Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition
Glen Sean Coulthard - 2014
The term “recognition” shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources.In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism.Coulthard demonstrates how a “place-based” modification of Karl Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation” throws light on Indigenous–state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power.In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.
The Canadian Constitution
Adam Dodek - 2013
The Canadian Constitution makes Canada’s Constitution readily accessible to readers for the first time. It includes the complete text of the Constitution Acts of 1867 and 1982 as well as a glossary of key terms, a short history of the Constitution, and a timeline of important constitutional events. The Canadian Constitution also explains how the Supreme Court of Canada works and describes the people and issues involved in leading constitutional cases.Author Adam Dodek, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, provides the only index to the Canadian Constitution as well as fascinating facts about the Supreme Court and the Constitution that have never been published before. This book is a great primer for those coming to Canada’s Constitution for the first time as well as a useful reference work for students and scholars.
Faisal
Rebecca Stefoff - 1989
A biography of the Saudi Arabian king who ruled from 1964 until his assassination in 1975 and who became, during his reign, an important world leader through his control of his country's vast oil resources.
Discrimination and Disparities
Thomas Sowell - 2018
It is readable enough for people with no prior knowledge of economics. Yet the empirical evidence with which it backs up its analysis spans the globe and challenges beliefs across the ideological spectrum.The point of Discrimination and Disparities is not to recommend some particular policy "fix" at the end, but to clarify why so many policy fixes have turned out to be counterproductive, and to expose some seemingly invincible fallacies behind many counterproductive policies.The final chapter deals with social visions and their human consequences.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
Jonathan Haidt - 2012
His starting point is moral intuition—the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim—that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.
Unfamiliar Fishes
Sarah Vowell - 2011
In Unfamiliar Fishes, Sarah Vowell argues that 1898 might be a year just as defining, when, in an orgy of imperialism, the United States annexed Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and invaded first Cuba, then the Philippines, becoming an international superpower practically overnight.Among the developments in these outposts of 1898, Vowell considers the Americanization of Hawaii the most intriguing. From the arrival of New England missionaries in 1820, their goal to Christianize the local heathen, to the coup d'état of the missionaries' sons in 1893, which overthrew the Hawaiian queen, the events leading up to American annexation feature a cast of beguiling, and often appealing or tragic, characters: whalers who fired cannons at the Bible-thumpers denying them their God-given right to whores, an incestuous princess pulled between her new god and her brother-husband, sugar barons, lepers, con men, Theodore Roosevelt, and the last Hawaiian queen, a songwriter whose sentimental ode "Aloha 'Oe" serenaded the first Hawaiian president of the United States during his 2009 inaugural parade.With her trademark smart-alecky insights and reporting, Vowell lights out to discover the off, emblematic, and exceptional history of the fiftieth state, and in so doing finds America, warts and all.
Look: Poems
Solmaz Sharif - 2016
In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed, in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discriminations endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. “Let it matter what we call a thing,” she writes. “Let me look at you.”
Perception and Misperception in International Politics
Robert Jervis - 1976
The New York Times called it, in an article published nearly ten years after the book's appearance, the seminal statement of principles underlying political psychology.The perspective established by Jervis remains an important counterpoint to structural explanations of international politics, and from it has developed a large literature on the psychology of leaders and the problems of decision making under conditions of incomplete information, stress, and cognitive bias.Jervis begins by describing the process of perception (for example, how decision makers learn from history) and then explores common forms of misperception (such as overestimating one's influence). Finally, he tests his ideas through a number of important events in international relations from nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history.In a contemporary application of Jervis's ideas, some argue that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 in part because he misread the signals of American leaders with regard to the independence of Kuwait. Also, leaders of the United States and Iraq in the run-up to the most recent Gulf War might have been operating under cognitive biases that made them value certain kinds of information more than others, whether or not the information was true. Jervis proved that, once a leader believed something, that perception would influence the way the leader perceived all other relevant information.
