This is a political biography of one of the 20th century’s most emblematic left-wing figures - Salvador Allende, who was president of Chile until he was ousted by General Pinochet in a US-supported coup in 1973.
Victor Figueroa Clark guides us through Allende's life and political project, answering some of the most frequently asked questions. Was he a revolutionary or a reformist? A bureaucrat or inspirational democrat? Clark argues that Allende and the Popular Unity Party created a unique fusion which was both revolutionary and democratic.
The process led by Allende was a symbol of hope for the left during his short time in power. Forty years on, and with left governments back in power across Latin America, this book looks back at the man and the process in order to draw vital lessons for the left in Latin America and around the world today.
Undocumented migration is a huge global phenomenon, yet little is known about the reality of life for those involved. Sans Papiers combines a contemporary account of the theoretical and policy debates with an in-depth exploration of the lived experiences of undocumented migrants in the UK from Zimbabwe, China, Brazil, Ukraine and Turkish Kurdistan.
Built around their voices, the book provides a unique understanding of migratory processes, gendered experiences and migrant aspirations. Moving between the uniqueness of individual experience and the search for commonalities, the book explores the ambiguities and contradictions of being an undocumented migrant.
With its insights into personal experiences alongside analysis of wider policy issues, Sans Papiers will have wide appeal for students, academics, policy-makers and practitioners.
A systematic exploration of the arguments for Scottish independence from a sympathetic angle.
The Scottish independence question is one of the pivotal questions facing British politics and the future of the United Kingdom. It is also one of the most contentious and misunderstood.
In Scotland Rising, Gerry Hassan addresses the fundamental questions covering the Scottish independence debate so that people can better understand the case for independence and the nuances, contours, and implications for the whole country. Looking beyond the merits and shortcomings of the SNP and the Conservative government in Westminster, Hassan tackles the larger driving dynamics of 'the Scottish Question' - a growing desire amongst many Scots for an explicit discussion about society, public policy choices, and wider values.
Addressing the constitutional framework, and questions about the role of government and democracy, the nature of the British state, society, and capitalism, Scotland Rising makes an urgent and intelligent contribution to one of the defining political questions of our time.
Africa is often seen as a place to be pitied or feared as an area of instability. This book challenges these complacent assumptions, showing how our demand for oil contributes to the chronic problems plaguing the continent.
Douglas A. Yates shows how the 'scramble' by the great powers for African oil has fed corruption and undermined democracy. Yates documents how Africans have refused to remain passive in the face of such developments, forming movements to challenge this new attempt at domination.
This book is an urgent challenge to our understanding of Africa, raising questions about the consequences of our reliance on foreign resources. It will be vital reading for all those studying development and global political economy.
Every year, millions of the rural poor suffer from predictable and preventable seasonal hunger. This hunger is less dramatic but no less damaging than the starvation associated with famines, wars and natural disasters. Seasons of Hunger explores why the world does not react to a crisis that we know will continue year after year.
Seasonal hunger is caused by annual cycles of shrinking food stocks, rising prices, and lack of income. This hidden hunger pushes millions of children to the brink of starvation every year, permanently stunting their physical and cognitive development, weakening their immune systems and opening the door for killer diseases. Action Against Hunger argue that ending seasonal hunger could save millions of young lives and is key to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. This book documents seasonal hunger in four countries - India, Malawi, Mali and Myanmar - including personal stories and country-wide data which shows the magnitude of the problem.
The authors also find encouraging examples of interventions designed to address seasonality - initiatives led by governments, donors and NGOs, and poor people themselves - and propose a package of advocacy messages that could contribute to the global eradication of seasonal hunger. This book will be a valuable resource for journalists, policy makers, NGO members and students of development studies.
The Second World War casts a long shadow, portrayed as a necessary and paradigmatic war that defeated fascism. During recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, US presidents and British prime ministers have tried to claim they were following in the footsteps of Winston Churchill by standing up to dictators.
In The Second World War Chris Bambery tests this position in a thorough account of the war and tries to understand why it still dominates TV history channels and school history books.
Bambery argues that the conflict ultimately was about a division of the world between the great powers, as well as a rising of ordinary people against fascism. He offers a complex and radical analysis, that is unique when compared to many modern and conventional histories of the war.
The exposure of undercover policeman Mark Kennedy in the eco-activist movement revealed how the state monitors and undermines political activism. This book shows the other grave threat to our political freedoms - undercover activities by corporations.
Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark documents how corporations are halting legitimate action and investigation by activists. Using exclusive access to previously confidential sources, Eveline Lubbers shows how companies such as Nestlé, Shell and McDonalds use covert methods to evade accountability. She argues that corporate intelligence gathering has shifted from being reactive to pro-active, with important implications for democracy itself.
Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark will be vital reading for activists, investigative and citizen journalists, and all who care about freedom and democracy in the 21st century.
Stories of smuggling as acts of resistance and decolonization.
'This conceptually vivid book refreshes our vision' - Ruth Wilson Gilmore
The word smuggler often unleashes a simplified, negative image painted by the media and the authorities. Such state-centric perspectives hide many social, political, and economic relations generated by smuggling. This book looks at the practice through the eyes of the smugglers, revealing how their work can be productive, subversive, and deeply sociopolitical.
By tracing the illegalized movement of people and goods across borders, Seeing Like a Smuggler shows smuggling as a contradiction within the nation-state system, and in a dialectical relation with the national order of things. It raises questions about how smuggling engages and unsettles the ethics, materialities, visualities, histories, and the colonial power relations that form borders and bordering.
Covering a wide spectrum of approaches from personal reflections and ethnographies to historical accounts, cultural analysis, and visual essays, the book spans the globe from Colombia to Ethiopia, Singapore to Guatemala, Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and from Kurdistan to Bangladesh, to show how people deal with global inequalities and the restrictions of poverty and immobility.
Sai Englert offers readers an accessible and global account of settler colonialism, taking in its history, some of its main characteristics, and its continued relevance today.
From the Palestinian struggle against Israel occupation to the First Nations' mass opposition to pipeline construction in North America, indigenous peoples are at the forefront of some of the most important struggles of our age. Rich with their own unique histories, characteristics, and social relations, these different struggles are connected by the enemy they face: settler colonialism.
While settler-colonial regimes differ, Englert explains how they are all defined by a fundamental conflict between themselves and the indigenous people they aim to dispossess, exploit and/or eliminate.
To understand settler colonialism as a distinct, structural, and contemporary process, is also to start engaging with a number of international social movements, political struggles, and solidarity campaigns differently. It is to start asking how decolonization – as a material struggle for freedom – might be possible.
Shadow Lives reveals the unseen side of the '9/11 wars': their impact on the wives and families of men incarcerated in Guantanamo, or in prison or under house arrest in Britain and the US. Victoria Brittain shows how these families have been made socially invisible and a convenient scapegoat for the state in order to exercise arbitrary powers under the cover of the 'War on Terror'.
A disturbing exposé of the perilous state of freedom and democracy in our society, the book reveals how a culture of intolerance and cruelty has left individuals at the mercy of the security services’ unverifiable accusations and punitive punishments.
Both a j'accuse and a testament to the strength and humanity of the families, Shadow Lives shows the methods of incarceration and social control being used by the British state and gives a voice to the families whose lives have been turned upside down. In doing so it raises urgent questions about civil liberties which no one can afford to ignore.
There is no more compelling and dramatic unfolding story, with more profound international ramifications, than the conflict in the Middle East.
Sharing the Land of Canaan is a critical examination of the core issues of the conflict that dares to put forward a radical but logical solution: that a shared state is the best way to achieve justice and peace for Israelis and Palestinians.
Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, a human rights activist based at Yale University, offers an overview of the issues at stake, and outlines his vision for a lasting peace based on upholding the principles of human rights for all. Tackling taboo subjects, myths and obstacles, he argues convincingly that apartheid in the form of a two-state solution is no longer a feasible way to achieve enduring peace.
At this critical time, when the 'road map' to peace looks more uncertain than ever, this book provides a refreshing counterpoint to the failed strategies of the past. It is a direct and accessible account of the history - and mythology - of the fabled 'Land of Canaan', which lays out hopeful ideas for the future of this truly multiethnic and multicultural region.
Neoliberals often point to improvements in public health and nutrition as examples of globalisation's success, but this book argues that the corporate food and medicine industries are destroying environments and ruining living conditions across the world.
Scientist Stan Cox expertly draws out the strong link between Western big business and environmental destruction. This is a shocking account of the huge damage that drug manufacturers and large food corporations are inflicting on the health of people and crops worldwide. Companies discussed include Wal-Mart, GlaxoSmithKline, Tyson Foods and Monsanto. On issues ranging from the poisoning of water supplies in South Asia to natural gas depletion and how it threatens global food supplies, Cox shows how the demand for profits is always put above the public interest.
While individual efforts to "shop for a better world" and conserve energy are laudable, Cox explains that they need to be accompanied by an economic system that is grounded in ecological sustainability if we are to find a cure for our Sick Planet.
Sinn Féin is a growing force in Irish politics. Now the country's third largest party, Sinn Féin have been one of the central architects of the peace process and are increasingly setting the terms of political debate in Ireland north and south. Despite this, the party remains much misunderstood and often misrepresented.
In Sinn Féin & The Politics of Left Republicanism, Sinn Féin activist Eoin Ó Broin explores the ideological and organisational origins of the party, charts their history and recent political development and assesses their possible futures.
