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The 'Albanian question' remains one of the major unresolved questions in south-eastern Europe, with the potential to disrupt the region, with grave consequences for the international community. The exodus of refugees from Kosovo into Albania in the late 1990s - and Kosovo's subsequent declaration of independence in February 2008 - rejuvenated interest in Albania and Kosovo and their place in the Balkans and Yet despite growing interest in the region's recent history, until now Albania's period of independence around World War I has been largely neglected.The Birth of Albania explores how an independent Albania first came into existence in the early twentieth century, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Nicola Guy explains how and why Albanian independence was finally achieved, in the context of the prevailing contemporary ideas of ethnicity and national identity, elaborated most famously by President Woodrow Wilson as 'national self-determination'. The Birth of Albania is the definitive account of this period and an essential contribution to our understanding of an important but often overlooked part of the world.
A unique contribution to the continuing debate over one of the most important international conflicts to emerge as the century turned, Schwartz offers a readable, profound, and multifaceted overview of the long Albanian-Serbian controversy over the troubled province, drawing on sources previously ignored by non-Balkan authors. He presents an original and detailed analysis of the collapse of Yugoslavia, a penetrating critique of Western inaction in the face of the long-festering Kosovo crisis, and a rare, unblinkered diagnosis of the weakness of Western and international policies in the Balkans following armed intervention. * Unique perspective of a long-term resident in the region * Draws on information unavailable to non-resident authors. * Highly readable yet thorough history of the ethnic violence in the Balkans
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In this impressive book, Edward S. Herman and David Peterson examine the uses and abuses of the word “genocide.” They argue persuasively that the label is highly politicized and that in the United States it is used by the government, journalists, and academics to brand as evil those nations and political movements that in one way or another interfere with the imperial interests of U.S. capitalism. Thus the word “genocide” is seldom applied when the perpetrators are U.S. allies (or even the United States itself), while it is used almost indiscriminately when murders are committed or are alleged to have been committed by enemies of the United States and U.S. business interests. One set...
'Required reading for anyone wishing to understand the war and the media's role in it.' --The New Internationalist
On July 11, 1995 the Bosnian Serbs captured the enclave Srebrenica. Thousands were executed. Claims were made that Western intelligence agencies had spectacular foreknowledge about the attack. But was this true? Or was it an intelligence failure? This book examines these questions presenting in as much detail as possible the intelligence collected by the Western services in Bosnia. The author was granted full access to the top-secret archives of the Dutch services and the still classified UN archives. Foreign intelligence services gave him confidential briefings. The author spoke with more than 100 intelligence officials from various countries.
A discussion of the political illusion created by the humanitarian bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 that tests popular beliefs
They call it "collateral damage," but legally and morally it is really mass murder. In Kosovo, America claimed its war was a "humanitarian intervention," in Afghanistan, "self-defense," and in Iraq, it claimed the authority of the Security Council of the United Nations. Yet each of these wars was illegal according to established rules of international law. According to these rules, illegal wars fall within the category of "supreme international crimes". So how come the war crimes tribunals never manage to turn their sights on America and always wind up putting America's enemies -- "the usual suspects" -- on trial? This new book by renowned scholar Michael Mandel offers a critical account of America's illegal wars and a war crimes system that has granted America's leaders an unjust and dangerous impunity, effectively encouraging their illegal wars and the war crimes that always flow from them.
Douglas Kellner's Persian Gulf TV War attacks the myths, disinformation, and propaganda disseminated during the Gulf war. At once a work of social theory, media criticism, and political history, this book demonstrates how television served as a conduit for George Bush's war policies while silencing anti-war voices and foregoing spirited discussion of the complex issues involved. In so doing, the medium failed to assume its democratic responsibilities of adequately informing the American public and debating issues of common concern. Kellner analyzes the dominant frames through which television presented the war and focuses on the propaganda that sold the war to the public–one of the great media spectacles and public relations campaigns of the post-World War II era. In the spirit of Orwell and Marcuse, Kellner studies the language surrounding the Gulf war and the cynical politics of distortion and disinformation that shaped the mainstream media version of the war, how the Bush administration and Pentagon manipulated the media, and why a majority of the American public accepted the war as just and moral.