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For years, American states have tinkered with the machinery of death, seeking to align capital punishment with evolving social standards and public will. Against this backdrop, North Carolina had long stood out as a prolific executioner with harsh mandatory sentencing statutes. But as the state sought to remake its image as modern and business-progressive in the early twentieth century, the question of execution preoccupied lawmakers, reformers, and state boosters alike. In this book, Seth Kotch recounts the history of the death penalty in North Carolina from its colonial origins to the present. He tracks the attempts to reform and sanitize the administration of death in a state as dedicated to its image as it was to rigid racial hierarchies. Through this lens, Lethal State helps explain not only Americans' deep and growing uncertainty about the death penalty but also their commitment to it. Kotch argues that Jim Crow justice continued to reign in the guise of a modernizing, orderly state and offers essential insight into the relationship between race, violence, and power in North Carolina. The history of capital punishment in North Carolina, as in other states wrestling with similar issues, emerges as one of state-building through lethal punishment. --! From publisher's description.

This article interrogates Marx's critique of political economy in the context of the global South and southern epistemologies. It first traces the contradictory roots of a non-Eurocentric conception of history within Adam Smith. Recovering Marx's silenced sociologies of colonialism in his writings and notebooks, it then shows that Marx incorporated colonialism and imperialism into his analysis of accumulation. The antagonism between wage-labour and capital needs to be understood as a global tendency, encompassing a hierarchy of forms of exploitation and oppression. Marx's support for the Taiping revolution (1850–1864) played a crucial, albeit often ignored, role in his theorisation. It allowed him to recognise the living potential for anti-colonial struggles and international solidarities, thus breaking with Eurocentric accounts of history. The article concludes that it is crucial to sociology's global futures that it reconnects with the critique of political economy, and actively learns from the anti-imperialist South.

