written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.
Download or read book Children in a Violent Society written by Joy D. Osofsky and published by Guilford Press. This book was released on 1998-08-10 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's children are bombarded with images of violence in cartoons, news reports, television shows, computer games, movies, and other media. In growing numbers, they are also exposed to real-life violence in their own homes and communities--as witnesses, victims, and, increasingly, perpetrators. Emphasizing the need for early intervention and prevention, this timely book details the incidence and scope of the violence epidemic and examines the developmental impact of violence on children. Contributors describe several exemplary prevention and intervention programs currently in place around the country and propose a range of educational and policy initiatives.
Download or read book Between Good and Evil written by Roger L. Depue and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2005-02-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He was a pioneer in modern law enforcement, a trailblazing leader in the hunt for serial killers. But after decades of staring deep into the darkness, he entered a seminary to search for the good... BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL No one gets closer to evil than a criminal profiler, trained to penetrate the hearts and minds of society's most vicious psychopaths. And no one is a more towering figure in the world of criminal profilers than Roger L. Depue. Chief of the FBI Behavioral Science Unit at a time when its innovative work first came to prominence, he headed a renowned team of mind hunters that included John Douglas, Robert Ressler, and Roy Hazelwood. In a subbasement sixty feet under the Academy gun vault in Quantico, he broke new ground with analytical techniques and training programs that are still used today. After retiring from the FBI, he founded an elite forensics group that consulted on high-profile cases, including the Martha Moxley and JonBenet Ramsey murders, and the Columbine school shootings. But coming face-to-face with the darkest deeds human beings are capable of took a horrific toll. After suffering a devastating personal loss, Depue, on the brink of despair, walked away from the outside world and joined a seminary. For three years this was his safe haven, a place where he exorcised personal demons and found a refuge from terrifying memories of real-life monsters. And it was there, while counseling maximum security inmates, that he rediscovered the capacity for goodness in people, and made the decision to return to the world to resume his work. Here is Depue's extraordinary personal account, from growing up as a police officer's son to tracking down some of today's most brutal murderers. With its harrowing descriptions of human depravity and passionate call to fight against evil, BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL is both a riveting dispatch from the front lines of a war against human predators...and the powerful story of one man's journey between darkness and redemption.
Download or read book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor written by Rob Nixon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode. In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
Download or read book This Violent Empire written by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Violent Empire traces the origins of American violence, racism, and paranoia to the founding moments of the new nation and the initial instability of Americans' national sense of self. Fusing cultural and political analyses to create a new form of political history, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explores the ways the founding generation, lacking a common history, governmental infrastructures, and shared culture, solidified their national sense of self by imagining a series of "Others" (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the propertyless) whose differences from European American male founders overshadowed the differences that divided those founders. These "Others," dangerous and polluting, had to be excluded from the European American body politic. Feared, but also desired, they refused to be marginalized, incurring increasingly enraged enactments of their political and social exclusion that shaped our long history of racism, xenophobia, and sexism. Close readings of political rhetoric during the Constitutional debates reveal the genesis of this long history.
Download or read book Caste written by Isabel Wilkerson and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author. #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Award Longlist • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist • Kirkus Prize Finalist “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.
Download or read book Our Violent World written by Kevin McDonald and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can the analysis of violence and terror tell us about the modern world? Why is violence often used to achieve religious, cultural or political goals? Can we understand the search for the extreme that increasingly shapes violence today? From 1960s student movements to today's global jihad, this text explores the factors and debates shaping violence and terrorism in our contemporary society. Each chapter confronts examples of disturbing terrorist acts and events of mass violence from recent history and uses these to examine key questions, theories and concepts surrounding this sensitive and controversial topic. In particular, the book: - Identifies core tools for the analysis of public violence - Explores the processes that mutate social movements into violent groups - Describes the cultural, embodied, experiential and imagined dimensions of violence - Highlights different periods and varying forms of terrorist violence - Examines the role of globalization, media, technology and the visual in violence and terror today. Our Violent World shows how the social sciences can contribute to an understanding of violence and responses to terror, as well as the construction of a social world less dominated by fear of the other. It is a must-read for students and citizens.