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War
Robert M. Gates - 2014
Bush and Barack Obama during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Before Robert M. Gates received a call from the White House in 2006, he thought he’d left Washington politics behind: after working for six presidents in both the CIA and the National Security Council, he was happy in his role as president of Texas A&M University. But when he was asked to help a nation mired in two wars and to aid the troops doing the fighting, he answered what he felt was the call of duty. Now, in this unsparing memoir, meticulously fair in its assessments, he takes us behind the scenes of his nearly five years as a secretary at war: the battles with Congress, the two presidents he served, the military itself, and the vast Pentagon bureaucracy; his efforts to help Bush turn the tide in Iraq; his role as a guiding, and often dissenting, voice for Obama; the ardent devotion to and love for American soldiers—his “heroes”—he developed on the job. In relating his personal journey as secretary, Gates draws us into the innermost sanctums of government and military power during the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, illuminating iconic figures, vital negotiations, and critical situations in revealing, intimate detail. Offering unvarnished appraisals of Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Presidents Bush and Obama among other key players, Gates exposes the full spectrum of behind-closed-doors politicking within both the Bush and Obama administrations. He discusses the great controversies of his tenure—surges in both Iraq and Afghanistan, how to deal with Iran and Syria, “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” Guantánamo Bay, WikiLeaks—as they played out behind the television cameras. He brings to life the Situation Room during the Bin Laden raid. And, searingly, he shows how congressional debate and action or inaction on everything from equipment budgeting to troop withdrawals was often motivated, to his increasing despair and anger, more by party politics and media impact than by members’ desires to protect our soldiers and ensure their success. However embroiled he became in the trials of Washington, Gates makes clear that his heart was always in the most important theater of his tenure as secretary: the front lines. We journey with him to both war zones as he meets with active-duty troops and their commanders, awed by their courage, and also witness him greet coffin after flag-draped coffin returned to U.S. soil, heartbreakingly aware that he signed every deployment order. In frank and poignant vignettes, Gates conveys the human cost of war, and his admiration for those brave enough to undertake it when necessary. Duty tells a powerful and deeply personal story that allows us an unprecedented look at two administrations and the wars that have defined them.
Cameron's Coup: How the Tories took Britain to the Brink
Polly Toynbee - 2015
Despite coalition compromises, he has turned out to be more radical than Margaret Thatcher.
She privatised industries. But he planned to dismantle the welfare state itself - starting with the NHS. The cuts signalled an assault on Britain's post-war social settlement.
Children, young people and the poor are bearing the brunt. Social welfare, police, council services, housing and legal aid are under fierce attack.
Will it succeed?
Writing with their trademark incisiveness and wit, Toynbee and Walker report how a party that failed to win a Commons majority has still been devastatingly effective. Blending analysis and statistics with moving human stories from Sydenham to Sheffield, Cameron's Coup argues that Britain is becoming meaner and harsher. The pressing question now is whether these changes are irrevocable.
Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham
Barbara Olson - 1999
In Accomplice , Olson separates fact from fiction and shows us Hilllary's often disturbing complicity in her husband's affairs.
White House, Inc.: How Donald Trump Turned the Presidency into a Business
Dan Alexander - 2020
is the definitive book on money and politics in the Trump era. It examines every aspect of the president's portfolio: his exclusive clubs, D.C. hotel, overseas partnerships, commercial properties, personal mansions and private planes.It also investigates Trump associates. The president's disregard for norms set the tone at the top of the federal government, sparking a trickle-down ethics crisis with no precedent in modern American history. Trump appointed an inner circle of centimillionaires and billionaires--including Jared Kushner, Wilbur Ross and Carl Icahn--who all arrived in Washington with their own conflict-ridden portfolios. With the president as their guide, they busted through barriers meant to separate their financial holdings from their government roles.Alexander tracks hundreds of millions flowing freely between big businesses and President Trump. He explains, in plain language, how Donald Trump bought and sold the presidency. In the tradition of game-changing political exposés like Dark Money, White House, Inc. represents the most complete financial account of the Trump presidency.
Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis
John R. Bradley - 2005
John R. Bradley uniquely exposes the turmoil that is shaking the House of Saud to its foundations, including the problems within the new leadership. From the heart of the secretive Islamic kingdom's urban centers to its most remote mountainous terrain, he provides intimate details and reveals regional, religious, and tribal rivalries. Bradley highlights tensions generated by social change, the increasing restlessness of Saudi youth with limited cultural and political outlets, and the predicament of Saudi women seeking opportunities but facing constraints. What are the implications for the Sauds and the West? This book offers a startling look at the present predicament and a troubling view of the future.
Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World
Edward W. Said - 1981
In this classic work, now updated, the author of Culture and Imperialism reveals the hidden agendas and distortions of fact that underlie even the most "objective" coverage of the Islamic world.
Whisper Mountain
Vivian Higginbotham Nichols - 2017
Because it was extremely difficult to verbalize the events to her own children years later, her adult family knew very little of the details until 30 years after her passing in 1967. That is when her granddaughter discovered her writings and promised to tell the story of what she endured.