Alice Ackerman's case for the Republic of Macedonia, as a rare - if not unique - example of conflict prevention by preventative diplomacy, makes a welcome addition to a relatively small body of literature which looks at how we can prevent war.
By way of introduction, she includes a brief survey of preventative diplomacy - and its critics - from cold-war attempts by the UN to keep the superpowers out of local conflicts, to the Boutros Ghali doctrine of preconflict prevention and early warning. With a chapter on case studies in which…
This interesting, engaging and often humorous CD is the edited recording of a lecture given in the summer of 1997 at Colorado College in the US by radical activist and academic Angela Davis.
At the core of this fairly simple lecture is the exposing of links between capitalism, racism and the prison system - and this is done fairly eloquently on the whole.
Drawing on her own prison experience and the experiences of her friends and comrades, combined with a professed ex-communist turned-socialist, feminist analysis, Davis…
It's hard to know what the objective of this book is. The title and blurb make it sound like a book on women on death row. Actually, it's Kathleen O'Shea's autobiography, interspersed at paragraph intervals with excerpts from interviews with ten other women, all ofthem on death row in the USA.
When this format works it is very powerful; often it is a harrowing reminder that the social and psychological forces which result in some women - innocent or guilty - ending up on death row are absolutely the same as those which touch the…
As an antimilitarist and probably a feminist, I rather liked this diary. While it has, in some ways, quite a US orientation (national holidays, significant events, the relationship between days and dates etc), it is still perfectly usable for anyone using the Christian-derived calendar.
It has a one week to a page display, plus a directory of WRI members, and a list of national (US) peace organisations and publications. However I think the best thing about this diary is the profiles of 57 radical women from around the world who have…
This is a guide to a trip every activist should take. There is, of course, only one rogue state -the United States of America. Any evil deed of the US that an activist can imagine in the wildest of paranoid dreams is described and referenced in this comprehensive guide by Blum, a journalist and ex-US State Department official.
In spite of the efforts of US leaders to make their actions appear humanitarian and democratic, Blum makes it clear that the US has run a global protection racket based on four imperatives: making the world…
Genocide, according to the UN Convention of 1948, is defined as any acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. This book represents a review of the various dimensions of a strategy that might lead to a genocide-free world.
The key strands identified include 1) Strengthening the institutions and actors like the UN and NGOs that are dedicated to the monitoring and the protection of human rights - including the establishment of an international criminal court; 2)…
“Only one thing can reverse the corporate take-over of Britain. It's you” ends Captive State and, wow,given the extent of corporate capture of public life that the book describes, what a task you will have. A long road ahead then, butat least mapped and made so much more comprehensible by Monbiot's Manifesto of Multinational Malevolence.
That's not really a fair reference - whilst the book makes compelling reading and calls for some response, Monbiot avoids painting a cliche'd picture of corporate greed and sticks to rational…
This is a book which looks at what has traditionally been regarded as “gun running”, but which is in reality a covert aspect of many nations' foreign policy.
This covers the “small arms” (guns and rifles to you and me), which are used to fuel many of the world's civil wars. This includes arms that are also sold on, from nation to nation and from nation to insurrectionary groups, as a form of covert government activity. Plus arms which might publicly be represented as a form of aid to client states, but which are by many regarded as…
The opening page of this book reads like an unpleasant army thriller, full of mystery and gung-ho action. However repellent this may be, don't let it put you off, because it's not characteristic of most of the rest of Rodriguez's volume.
This is actually a detailed and often fascinating account of the runup to the attempted invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro forces backed by the US. The extent of this backing, and the depth of US hatred of any attempts at independence by states within its orbit, is seen in the speedy reaction to the…