Download or read book Contagion of Violence written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2013-03-06 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past 25 years have seen a major paradigm shift in the field of violence prevention, from the assumption that violence is inevitable to the recognition that violence is preventable. Part of this shift has occurred in thinking about why violence occurs, and where intervention points might lie. In exploring the occurrence of violence, researchers have recognized the tendency for violent acts to cluster, to spread from place to place, and to mutate from one type to another. Furthermore, violent acts are often preceded or followed by other violent acts. In the field of public health, such a process has also been seen in the infectious disease model, in which an agent or vector initiates a specific biological pathway leading to symptoms of disease and infectivity. The agent transmits from individual to individual, and levels of the disease in the population above the baseline constitute an epidemic. Although violence does not have a readily observable biological agent as an initiator, it can follow similar epidemiological pathways. On April 30-May 1, 2012, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Forum on Global Violence Prevention convened a workshop to explore the contagious nature of violence. Part of the Forum's mandate is to engage in multisectoral, multidirectional dialogue that explores crosscutting, evidence-based approaches to violence prevention, and the Forum has convened four workshops to this point exploring various elements of violence prevention. The workshops are designed to examine such approaches from multiple perspectives and at multiple levels of society. In particular, the workshop on the contagion of violence focused on exploring the epidemiology of the contagion, describing possible processes and mechanisms by which violence is transmitted, examining how contextual factors mitigate or exacerbate the issue. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary covers the major topics that arose during the 2-day workshop. It is organized by important elements of the infectious disease model so as to present the contagion of violence in a larger context and in a more compelling and comprehensive way.
Download or read book Reload written by Christopher B. Strain and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is violence an inextricable part of our American heritage?
Download or read book The Violence Inside Us written by Chris Murphy and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An engrossing, moving, and utterly motivating account of the human stakes of gun violence in America.”—Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Education of an Idealist Is America destined to always be a violent nation? This sweeping history by U.S. senator Chris Murphy explores the origins of our violent impulses, the roots of our obsession with firearms, and the mythologies that prevent us from confronting our national crisis. In many ways, the United States sets the pace for other nations to follow. Yet on the most important human concern—the need to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe from physical harm—America isn’t a leader. We are disturbingly laggard. To confront this problem, we must first understand it. In this carefully researched and deeply emotional book, Senator Chris Murphy dissects our country’s violence-filled history and the role that our unique obsession with firearms plays in this national epidemic. Murphy tells the story of his profound personal transformation in the wake of the mass murder at Newtown, and his subsequent immersion in the complicated web of influences that drive American violence. Murphy comes to the conclusion that while America’s relationship to violence is indeed unique, America is not inescapably violent. Even as he details the reasons we’ve tolerated so much bloodshed for so long, he explains that we have the power to change. Murphy takes on the familiar arguments, obliterates the stale talking points, and charts the way to a fresh, less polarized conversation about violence and the weapons that enable it—a conversation we urgently need in order to transform the national dialogue and save lives.
Download or read book Gandhi A Very Short Introduction written by Bhikhu Parekh and published by Oxford Paperbacks. This book was released on 2001-02-22 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) was one of the few men in history to fight simultaneously on moral, religious, political, social, economic, and cultural fronts. His life and thought has had an enormous impact on the Indian nation, and he continues to be widely revered - known before and after his death by assassination as Mahatma, the Great Soul.
Download or read book Violence and Social Orders written by Douglass Cecil North and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-26 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book integrates the problem of violence into a larger framework, showing how economic and political behavior are closely linked.
Download or read book The Hungry Steppe written by Sarah Cameron and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime: the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, perished. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. Through extremely violent means, the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clear boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economy; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves integrated into Soviet society the way Moscow intended. The experience of the famine scarred the republic and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991. Cameron examines the Kazakh famine to overturn several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin, highlighting the creation of a new Kazakh national identity and how environmental factors shaped Soviet development. Ultimately, The Hungry Steppe depicts the Soviet regime and its disastrous policies in a new and unusual light.
Download or read book Demonic Males written by Richard W. Wrangham and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1996 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whatever their virtues, men are more violent than women. Why do men kill, rape, and wage war, and what can be done about it? Drawing on the latest discoveries about human evolution and about our closest living relatives, the great apes, "Demonic Males" offers some startling new answers to these questions.
Download or read book The End of Policing written by Alex S. Vitale and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The massive uprising following the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020--by some estimates the largest protests in US history--thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefront of international politics. It also made The End of Policing a bestseller and Alex Vitale, its author, a leading figure in the urgent public discussion over police and racial justice. As the writer Rachel Kushner put it in an article called "Things I Can't Live Without", this book explains that "unfortunately, no increased diversity on police forces, nor body cameras, nor better training, has made any seeming difference" in reducing police killings and abuse. "We need to restructure our society and put resources into communities themselves, an argument Alex Vitale makes very persuasively." The problem, Vitale demonstrates, is policing itself-the dramatic expansion of the police role over the last forty years. Drawing on first-hand research from across the globe, The End of Policing describes how the implementation of alternatives to policing, like drug legalization, regulation, and harm reduction instead of the policing of drugs, has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice. This edition includes a new introduction that takes stock of the renewed movement to challenge police impunity and shows how we move forward, evaluating protest, policy, and the political situation.