In response to Hamas's brutal attack on Israel on October 7, the IDF invaded Gaza with a stated purpose of destroying the terror group. As such, the IDF is fighting what many have come to call a "war of counter-insurgency." Hamas has no "army" in any well accepted sense of the word. Rather, Hamas's military arm is reasonably well-organized (and well-funded) confederation of guerrilla fighters. The IDF's aim is to kill or otherwise incapacitate Hamas's fighters and, insofar as possible, leave civilians alone.But the IDF is not really fighting a war of counter-insurgency in Gaza. What it is fighting is best understood as a "war of occupation." The Israelis left Gaza in 2005, and now they are back as de facto occupiers. This characterization isn't to imply that the IDF will stay in Gaza in the long term. They may, they may not. It is rather an apt description of the challenging and dangerous military situation the IDF faces as it stands today. What is the difference between a war of counter-insurgency and a war of occupation, and is it useful for understanding the war in Gaza?In a war of counter-insurgency — at least as understood by politicians and theorists insisting that such a war is being fought — there are insurgents and civilians. The former are politically motivated, well-armed, and deadly. The civilians are simply "in the way." They are politically neutral if not exactly supportive of the troops sent to "help" them. In the understanding of the counter-insurgency experts, most civilians just want the war to end so they can get on with their lives. The West German operations against the Red Army Faction provide an example of a war of counter-insurgency, as does, perhaps, the American effort against al-Qaida and the Islamic State. In these cases, the insurgents were difficult to identify, but they did not generally enjoy the support of local population. This situation made military operations easier. In a war of occupation, however, there are insurgents and hostile civilians. The former are, as in a war of counter-insurgency, armed and deadly. But the latter — and this is the crucial difference — are decidedly unfriendly to the occupying forces. Whatever their political leanings, the occupied believe that the foreign troop should go home. The civilians may not be active combatants, but they are likely to give aid to the insurgents simply on nationalistic grounds. Thus understood, wars of occupation — often propagandistically called "wars of counter-insurgency" by occupying powers — have been common and deadly in modern times. One need only recall the British in Malaysia, the Americans in Vietnam, the French in Vietnam and Algeria, the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. In these cases, the insurgents were difficult to identify, but — and very significantly — much of the local population was decidedly hostile to occupying troops. This situation made military operations more difficult.The example of a war of occupation I know best is that of the Vietnam war, and it illustrates how difficult it is to fight — let alone win — such a war. From the beginning, the U.S. said it was fighting a war of counter-insurgency in South Vietnam, a "different kind of war" the Pentagon and successive presidential administrations called it. The U.S. did not invade North Vietnam and it said it did not invade the South Vietnam. But invade is what it did. The U.S. sent 2.6 million military personnel to South Vietnam over the course of the war; at the high point of operations, it had over half a million men there. The U.S., essentially, occupied much of South Vietnam.One of the places the U.S. occupied was Quang Ngai province on the northeast coast of South Vietnam. This, tellingly, is where the My Lai massacre occurred. U.S. ground troops in Quang Ngai hunted — and sometimes engaged — the Viet Cong, the "insurgents" of counter-insurgency theory. But they also encountered a population of South Vietnamese that was profoundly hostile to the Americans. The locals sniped at them, laid boobytraps and mines, aided the Viet Cong, and were generally involved in anti-American resistance.U.S. troops recognized the antagonism of the Vietnamese population in Quang Ngai, a population they were nominally defending. In the wake of the My Lai Massacre, the U.S. Army conducted an investigation to find out what had gone wrong with their counter-insurgency strategy. The investigators asked the perpetrators why they had killed civilians. The soldiers often responded by saying they did not know they were "civilians." The Vietnamese in Quang Ngai were, so the American troops claimed, all "VC sympathizers" and therefore dangerous. It's important to recognize that the American soldiers were not saying that it was (as the common trope goes) "difficult to tell combatants from civilians." They were saying that all the civilians were potentially threatening. In Gaza, the IDF finds itself in a situation like that of the American army in Quang Ngai province. The Israelis are there nominally on a counter-insurgency mission. But in fact, they have occupied Gaza. Hamas does not want them there, but neither do most Gazans who are suffering under the IDF onslaught. Is it too much to say that most Gazans hate the IDF? Perhaps not. Critics might well say that many Gazans hated the IDF before the Israeli invasion. Again, perhaps true. But the invasion and occupation certainly have not improved the situation. In a recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy Survey and Research, 57% of Gazans said Hamas was "correct" to attack Israel on October 7. Nearly all of those surveyed — 97% — said the Israelis were committing "war crimes" in Gaza. This fact — a nearly uniformly hostile population — makes IDF military operations very difficult. The Israeli forces must fight Hamas, but they also must worry about hostile Palestinian civilians living under what the Palestinians see as IDF occupation. The dangers of conducting military operations in such a context are numerous, but the most significant — at least from the point of protecting civilians — is that the IDF will come to view the hostile residents of Gaza as "Hamas sympathizers" with tragic results.The perils of inherent in a war of occupation were vividly illustrated on December 15 when the IDF killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza City. According to the IDF, the Israeli troops "mistakenly identified three Israeli hostages as a threat" even though they were unarmed and were waving a white flag. The IDF went on to explain that the killings violated the Israeli rules of engagement. Of course they did, but that's to miss the point: from the perspective of the Israeli ground troops, all Gazans, no matter how innocent they appear, are perceived as a threat. This is particularly true of military-aged males, and all three of the murdered Israeli hostages were military-aged males. In modern times, wars of occupation have not ended well for the occupied or the occupiers. Typically, hostile civilians — what the occupying power sees as "sympathizers" — suffer tremendously and the occupying power leaves defeated. Such was the case in Algeria, Vietnam (twice), and Afghanistan (twice). The IDF knows this fact well, having fought, and lost, a war of occupation in southern Lebanon intermittently from 1982 to 2000. It remains to be seen if the Israelis have truly learned this lesson.

"To be taken seriously, therapies that claim to "cure" homosexuality wrap themselves in lab coats. Even though the fit is bad, and such therapies and their theorists now inhabit the scientific fringe, the science of sexuality has made some adjustments, too, Tom Waidzunas tells us in this provocative work. Intervening in the politics of sexuality and science, The Straight Line argues that scientific definitions of sexual orientation do not merely reflect the results of investigations into human nature, but rather emerge through a process of social negotiation between opposing groups. The demedicalization of homosexuality and the discrediting of reparative therapies, ex-gay ministries, and reorientation research have, Waidzunas contends, required scientists to enforce key boundaries around scientific expertise and research methods. Drawing on extensive participant observation at conferences for ex-gays, reorientation therapists, mainstream psychologists, and survivors of ex-gay therapy, as well as interviews with experts and activists, The Straight Line traces reorientation debates in the United States from the 1950s to the present, following homosexuality therapies from the mainstream to the margins. As the ex-gay movement has become increasingly transnational in recent years, Waidzunas turns to Uganda, where ideas about the scientific nature of homosexuality influenced the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014. While most studies treat the ex-gay movement as a religious phenomenon, this book looks at how the movement, in its attempts to establish legitimacy, has engaged with scientific institutions, shaping virulent anti-gay public policy."--

Quoting is all around us. But do we really know what it means? How do people actually quote today, and how did our present systems come about? This book brings together a down-to-earth account of contemporary quoting with an examination of the comparative and historical background that lies behind it and the characteristic way that quoting links past and present, the far and the near. Drawing from anthropology, cultural history, folklore, cultural studies, sociolinguistics, literary studies and the ethnography of speaking, Ruth Finnegan's fascinating study sets our present conventions into cross-cultural and historical perspective. She traces the curious history of quotation marks, examines the long tradition of quotation collections with their remarkable recycling across the centuries, and explores the uses of quotation in literary, visual and oral traditions. The book tracks the changing definitions and control of quoting over the millennia and in doing so throws new light on ideas such as 'imitation', 'allusion', 'authorship', 'originality' and 'plagiarism'.

