Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> Civil Rights

Many years before the U.S. military had to deal with the repercussions of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the U.S. armed forces were vigorously engaged in helping their Latin American counterparts to recognize the strategic imperatives of respecting human rights on the battlefield. Before Iraqi accusations of massacre at Haditha forced the U.S. military to again scramble to defend its honor and reputation, U.S. forces in Latin America were more than a decade into repairing their image after taking the blame for numerous human rights crises. Indeed, U.S. military relations with Latin...

Throughout Latin America, indigenous peoples are responding to state violence and pro-democracy social movements by asserting their rights to a greater measure of cultural autonomy and self-determination. This volume's rich case studies of movements in Colombia, Guatemala, and Brazil weigh the degree of success achieved by indigenous leaders in influencing national agendas when governments display highly ambivalent attitudes about strengthening ethnic diversity.

The contributors to this volume are leading anthropologists and indigenous activists from the United States and Latin...

From Justice Department officials seizing people's homes based on mere rumors to the IRS and its master plan to prohibit the nation's self-employed from working for themselves to the perpetrators of the Waco siege, government officials are tearing the Bill of Rights to pieces. Today's citizen is now more likely than ever to violate some unknown law or regulation and be placed at the mercy of an administrator or politician hungering for publicity. Unfortunately, the only way many government agencies can measure their "public service" is by the number of citizens they harass, hinder,...

Never afraid to take on tough cases or tackle difficult issues, here in From Freedom to Slavery Gerry Spence comes at us uncensored, with his passions on fire. In this underground bestseller, which has come to define Spence's political philosophy, he speaks out against the destructive forces in America today-forces of government and corporate tyranny that are robbing us of our freedom-and he warns us that time is running out.

In a dramatic new chapter, presented for the first time in a trade paperback edition, Spence recounts in astonishing detail the government shoot-out at...

Steinberg addresses such questions as: How did the notion of a social contract develop? What did social contract mean to Locke and Rousseau? Can social contract describe the working basis of representative democracy?

This volume examines the causes, consequences, and dynamics of that style of governance by force that has come to be known as state terror. The collection deals with theoretical issues and examines case applications as well. The editors distinguish among the study of oppression, repression, and state terror systems. State terrorism in the form of enforcement terrorism, economic repression, military control, and the legal oppression of apartheid in Latin America, Argentina, the Philippines, and South Africa is discussed. One chapter explores American containment policy. Theoretical chapters...

The intertwining of development and human rights is the subject of the twelve essays collected by the editors. The individual authors extensively examine the commonly held belief that economic development cannot take place in Third World countries without the short term sacrifice of political liberty and demonstrate that there is considerable evidence to the contrary. Following a theoretical stage-setting that concentrates on the severe power limitations and the dependency of weak Third World states, case studies focus on such issues as state terrorism, food, the right to modernize,...

A form of terrorism that is receiving increased attention is human rights abuses on the part of individual states. This study, written by specialists from several countries, attempts to define the parameters of state terrorism, analyze its causes, and identify the types of data and methods needed for policy-relevant research. It focuses on state use of acts of terror to intimidate, pacify, coerce, or destroy whole populations, groups, or classes of citizens. The problems encountered in the study of state terrorism, particularly in the areas of definition and measurement and in the...