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"With an unrelenting barrage of record-breaking temperatures dominating the headlines, an enigma arises--despite the flames licking at our feet, most people fail to fully grasp the gravity of environmental overheating. What acquired habits and mechanisms grant us the capacity to turn a blind eye with an air of detachment? Heat: A History shows how scientific methods of accounting for heat and modern forms of acclimatization have desensitized us to climate change. Ubiquitous air conditioning, shifts in urban planning, and changes in mobility all served as temporary remedies for escaping the heat in hotspots such as the twentieth-century Middle East. However, all these measures have ultimately fuelled not only greenhouse gas emissions but also a collective myopia regarding the impact of rising temperatures. Identifying the scientific abstractions and economic and cultural forces that have numbed our responses this book charts a way forward out of short-term thinking and towards meaningful action"--

The Age of Empire was driven by coal, and the Middle East--as an idea--was made by coal. Coal's imperial infrastructure presaged the geopolitics of oil that wreaks carnage today, as carbonization threatens our very climate. Powering Empire argues that we cannot promote worldwide decarbonization without first understanding the history of the globalization of carbon energy. How did this black rock come to have such long-lasting power over the world economy? Focusing on the flow of British carbon energy to the Middle East, On Barak excavates the historic nexus between coal and empire to reveal the political and military motives behind what is conventionally seen as a technological innovation. He provocatively recounts the carbon-intensive entanglements of Western and non-Western powers and reveals unfamiliar resources--such as Islamic risk-aversion and Gandhian vegetarianism--for a climate justice that relies on more diverse and ethical solutions worldwide.

Figurations of body, community, and politics traversed India and the Ottoman world along the artificial coaling archipelago that connected both via legal islands of extraterritoriality and other technologies in the Red Sea. Examining this system and the ethnic groups that operated and subverted it reveals how minority formation and other forms of making community and autonomy were linked to processes of anatomization and a rearticulation of ideas about race, blood, and soil. This "infrastructural turn" meant that sociability, religion, identity, and political legitimacy in the inter- and intra-imperial domains were biologized and thus fastened to the material and technological systems these groups were part of. Parsis and their Muslim competitors naturalized this system and made it and themselves into parts of the landscape. Such ecologies of ethnicity and extrastatecraft flourished on the margins of large-scale infrastructures, underpinning the emergence of minorities and diasporas in the twentieth century.

Anwar Sadat's "open door" policy involved the forceful promotion of an American-inspired car society. This essay traces the development of Egypt's motorscape by recounting the first eight decades of automobility in Egypt. Focusing on the 1970s, it suggests that the increasing number of vehicles on the road and consequent congestion were the result, and apparently also the driving force, of politics at every level: from class and gender to geopolitics. In particular, the adoption of the car during the infitah was informed by a discourse of demographic and urban crisis that it was meant to solve yet actually aggravated. Contrasting the private car to the public bus—and stressing zahma, population control, and regulation of sexuality—brought to the fore gendered aspects of automobility and especially sexual harassment rather than issues such as energy efficiency, traffic accidents, and environmental pollution, which would describe the car as the more dangerous vehicle. This contextualization helped neutralize the immoral connotations cars carried over from the prerevolutionary era. Against this background, Egypt's motorscape was partitioned into public and private, dangerous and safe, humiliating and respectable, in a way that made the bus stand for all the former connotations and the car for all the latter.

AbstractDuring the long 19th century, British coal proliferated throughout the Ottoman Empire in increasing quantity, rapidity, and regularity via junctions and political arrangements that became evermore stable and dominant. The British used coal export to project their power elsewhere, offshoring the Industrial Revolution by building an infrastructure that could support it overseas and connect it to existing facets of the imperial project. Examining this "outsourcing" and the importance of foreign coal markets to industrialization helps provincialize the steam engine and anchor it in a global context. It also allows us to explore the impact of fossil energy on the Middle East and the ways coal both set the stage for the arrival of oil and informed the possibilities for translating carbon power into politics. Coal, the article suggests, animated political participation in England while reinforcing authoritarian tendencies in the Middle East.

The abstraction of "energy" emerged in the second third of the nineteenth century amid attempts to disentangle human, animal, hydro, and carbon powers, seeking to thereby transform them into manageable and docile forces. This simplification still animates the notion of "energy regimes," so prevalent in analytic attempts to make sense of historical shifts involving these powers. Barak's essay probes the development of this abstraction as well as the continuities and entanglements it obfuscated by attending to the imperial context of the increasing reliance on carbon-based energy, focusing on the British textile spinning and weaving sector and the carbon fibers it extended to Egypt's agricultural periphery and urban centers. Instead of the advent of a new energy regime, coal inserted itself into existing systems and changed them from within. This rearrangement was characterized, surprisingly, by the intensification of existing forces: if animal- or waterpower gradually became relatively less central with the advent of coal, in absolute terms and in terms of their social significance their importance often grew.