He argues that Sinn Féin is part of a distinct left-republican tradition in Irish society whose future lies in the globally resurgent radical democratic left.
The Slow Food movement was set up in Italy as a response to the dominance of fast food chains, supermarkets and large-scale agribusiness. It seeks to defend what it calls 'the universal right to pleasure' and promotes an alternative approach to food production and consumption based on the promotion of 'good, clean and fair' local products.
This is the first in-depth study of the fascinating politics of Slow Food, which in twenty years has grown into an international organisation with more than 80,000 members in over 100 countries. With its roots in the 1960s and 1970s counter-culture, Slow Food's distinctive politics lie in the unity between gastronomic pleasure and environmental responsibility. The movement crosses the left-right divide to embrace both the conservative desire to preserve traditional rural communities and an alternative 'virtuous' idea of globalisation.
Geoff Andrews shows that the alternative future embodied in Slow Food extends to all aspects of modern life. The Slow Food Story presents an extensive new critique of fast-moving, work-obsessed contemporary capitalist culture.
What is socialist feminism and why is it needed to fight the global rise of authoritarianism and fascism?
Frieda Afary brings the insights gained through her study of feminist philosophy, her international activism, and her work in community education as a public librarian in Los Angeles, offering a bold new vision of an alternative to capitalism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and alienation.
Socialist Feminism: A New Approach reclaims theories of women’s oppression through a return to humanism, enriched by social reproduction theories, Black feminist intersectionality, abolitionism, queer theories, Marxist-Humanism, and the author’s own experiences as an Iranian American feminist, scholar, and activist.
She looks at global developments in gender relations since the 1980s, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the distinct features of twenty-first-century authoritarianism, and current struggles against it, drawing out lessons for revolutionary theorizing, organizing, and international solidarity including the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements.
This book also contains a study guide that transforms it into a useful pedagogical tool for teachers and activists.
More than thirty years after the collapse of the USSR, the critique of state socialism is still used to deny alternatives to capitalism, irrespective of global capitalist ecological and social devastation. There is seemingly nothing worthwhile salvaging from decades of state socialist experiences.
As the climate crisis deepens, Engel-Di Mauro argues that we need to re-evaluate the environmental practices and policies of state socialism, especially as they had more environmentally beneficial than destructive effects. Rather than dismissing state socialism’s heritage out of hand, we should reclaim it for contemporary eco-socialist ends.
By means of a comparative and multiple-scaled approach, Engel-Di Mauro points to highly diverse and environmentally constructive state socialist experiences. Taking the reader from the USSR to China and Cuba, this is a fiery and contentious look at what worked, what didn’t, and how we can move towards an eco-socialist future.
The Squatters' Movement in Europe is the first definitive guide to squatting as an alternative to capitalism. It offers a unique insider's view on the movement – its ideals, actions and ways of life. At a time of growing crisis in Europe with high unemployment, dwindling social housing and declining living standards, squatting has become an increasingly popular option.
The book is written by an activist-scholar collective, whose members have direct experience of squatting: many are still squatters today. There are contributions from the Netherlands, Spain, the USA, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and the UK.
In an age of austerity and precarity this book shows what has been achieved by this resilient social movement, which holds lessons for policy-makers, activists and academics alike.
This book offers a pioneering window into the elusive workings of state-corporate crime within the mining industry. It follows a campaign of resistance organised by indigenous activists on the island of Bougainville, who struggled to close a Rio Tinto owned copper mine, and investigates the subsequent state-corporate response, which led to the shocking loss of some 10,000 lives.
Drawing on internal records and interviews with senior officials, Kristian Lasslett examines how an articulation of capitalist growth mediated through patrimonial politics, imperial state-power, large-scale mining, and clan-based, rural society, prompted an ostensibly ‘responsible’ corporate citizen, and liberal state actors, to organise a counterinsurgency campaign punctuated with gross human rights abuses.
State Crime on the Margins of Empire represents a unique intervention rooted in a classical Marxist tradition that challenges positivist streams of criminological scholarship, in order to illuminate with greater detail the historical forces faced by communities in the global south caught in the increasingly violent dynamics of the extractive industries.
The State of Islam tells the story of Pakistan through the lens of the Cold War, and more recently the War on Terror, to shed light on the domestic and international processes behind the global rise of militant Islam.
Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly-defined ‘political’ realm, Saadia Toor highlights the significance of cultural politics in Pakistan from its origins to the contemporary period. This extra dimension allows Toor to explain how the struggle between Marxists and liberal nationalists was influenced and eventually engulfed by the agenda of the religious right.
Timely and unique, this book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the roots of modern Pakistan and the likely outcome of current power struggles in the country.
The period in Northern Ireland known as 'the Troubles' (1968-98) seemed to have been conclusively ended by the official peace process. But recent violence from dissident Republicans shows that tensions from the past remain unresolved.
