Sinclair, Ian

Sinclair, Ian

Ian Sinclair

1 December 2012Review

Zed, 2012; 224pp; £12.99

The dominant view of Somalia today is of a failed state riven by war, terrorism, piracy, poverty and hunger.

Mary Harper, a BBC journalist who has been reporting from Somalia since 1991, argues these images and labels act as a barrier to a more nuanced and deeper understanding of the country.

Citing numerous Somali voices, Harper maintains that continual conflict and crisis have forced Somalis to invent surprisingly workable and resilient alternative political and economic…

26 September 2012Review

Routledge, 2011; 208pp; £17.99

Simon Hall, senior lecturer in American History at the University of Leeds, has written an impressively researched, concise history of the anti-Vietnam War movement. With extensive endnotes and a wide-ranging bibliography, this is a superb introduction for students of the period and those interested in anti-war protest more broadly.

Incredibly, the 4,000 college students who demonstrated in Washington DC in 1962 in support of a conciliatory foreign policy made up, at that point,…

31 May 2012Review

OR Books, 2012; 190pp, £7

Born in a small Oklahoma town in 1987, computer whizz-kid Bradley Manning enlisted in the US army in 2007.

Two years later, he was posted to Iraq where he worked as an intelligence analyst in a remote forward operating base close to Baghdad.

Increasingly concerned about US actions in Iraq and unhappy about his role in them, Manning allegedly sent hundreds of thousands of documents to the organisation Wikileaks.

The documents published by Wikileaks in 2010 included the…

30 May 2012Feature

PN marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of a ground-breaking pamphlet

One hundred years ago, a group of miners from South Wales published a radical economic and political pamphlet which ‘received a blaze of publication’ in The Times and other national newspapers. It was the topic of a special house of commons debate and ‘became a household word’ in the coalfields of Britain, according to miners’ historian R Page Arnot.

As the pre-First World War…

30 May 2012Feature

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel describes nonviolent resistance in Latin America

Born in Buenos Aires in 1931, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel played a key role in the nonviolent resistance to the South American military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1977, he was imprisoned and tortured by the Argentinian military junta. Three years later he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Ian Sinclair interviewed him, with Beverly Keene interpreting, when he visited London in April.

PN: During the 1970s and early 1980s, up to 30,000 Argentinians died in the so-called ‘…

27 April 2012Review

OUP, 2012; 345 pp, £12.99.

Gene Sharp is today better known than ever. This dictionary will further cement the 84-year-old American’s position as the world’s leading advocate of nonviolent struggle. Arising from decades of labour and action, including a stint at Peace News in the 1950s, Sharp hopes his book will bring clarity to a subject that has long been accompanied by politically-motivated ‘terminological confusion.’

Without clear thought and…

31 March 2012Review

A big book in every sense, The Death of Others looks at the fate of civilians in American wars since 1945 – focussing on the Korean War, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

John Tirman, executive director of the Center for International Studies at MIT and the person who commissioned the 2006 Lancet study on deaths in Iraq, argues that the American public is indifferent to the suffering of civilians in the wars their tax dollars pay for – just as the US military has little concern for…

1 March 2012Feature

Gene Sharp has influenced popular revolutions and revolts across the globe. PN interviewed him during his recent trip to London.

Gene Sharp. PHOTO: Conor Doherty

Arguably the best-known advocate of nonviolence working today, through books such as 1993’s 'From Dictatorship to Democracy', Gene Sharp has influenced popular revolutions and revolts across the globe. He was interviewed by Ian Sinclair for PN.

Peace News: When and why did you first get interested in the serious study of nonviolent struggle?

Gene Sharp: Well, the world was in a bit of a mess [after the Second World War], and I began to learn…

1 March 2012Review

Verso, 2012; 237pp; £12.99

As the BBC Newsnight economics editor, Paul Mason has become a familiar face on television over the last few years, reporting on the protest movements, revolutions and revolts that have been “kicking off” across the globe since 2009.

Mason is also a keen blogger, and it is these (albeit now cleaned up) postings that form the backbone of this electrifying new book.

The essence of his argument is that “we’re in the middle of a revolution caused by the near collapse of free-market…

1 March 2012Review

2011; 87 minutes; available for £11.99 + p&p from TVF: tvinternational.com

A common argument in the leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein could only be toppled by a foreign invasion, that it was impossible for Iraqis themselves to remove such a brutal dictator.

An insightful and stirring look at the life and work of Gene Sharp, How To Start A Revolution demolishes this argument. Countering the widely accepted view of nonviolence as hopelessly naïve, the 84-year-old professor of political science has spent his life documenting the…

24 January 2012Review

 Seal Press, 2011; 208 pp; £10.99

Michael Kaufman and Michael Kimmel, Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York, are two of the biggest names in contemporary Men’s Studies, writing heavyweight books with wordy titles like The Gender of Desire: Essays on Masculinity and Theorizing Patriarchy.

In contrast, The Guy’s Guide to Feminism is a short, consciously popular and non-academic introduction to feminism for men. Noting that feminism…

1 December 2011Review

New Internationalist. Oxford. 2011. 224 pp; £9.99

"This book", says Tim Gee at the start of the first chapter, "will make a bold claim. That a single idea helps explain why social movements past and present have succeeded, partially succeeded, or failed. Strategically applied, it has helped win campaigns, secure human rights, stop wars and even bring down governments."

The central idea is Counterpower, which he describes as "the resistance of the oppressed". There are three types of Counterpower: Idea Counterpower which challenges…

1 November 2011Feature

Peace News explores the politics of cinema with Matthew Alford, author of Reel Power: Hollywood cinema and American supremacy

Last year Matthew Alford published Reel Power: Hollywood cinema and American supremacy (Pluto Press), an analysis of mainstream US cinema’s representation of US foreign policy since 9/11. He discussed his book with Peace News at the Rebellious Media Conference.

PN: What is the main argument of Reel Power?
MA: That Hollywood films which depict American foreign policy have a very strong tendency to support notions of American “exceptionalism” and almost never criticise it at a…

1 October 2011Review

The Global Warming Reader (OR Books, 2011; 400pp; £14.00); Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand (Earthscan, 2011; 192 pages; £14.99)

Despite UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s 2007 warning that climate change “is the defining challenge of our age”, since the Copenhagen summit global warming has fallen off the political agenda. No better time then to read these two essential and accessible books to enlighten and inspire action.

Divided into three sections – Science, Politics and Meaning – The Global Warming Reader is an edited collection of 36 seminal scientific papers, newspaper articles and book chapters. Famous…

1 September 2011Review

The No-nonsense Guide to Green politics (New Internationalist, 2010; 144pp; £7.99); The Rise of the Green Left: Inside the Worldwide Ecosocialist Movement. (Pluto Press, 2010; 208pp; £12.99)

As the last “male principal speaker” for the Green Party for England and Wales, the author of numerous books on environmentalism and a lecturer in political economy, Derek Wall is well placed to write on Green politics.

Due to the quickening climate crisis, it is a politics he describes, in the No-nonsense Guide, as one “of survival”. Wall manages to pack a lot of interesting information and ideas into a short book, including summaries of what he sees as the four pillars of Green…