Other books that might interest you

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  Soldier in the Sand - A Personal...

  Simon Mayall

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  Insight into the Middle East from a general with long experience in the region: “His analysis of the revolution in Iran is particularly enlightening.” —John Simpson, BBC journalist 
   
  With the Middle East in a state of persistent change and upheaval, there has long been a need for a comprehensive yet readable study that can give the intelligent and interested layperson a greater understanding of this diverse, complex region. 
   
  Simon Mayall, whose links with the area are deep and longstanding, provides just that in Soldier in the Sand. As well as analyzing the Middle East’s history and religions, which strongly influence people’s actions, attitudes, and relationships, Mayall draws on his own experiences and impressions based on his many years in key military and diplomatic appointments in numerous countries. In addition to knowing many of the key players personally, he has studied, at leading universities, British policy and engagement in the area and he understands the effects of this long-term engagement. 
   
  This invaluable book’s unique mixture of history, politics, academic study, and first-hand experience affords the reader an invaluable insight into a fascinating, fractured, and frustrating area of the world. General Mayall explains complex situations in a thoroughly accessible and human manner, as lecture audiences worldwide already know, and now his knowledge and common sense approach is also available in this important, entertaining book.

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  Observing Conflict Escalation in...

  Richard Bösch

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  How do conflicts escalate? This is one of the major questions in conflict research. To offer further answers, Richard Bösch follows a tripartite agenda: First, he develops a constructivist methodology for the study of conflict escalation embedded in a Luhmannian systems theoretical world society perspective. Bösch argues that conflicts can be observed as social systems and he looks at the process of conflict escalation by analysing communication. Second, this analysis offers two case studies: the Maidan protests in Ukraine 2013-2014 and Mali's crisis 2010-2012. Third, it gives insights on how systems theoretical research can be beneficial for Peace and Conflict Studies.

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  Cancel Culture - The Latest...

  Alan M. Dershowitz

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  Alan Dershowitz has been called "one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America" by Politico and "the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights" by Newsweek. Yet he has come under intense criticism for his steadfast and consistent championing of those same principles, and his famed "shoe-on-the-other-foot test," to those who have been "cancelled" for any number of faults, both real and imagined. Cancel Culture is a defense of due process, free speech, and even-handedness in the application of judgment. It makes the case for restraint and care in decisions about whom and what to cancel, boycott, deplatform, and bar from public life, and offers recommendations for when, why, and to what degree these steps may be appropriate, as long as objective, fair-minded criteria can be determined and met. While Dershowitz argues against the worst excesses of cancel culture, he also acknowledges that its defenders ostensibly try to use it to create meaningful, positive change, and notes that cancelling may itself be a constitutionally protected form of free speech.In the end, Cancel Culture represents an icon in the defense of free speech and due process reckoning with the greatest challenge and threat to these rights since the rise of McCarthyism.

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  The Communist Manifesto

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels

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  The Communist Manifesto is an 1848 political document by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London just as the Revolutions of 1848 began to erupt, the Manifesto was later recognized as one of the world's most influential political documents. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and then-present) and the conflicts of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms. 
  The Communist Manifesto summarizes Marx and Engels' theories concerning the nature of society and politics, namely that in their own words "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism. In the last paragraph of the Manifesto, the authors call for a "forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions", which served as a call for communist revolutions around the world.

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  Necropolitics

  Achille Mbembe

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  In Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side—what he calls its "nocturnal body"—which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.

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  Greater - Britain After the Storm

  Chris Lewis, Penny Mordaunt

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  We're used to hearing that we live in an age of unprecedented division, that the great storms that have engulfed British politics over the past ten years have driven us further apart than ever, with no hope of finding common ground.
  Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis disagree. In this lively and insightful book, they argue that although differences of opinion are a natural part of healthy political debate, some of our current division is caused by a need for political reform. A wave of scandals has corroded public confidence in leadership in all walks of life, fuelled by a hyper-individualistic social media landscape – but by rebuilding public trust we can restore national pride and positive, competent politics.
  Greater lays out a plan for post-Brexit Britain. Delving into our history, our institutions and our culture, it explains how we arrived at this point and how the British character points the way towards practical national missions.
  It explores Britain's role in the world and how to balance global and local priorities; makes the case for the United Kingdom based on the mutuality that binds us; and calls for modernising reform in politics, government and markets. It describes the role of social media in culture wars and calls for a relentless focus on aspiration and a social enterprise revolution. Above all, it reminds us of the many reasons we have to be optimistic.

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