In The Geography of Injustice, Barak Kushner argues that the war crimes tribunals in East Asia formed and cemented national divides that persist into the present day. In 1946 the Allies convened the Tokyo Trial to prosecute Japanese wartime atrocities and Japan's empire. At its conclusion one of the judges voiced dissent, claiming that the justice found at Tokyo was only "the sham employment of a legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for revenge." War crimes tribunals, Kushner shows, allow for the history of the defeated to be heard. In contemporary East Asia a fierce battle between memory and history has consolidated political camps across this debate. The Tokyo Trial courtroom, as well as the thousands of other war crimes tribunals opened in about fifty venues across Asia, were legal stages where prosecution and defense curated facts and evidence to craft their story about World War Two. These narratives and counter narratives form the basis of postwar memory concerning Japan's imperial aims across the region. The archival record and the interpretation of court testimony together shape a competing set of histories for public consumption. The Geography of Injustice offers compelling evidence that despite the passage of seven decades since the end of the war, East Asia is more divided than united by history

Indicting the 45th President is a sequel to Criminology on Trump in real time, continuing the criminological investigation into the former US president. It develops and expands on the themes of family dynamics, deviance, deception, dishonesty, and the weaponization of the law.

Criminology on Trump is a criminological investigation of the world's most successful outlaw, Donald J. Trump. Over the course of five decades, Donald Trump has been accused of sexual assault, tax evasion, money laundering, non-payment of employees, and the defrauding of tenants, customers, contractors, investors, bankers, and charities. Yet, he has continued to amass wealth and power. In this book, criminologist and social historian Gregg Barak asks why and how?This book examines how the United States precariously maintains stability through conflict in which groups with competing interests and opposing visions struggle for power, negotiate rule breaking, and establish criminal justice. While primarily focused on Trump's developing character over three quarters of a century, it is also an inquiry into the changing cultural character and social structure of American society. It explores the ways in which both crime and crime control are socially constructed in relation to a changing political economy. An accessible and compelling read, this book is essential for all those who seek a criminological understanding of Donald Trump's rise to power.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Foreword -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Coming of Age at the Berkeley School of Criminology -- Chapter 2. Life as a Young Criminologist -- Chapter 3. Doing Public Criminology -- Chapter 4. Doing Newsmaking Criminology -- Chapter 5. Doing Multidisciplinary Criminology -- Part Three. Academic Praxis -- Chapter 6. Integrating Criminology -- Chapter 7. Globalizing Criminology -- Appendix -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index -- About the Author

"Lebanon and Israel/Palestine are two political entities that expanded in 1920 and 1967 respectively, and became divided societies characterized by periods of stability and conflict. This book provides the first detailed comparison between the two states and also explores the effects of their expansion on their changing relations. It looks first at how both expanded states attempted to cope with their predicaments, focusing on the relationship between state, community and security, before moving on to analyze the de-stabilizing effects of expansion on Israeli-Lebanese relations. The book draws on previously unpublished official documents, memoirs, media resources and films produced in Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, in addition to existing works on the two states and the Middle East. Bridging the gap between comparative politics and international relations, it will interest students of Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, the Middle East, and conflict and peace."

Why are crimes of the suite punished more leniently than crimes of the street? When police killings of citizens go unpunished, political torture is sanctioned by the state, and the financial frauds of Wall Street traders remain unprosecuted, nothing succeeds with such regularity as the active failures of national states to obstruct the crimes of the powerful. Written from the perspective of global sustainability and as an unflinching and unforgiving exposé of the full range of the crimes of the powerful, Unchecked Corporate Power reveals how legalized authorities and political institutions charged with the duty of protecting citizens from law-breaking and injurious activities have increasingly become enablers and colluders with the very enterprises they are obliged to regulate. Here, Gregg Barak explains why the United States and other countries are duplicitous in their harsh reactions to street crimes in comparison to the significantly more harmful and far-reaching crimes of the powerful, and why the crimes of the powerful are treated as beyond incrimination. What happens to nations that surrender ever-growing economic and political power to the globally super rich and the mammoth multinational corporations they control? And what can people from around the world do to resist the criminality and victimization perpetrated by multinationals, and generated by the prevailing global political economy? Barak examines an array of multinational crimes - corporate, environmental, financial, and state - and their state-legal responses, and outlines policies and strategies for revolutionizing these contradictory relations of capital reproduction, criminality, and unsustainability. --