Download or read book The Dictatorship Syndrome written by Alaa Al Aswany and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-29 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of dictatorship in the West has acquired an almost exotic dimension. But authoritarian regimes remain a painful reality for billions of people worldwide who still live under them, their freedoms violated and their rights abused. They are subject to arbitrary arrest, torture, corruption, ignorance, and injustice. What is the nature of dictatorship? How does it take hold? In what conditions and circumstances is it permitted to thrive? And how do dictators retain power, even when reviled and mocked by those they govern? In this deeply considered and at times provocative short work, Alaa Al Aswany tells us that, as with any disease, to understand the syndrome of dictatorship we must first consider the circumstances of its emergence, along with the symptoms and complications it causes in both the people and the dictator.

Download or read book Dictatorship written by Carl Schmitt and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-01-28 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now available in English for the first time, Dictatorship is Carl Schmitt’s most scholarly book and arguably a paradigm for his entire work. Written shortly after the Russian Revolution and the First World War, Schmitt analyses the problem of the state of emergency and the power of the Reichspräsident in declaring it. Dictatorship, Schmitt argues, is a necessary legal institution in constitutional law and has been wrongly portrayed as just the arbitrary rule of a so-called dictator. Dictatorship is an essential book for understanding the work of Carl Schmitt and a major contribution to the modern theory of a democratic, constitutional state. And despite being written in the early part of the twentieth century, it speaks with remarkable prescience to our contemporary political concerns.

Download or read book Liberal Terror written by Brad Evans and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Security is meant to make the world safer. Yet despite living in the most secure of times, we see endangerment everywhere. Whether it is the threat of another devastating terrorist attacks, a natural disaster or unexpected catastrophe, anxieties and fears define the global political age. While liberal governments and security agencies have responded by advocating a new catastrophic topography of interconnected planetary endangerment, our desire to securitize everything has rendered all things potentially terrifying. This is the fateful paradox of contemporary liberal rule. The more we seek to secure, the more our imaginaries of threat proliferate. Nothing can therefore be left to chance. For everything has the potential to be truly catastrophic. Such is the emerging state of terror normality we find ourselves in today. This illuminating book by Brad Evans provides a critical evaluation of the wide ranging terrors which are deemed threatening to advanced liberal societies. Moving beyond the assumption that liberalism is integral to the realisation of perpetual peace, human progress, and political emancipation on a planetary scale, it exposes how liberal security regimes are shaped by a complex life-centric rationality which directly undermines any claims to universal justice and co-habitation. Through an incisive and philosophically enriched critique of the contemporary liberal practices of making life more secure, Evans forces us to confront the question of what it means to live politically as we navigate through the dangerous uncertainty of the 21st Century.

Download or read book An Uncertain Ally written by David L. Phillips and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-23 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under the rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan Turkey has descended into a dictatorship, promotes the Islamist agenda, abuses human rights, limits freedom of expression in the press, and wages war against the Kurds. While Turkey has historically been important geopolitically, it has become an outlier in Europe and an uncertain ally of the United States. An Uncertain Ally is a straightforward indictment of Erdogan. Drawing on inside sources in his Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the police, the book reveals corruption and money laundering schemes that benefitted Erdogan, his cronies, and family members. Erdogan has polarized Turkish society and created conditions that led to the coup attempt of July 2016. He has also deepened divisions by accusing Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic teacher in Pennsylvania, of establishing a parallel state and masterminding the coup attempt. Erdogan has seized on the failed coup to justify a witch hunt, arresting thousands and ordering the wholesale dismissal of alleged coup sympathizers. Rather than foster reconciliation, he pursued vendettas and turned Turkey into a gulag. An Uncertain Ally exposes Turkey’s ties to jihadists in Syria and the Islamic State, questioning its suitability as a NATO member. Under Erdogan, Turkey faces a dark future that poses a danger to the region and internationally.

Download or read book Dictators and Democrats written by Stephan Haggard and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rigorous and comprehensive account of recent democratic transitions around the world From the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the spread of democracy across the developing and post-Communist worlds transformed the global political landscape. What drove these changes and what determined whether the emerging democracies would stabilize or revert to authoritarian rule? Dictators and Democrats takes a comprehensive look at the transitions to and from democracy in recent decades. Deploying both statistical and qualitative analysis, Stephen Haggard and Robert Kaufman engage with theories of democratic change and advocate approaches that emphasize political and institutional factors. While inequality has been a prominent explanation for democratic transitions, the authors argue that its role has been limited, and elites as well as masses can drive regime change. Examining seventy-eight cases of democratic transition and twenty-five reversions since 1980, Haggard and Kaufman show how differences in authoritarian regimes and organizational capabilities shape popular protest and elite initiatives in transitions to democracy, and how institutional weaknesses cause some democracies to fail. The determinants of democracy lie in the strength of existing institutions and the public's capacity to engage in collective action. There are multiple routes to democracy, but those growing out of mass mobilization may provide more checks on incumbents than those emerging from intra-elite bargains. Moving beyond well-known beliefs regarding regime changes, Dictators and Democrats explores the conditions under which transitions to democracy are likely to arise.

