Download or read book To Catch a Dictator written by Reed Brody and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it take to make a dictator answer for his crimes? Hissène Habré, the former despot of Chad, had terrorized, tortured, and killed on a horrific scale over eight bloody years in power—all while enjoying full American and Western support. After Habré’s overthrow, his victims and their supporters were determined to see him held responsible for his atrocities. Their quest for justice would be long, tense, and unnerving, but they would not back down. To Catch a Dictator is a dramatic insider’s account of the hunt for Habré and his momentous trial. The human rights lawyer Reed Brody recounts how he and an international team of investigators, legal experts, and victims worked across three continents to unearth evidence and witnesses, petition courts and skeptical governments, and rally public opinion. They faced many obstacles and constant threats. One of Brody’s Chadian colleagues was gravely injured in a bomb attack, and another had to seek asylum in the United States. Habré fought back bitterly, drawing on secret bank accounts and extensive political connections to preserve his life of luxurious exile. Yet Brody and his allies ultimately triumphed: Habré became the first former head of state to be convicted of crimes against humanity in the courts of another country. This fast-paced, suspenseful book shows that there is nothing inevitable about the impunity that too often protects the powerful and that even the worst tyrants can be brought to justice. The book also features a foreword by Jacqueline Moudeïna, the lead lawyer for Hissène Habré’s victims, who received the Right Livelihood Award (the “alternative Nobel Peace Prize”) in 2011.
Download or read book The President on Trial written by Sharon Weill and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book details and contextualizes the trial of Hissène Habré, who was prosecuted by a court in Senegal for his role in atrocities committed against Chadian citizens during the 1980s. It employs an innovative combination of first-person accounts from direct actors and academic analysis from leading experts on international criminal justice.
Download or read book Popular Dictatorships written by Aleksandar Matovski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-25 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Electoral autocracies – regimes that adopt democratic institutions but subvert them to rule as dictatorships – have become the most widespread, resilient and malignant non-democracies today. They have consistently ruled over a third of the countries in the world, including geopolitically significant states like Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan. Challenging conventional wisdom, Popular Dictators shows that the success of electoral authoritarianism is not due to these regimes' superior capacity to repress, bribe, brainwash and manipulate their societies into submission, but is actually a product of their genuine popular appeal in countries experiencing deep political, economic and security crises. Promising efficient, strong-armed rule tempered by popular accountability, elected strongmen attract mass support in societies traumatized by turmoil, dysfunction and injustice, allowing them to rule through the ballot box. Popular Dictators argues that this crisis legitimation strategy makes electoral authoritarianism the most significant threat to global peace and democracy.
Download or read book Arafat written by Saïd K. Aburish and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 1999-09-27 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the Palestinian leader
Download or read book Dictators and their Secret Police written by Sheena Chestnut Greitens and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the secret police organizations of East Asian dictators: their origins, operations, and effects on ordinary citizens' lives.
Download or read book American Dictators written by Steven Hart and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-25 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One man was tongue-tied and awkward around women, in many ways a mama's boy at heart, although his reputation for thuggery was well earned. The other was a playboy, full of easy charm and ready jokes, his appetite for high living a matter of public record. One man tolerated gangsters and bootleggers as long as they paid their dues to his organization. The other was effectively a gangster himself, so crooked that he hosted a national gathering of America's most ruthless killers. One man never drank alcohol. The other, from all evidence, seldom drank anything else. American Dictators is the dual biography of two of America’s greatest political bosses: Frank Hague and Enoch “Nucky” Johnson. Packed with compelling information and written in an informal, sometimes humorous style, the book shows Hague and Johnson at the peak of their power and the strength of their political machines during the years of Prohibition and the Great Depression. Steven Hart compares how both men used their influence to benefit and punish the local citizenry, amass huge personal fortunes, and sometimes collaborate to trounce their enemies. Similar in their ruthlessness, both men were very different in appearance and temperament. Hague, the mayor of Jersey City, intimidated presidents and wielded unchallenged power for three decades. He never drank and was happily married to his wife for decades. He also allowed gangsters to run bootlegging and illegal gambling operations as long as they paid protection money. Johnson, the political boss of Atlantic City, and the inspiration for the hit HBO series Boardwalk Empire, presided over corruption as well, but for a shorter period of time. He was notorious for his decadent lifestyle. Essentially a gangster himself, Johnson hosted the infamous Atlantic City conference that fostered the growth of organized crime. Both Hague and Johnson shrewdly integrated otherwise disenfranchised groups into their machines and gave them a stake in political power. Yet each failed to adapt to changing demographics and circumstances. In American Dictators, Hart paints a balanced portrait of their accomplishments and their failures.
Download or read book It Can t Happen Here written by Sinclair Lewis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The novel that foreshadowed Donald Trump’s authoritarian appeal.”—Salon It Can’t Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler’s aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press. Called “a message to thinking Americans” by the Springfield Republican when it was published in 1935, It Can’t Happen Here is a shockingly prescient novel that remains as fresh and contemporary as today’s news. Includes an Introduction by Michael Meyer and an Afterword by Gary Scharnhorst
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 How to Feed a Dictator written by Witold Szablowski and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Amazing stories . . . Intimate portraits of how [these five ruthless leaders] were at home and at the table.” —Lulu Garcia-Navarro, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday Anthony Bourdain meets Kapuściński in this chilling look from within the kitchen at the appetites of five of the twentieth century's most infamous dictators, by the acclaimed author of Dancing Bears and What’s Cooking in the Kremlin What was Pol Pot eating while two million Cambodians were dying of hunger? Did Idi Amin really eat human flesh? And why was Fidel Castro obsessed with one particular cow? Traveling across four continents, from the ruins of Iraq to the savannahs of Kenya, Witold Szabłowski tracked down the personal chefs of five dictators known for the oppression and massacre of their own citizens—Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Uganda’s Idi Amin, Albania’s Enver Hoxha, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Cambodia’s Pol Pot—and listened to their stories over sweet-and-sour soup, goat-meat pilaf, bottles of rum, and games of gin rummy. Dishy, deliciously readable, and dead serious, How to Feed a Dictator provides a knife’s-edge view of life under tyranny.
