Recommendations based on "Fifty Years of The Battle of Algiers Past as Prologue"

Gaza in Crisis is Noam Chomsky's clear-sighted analysis of an area in a desperate impasse.From the targeting of schools and hospitals, to the indiscriminate use of white phosphorus, Israel's conduct in 'Operation Cast Lead' has rattled even some of its most strident supporters.In Gaza in Crisis, Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé survey the fallout from that devastation, and place the massacre in Gaza in the context of Israel's long-standing war against the Palestinians. It is a rigorous, historically informed and much-needed analysis of the situation and will be welcomed by all those eager for Chomsky's and Pappé's insights into yet another political catastrophe.'Noam Chomsky is a global phenomenon . . . he may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet today' The New York Times Book Review'Ilan Pappé is Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian' John PilgerNoam Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling political books, including Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, Interventions, What We Say Goes and Hopes and Prospects, all of which are published by Hamish Hamilton/Penguin. Ilan Pappé is Professor of History at the University of Exeter, co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies, director of the Palestine Studies Centre at the University of Exeter, and the author of various books, including the bestselling The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld).

Shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural UnderstandingMaking the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, this book calls us to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities and minorities.In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe―from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan―the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority.The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence.Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors―victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries―based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.

Why violence in the Congo has continued despite decades of international interventionWell into its third decade, the military conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been dubbed a “forever war”―a perpetual cycle of war, civil unrest, and local feuds over power and identity. Millions have died in one of the worst humanitarian calamities of our time. The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name investigates the most recent phase of this conflict, asking why the peace deal of 2003―accompanied by the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world and tens of billions in international aid―has failed to stop the violence. Jason Stearns argues that the fighting has become an end in itself, carried forward in substantial part through the apathy and complicity of local and international actors.Stearns shows that regardless of the suffering, there has emerged a narrow military bourgeoisie of commanders and politicians for whom the conflict is a source of survival, dignity, and profit. Foreign donors provide food and urgent health care for millions, preventing the Congolese state from collapsing, but this involvement has not yielded transformational change. Stearns gives a detailed historical account of this period, focusing on the main players―Congolese and Rwandan states and the main armed groups. He extrapolates from these dynamics to other conflicts across Africa and presents a theory of conflict that highlights the interests of the belligerents and the social structures from which they arise.Exploring how violence in the Congo has become preoccupied with its own reproduction, The War That Doesn't Say Its Name sheds light on why certain military feuds persist without resolution.

For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

“Their first-hand experiences and active participation in the anti-capitalist society being built in the region make this the first detailed account of the popular revolution....The definitive book so far on Rojava."―Morning StarRevolution in Rojava tells the story of Rojava's groundbreaking experiment in what they call democratic confederalism, a communally organized democracy that is fiercely anti-capitalist and committed to female equality, while rejecting reactionary nationalist ideologies.Rooted in the ideas of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, the system is built on effective gender quotas, bottom-up democratic structures, far-sighted ecological policies, and a powerful militancy that has allowed the region to keep ISIS at bay.Given the widespread violence and suffering in Syria, it's not unreasonable that outsiders look at the situation as unrelentingly awful. And while the reality of the devastation is undeniable, there is reason for hope in at least one small pocket of the nation: the cantons of Rojava in Syrian Kurdistan, where in the wake of war people are quietly building one of the most progressive societies in the world today. Chapters here include:*Rojava's Diverse Cultures*Democratic Confederalism*The Liberation*A Women's Revolution*Democratic Autonomy in Rojava*Civil Society Associations*The Theory of the Rose: Defense*The New Justice System*Democratization of Education*Health Care*The Social Economy*Ecological ChallengesThis first full-length study of democratic developments in Rojava tells an extraordinary and powerfully hopeful story of a little-known battle for true freedom in dark times. With excellent first-hand background information about this important, but little understood struggle, Revolution in Rojava will educate and inspire the reader to learn more about Rojava, Syria, and the fight for change in one of the world's most dangerous regions.

John Berger occupies a unique position in the international cultural landscape: artist, filmmaker, poet, philosopher, novelist, essayist, he is also a deeply thoughtful political activist. In Hold Everything Dear, he artistry and activism mesh in an attempt to make sense of the world as we have come to know it during the past six years.Berger analyzes the nature of terrorism and the profound despair that gives rise to it. He writes about the homelessness of millions across the globe who have been forced by poverty and war into lives as refugees. He discusses Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Serbia, Bosnia, China, Indonesia--anyplace the power of corporations, the military, or paramilitary elements is being exercised, depriving ordinary citizens of autonomy or livelihoods or the most basic of freedoms.Singularly lucid and bold, Hold Everything Dear fully acknowledges the depth of suffering occurring around the world and suggests ideas and action that might finally help bring it to an end. From one of the most widely admired, articulate, and impassioned writers of our time, this is a powerful collections of essays that holds a starkly reflective mirror up to post-9/11 realities.

