Download or read book Violence as Usual written by Marie Muschalek and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-15 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slaps in the face, kicks, beatings, and other forms of run-of-the-mill violence were a quotidian part of life in German Southwest Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. Unearthing this culture of normalized violence in a settler colony, Violence as Usual uncovers the workings of a powerful state that was built in an improvised fashion by low-level state representatives. Marie A. Muschalek's fascinating portrayal of the daily deeds of African and German men enrolled in the colonial police force called the Landespolizei is a historical anthropology of police practice and the normalization of imperial power. Replete with anecdotes of everyday experiences both of the policemen and of colonized people and settlers, Violence as Usual re-examines fundamental questions about the relationship between power and violence. Muschalek gives us a new perspective on violence beyond the solely destructive and the instrumental. She overcomes, too, the notion that modern states operate exclusively according to modes of rationalized functionality. Violence as Usual offers an unusual assessment of the history of rule in settler colonialism and an alternative to dominant narratives of an ostensibly weak colonial state.
Download or read book Normal Life written by Dean Spade and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-23 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revised and Expanded Edition Wait—what's wrong with rights? It is usually assumed that trans and gender nonconforming people should follow the civil rights and "equality" strategies of lesbian and gay rights organizations by agitating for legal reforms that would ostensibly guarantee nondiscrimination and equal protection under the law. This approach assumes that the best way to address the poverty and criminalization that plague trans populations is to gain legal recognition and inclusion in the state's institutions. But is this strategy effective? In Normal Life Dean Spade presents revelatory critiques of the legal equality framework for social change, and points to examples of transformative grassroots trans activism that is raising demands that go beyond traditional civil rights reforms. Spade explodes assumptions about what legal rights can do for marginalized populations, and describes transformative resistance processes and formations that address the root causes of harm and violence. In the new afterword to this revised and expanded edition, Spade notes the rapid mainstreaming of trans politics and finds that his predictions that gaining legal recognition will fail to benefit trans populations are coming to fruition. Spade examines recent efforts by the Obama administration and trans equality advocates to "pinkwash" state violence by articulating the US military and prison systems as sites for trans inclusion reforms. In the context of recent increased mainstream visibility of trans people and trans politics, Spade continues to advocate for the dismantling of systems of state violence that shorten the lives of trans people. Now more than ever, Normal Life is an urgent call for justice and trans liberation, and the radical transformations it will require.
Download or read book Ordinary Violence in Mussolini s Italy written by Michael R. Ebner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ordinary Violence in Mussolini's Italy reveals the centrality of violence to Fascist rule, arguing that the Mussolini regime projected its coercive power deeply and diffusely into society through confinement, imprisonment, low-level physical assaults, economic deprivations, intimidation, discrimination, and other everyday forms of coercion. Fascist repression was thus more intense and ideological than previously thought and even shared some important similarities with Nazi and Soviet terror.
Download or read book A Pattern of Violence written by David Alan Sklansky and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A law professor and former prosecutor reveals how inconsistent ideas about violence, enshrined in law, are at the root of the problems that plague our entire criminal justice system—from mass incarceration to police brutality. We take for granted that some crimes are violent and others aren’t. But how do we decide what counts as a violent act? David Alan Sklansky argues that legal notions about violence—its definition, causes, and moral significance—are functions of political choices, not eternal truths. And these choices are central to failures of our criminal justice system. The common distinction between violent and nonviolent acts, for example, played virtually no role in criminal law before the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet to this day, with more crimes than ever called “violent,” this distinction determines how we judge the seriousness of an offense, as well as the perpetrator’s debt and danger to society. Similarly, criminal law today treats violence as a pathology of individual character. But in other areas of law, including the procedural law that covers police conduct, the situational context of violence carries more weight. The result of these inconsistencies, and of society’s unique fear of violence since the 1960s, has been an application of law that reinforces inequities of race and class, undermining law’s legitimacy. A Pattern of Violence shows that novel legal philosophies of violence have motivated mass incarceration, blunted efforts to hold police accountable, constrained responses to sexual assault and domestic abuse, pushed juvenile offenders into adult prisons, encouraged toleration of prison violence, and limited responses to mass shootings. Reforming legal notions of violence is therefore an essential step toward justice.
