front cover of Complacency and Collusion
Complacency and Collusion
A Critical Introduction to Business and Financial Journalism
Keith J. Butterick
Pluto Press, 2015
In Complacency and Collusion, Keith J. Butterick draws on extensive experience as a journalist and scholar to show why financial and business journalism is so often toothless. He offers compelling explanations for why big business needs the press—and vice versa—and presents piercing analyses of the inadequacies of reporting in such major outlets as the Economist and the Financial Times, showing how those failures are rooted in the close relationship between businesses and those covering them. He concludes with a reflection on what the growth and spread of a complacent, complicit corporate journalism will mean for the future of a truly free media.
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front cover of Counterinsurgency and Collusion in Northern Ireland
Counterinsurgency and Collusion in Northern Ireland
Mark McGovern
Pluto Press, 2019
Collusion by British state forces in killings perpetrated by loyalist paramilitaries was a dubious hallmark of the ‘dirty war’ in the north of Ireland. Now, more than twenty years since the Good Friday Agreement, the story of collusion remains one of the most enduring and contentious legacies of the conflict, a shadow that trails British counterinsurgency to this day.

Here Mark McGovern turns back the clock to the late 1980s and early ‘90s—the ‘endgame’ of the Troubles and a period defined by a rash of state-sanctioned paramilitary killings. Drawing on previously unpublished evidence, and original testimony of victims’ families and eyewitnesses, McGovern examines several dozen killings of republicans and their families and communities that took place in the Mid-Ulster area. Placing these accounts within a wider critical analysis of the nature of British counterinsurgency and the state use of agents and informers, McGovern paints a damning picture of covert, deniable, and unlawful violence.
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State Violence, Collusion and the Troubles
Counter Insurgency, Government Deviance and Northern Ireland
Maurice Punch
Pluto Press, 2012

The period in Northern Ireland known as 'the Troubles' (1968-98) seemed to have been conclusively ended by the official peace process. But recent violence from dissident Republicans shows that tensions from the past remain unresolved.

State Violence, Collusion and the Troubles reveals disturbing unanswered questions about the use of state violence during this period. Maurice Punch documents in chilling detail how the British government turned to desperate, illegal measures in a time of crisis, disregarding domestic and international law. He broadens out his analysis to consider other cases of state violence against ‘insurgent groups’ in Spain and South Africa.

This is the story of how the British state collaborated with violent groups and directly participated in illegal violence. It also raises urgent questions about why states around the world continue to deploy such violence rather than seeking durable political settlements.

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