Between Democracy and Terror PDF Download

Author: Ibrahim Abdullah
Publisher: Unisa Press
ISBN: 9782869781238
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This is the most authoritative study of the Sierra Leone civil war to emanate from Africa, or indeed any publications' programme on Africa. It explores the genesis of the crisis, the contradictory roles of different internal and external actors, civil society and the media; the regional intervention force and the demise of the second republic. It analyses the numerous peace initiatives designed to end a war, which continued nonetheless to defy and outlast them; and asks why the war became so prolonged. The study articulates how internal actors trod the multiple and conflicting pathways to power. It considers how non-conventional actors were able to inaugurate and sustain an insurgency that called forth the largest concentration of UN peacekeepers the world has ever seen.

Author: Susan N. Herman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019978275X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
In this eye-opening work, the president of the ACLU takes a hard look at the human and social costs of the War on Terror. Over a decade after 9/11, it is far from clear that the government's hastily adopted antiterrorist tactics--such as the Patriot Act--are keeping us safe, but it is increasingly clear that these emergency measures in fact have the potential to ravage our lives--and have already done just that to countless Americans. From the Oregon lawyer falsely suspected of involvement with terrorism in Spain to the former University of Idaho football player arrested on the pretext that he was needed as a "material witness" (though he was never called to testify), this book is filled with unsettling stories of ordinary people caught in the government's dragnet. These are not just isolated mistakes in an otherwise sound program, but demonstrations of what can happen when our constitutional protections against government abuse are abandoned. Whether it's running a chat room, contributing to a charity, or even urging a terrorist group to forego its violent tactics, activities that should be protected by the First Amendment can now lead to prosecution. Blacklists and watchlists keep people grounded at airports and strand American citizens abroad, although these lists are rife with errors--errors that cannot be challenged. National Security Letters allow the FBI to demand records about innocent people from libraries, financial institutions, and internet service providers without ever going to court. Government databanks now brim with information about every aspect of our private lives, while efforts to mount legal challenges to these measures have been stymied. Barack Obama, like George W. Bush, relies on secrecy and exaggerated claims of presidential prerogative to keep the courts and Congress from fully examining whether these laws and policies are constitutional, effective, or even counterproductive. Democracy itself is undermined. This book is a wake-up call for all Americans, who remain largely unaware of the post-9/11 surveillance regime's insidious and continuing growth.

Author: Karrin Hanshew
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139560778
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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In 1970, the Red Army Faction declared war on West Germany. The militants failed to bring down the state, but this book argues that the decade-long debate they inspired helped shape a new era. After 1945, West Germans answered long-standing doubts about democracy's viability and fears of authoritarian state power with a 'militant democracy' empowered against its enemies and a popular commitment to anti-fascist resistance. In the 1970s, these postwar solutions brought Germans into open conflict, fighting to protect democracy from both terrorism and state overreaction. Drawing on diverse sources, Karrin Hanshew shows how Germans, faced with a state of emergency and haunted by their own history, managed to learn from the past and defuse this adversarial dynamic. This negotiation of terror helped them to accept the Federal Republic of Germany as a stable, reformable polity and to reconceive of democracy's defence as part of everyday politics.

Author: Natan Sharansky
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 0786737069
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Natan Sharansky believes that the truest expression of democracy is the ability to stand in the middle of a town square and express one's views without fear of imprisonment. He should know. A dissident in the USSR, Sharansky was jailed for nine years for challenging Soviet policies. During that time he reinforced his moral conviction that democracy is essential to both protecting human rights and maintaining global peace and security. Sharansky was catapulted onto the Israeli political stage in 1996. In the last eight years, he has served as a minister in four different Israeli cabinets, including a stint as Deputy Prime Minister, playing a key role in government decision making from the peace negotiations at Wye to the war against Palestinian terror. In his views, he has been as consistent as he has been stubborn: Tyranny, whether in the Soviet Union or the Middle East, must always be made to bow before democracy. Drawing on a lifetime of experience of democracy and its absence, Sharansky believes that only democracy can safeguard the well-being of societies. For Sharansky, when it comes to democracy, politics is not a matter of left and right, but right and wrong. This is a passionately argued book from a man who carries supreme moral authority to make the case he does here: that the spread of democracy everywhere is not only possible, but also essential to the survival of our civilization. His argument is sure to stir controversy on all sides; this is arguably the great issue of our times.