Download or read book Constitutionalism and Dictatorship written by Robert Barros and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-07-04 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely believed that autocratic regimes cannot limit their power through institutions of their own making. This book presents a surprising challenge to this view. It demonstrates that the Chilean armed forces were constrained by institutions of their own design. Based on extensive documentation of military decision-making, much of it long classified and unavailable, this book reconstructs the politics of institutions within the recent Chilean dictatorship (1973–1990). It examines the structuring of institutions at the apex of the military junta, the relationship of military rule with the prior constitution, the intra-military conflicts that led to the promulgation of the 1980 constitution, the logic of institutions contained in the new constitution, and how the constitution constrained the military junta after it went into force in 1981. This provocative account reveals the standard account of the dictatorship as a personalist regime with power concentrated in Pinochet to be grossly inaccurate.
Download or read book How Dictatorships Work written by Barbara Geddes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains how dictatorships rise, survive, and fall, along with why some but not all dictators wield vast powers.
Download or read book The Autumn of the Patriarch written by Gabriel García Márquez and published by Penguin Books India. This book was released on 1996 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No Marketing Blurb
Download or read book The Making of Donald Trump written by David Cay Johnston and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER that connects the dots from Donald Trump's racist background to the Russian scandals "A searing indictment." — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Johnston has given us this year's must-read Trump book." — Lawrence O'Donnell, host of MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell The international bestseller that brought Trump's long history of racism, mafia ties, and shady business dealings into the limelight. Now with a new introduction and epilogue. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, who had spent thirty years chronicling Donald Trump for the New York Times and other leading newspapers, takes readers from the origins of the Trump family fortune—his grandfather's Yukon bordellos during the Gold Rush—to his tumultuous gambling and real estate dealings in New York and Atlantic City, all the way to his election as president of the United States, giving us a deeply researched and shockingly full picture of one of the most controversial figures of our time.
Download or read book Political Institutions under Dictatorship written by Jennifer Gandhi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often dismissed as window-dressing, nominally democratic institutions, such as legislatures and political parties, play an important role in non-democratic regimes. In a comprehensive cross-national study of all non-democratic states from 1946 to 2002 that examines the political uses of these institutions by dictators, Gandhi finds that legislative and partisan institutions are an important component in the operation and survival of authoritarian regimes. She examines how and why these institutions are useful to dictatorships in maintaining power, analyzing the way dictators utilize institutions as a forum in which to organize political concessions to potential opposition in an effort to neutralize threats to their power and to solicit cooperation from groups outside of the ruling elite. The use of legislatures and parties to co-opt opposition results in significant institutional effects on policies and outcomes under dictatorship.
Download or read book Salazar written by Tom Gallagher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty years after his death, Portugal's Salazar remains a controversial and enigmatic figure, whose conservative and authoritarian legacy still divides opinion. Some see him as a reactionary and oppressive figure who kept Portugal backward, while others praise his honesty, patriotism and dedication to duty. Contemporary radicals are wary of his unabashed elitism and skepticism about social progress, but many conservatives give credit to his persistent warnings about the threats to Western civilization from runaway materialism and endless experimentation. For a dictator, Salazar's end was anti-climactic--a domestic accident. But during his nearly four decades in power, he survived less through reliance on force and more through guile and charm. This probing biography charts the highs and lows of Salazar's rule, from rescuing Portugal's finances and keeping his strategically-placed nation out of World War II to maintaining a police state while resisting the winds of change in Africa. It explores Salazar's long-running suspicion of and conflict with the United States, and how he kept Hitler and Mussolini at arm's length while persuading his fellow dictator Franco not to enter the war on their side. Iberia expert Tom Gallagher brings to life a complex leader who deserves to be far better known.
Download or read book In the Time of the Butterflies written by Julia Alvarez and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2010-01-12 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2024, internationally bestselling author and literary icon Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies is "beautiful, heartbreaking and alive ... a lyrical work of historical fiction based on the story of the Mirabal sisters, revolutionary heroes who had opposed and fought against Trujillo." (Concepción de León, New York Times) Alvarez’s new novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is coming April 2, 2024. Pre-order now! It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—the Butterflies. In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters--Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé--speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from secret crushes to gunrunning, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human costs of political oppression. "Alvarez helped blaze the trail for Latina authors to break into the literary mainstream, with novels like In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents winning praise from critics and gracing best-seller lists across the Americas."—Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review "This Julia Alvarez classic is a must-read for anyone of Latinx descent." —Popsugar.com "A gorgeous and sensitive novel . . . A compelling story of courage, patriotism and familial devotion." —People "Shimmering . . . Valuable and necessary." —Los Angeles Times "A magnificent treasure for all cultures and all time.” —St. Petersburg Times "Alvarez does a remarkable job illustrating the ruinous effect the 30-year dictatorship had on the Dominican Republic and the very real human cost it entailed."—Cosmopolitan.com
Download or read book The Taming of Democracy Assistance written by Sarah Sunn Bush and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-30 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most government programs seeking to aid democracy abroad do not directly confront dictators. This book explains how organizational politics 'tamed' democracy assistance.
