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Mainstream commentators claim that the Taliban are the main culprits behind Afghanistan's skyrocketing drug trade and that the US military is waging a war on drugs in Afghanistan to weaken the insurgency and keep our streets free of heroin. Cruel Harvest lifts the lid on the reality behind the mainstream narrative, showing that the United States in fact shares a large part of the responsibility by supporting drug lords, refusing to adopt effective drug control policies and failing to crack down on drug money laundered through Western banks. Julien Mercille argues that the United States is not concerned about waging a real war on drugs, and that alleged concerns about narco-terrorism mostly act as pretexts to justify occupation. In a powerful conclusion Mercille contends that US intervention in Afghanistan is motivated by power imperatives, not benign intentions.
The European economic crisis has been ongoing since 2008 and while austerity has spread over the continent, it has failed to revive economies. The media have played an important ideological role in presenting the policies of economic and political elites in a favourable light, even if the latter’s aim has been to shift the burden of adjustment onto citizens. This book explains how and why, using a critical political economic perspective and focusing on the case of Ireland. Throughout, Ireland is compared with contemporary and historical examples to contextualise the arguments made. The book covers the housing bubble that led to the crash, the rescue of financial institutions by the state, the role of the European institutions and the International Monetary Fund, austerity, and the possibility of leaving the eurozone for Europe’s peripheral countries. Through a systematic analysis of Ireland’s main newspapers, it is argued that the media reflect elite views and interests and downplay alternative policies that could lead to more progressive responses to the crisis.
At least 200,000-250,000 people died in the war in Bosnia. "There are three million child soldiers in Africa." "More than 650,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the U.S. occupation of Iraq." "Between 600,000 and 800,000 women are trafficked across borders every year." "Money laundering represents as much as 10 percent of global GDP." "Internet child porn is a $20 billion-a-year industry." These are big, attention-grabbing numbers, frequently used in policy debates and media reporting. Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill see only one problem: these numbers are probably false. Their continued use and abuse reflect a much larger and troubling pattern: policymakers and the media naiv...
This book provides the basic knowledge of Japanese contributions in political economy and the ongoing research agenda, such as the pursuit of theoretical consistency in Marxian economics by Uno School; the concept of ‘civil society’ as a criterion of existing socio-economic structure; a mathematical reconstruction of Marxian theory; and an analysis of environmental pollution. The new generation of Japanese political economists in collaboration with their overseas counterparts has produced new insights into political economy and into the newly emerging structure of the world economy. The book provides useful insights into international capitalism and how past patterns of uneven development are now changing; the role of international finance in affecting both national and international growth and employment patterns; an analysis of recent growth patterns in Asia; and the specific issue emerging within the Asian region and the implications for economics, social change and geopolitics.
Ireland is a strikingly different country now to the one it was in the mid-1990s. Dramatic economic, social and cultural changes, including the Celtic Tiger boom and increasingly secular debate about abortion, the status of women and same-sex marriage underlined the scale of the transformation. The new diversity of the population and literary and musical prowess also revealed a country experiencing rapid alteration. The road to peace - that saw an end to war in Northern Ireland and culminated in the first visit to southern Ireland of a reigning British monarch in 100 years - illuminated the new Anglo-Irish dynamic. Explosive revelations about deep betrayals from the past destroyed the credib...
This handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the cutting-edge field of cultural legal studies. Cultural legal studies is at the forefront of the legal discipline, questioning not only doctrine or social context, but how the concerns of legality are distributed and encountered through a range of material forms. Growing out of the interdisciplinary turn in critical legal studies and jurisprudence that took place in the latter quarter of the 20th century, cultural legal studies exists at the intersection of a range of traditional disciplinary areas: legal studies, cultural studies, literary studies, jurisprudence, media studies, critical theory, history, and philosophy. It is an area ...
Concerns over affordability and accountability have tended to direct focus away from the central aims of liberal learning, such as preparing minds for free inquiry and inculcating the habits of mind, practical skills, and values necessary for effective participation in civil society. The contributors to this volume seek to understand better what it is that can be done on a day-to-day basis within institutions of liberal learning that shape the habits and practices of civil society. The central argument of this volume is that institutions of liberal learning are critical to a developing and flourishing civil society. It is within these "civil society incubators" that the habits of open discou...
Since the late 1980s, critical geopolitics has gone from being a radical critical perspective on the disciplines of political geography and international relations theory to becoming a recognised area of research in its own right. Influenced by poststructuralist concerns with the politics of representation, critical geopolitics considers the ways in which the use of particular discourses shape political practices. Initially critical geopolitics analysed the practical geopolitical language of the elites and intellectuals of statecraft. Subsequent iterations have considered the role that popular representations of the international political world play. As critical geopolitics has become a mor...
Public credit was controversial in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. It entailed new ways of thinking about the individual in relation to the State and was for many reasons a site of cultural negotiation and debate. At the same time, it required commitment from participants in order to function. Some of the debates relating to public credit, whose success was tied up in the way it was represented, find their way into contemporary fiction – in particular the eighteenth-century novel. This book reads eighteenth-century fiction alongside works of political economy in order to offer a new perspective on credible commitment and the rise of a credit economy facilitated by public credi...
Get the Summary of David Farber's The War on Drugs in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. "The War on Drugs" by David Farber traces the complex history of drug regulation and prohibition in the United States, from the early 20th century to the present day. The book examines the ambivalent attitudes toward substances like alcohol, opium, cocaine, heroin, and cannabis, leading to various legislative efforts to control their use. It delves into the origins of the War on Drugs under President Nixon, who declared drug abuse as "public enemy number one," and the subsequent investment of approximately one trillion dollars over five decades...