American Military Intervention in Unconventional War: From the Philippines to Iraq
Author: Wayne Bert File Type: pdf A study of the major U.S. military interventions in unconventional war, this book looks at four wars that occurred while the U.S. was a superpower in the post-war WW II period and one in the Philippines in 1898.
Author: Leigh Phillips
File Type: epub
For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us? An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The Peoples Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.
Author: Bob Usherwood
File Type: pdf
This important volume by one of the leading scholars in the field examines and discusses how library professionals can meet the demands of policy makers to open up the public library service without destroying it. Based on a critical literature review, a survey of library professionals and consultations with stakeholders in the service, the book discusses the challenges involved in providing a library service which prioritizes equity and social inclusion and at the same time attempts to promote and maintain high intellectual and ethical standards. The author goes on to assess how those responsible for library services around the world deal with this dilemma and celebrate its possibilities.About the AuthorBob Usherwood is Emeritus Professor of Librarianship in the Department of Information Studies, The University of Sheffield, UK. A former President of the Library Association, he has authored over 200 publications, and his major books have been translated into Korean, Russian and Portuguese. He has also carried out research and consultancy for a number of national and international organizations.
Author: Joshua M. Price
File Type: pdf
The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. To be sentenced to prison is to face systematic violence, humiliation, and, perhaps worst of all, separation from family and community. It is, to borrow Orlando Pattersons term for the utter isolation of slavery, to suffer social death. InPrison and Social Death, Joshua Price exposes the unexamined cost that prisoners pay while incarcerated and after release, drawing upon hundreds of often harrowing interviews conducted with people in prison, parolees, and their families.Price argues that the prison separates prisoners from desperately needed communities of support from parents, spouses, and children. Moreover, this isolation of people in prison renders them highly vulnerable to other forms of violence, including sexual violence. Price stresses that the violence they face goes beyond physical abuse by prison guards and it involves institutionalized forms of mistreatment, ranging from abysmally poor health care to routine practices that are arguably abusive, such as pat-downs, cavity searches, and the shackling of pregnant women. And social death does not end with prison. The condition is permanent, following people after they are released from prison. Finding housing, employment, receiving social welfare benefits, and regaining voting rights are all hindered by various legal and other hurdles. The mechanisms of social death, Price shows, are also informal and cultural. Ex-prisoners face numerous forms of distrust and are permanently stigmatized by other citizens around them.A compelling blend of solidarity, civil rights activism, and social research,Prison and Social Deathoffers a unique look at the American prison and the excessive and unnecessary damage it inflicts on prisoners and parolees.
Author: June McDaniel
File Type: pdf
This book is a study of religious ecstasy, and the ways that it has been suppressed in both the academic study of religion, and in much of the modern practice of religion. It examines the meanings of the term, how ecstatic experience is understood in a range of religions, and why the importance of religious and mystical ecstasy has declined in the modern West. June McDaniel examines how the search for ecstatic experience has migrated into such areas as war, terrorism, transgression, sexuality, drug use, and anti-institutional forms of spirituality. She argues that the loss of religious and mystical ecstasy, as both a religious goal and as a topic of academic study, has had wide-ranging negative effects. She also proposes that the field of religious studies must go beyond criminalizing, trivializing and pathologizing ecstatic and mystical experiences. Both religious studies and theology need to take these states seriously as important aspects of lived human experience.
Author: Robert W. Witkin
File Type: pdf
Adorno is one of the leading cultural thinkers of the twentieth century. This is the first detailed account of Adornos texts on music from a sociological perspective. In clear, non-technical language, Robert Witkin guides the reader through the complexities of Adornos argument about the link between music and morality and between musical works and social structure. It was largely through these works Adorno established the right of the arts to be acknowledged as a moral and critical force in the development of a modern society. By recovering them for non-musicologists, Witkin adds immeasurably to our appreciation of this giant of twentieth-century thought. More than half of the published works of Theodor Adorno were devoted to his studies in music. As his reputation has grown in recent years, however, Adornos work on music has remained a neglected area because of its musicological complexity. This account of Adornos texts on music takes a sociological perspective. In non-technical language, Robert Witkin guides the reader through the complexities of Adornos argument about the link between music and morality and between musical works and social structure. It was through these works more than any others that Adorno established the right of the arts to be acknowledged as a moral and critical force in the development of a modern society. By recovering them for non-musicologists, Witkin adds immeasurably to our appreciation of this giant 20th-century thought.
Author: Tim R. McClanahan
File Type: pdf
For those who depend on the bounty of the sea for their livelihoods, climate change and its consequences (warming water, coral bleaching, rising sea levels) could spell disaster. The region comprising the eastern coastline of Africa and the islands of the western Indian Ocean--home to many of the Earths most impoverished people--is particularly vulnerable to significant climate impacts. Focusing on coral reef fisheries in these areas, which collectively support millions of people, this book provides a tool box of options for confronting the consequences of climate change through building local-scale adaptive capacity and improving the condition of natural resources. This requires strengthening a societys flexibility, assets, learning, and social organizations, as well as restricting or limiting its resource use. These two broad concepts--building social capacity and limiting certain types of resource use--interact in complicated ways, requiring coordinated actions. The authors argue that adaptation solutions are context dependent, determined in part by local resource conditions, human adaptive capacity, and exposure to climate change impacts, but also by a peoples history, culture, and aspirations. Providing an up-to-date and original synthesis of environmental stress, natural resources, and the socioeconomics of climate change, Adapting to a Changing Environment develops a framework to provide governments, scientists, managers, and donors with critical information about local context, encouraging the implementation of nuanced actions that reflect local conditions.
Author: James Naus
File Type: pdf
Crusading kings such as Louis IX of France and Richard I of England exert a unique hold on our historical imagination. For this reason, it can be easy to forget that European rulers were not always eager participants in holy war. The First Crusade was launched in 1095, and yet the first monarch did not join the movement until 1146, when the French king Louis VII took the cross to lead the Second Crusade. One contemporary went so far as to compare the crusades to Creation and mans redemption on the cross, so what impact did fifty years of non-participation have on the image and practice of European kingship and the parameters of cultural development? Constructing kingship considers this question by examining the challenge to political authority that confronted the French kings and their family members as a direct result of their failure to join the early crusades, and their less-than-impressive involvement in later ones.