The exploitation of 2.5 million west Africans, and their descendants born into slavery, in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean enriched generations of Britons and the British nation. 'Britain's Slavery Debt' offers a concise, reasoned, practical case for why Britain should pay reparations for these historic wrongs to present Caribbean inhabitants.
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
Recent years have seen a growing recognition of the role that White Christian Nationalism plays in American society. As White Christian Nationalism has become a major force, & as racial & religious attitudes become increasingly aligned among whites - for example, the more likely you are to say that the decline of white people as a share of the population is 'bad for society,' the more likely you are to believe the government should support religious values - it has become reasonable to wonder which of the adjectives in the phrase 'White Christian Nationalism' takes precedence. In this book, the authors respond definitively: the answer is 'white.' The majority of white Christians in America, they argue, are believers in a 'Religion of Whiteness' that shapes their faith, their politics, & more.
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
Institutional Roots of India's Security Policy presents high-quality analytical examinations of several foreign policy and national security institutions spread across four domains: the armed services, intelligence, border and internal security, and policy and coordination to offer insights on their organizational and institutional foundations.
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
How do we understand the nature and diversity of populist politics, in developed and developing countries? 'Righteous Demagogues' provides a novel approach grounded in democratic theory, inequality, and party competition. It argues that populists are successful when they evoke the moral contract - that states are obligated to redress certain types of inequality - and promise its restoration, in ways that resonate across the normal lines of social division and partisanship. These changes in political competition can spur confrontations with the opposition and state institutions, leading to populist rejection or authoritarian governance.
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
Why do candidates make ethnic appeals in election campaigns? More specifically, why do some candidates appeal to their ethnic group while others reach out to different ethnic groups or abandon appeals altogether? This book develops key concepts of ethnic bonding, bridging, and bypassing to interpret ethnic politics in Indonesia, one of the world's largest and most ethnically diverse emerging democracies.
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
Broad-based community organizing (BBCO) is perhaps the most widely used form of political participation supported by American religious institutions today. As organizing groups become more religiously diverse, however, so do the conceptions of sacred value that ground organizing in the first place. In today's political climate what we hold most dear, those sacred values such as human life, a land, or a natural resource may seem to only further entrench us in our enclaves and threaten the solidarity of any constituency. This book tells a different story. People organize to protect and fight for what they hold most dear. Using auto-ethnography from over a decade of interfaith BBCO experiences, Listening to the Spirit makes a case for the political role of sacred values in BBCO, especially as they show up in two organizing practices: the "listening campaign" and the "relational meeting."
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
A history of Argentina that examines how trans bodies were understood, policed, and shaped in a country that banned medically assisted gender affirmation practices and punished trans lives. As a trans history of Argentina, a country that banned medically assisted gender affirmation practices and punished trans lives, A Body of One's Own places the histories of trans bodies at the core of modern Argentinian history. Patricio Simonetto documents the lives of people who crossed the boundaries of gender from the early twentieth century to the present. Based on extensive archival research in public and community-based archives, this book explores the mainstream medical and media portrayals of trans or travesti people, the state policing of gender embodiment, the experiences of those transgressing the boundaries of gender, and the development of homemade technologies from prosthetics to the self-injection of silicone. A Body of One's Own explores how trans activists' challenges to the exclusionary effects of Argentina's legal, cultural, social, and political cisgender order led to the passage of the Gender Identity Law in 2012. Analyzing the decisive yet overlooked impact of gender transformation in the formation of the nation-state, gender-belonging, and citizenship, this book ultimately shows that supposedly abstract struggles to define the shifting notions of "sex," citizenship, and nationhood are embodied material experiences
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
A study of Cuban culture and media in the twenty-first century as both a global phenomenon and a local reality, at a time when the declared death of socialism coexists in tension with emerging anticapitalist movements worldwide. Why does Cuban socialism endure as an object of international political desire, while images of capitalist markets consume Cuba's national imagination? This bold new study argues that Cuba's changing media cultures are key to our understanding of the global postsocialist condition and its competing political imaginaries. Portable Postsocialisms calls on a vast multimedia archive to offer a groundbreaking cultural interpretation of Cuban postsocialism. Paloma Duong examines songs, artworks, advertisements, memes, literature, jokes, and networks that refuse exceptionalist and exoticizing visions of Cuba. Expanding postsocialist critical theory to read this complex mediascape, Duong argues that a materialist critique of Cuba's revolutionary legacy must account for Cubans' everyday demands for agency and self-representation. This long overdue reassessment of Cuba's place in Latin American and post-Marxist studies shows Cuban postsocialism to be an urgent and indispensable referent for core debates on the politics of participatory cultures in new media studies. Portable Postsocialisms performs the crucial task of redefining how we envision imaginaries of social change in Latin America and the Caribbean