State Violence, Collusion and the Troubles reveals disturbing unanswered questions about the use of state violence during this period. Maurice Punch documents in chilling detail how the British government turned to desperate, illegal measures in a time of crisis, disregarding domestic and international law. He broadens out his analysis to consider other cases of state violence against ‘insurgent groups’ in Spain and South Africa.
This is the story of how the British state collaborated with violent groups and directly participated in illegal violence. It also raises urgent questions about why states around the world continue to deploy such violence rather than seeking durable political settlements.
How did the US become a world power? How did it become involved in the Middle East? What is the history and nature of its 'special relationship' with Israel?
Given the increase in tensions in the Middle East, and the United States' involvement in them, news coverage is in abundance. Yet, the reportage and discussion of American foreign policy is often narrow in scope, offering little background or context. The subject is routinely treated with the vocabulary provided by government officials, presenting best intentions while conceding occasional mistakes and unfortunate incidents. As Gregory Harms demonstrates in Straight Power Concepts, the historical record bears out a different vocabulary and tells a story that sharply contrasts with the common assumptions.
In this brief and accessible account, the reader is guided through the panoramic sweep of world and American history, reviewing how the US became a world power, how the Middle East became 'modern' and how Israel became an American 'strategic asset.' In so doing, the book provides a broad frame of reference, illustrating that recent developments are closer to business-as-usual and nothing resembling the rhetoric commonly used by heads of state, press secretaries, news media, and commentators.
As in his highly successful book The Palestine-Israel Conflict, Harms makes complex subjects accessible to everyone, without sacrificing analytical rigour. This book should be the first port of call for students and anyone seeking clarity and a historical elucidation of current events involving the United States, Israel, and the Middle East.
Every year, over a hundred thousand workers bring claims to an Employment Tribunal. The settling of disputes between employers and unions has been exchanged by many for individual litigation.
In Struck Out, barrister David Renton gives a practical and critical guide to the system. In doing so he punctures a number of media myths about the Tribunals. Far from bringing flimsy cases, two-thirds of claimants succeed at the hearing. And rather than paying lottery-size jackpots, average awards are just a few thousand pounds – scant consolation for a loss of employment and often serious psychological suffering. The book includes a critique of the present government’s proposals to reform the Tribunal system.
Employment Tribunals are often seen by workers as the last line of defence against unfairness in the workplace. Struck Out shows why we can't rely on the current system to deliver fairness and why big changes are needed.
In this bold and innovative book, Massimo Modonesi weaves together theory and political practice by relating the concepts of subalternity, antagonism and autonomy to contemporary movements in Latin America and elsewhere.
In a sophisticated account, Modonesi reconstructs the debates between Marxist authors and schools of thought in order to sketch out informed strategies of resistance. He reviews the works of Gramsci, Negri, Castoriadis and Lefort, and engages with the arguments made by E. P. Thompson, Spivak, Laclau and Mouffe.
Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy firmly roots key theoretical arguments from a range of critical thinkers within specific political movements in order to recover these concepts as analytical instruments which can help to guide contemporary struggles.
Liz Fekete is a leading authority on issues of racism, Islamophobia and national security legislation. A Suitable Enemy draws on sixteen years of research to present a comprehensive overview of EU immigration, asylum, race and security policies.
Fekete argues that at the same time as the EU introduces selective migration policies, it closes its borders against asylum seekers who were the first victims of the growth of the security state which now embraces Muslims. She explores the way in which anti-terrorist legislation has been used to evict undesirable migrants, how deportation policies commodify and de-humanise the most vulnerable and how these go hand in hand with evolving forms of racism, particularly Islamophobia.
At the heart of the book is an examination of xeno-racism -- a non-colour coded form of institutionalised racism -- where migrants who do not assimilate, or who are believed to be incapable of assimilation, are excluded.
From militant suffragette at the beginning of the twentieth century to campaigner against colonialism in Africa after the Second World War, Sylvia Pankhurst dedicated her life to fighting oppression and injustice.
In this vivid biography Katherine Connelly examines Pankhurst’s role at the forefront of significant developments in the history of radical politics. She guides us through Pankhurst's construction of a suffragette militancy which put working-class women at the heart of the struggle, her championing of the Bolshevik Revolution and her clandestine attempts to sabotage the actions of the British state, as well as her early identification of the dangers of Fascism.
The book explores the dilemmas, debates and often painful personal consequences faced by Pankhurst which were played out in her art, writings and activism. It argues that far from being an advocate of disparate causes, Pankhurst’s campaigns were united by an essential continuity which hold vital lessons for achieving social change. This lively and accessible biography presents Pankhurst as a courageous and inspiring campaigner, of huge relevance to those engaged in social movements today.
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