Download or read book Violence All Around written by John Sifton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-11 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A human rights lawyer travels to hot zones around the globe, before and after the September 11 attacks, to document abuses committed by warlords, terrorist groups, and government counterterrorism forces. Whether reporting on al Qaeda safe houses, the mechanics of the Pentagon’s smartest bombs, his interviews with politicians and ordinary civilians, or his own brush with death outside Kabul, John Sifton wants to help us understand violence—what it is, and how we think and speak about it. For the human rights community, the global war on terror brought unprecedented challenges. Of special concern were the secret detention centers operated by the CIA as it expanded into a paramilitary force, and the harsh treatment of prisoners throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. In drafting legal memoranda that made domestic prosecution for these crimes impossible, Sifton argues, the United States possessed not only the detainees but the law itself. Sifton recounts his efforts to locate secret prisons and reflects on the historical development of sanctioned military or police violence—from hand-to-hand combat to the use of drones—and the likelihood that technology will soon enable completely automated killing. Sifton is equally concerned to examine what people have meant by nonviolent social change, and he asks whether pure nonviolence is ever possible. To invoke rights is to invoke the force to uphold them, he reminds us. Ultimately, advocates for human rights can only shame the world into better behavior, and their work may involve advocating the very violence they deplore.
Download or read book Violence written by Slavoj Zizek and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-07-22 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosopher, cultural critic, and agent provocateur Zizek constructs a fascinating new framework to look at the forces of violence in the world.
Download or read book Victims and Warriors written by Casey High and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-03-30 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1956, a group of Waorani men killed five North American missionaries in Ecuador. The event cemented the Waorani's reputation as ""wild Amazonian Indians"" in the eyes of the outside world. It also added to the myth of the violent Amazon created by colonial writers and still found in academia and the state development agendas across the region. Victims and Warriors examines contemporary violence in the context of political and economic processes that transcend local events. Casey High explores how popular imagery of Amazonian violence has become part of Waorani social memory in oral histories, folklore performances, and indigenous political activism. As Amazonian forms of social memory merge with constructions of masculinity and other intercultural processes, the Waorani absorb missionaries, oil development, and logging depredations into their legacy of revenge killings and narratives of victimhood. High shows that these memories of past violence form sites of negotiation and cultural innovation, and thus violence comes to constitute a central part of Amazonian sociality, identity, and memory.
Download or read book The Value of Violence written by Benjamin Ginsberg and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative thesis calls violence the driving force not just of war, but of politics and even social stability. Though violence is commonly deplored, political scientist Ginsberg argues that in many ways it is indispensable, unavoidable, and valuable. Ginsberg sees violence manifested in society in many ways. "Law-preserving violence" (using Walter Benjamin's phrase) is the chief means by which society preserves social order. Behind the security of a stable society are the blunt instruments of the police, prisons, and the power of the bureaucratic state to coerce and manipulate. Ginsberg also discusses violence as a tool of social change, whether used in outright revolution or as a means of reform in public protests or the threat of insurrection. He notes that even groups committed to nonviolent tactics rely on the violent reactions of their opponents to achieve their ends. And to avoid the threat of unrest, modern states resort to social welfare systems (a prudent use of the carrot instead of the stick). Emphasizing the unavoidability of violence to create major change, Ginsberg points out that few today would trade our current situation for the alternative had our forefathers not resorted to the violence of the American Revolution and the Civil War.
Download or read book Reverberations written by Yael Navaro and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reverberations aims to generate new concepts and methodologies for the study of political violence and its aftermath. Essays attend to the distribution, extension, and endurance of violence across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, and political imaginations.
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 498 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 A History of Violence written by Robert Muchembled and published by Polity. This book was released on 2012 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a history of violence in Europe and discusses the theory that violence has actually been in decline since the thirteenth century.
Download or read book Every 90 Seconds written by Anne P. DePrince and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Every 90 Seconds, Anne P. DePrince argues that to end violence against women, we must fundamentally redefine how we engage with it-starting by abandoning the idea that such acts are a problem involving only those who abuse or are abused. Instead, DePrince explains how violence against women is inextricably linked to other issues that stoke our greatest passions, including healthcare and education, immigration, economic security, criminal justice reform, and gun control.
