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The essays in this volume engage on one plane with the totality of the concept, while at another they acknowledge the porosity of the idea of non-violence, particularly with respect to praxis or what can be thought of as learnt non violence. Conceived and osmotically structured around four themes - religion, protest, the modern condition, and the world today - the book is an invitation to consider the practical possibilities of non violence.

This unique volume seeks both to historicize and to deconstruct the pervasive, almost ritualistic, association of Africa with forms of terrorism as well as extreme violence, the latter bordering on and including genocide. Africa is tendentiously associated with violence in the popular and academic imagination alike. Written by leading authorities in postcolonial studies and African history, as well as highly promising emergent scholars, this book highlights political, social and cultural processes in Africa which incite violence or which facilitate its negotiation or negation through.

The problem of violence in American culture has been a subject of increasing concern during the past two decades. In the fifties, there was rampant the school of "consensus" history writing, which tended to deny the existence of conflicts about basic issues in American history. More recently, the past has been portrayed in an entirely different light: Conflict, and particularly violent conflict, are seen as having been virtually endemic. Against the background of violent crime and civil disturbance, several presidential commissions have investigated violence, and they usually emerge with the conclusion that Americans are a peculiarly violent people. The atrocities of the Vietnam war, and police and ghetto violence, have led many to wonder at the same time whether the alleged merits of the American political system are as great as its defenders have insisted.

As this issue of Race & Class was going to press, we received from a friend in Jerusalem an Arabic language pamphlet which is currently circulating among Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel. The author of al-A'anaf fi al-Aradhi al-Muhattalati (Non-violence in the Occupied Territories) is Dr Mubarak A wad, a US trained Palesti nian educator. We think this is a very important initiative, and the lively interest it has sparked among Palestinian activists to be a most significant development. In rough translation, we publish excerpts from this pam phlet in the hope that it will receive broad attention, and the discussion be constructively joined by others engaged in the struggle for justice and Palestinian self-determination.