"Ancient Greek migrants in Sicily produced societies and economies that both paralleled and differed from their homeland. Since the nineteenth century explanations for these similarities and differences have been heavily debated, with attention focusing in particular on the roles played on this frontier by locals and immigrants in Greek Sicily's remarkable cultural efflorescence. Polarized positions have resulted. On one side, scholars have viewed the ancient Greeks as one of a long line of incomers whom Sicily and its inhabitants shape. On the other side, the ancient Greeks have been viewed in a hierarchical manner with the Sicilian Greeks acting as the source of innovation and achievement in shaping their Sicily, while at the same being lesser to homeland Greece, the center of their world. Neither of these two extremes is completely satisfactory. What is lacking in this debate is a basic work on social and economic history that gathers the historical and archaeological evidence and deploys it to test the various historical models proposed over the past two hundred years. This book represents the first ever such systematic and comprehensive endeavor. It adopts a broadly based interdisciplinary approach that combines classical and prehistoric studies, texts, and material culture, and a variety of methods and theories to put the history of Greek Sicily on a completely new footing. While Sicily and Greece had conjoined histories right from the start, their relationship was not one of center and periphery or "colonial" in any sense, but of an interdependent and mutually enriching diaspora. At the same time, local conditions and peoples, including Phoenician migrants, also shaped the evolution of Sicilian Greek societies and economies. This book reveals and explains the similarities and differences with developments in Greece and brings greater clarity to the parts played by locals and immigrants in ancient Sicily's impressive achievements"--

<p>Nuestro trabajo defiende que el cosmopolitismo es una fuente importante para pensar en las identidades políticas, una fuente que sin embargo debe renovarse. El trabajo comienza por exponer algunas situaciones políticas tanto en Europa como en América del Norte, donde la discusión sobre la identidad nacional se enfrenta con la necesidad de una idea renovada del cosmopolitismo, una idea que debe ser diferenciada de nociones similares como la diversidad cultural o el multiculturalismo, pero también del ideal de la globalización. Se muestra en este sentido que hay una diferencia importante y a menudo olvidada entre el cosmopolitismo y la política, una diferencia esencial para pensar en la situación real en Europa. El trabajo expone como el cosmopolitismo contemporáneo tiene sus raíces en los ideales estoicos y kantianos, ideales que deben conservarse, pero que ya no son válidos y que deben renovarse para enfrentar las nuevas demandas de la complejidad del mundo. El trabajo termina defendiendo la necesidad de un nuevo cosmopolitismo (en la línea de propuestas como las de Hans Jonas o Yves Charles Zarka) que debe ser respetuoso con la política (pero sin dejar de orientarla) y también con las diferentes identidades nacionales o supranacionales, ya que proporciona de hecho una metaidentidad para el hombre como ciudadano del mundo.</p><p><strong>Recibido:</strong> 02 julio 2018<br /> <strong>Aceptado: </strong>16 julio 2018<br /> <strong>Publicación en línea: </strong>27 febrero 2019</p>

Presents 1991 statistics on Belgian politics, including legislative elections, & on the civil service, public policy, & indices of legitimacy, eg, public opinion, cabinet stability, party membership, strikes, & public protests. Data from ministerial, party, & other sources are summarized. 41 Tables, 9 Figures. A. Levine

Adam Chapnick, the editor of the International Journal's excellent series on the "lessons of history," is a respected historian, but of the authors recruited to study what lessons history provides, only one dwells professionally in a department of history (Andrew Preston at Oxford). Three others have doctorates in history but one teaches international studies (David Webster) while John Hilliker is a retired official historian and Chris Pennington is an editor at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. The remainder -- David Bosco, Margaret Doxey, Barbara Falk, Joseph Jockei, Carol Lancaster, Chris Sands, and Chris Spearin -- have degrees in political science, law, or international relations/studies. While this group has made significant contributions to historical scholarship and their essays reflect their solid understanding of historical scholarship, their professional careers have reflected their training in political science, economics, or international relations. The essayists vary considerably in their willingness to find lessons in history. Adapted from the source document.