Download or read book An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy written by Alison Stone and published by Polity. This book was released on 2007-12-17 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to offer a systematic account of feminist philosophy as a distinctive field of philosophy. The book introduces key issues and debates in feminist philosophy including: the nature of sex, gender, and the body; the relation between gender, sexuality, and sexual difference; whether there is anything that all women have in common; and the nature of birth and its centrality to human existence. An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy shows how feminist thinking on these and related topics has developed since the 1960s. The book also explains how feminist philosophy relates to the many forms of feminist politics. The book provides clear, succinct and readable accounts of key feminist thinkers including de Beauvoir, Butler, Gilligan, Irigaray, and MacKinnon. The book also introduces other thinkers who have influenced feminist philosophy including Arendt, Foucault, Freud, and Lacan. Accessible in approach, this book is ideal for students and researchers interested in feminist philosophy, feminist theory, women's studies, and political theory. It will also appeal to the general reader.

Download or read book The Tyranny of Experts written by William Easterly and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this "bracingly iconoclastic” book (New York Times Book Review), a renowned economics scholar breaks down the fight to end global poverty and the rights that poor individuals have had taken away for generations. In The Tyranny of Experts, renowned economist William Easterly examines our failing efforts to fight global poverty, and argues that the "expert approved" top-down approach to development has not only made little lasting progress, but has proven a convenient rationale for decades of human rights violations perpetrated by colonialists, postcolonial dictators, and US and UK foreign policymakers seeking autocratic allies. Demonstrating how our traditional antipoverty tactics have both trampled the freedom of the world's poor and suppressed a vital debate about alternative approaches to solving poverty, Easterly presents a devastating critique of the blighted record of authoritarian development. In this masterful work, Easterly reveals the fundamental errors inherent in our traditional approach and offers new principles for Western agencies and developing countries alike: principles that, because they are predicated on respect for the rights of poor people, have the power to end global poverty once and for all.

Download or read book Children of Monsters written by Jay Nordlinger and published by . This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Some years ago, the author, Jay Nordlinger, was in Albania. He was there to give a talk under State Department auspices. Albania was about ten years beyond the collapse of Communism. For almost 40 years, the country had been ruled by one of the most brutal dictators in history: Enver Hoxha. Nordlinger wondered whether this dictator had had children. He had indeed: three of them. And they were still in Albania, with their 3 million fellow citizens. Nordlinger wondered, "What are the lives of the Hoxha kids like? What must it be like to be the son or daughter of a monstrous dictator? What must it be like to bear a name synonymous with oppression, terror, and evil?" In this book, Nordlinger surveys 20 dictators in all. They are the worst of the worst: Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and so on. The book is not about them, really, though of course they figure in it. It's about their children. Some of them are absolute loyalists. They admire, revere, or worship their father. Some of them actually succeed their father as dictator-as in North Korea, Syria, and Haiti. Some of them have doubts. A couple of them become full-blown dissenters, even defectors. A few of the daughters have the experience of having their husband killed by their father. Most of these children are rocked by exile, prison, and the like. Obviously, the children have some things in common. But they are also individuals, making of life what they can. The main thing they have in common is this: They have been dealt a very, very unusual hand. What would you do, if you were the offspring of an infamous dictator, who lords it over your country? Chances are, you'll never have to find out! But some people have-and this book investigates those lucky, or unlucky, few"--