Are alternative energies and Green New Deals enough to deliver environmental justice? Peter Gelderloos argues that international governmental responses to the climate emergency are structurally incapable of solving the crisis. But there is hope. Across the world, grassroots networks of local communities are working to realize their visions of an alternative revolutionary response to planetary destruction, often pitted against the new megaprojects promoted by greenwashed alternative energy infrastructures and the neocolonialist, technocratic policies that are the forerunners of the Green New Deal. Gelderloos interviews food sovereignty activists in Venezuela, Indigenous communities reforesting their lands in Brazil and anarchists fighting biofuel plantations in Indonesia, looking at the battles that have cancelled airports, stopped pipelines, and helped the most marginalized to fight borders and environmental racism, to transform their cities, to win a dignified survival.Are alternative energies and Green New Deals enough to deliver environmental justice? Peter Gelderloos argues that international governmental responses to the climate emergency are structurally incapable of solving the crisis. But there is hope. Across the world, grassroots networks of local communities are working to realise their visions of an alternative revolutionary response to planetary destruction, often pitted against the new megaprojects promoted by greenwashed alternative energy infrastructures and the neocolonialist, technocratic policies that are the forerunners of the Green New Deal. Gelderloos interviews food sovereignty activists in Venezuela, Indigenous communities reforesting their lands in Brazil and anarchists fighting biofuel plantations in Indonesia, looking at the battles that have cancelled airports, stopped pipelines, and helped the most marginalised to fight borders and environmental racism, to transform their cities, to win a dignified survival.

In the 1920s, the US government passed legislation against undocumented entry into the country, and as a result the figure of the "illegal alien" took form in the national discourse. In this book, Lisa A. Flores explores the history of our language about Mexican immigrants and exposes how our words made these migrants "illegal." Deportable and Disposable brings a rhetorical lens to a question that has predominantly concerned historians: how do differently situated immigrant populations come to belong within the national space of whiteness, and thus of American-ness? Flores presents a genealogy of our immigration discourse through four stereotypes: the "illegal alien," a foreigner and criminal who quickly became associated with Mexican migrants; the "bracero," a docile Mexican contract laborer; the "zoot suiter," a delinquent Mexican American youth engaged in gang culture; and the "wetback," an unwanted migrant who entered the country by swimming across the Rio Grande. By showing how these figures were constructed, Flores provides insight into the ways in which we racialize language and how we can transform our political rhetoric to ensure immigrant populations come to belong as part of the country, as Americans. Timely, thoughtful, and eye-opening, Deportable and Disposable initiates a necessary conversation about the relationship between racial rhetoric and the literal and figurative borders of the nation. This powerful book will inform policy makers, scholars, activists, and anyone else interested in race, rhetoric, and immigration in the United States.

“Maia Ramnath's Haj to Utopia is an odyssey through the world of early twentieth-century political radicalism, with a focus on the freedom dreams of those of Indian ancestry who found themselves on the West Coast of the United States. She traces with pointillist care the unruly imaginations fired up by empire's unimaginative rule. To be read and re-read.”—Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World"Maia Ramnath’s Haj to Utopia is a thought-provoking study of the Ghadar project for revolutionary change. Going beyond the frame of a nationalist, armed struggle for the overthrow of British rule in India, the author deftly explores and contextualizes the links between Ghadar and a medley of revolutionary groups, and the exotic mix of radical ideas and activities. It provides valuable insight into the peculiar conjunction of nationalist, pan-Islamist, and Marxian discourses which made Ghadar a unique revolutionary adventure." —Harish K. Puri, author Ghadar Movement: Ideology, Organisation and Strategy“Maia Ramnath's book on the Ghadar Movement is an impressive accomplishment: it is at once an in-depth monograph surpassing all previous work on the subject, and a model of how world history should be written. She places the Ghadar in the perspective of pre-nationalist, anti-imperialist struggles, connecting it with other contemporary revolutionary movements around the world. It is empirically rich—Ramnath explores all extant empirical sources and illuminates them with exacting theoretical insights.”—Dilip Basu, University of California, Santa Cruz“Maia Ramnath's meticulous scholarship enables her to effortlessly avoid the old clichés of nationalist historiography and the new clichés of ‘global’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ history. The Haj to Utopia is respectful of detail and context and has a fine feeling for the diverse social histories and intellectual movements in which its characters find themselves.”—Benjamin Zachariah, author of Playing the Nation Game: the Ambiguities of Nationalism in India

African Americans. Black Revolution.