Author: Robert L. Ivie
Publisher: Rhetoric, Culture, and Social
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Robert Ivie discusses democracy's centrality to the national identity and how prevailing constructions of democracy constitute a republic of fear in which the threat of foreign and domestic "others" is chronically exaggerated through rituals of vilification and victimization.

Author: Jennifer L. Merolla
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226520560
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
How do threats of terrorism affect the opinions of citizens? Speculation abounds, but until now no one had marshaled hard evidence to explain the complexities of this relationship. Drawing on data from surveys and original experiments they conducted in the United States and Mexico, Jennifer Merolla and Elizabeth Zechmeister demonstrate how our strategies for coping with terrorist threats significantly influence our attitudes toward fellow citizens, political leaders, and foreign nations. The authors reveal, for example, that some people try to restore a sense of order and control through increased wariness of others—especially of those who exist outside the societal mainstream. Additionally, voters under threat tend to prize “strong leadership” more highly than partisan affiliation, making some politicians seem more charismatic than they otherwise would. The authors show that a wary public will sometimes continue to empower such leaders after they have been elected, giving them greater authority even at the expense of institutional checks and balances. Having demonstrated that a climate of terrorist threat also increases support for restrictive laws at home and engagement against terrorists abroad, Merolla and Zechmeister conclude that our responses to such threats can put democracy at risk.

Author: Iftikhar Haider Malik
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civil society
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
As the Fall-Out of the us-led "War on Terror" Continues to destabilize the countries of the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan and its fate are rarely out of the headlines. How did this predominantly Muslim country of 175 million reach this critical state? And what does the future hold in the face of such political and social upheaval? This clear, comprehensive book synthesizes the complex issues facing Pakistan today while remaining cautiously optimistic about the future of a pluralistic naiton caught between civic and military imperatives. Professor Malik examines the country's strategic geopolitical position; the main characters who have shaped the nation; the legacy of Partition and the role of civil society as a force for change; and the parts played by Political Islam and jihadi extremism, and by the West in its use of Pakistan as a buffer state. Book jacket.

Author: Gabriel Rubin
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739164554
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book forwards the debate on how to respond to terror attacks. It compares legislative responses to terrorism in the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel finding that government centralization and abridgement of rights are common, but that the story is much more nuanced and complicated than at first meets the eye. Not all terror attacks lead to new legislation, many lead to muted responses.

Author: Wendy Z. Goldman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521685092
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Terror and Democracy in Stalin's Russia is the first book devoted exclusively to popular participation in the “Great Terror,” a period in which millions of people were arrested, interrogated, shot, and sent to labor camps. In the unions and the factories, repression was accompanied by a mass campaign for democracy. Party leaders urged workers to criticize and remove corrupt and negligent officials. Workers, shop foremen, local Party members, and union leaders adopted the slogans of repression and used them, often against each other, to redress long-standing grievances. Using new, formerly secret archival sources, Terror and Democracy in Stalin's Russia shows how ordinary people moved in clear stages toward madness and self-destruction. Wendy Z. Goldman is a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. She is author of Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge, 1993), winner of the Berkshire Conference Book Award, as well as Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin's Russia (Cambridge, 2002).

Author: Binyamin Netanyahu
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374154929
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
In this book, the author offers an approach to understanding and fighting the increase in domestic and international terrorism throughout the world. Citing diverse examples from around the globe, he demonstrates that domestic terrorist groups are usually no match for an advanced technological society which can successfully roll back terror without any significant curtailment of civil liberties. But he sees an even more potent threat from the new international terrorism which is increasingly the product of Islamic militants, who draw their inspiration and directives from Iran and its growing cadre of satellite states. The spread of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, coupled with the possibility that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons, poses a more frightening threat from an adversary less rational and therefore less controllable than was Soviet Communism. How democracies can defend themselves against this new threat concludes this book.