Download or read book A Brotherhood of Tyrants written by D. Jablow Hershman and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-10-29 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin were three tyrants, and the effects of their brutal regimes are still with us. Each attained absolute power, and misused it in a gargantuan fashion, leaving in his wake a trail of hatred, devastation, and death.In A Brotherhood of Tyrants, D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb uncover manic depression as a hidden cause of dictatorship, war, and mass killing. In comparing these three tyrants, they describe a number of behavioral similarities supporting the contention that a specific psychiatric disorder - manic depression - can be one of the key factors in such political pathologies as tyranny and terrorism.Manic depressive disorder has also produced the great destroyers in history - when in addition to ambition and egotism have been added large measures of ruthlessness, willfulness, utter intolerance of criticism, a consuming need to dominate others, paranoia, and megalomania.Focusing on these three dictators, A Brotherhood of Tyrants argues that manic depression has always been, and continues to be, a critical factor in compelling some individuals to seek political power and to become tyrants. It powerfully demonstrates how this disorder is the source of many of the typical characteristics - including grandiosity and megalomania - of a tyrannical personality and provides a manual for the identification of the psychotic tyrant.In their epilogue, the authors outline the clinical signs of manic depression as described in the classic studies of the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926). They apply these clinical signs and symptoms to the pathologies of four notorious mass killers of recent times: David Koresh, Jeffrey Dahmer, Jim Jones, and Colin Ferguson. They argue that if these individuals had been identified in time as manic depressives, they could have been successfully treated, and hundreds of innocent lives could have been saved.

Download or read book The Automobile Club of Egypt written by Alaa Al Aswany and published by Random House India. This book was released on 2015-08-22 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rollicking, exuberant and powerfully moving story of a family swept up by social unrest in post–World War II Cairo Abd el-Aziz Gaafar, formerly a well-respected landowner now in the grip of penury, moves his family to Cairo and takes on menial work at the Automobile Club—a place of refuge and luxury for its European members, but one where Egyptians may appear only as servants. Alku, the lifelong Nubian servant of Egypt’s corrupt king, runs the show in all but name. The servants, a squabbling, humorous, and deeply human group, live in a perpetual state of fear: beaten for their mistakes, their wages dependent on Alku’s whims. When Abd el-Aziz’s pride gets the better of him and he stands up for himself, his death—as much from shame as from his injuries after Alku has him beaten—leaves his widow further impoverished and two of his sons obliged to work in the Club. As the family is drawn into the turbulent politics of Egypt—public and private—both servants and masters are subsumed by the country’s social upheaval. Soon, the Egyptians of the Automobile Club face a stark choice: to live safely but without dignity as servants, or to fight for their rights and risk everything.

Download or read book Crisis written by Sylvia Walby and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-10-30 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are living in a time of crisis which has cascaded through society. Financial crisis has led to an economic crisis of recession and unemployment; an ensuing fiscal crisis over government deficits and austerity has led to a political crisis which threatens to become a democratic crisis. Borne unevenly, the effects of the crisis are exacerbating class and gender inequalities. Rival interpretations – a focus on ‘austerity’ and reduction in welfare spending versus a focus on ‘financial crisis’ and democratic regulation of finance – are used to justify radically diverse policies for the distribution of resources and strategies for economic growth, and contested gender relations lie at the heart of these debates. The future consequences of the crisis depend upon whether there is a deepening of democratic institutions, including in the European Union. Sylvia Walby offers an alternative framework within which to theorize crisis, drawing on complexity science and situating this within the wider field of study of risk, disaster and catastrophe. In doing so, she offers a critique and revision of the social science needed to understand the crisis.

Download or read book Psychoses Of Power written by Samuel Decalo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-21 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the idiosyncratic personal dictatorships sprang up in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. It surveys the social, economic, and political histories of Uganda, Central African Republic and Equatorial Guinea, exploring conditions that facilitated the rise of the dictatorial triumvirate.

Download or read book The Pariah Syndrome written by Ian F. Hancock and published by Karoma Publishers, Incorporated. This book was released on 1987 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book No One Is Talking About This written by Patricia Lockwood and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE & A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2021 WINNER OF THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE “A book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, witty and, eventually, deeply moving.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice “Wow. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much reading a book. What an inventive and startling writer…I’m so glad I read this. I really think this book is remarkable.” —David Sedaris From "a formidably gifted writer" (The New York Times Book Review), a book that asks: Is there life after the internet? As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. "Are we in hell?" the people of the portal ask themselves. "Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?" Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong," and "How soon can you get here?" As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary. Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.

Download or read book Confronting Fascism in Egypt written by Israel Gershoni and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-21 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confronting Fascism in Egypt offers a new reading of the political and intellectual culture of Egypt during the interwar era. Though scholarship has commonly emphasized Arab political and military support of Axis powers, this work reveals that the shapers of Egyptian public opinion were largely unreceptive to fascism, openly rejecting totalitarian ideas and practices, Nazi racism, and Italy's and Germany's expansionist and imperialist agendas. The majority (although not all) of Egyptian voices supported liberal democracy against the fascist challenge, and most Egyptians sought to improve and reform, rather than to replace and destroy, the existing constitutional and parliamentary system. The authors place Egyptian public discourse in the broader context of the complex public sphere within which debate unfolded—in Egypt's large and vibrant network of daily newspapers, as well as the weekly or monthly opinion journals—emphasizing the open, diverse, and pluralistic nature of the interwar political and cultural arena. In examining Muslim views of fascism at the moment when classical fascism was at its peak, this enlightening book seriously challenges the recent assumption of an inherent Muslim predisposition toward authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and "Islamo-Fascism."

