You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
How does society deal with a serial killer in its midst? What if the murderer is a Catholic priest living among native villagers in colonial Peru? In The Chankas and the Priest, Sabine Hyland chronicles the horrifying story of Father Juan Bautista de Albadán, a Spanish priest to the Chanka people of Pampachiri in Peru from 1601 to 1611. During his reign of terror over his Andean parish, Albadán was guilty of murder, sexual abuse, sadistic torture, and theft from his parishioners, amassing a personal fortune at their expense. For ten years, he escaped punishment for these crimes by deceiving and outwitting his superiors in the colonial government and church administration. Drawing on a rema...
A severe social and political crisis in El Salvador during politicians, religious figures and activists through strikes but organized the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMNL) and launched an armed insurrection against the government in early 1981. Within months, the FMLN established itself in control over two departments which it was to guerrillas support base in the countryside. Although bombardments, strafing, shelling, summary execution of anybody captured, and massacres of civilians became the norm of the day, the FMLN continued growing in strength and by 1983, reached the peak of its power and control over the countryside. El Salvador, Volume 1: Crisis, Coup and Uprising 1970-1983 is the first inclusive and incisive military history of this incredibly vicious, merciless war: one of two major conflicts fought in Central America during the 1980s within the context of the Cold War. Based on official documentation and carefully cross-referenced secondary sources, it is lavishly illustrated with original photographs and custom-drawn color profiles and is an indispensable single-point source of reference.
This book highlights historical explanations to and roots of present phenomena of violence, insecurity, and law enforcement in Central America. Violence and crime are among the most discussed topics in Central America today, and sensationalism and fear of crime is as present as the increase of private security, the re-militarization of law enforcement, political populism, and mano dura policies. The contributors to this volume discuss historical forms, paths, continuities, and changes of violence and its public and political discussion in the region. This book thus offers in-depth analysis of different patterns of violence, their reproduction over time, their articulation in the present, and finally their discursive mobilization.
"The collection strikes a blackly comic but erudite tone." –Sophia Nguyen, The Washington Post Kissinger is dead but his blood-soaked legacy endures If the American foreign policy establishment is a grand citadel, then Henry Kissinger is the ghoul haunting its hallways. For half a century, he was an omnipresent figure in war rooms and at press briefings, dutifully shepherding the American empire through successive rounds of growing pains. For multiple generations of anti-war activists, Kissinger personified the depravity of the American war machine. The world Kissinger wrought is the world we live in, where ideal investment conditions are generated from the barrel of a gun. Today, global c...
Official figures classify some fifty million of the world’s people as 'victims of forced displacement'. Refugees, asylum seekers, disaster victims, the internally displaced and the temporarily tolerated - categories of the excluded proliferate, but many more are left out of count. In the face of this tragedy, humanitarian action increasingly seems the only possible response. On the ground, however, the 'facilities' put in place are more reminiscent of the logic of totalitarianism. In a situation of permanent catastrophe and endless emergency, 'undesirables' are kept apart and out of sight, while the care dispensed is designed to control, filter and confine. How should we interpret the disturbing symbiosis between the hand that cares and the hand that strikes? After seven years of study in the refugee camps, Michel Agier reveals their 'disquieting ambiguity' and stresses the imperative need to take into account forms of improvisation and challenge that are currently transforming the camps, sometimes making them into towns and heralding the emergence of political subjects. A radical critique of the foundations, contexts, and political effects of humanitarian action.
Humanitarian groups have failed, Fiona Terry believes, to face up to the core paradox of their activity: humanitarian action aims to alleviate suffering, but by inadvertently sustaining conflict it potentially prolongs suffering. In Condemned to Repeat?, Terry examines the side-effects of intervention by aid organizations and points out the need to acknowledge the political consequences of the choice to give aid. The author makes the controversial claim that aid agencies act as though the initial decision to supply aid satisfies any need for ethical discussion and are often blind to the moral quandaries of aid. Terry focuses on four historically relevant cases: Rwandan camps in Zaire, Afghan...
After Algeria’s president Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced his intention to run for a fifth term in early 2019, a popular peaceful uprising erupted calling for change. Bouteflika, who had been in office since 1999, was eventually forced to resign, but the Hirak (“movement”) continued to protest the country’s inequalities and entrenched ruling elite. The Suspended Disaster examines the dynamics of the Algerian political system, offering new insights into the last years of Bouteflika’s rule and the factors that shaped the emergence of an unexpected social movement. Thomas Serres argues that the Algerian ruling coalition developed a mode of government based on the management of a seemin...
While not commonly centered in the Cold War story, Latin America was intensely affected by that historic conflict. In this book, available for the first time in English, Vanni Pettina makes sense of the region's diverse, complex political experiences of the Cold War era. Cross-fertilized by Latin American and Anglophone historiography, his account shifts from an overemphasis on U.S. interventions toward a comprehensive Latin American perspective. Connecting Cold War events to the region's political polarizations, revolutionary mobilizations, draconian state repression, and brutal violence in almost every sphere, Pettina demonstrates that Latin America's Cold War was rarely cold. In the midst...
A comprehensive history and comparative analysis of the most important Caribbean armed revolutionary movements during the Cold War era.