Download or read book Histories of Violence written by Brad Evans and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.
Download or read book Stealth Conflicts written by Virgil Hawkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of the world's deadliest conflicts are largely ignored - becoming off-the-radar 'stealth conflicts'. How can this be possible in a world with unprecedented levels of access to information, and unprecedented levels of attention and resources being devoted to foreign affairs? Virgil Hawkins reveals and explains the highly distorted and assimilated responses to foreign conflicts by major actors in the world. He examines the agenda-setting processes of policy makers, the media, the public and academics in relation to foreign conflicts. Using a vast array of detailed examples, he systematically unravels the internal dynamics and external influences experienced by these actors, and in so doing he brings the academic agenda into the loop of the conflict response agenda-setting process for the first time. With agenda-setting research tending to focus on the question of why a response to a particular event or issue occurred, this book furthers research by focusing equally on why a response did not occur. The volume is critically important in understanding why actors do and do not respond to foreign conflicts.
Download or read book Violence of Mind Training and Preparation for Extreme Violence written by Varg Freeborn and published by . This book was released on 2018-02-23 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book covering the topic of self-defense from a shocking, first-hand perspective. The subjects of criminal violence, self-defense, lethal force, mindset, firearms training and concealment have never been introduced so comprehensively in one place. Having successfully sold world-wide in its independently published and distributed paperback form, it is now available on Kindle. "A powerful, gripping, and self-reflective roller-coaster that's part cautionary tale, part how-to book on building the counterpart to the high-order predator, Varg makes no apologies for it being an in-your-face look at real violence from the perspective of that rare someone who can speak from deep personal experience, from both sides of the fence. In an industry littered with those often driven by ego, fantasy, and disconnected from reality, there are a vast number of people in this industry that NEED to read this. A book only an authentic leader in the industry could produce, fully-recommended. Read this book if you're serious about personal protection." D.P. Friesen, CLTP, Costa RicaVarg Freeborn is an author, fitness coach, violence educator and lethal force instructor widely known for his unique background in the violent criminal underworld. His breadth of experience is unmatched in criminal violence education and self-defense training.
Download or read book Masters of Violence written by Tristan Stubbs and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From trusted to tainted, an examination of the shifting perceived reputation of overseers of enslaved people during the eighteenth century. In the antebellum southern United States, major landowners typically hired overseers to manage their plantations. In addition to cultivating crops, managing slaves, and dispensing punishment, overseers were expected to maximize profits through increased productivity—often achieved through violence and cruelty. In Masters of Violence, Tristan Stubbs offers the first book-length examination of the overseers—from recruitment and dismissal to their relationships with landowners and enslaved people, as well as their changing reputations, which devolved from reliable to untrustworthy and incompetent. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, slave owners regarded overseers as reliable enforcers of authority; by the end of the century, particularly after the American Revolution, plantation owners viewed them as incompetent and morally degenerate, as well as a threat to their power. Through a careful reading of plantation records, diaries, contemporary newspaper articles, and many other sources, Stubbs uncovers the ideological shift responsible for tarnishing overseers’ reputations. In this book, Stubbs argues that this shift in opinion grew out of far-reaching ideological and structural transformations to slave societies in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia throughout the Revolutionary era. Seeking to portray slavery as positive and yet simultaneously distance themselves from it, plantation owners blamed overseers as incompetent managers and vilified them as violent brutalizers of enslaved people. “A solid work of scholarship, and even specialists in the field of colonial slavery will derive considerable benefit from reading it.” —Journal of Southern History “A major achievement, restoring the issue of class to societies riven by racial conflict.” —Trevor Burnard, University of Melbourne “Based on a detailed reading of overseers’ letters and diaries, plantation journals, employer’s letters, and newspapers, Tristan Stubbs has traced the evolution of the position of the overseer from the colonial planter’s partner to his most despised employee. This deeply researched volume helps to reframe our understanding of class in the colonial and antebellum South.” —Tim Lockley, University of Warwick
Download or read book Violence written by James Gilligan and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He focuses on how feelings of shame cause violent and vengeful behaviour, argues that conventional punitive legal and penal systems which are based on notions of justice and retribution perpetuate violent behaviour. This ground-breaking book is a read for everyone touched by violence, all those who are working to prevent it and its consequences.
