No name
By former member of Allende’s cabinet.
Relevant for background to the events of 2011.
Indigenous women from Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Belau, Bougainville, East Timor, Ka Pa’aina (Hawaii), the Marshall Islands, Te Ao Maohi (French Polynesia) and West Papua (Irian Jaya) condemn imperialism, war, ‘nuclear imperialism’ (in the form of nuclear tests) and military bases in the hope ‘that when people around the world learn what is happening in the Pacific they will be inspired to stand beside them and to act’. The book is a contribution to the Hague Appeal for Peace, 1999.
Explores both attempts at legal reform and those reforms achieved in Islamic countries (Palestine, Yemen, Iran and Egypt) and problems of implementing reform, for example the domestic violence law in Ghana.
An extensive examination of the possibilities and implications of artificial intelligence applied to the battlefield, from drones to 'killer robots', with varying degrees of autonomous ability to make decisions without human intervention. Scharre interviewed engineers creating new weapons and those in the military who might use them. He disagrees with campaigners seeking a total ban, which he thinks impossible, arguing instead for ensuring a minimum degree of human involvement in their deployment.
See also: Trying to Restrain the Robots', The Economist, 19 Sept. 2019, pp. 26-27.
A succinct examination of autonomous weapons and of issues arising, starting with the 'Harop' drone produced by Israeli Aerospace Industries, which can be classed as either a remote-controlled weapon or as an autonomous robot, depending on its software at the time. The article reports briefly on the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of 89 NGOs, and concludes by noting that in 2017 the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (also known as the Inhumane Weapons Convention, agreed in 1980) appointed an expert group to examine the implications of autonomous weapons and different approaches to controlling their use.
Analysis of background and context of elections, the regime’s role and actions of the opposition.
Focuses on 1974-75, and provides more detailed references in both Portuguese and English.
Sympathetic account of the ‘Cedar Revolution’ by journalist of mixed Lebanese-American parentage.
A study of community power and regional planning on the environment, based on US case studies.
Covers origins and development of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and key events, as well as attempts to recruit Afro-American veterans and the role of women in the organization.
Stresses challenge to Pinochet legacy and links with workers’ unions. Includes timeline of protests from May 2011 – August 2012.
Matt Taibbi discusses Eric Garner’s life and work as a cigarettes dealer, and his subsequent killing by the police of New York that strengthened the Black Lives Matter movement and protest. He reports on how he become targeted by the police, and allegedly mistaken by police officers on the day of his death. He touches upon his problematic personal and health conditions, within the wider context of the criminalisation of drugs policies in the United States of America. The work expands on Garner’s life and killing, contextualising its narration on the 2008 Bloomberg’s policy of tax increase on cigarettes of 400% per pack, which – Taibbi argues – motivated Eric Garner to sell cigarettes to people who couldn’t afford them. Additional contextualising elements to the analysis that Taibbi offers are the ‘broken windows’ policing, computerised policing and statistical analyses on crime rate and the inherently racialized imposition of order that stems from them.
Interview with Fatima Sadiqi, professor of Linguistics and Gender Studies, on the discourse around feminism, Islam, gender equality, social justice and democracy in Morocco.
This report sets out Amnesty International’s concerns about the Mexican state’s failure to comply with observations of the Committee (in the combined seventh and eighth periodic reports) on violence against women. Amnesty notes in particular the murder of women for gender-based motives, also known as “femicides”, the gender alert mechanism, disappearances of women, and the torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of women during detention, which is exacerbated in the context of a militarization of public security.
The author’s research spans the period 1998 -2012 to chart the impact of the economic reforms on rural women drawn into urban areas, often employed in domestic service or in hotels and office cleaning. She notes how this migration of cheap and flexible labour from the countryside has underpinned high levels of urban consumption, and both helped to empower the women migrants and to perpetuate gendered forms of difference and inequality.
See also: Chang, Leslie T., Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, New York, Penguin Random House, 2009, pp. 448 (pb).
Chang, who was a journalist for the Wall Street Journal inside China, revealed the lives of migrant women working on assembly lines in an industrial city, primarily by focusing on the experiences of two young women for three years. Her book which won awards in the USA, threw light on a previously unknown area, and illustrated the very mixed impact of the economic reforms and migration from the countryside on women’s opportunities.
Survey of youth climate activism in schools and universities in Canada, focused on the climate impacts of excess consumption and fast fashion, symbolized by the November 2019 'Black Friday' shopping spree. Based on interviews with six young Canadians involved in a rang e of environmental activism.
Scholarly, interdisciplinary analysis of the Assad regime and of the first two years of the uprising. The book explores the nature of the uprising, reasons for the lack of success, and why it turned into an increasingly sectarian civil war.
See also: Hinnenbusch, Raymond, Omar Imady and Tina Zintl, 'Civil Resistance in the Syrian Uprising: From Peaceful Protest to Sectarian Civil War', in Adam Roberts, Michael J. Willis, Rory McCarthy and Timothy Garton Ash, eds. Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring (E.V.B.a.), pp. 223-47.
An overview with a focus on the role, possibilities and limitations of civil resistance in the specific context of the Assad regime, and the realities of the civil war from 2012 and the rise of ISIS.
Wu, a university teacher of English educated in the US, returned to China in 1951. This is a personal account of his experiences. The Hundred Flowers campaign is covered pp. 47-72.