You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Richardson-Little exposes the forgotten history of human rights in the German Democratic Republic, placing the history of the Cold War, Eastern European dissidents and the revolutions of 1989 in a new light. By demonstrating how even a communist dictatorship could imagine itself to be a champion of human rights, this book challenges popular narratives on the fall of the Berlin Wall and illustrates how notions of human rights evolved in the Cold War as they were re-imagined in East Germany by both dissidents and state officials. Ultimately, the fight for human rights in East Germany was part of a global battle in the post-war era over competing conceptions of what human rights meant. Nonetheless, the collapse of dictatorship in East Germany did not end this conflict, as citizens had to choose for themselves what kind of human rights would follow in its wake.
Set in 1980s communist East Germany, Leipzig is a tale of personal and political betrayal. When Robert travels from St. Andrews to Leipzig University on a student exchange and falls in love with Magda, an enigmatic linguist from Berlin, he enters a world he doesn't understand. Magda has a hidden agenda, and his stumbling attempts to help her end tragically.
Cannabis consumption, commerce, and control in global history, from the nineteenth century to the present day. This book gathers together authors from the new wave of cannabis histories that has emerged in recent decades. It offers case studies from Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. It does so to trace a global history of the plant and its preparations, arguing that Western colonialism shaped and disseminated ideas in the nineteenth century that came to drive the international control regimes of the twentieth. More recently, the emergence of commercial interests in cannabis has been central to the challenges that have undermined that cannabis consensus. Throughout, the determination of people around the world to consume substances made from the plant has defied efforts to stamp them out and often transformed the politics and cultures of using them. These texts also suggest that globalization might have a cannabis history. The migration of consumers, the clandestine networks established to supply them, and international cooperation on control may have driven much of the interconnectedness that is a key feature of the contemporary world.
This book is a succinct yet comprehensive history of East Germany which provides a differentiated picture of the communist state. It offers a sophisticated analysis of life under dictatorship which candidly confronts the abuses of the East German Communist Party (SED) and the Stasi state security service. Ned Richardson-Little delves into the central contradictions of the GDR as a state meant to overcome the horrors of the Third Reich and create a new utopia, while itself a brutal dictatorship. He also convincingly argues that while the existence of the GDR was a product of the Cold War, it was also entangled in international politics well beyond the rivalry between the United States and the...
Between the 1960s and the 1980s, the human rights movement achieved unprecedented global prominence. Amnesty International attained striking visibility with its Campaign Against Torture; Soviet dissidents attracted a worldwide audience for their heroism in facing down a totalitarian state; the Helsinki Accords were signed, incorporating a "third basket" of human rights principles; and the Carter administration formally gave the United States a human rights policy. The Breakthrough is the first collection to examine this decisive era as a whole, tracing key developments in both Western and non-Western engagement with human rights and placing new emphasis on the role of human rights in the int...
An argument that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. Discard studies is an emerging field that looks at waste and wasting broadly construed. Rather than focusing on waste and trash as the primary objects of study, discard studies looks at wider systems of waste and wasting to explore how some materials, practices, regions, and people are valued or devalued, becoming dominant or disposable. In this book, Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky argue that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. They show how the theories and methods of discard studies can be applied in a...
The contributions of socialist thinkers and states to the development of international law often go unrecognized. Socialism and International Law: The Cold War and Its Legacies explores how socialist individuals and governments from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia made vital contributions to international law as it is practiced today, and also brought ideas and initiatives that constituted important disruptive moments in its history. The socialist world of the 20th century was an ambiguous and fragile construct: there were clear divisions between the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc, which kept one foot in Western Eurocentric traditions, and the positions of the radical Third World, primarily post-c...
This collected volume is the first to study the interface between contemporary social movements, cultural memory and digital media. Establishing the digital memory work practices of social movements as an important area of research, it reveals how activists use digital media to lay claim to, circulate and curate cultural memories. Interdisciplinary in scope, its contributors address mobilizations of mediated remembrance in the USA, Germany, Sweden, Italy, India, Argentina, the UK and Russia.
When East Germany collapsed in 1989-1990, outside observers were shocked to learn the extent of environmental devastation that existed there. Saving Nature Under Socialism introduces readers to environmentalism in Cold War East Germany and traces the evolution of environmental policy and protest in East Germany and central Europe from the 1960s.