Download or read book Dark Persuasion written by Joel E. Dimsdale and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A harrowing account of brainwashing’s pervasive role in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries This gripping book traces the evolution of brainwashing from its beginnings in torture and religious conversion into the age of neuroscience and social media. When Pavlov introduced scientific approaches, his research was enthusiastically supported by Lenin and Stalin, setting the stage for major breakthroughs in tools for social, political, and religious control. Tracing these developments through many of the past century’s major conflagrations, Dimsdale narrates how when World War II erupted, governments secretly raced to develop drugs for interrogation. Brainwashing returned to the spotlight during the Cold War in the hands of the North Koreans and Chinese. In response, a huge Manhattan Project of the Mind was established to study memory obliteration, indoctrination during sleep, and hallucinogens. Cults used the techniques as well. Nobel laureates, university academics, intelligence operatives, criminals, and clerics all populate this shattering and dark story—one that hasn’t yet ended.

Download or read book The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos written by Primitivo Mijares and published by . This book was released on 2016-01-17 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author's Foreword This book is unfinished. The Filipino people shall finish it for me. I wrote this volume very, very slowly. 1 could have done with it In three months after my defection from the conjugal dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos on February 20.1975. Instead, I found myself availing of every excuse to slow it down. A close associate, Marcelino P. Sarmiento, even warned me, "Baka mapanis 'yan." (Your book could become stale.)While I availed of almost any excuse not to finish the manuscript of this volume, I felt the tangible voices of a muted people back home in the Philippines beckoning to me from across the vast Pacific Ocean. In whichever way I turned, I was confronted by the distraught images of the Filipino multitudes cryingout to me to finish this work, lest the frailty of human memory -- or any incident a la Nalundasan - consign to oblivion the matters I had in mind to form the vital parts of this book. It was as if the Filipino multitudes and history itself were surging in an endless wave presenting a compelling demand on me toSan Francisco, California perpetuate the personal knowledge I have gained on the infamous machinations of Ferdinand E. Marcos and his overly ambitious wife, Imelda, that led to a day of infamy in my country, that Black Friday on September 22, 1972, when martial law was declared as a means to establish history's first conjugal dictatorship. The sense of urgency in finishing this work was also goaded by the thought that Marcos does not have eternal life and that the Filipino people are of unimaginable forgiving posture. I thought that, if I did not perpetuate this work for posterity, Marcos might unduly benefit from a Laurelian statement that, when a man dies, the virtues of his past are magnified and his faults are reduced to molehills. This is a book for which so much has been offered and done by Marcos and his minions so that it would never see the light of print. Now that it is off the press. I entertain greater fear that so much more will be done to prevent its circulation, not only in the Philippines but also in the United States.But this work now belongs to history. Let it speak for itself in the context of developments within the coming months or years. Although it finds great relevance in the present life of the present life of the Filipinos and of Americans interested in the study of subversion of democratic governments by apparently legal means, this work seeks to find its proper niche in history which mustinevitably render its judgment on the seizure of government power from the people by a lame duck Philippine President.If I had finished this work immediately after my defection from the totalitarian regime of Ferdinand and Imelda, or after the vicious campaign of the dictatorship to vilify me in July-August. 1975, then I could have done so only in anger. Anger did influence my production of certain portions of the manu-script. However, as I put the finishing touches to my work, I found myself expurgating it of the personal venom, the virulence and intemperate language of my original draft.Some of the materials that went into this work had been of public knowledge in the Philippines. If I had used them, it was with the intention of utilizing them as links to heretofore unrevealed facets of the various ruses that Marcos employed to establish his dictatorship.Now, I have kept faith with the Filipino people. I have kept my rendezvous with history. I have, with this work, discharged my obligation to myself, my profession of journalism, my family and my country.I had one other compelling reason for coming out with this work at the great risks of being uprooted from my beloved country, of forced separation from my wife and children and losing their affection, and of losing everything I have in my name in the Philippines - or losing life itself. It is that I wanted to makea public expiation for the little influence that I had . . . .(more inside)