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
An unflinching investigation of the false promises of land sparing, exposing how its illusory successes mask the failures of green capitalism For two decades, the concept of land sparing, the claim that agricultural intensification can spare land by preventing forest clearing for agricultural expansion, has dominated tropical forest conservation. Land sparing policies transform landscapes and livelihoods with the promise of reconciling agricultural development with environmental conservation. But that land sparing promise is false. Based on six years of research on agrarian frontiers in Indonesia, Brazil, and Bolivia, this book traces where and how land sparing becomes policy and charts the social and ecological effects of these political contests. Gregory M. Thaler explains why land sparing appears successful in some places but not in others and reveals that success as an illusion achieved by displacing deforestation to new frontiers. The failure of land sparing exposes a harsh truth behind assurances of green capitalism: capitalist development is ecocide
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
At the pilgrimage site of Adam's Peak in Sri Lanka, a footprint is embedded atop the mountain summit. Buddhists hold that it was left by the Buddha, Hindus say Lord Siva, and Muslims and Christians identify it with Adam, the first man. The Sri Lankan state, for its part, often uses the Peak as a prop to convey a harmonious image of religious pluralism, despite increasing Buddhist hegemony. How should the diversity of this place be understood historically and managed practically?Considering the varied heritage of this sacred site, Alexander McKinley develops a new account of pluralism based in political ecology, representing the full array of actors and issues on the mountain. From its diverse people to rare species to deep geology, the Peak exemplifies a planetary pluralism that recognizes a multiplicity of beings while accepting competition and disorder. Taking a place-based approach, McKinley casts the mountain as an actor, exploring how its rocks, forests, and waters promote pilgrimage, inspire storytelling, and make ethical demands on human communities. Combining history and ethnography while furnishing original translations of sources from Pali, Sinhala, and Tamil, this multidisciplinary and stylistically innovative book shows how religious traditions share literal common ground in their reverence for the mountain
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
Policing is violent. And its violence is not distributed equally: stark racial disparities persist despite decades of efforts to address them. Amid public outcry and an ongoing crisis of police legitimacy, there is pressing need to understand not only how police perceive and use violence but also why.With unprecedented access to three police departments and drawing on more than 100 interviews and 1,000 hours on patrol, The Danger Imperative provides vital insight into how police culture shapes officers' perception and practice of violence. From the front seat of a patrol car, it shows how the institution of policing reinforces a cultural preoccupation with violence through academy training, departmental routines, powerful symbols, and officers' street-level behavior.This violence-centric culture makes no explicit mention of race, relying on the colorblind language of "threat" and "officer safety." Nonetheless, existing patterns of systemic disadvantage funnel police hyperfocused on survival into poor minority neighborhoods. Without requiring individual bigotry, this combination of social structure, culture, and behavior perpetuates enduring inequalities in police violence.A trailblazing, on-the-ground account of modern policing, this book shows that violence is the logical consequence of an institutional culture that privileges officer survival over public safety
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
A profound cultural shift is taking place in western societies: religion is in decline and secular worldviews are on the rise. At the same time, religion is taking more overtly political shapes and still affects our world in important, sometimes dangerous ways. This book examines two rival explanations for these trends, critiquing the popular notion that God has been 'killed' by modern science, and offering a fresh take that draws on research in the social sciences to argue that greater socio-economic equality and moral values that favour tolerance are at the heart of our collective drift away from organized faith.
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
This text examines Immanuel Kant's impact on moral philosophy from his time to our own. Kant's moral philosophy can seem complicated, but at the most basic level it is driven by the simple idea that the greatest possible freedom for each combined with an equal degree of freedom for all is the fundamental principle of philosophy.
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
Over the last few decades, biology, psychology, anthropology, and cognate fields have substantially enriched traditional philosophical theories about who we are and where we come from. Nevertheless, the hallowed topic of human nature remains frustratingly elusive. Why have we not been able to crack the mystery? Marco J. Nathan provides an overview and explanation of recent research and argues that human nature is a core scientific concept that is not susceptible to an explanation, scientific or otherwise. He traces the scientific history of human nature to conclude that, as an epistemological indicator, science cannot adequately grasp human nature without dissolving it in the process.
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries: