Modern permissiveness and the new culture of entitlement allows disturbed people to reach adulthood without proper socialization. In a book meant both for the general public and for professionals, bestselling author and psychologist George Simon explains in plain English:

•How most disturbed characters think.
•The habitual behaviors the disturbed use to avoid responsibility and to manipulate, deceive, and exploit others.
•Why victims in relationships with disturbed characters do not get help they need from traditional therapies.
•A straightforward guide to recognizing and understanding all relevant personality types, especially those most likely to undermine relationships.
•A new framework for making sense of the crazy world many find themselves in when there's a disturbed character in their lives.
•Concrete principles that promote responsibility and positive change when engaging disturbed characters.
•Tactics (for both lay persons and therapists) to lessen the chances for victimization and empower those who would otherwise be victims in their relationships with many types of disturbed characters.

Mexico has become notorious for crime-related violence, and the efforts of governments and national and international NGOs to counter this violence have proven largely futile. Citizens against Crime and Violence studies societal responses to crime and violence within one of Mexico’s most affected regions, the state of Michoacán. Based on comparative ethnography conducted over twelve months by a team of anthropologists and sociologists across six localities of Michoacán, ranging from the most rural to the most urban, the contributors consider five varieties of societal responses: local citizen security councils that define security and attempt to influence its policing, including by self-defense groups; cultural activists looking to create safe 'cultural' fields from which to transform their social environment; organizations in the state capital that combine legal and political strategies against less visible violence (forced disappearance, gender violence, anti-LGBT); church-linked initiatives bringing to bear the church’s institutionality, including to denounce 'state capture'; and women’s organizations creating 'safe' networks allowing to influence violence prevention.

More than two hundred wars have been fought in the past half century. Nearly all have been civil wars, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than thirty civil wars were being fought. The “rules” of interstate war do not apply; each atrocity provokes retribution, and civil war takes on a brutal dynamic of its own. Civil War, Civil Peace challenges common but simplistic explanations of war, including greed, gender, and long-standing religious or ethnic hatreds, which ignore that these groups have lived together in peace for centuries. 

When a cease-fire is arranged, aid workers, military personnel, diplomats, and others pour in from the United States, Europe, and international agencies. Outside help is essential after a war, but too often, well-intentioned interveners do more harm than good. A half of civil wars have resumed after failed peace agreements.

Each war is different, and there can be no intervention handbook or best practices guide. Aimed at practitioners and policy makers, and essential reading for students of war, humanitarian intervention, peace building, and development, Civil War, Civil Peace provides a comprehensive examination of how interventions can be improved through a better understanding of the roots of war and of the grievances and interests that fueled the war.

Minor debts, derisive remarks, a fight over a parking space, butting in line—these are the little things that nevertheless account for much of the violence in human society. But why? Roger V. Gould considers this intriguing question in Collision of Wills. He argues that human conflict is more likely to occur in symmetrical relationships—among friends or social equals—than in hierarchical ones, wherein the difference of social rank between the two individuals is already established.

This, he maintains, is because violence most often occurs when someone wants to achieve superiority or dominance over someone else, even if there is no substantive reason for doing so. In making the case for this original idea, Gould explores a diverse range of examples, including murders, blood feuds, vendettas, revolutions, and the everyday disagreements that compel people to act violently. The result is an intelligent and provocative work that restores the study of conflict to the center of social inquiry.

The editors and contributors to Color of Violence ask: What would it take to end violence against women of color? Presenting the fierce and vital writing of organizers, lawyers, scholars, poets, and policy makers, Color of Violence radically repositions the antiviolence movement by putting women of color at its center. The contributors shift the focus from domestic violence and sexual assault and map innovative strategies of movement building and resistance used by women of color around the world. The volume's thirty pieces—which include poems, short essays, position papers, letters, and personal reflections—cover violence against women of color in its myriad forms, manifestations, and settings, while identifying the links between gender, militarism, reproductive and economic violence, prisons and policing, colonialism, and war. At a time of heightened state surveillance and repression of people of color, Color of Violence is an essential intervention.
 

This special issue explores the devastated terrain where the peculiar form of East Asian colonial modernity and militarism intersects with gender and sexuality. The contributors suggest that in building the modern nation-state, through the inversion of public and domestic space, Japan created a state-administered system of licensed prostitution within itself and its colonies. The “Comfort Women” system that drafted over 200,000 Asian women into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during the Pacific War, is a testimony of the racial and gender contradictions of the Japanese Empire. While the essays in the issue attempt to untangle this grotesque history—repressed and misrepresented in the name of nationalism in both Japan and its former colonies—they also question the nationalistic inclination of the movement that aims to reaudit this history.
Extending its interrogation to the Cold War power dynamics and contingent economic development that have contributed to the silencing of the colonial past in East Asia, these essays also examine “the Tokyo Trials” and the discourses of postwar compensation and apology. They not only reveal the capitalistic incentives behind the nominalism of compensation but also unmask the Janus face of humanism, which claims to be universal while excluding Asian women from the category of humanity.
This exceptional collection includes artwork by two Korean comfort women, Tok-kyong Kang and Sun-dok Kim, as well as pieces by Japanese artists and Korean American artists. Other features include a narrative composed of several interviews with comfort women and a conversation between the Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe of Japan and South Korean dissident poet Chi-ha Kim.

Contributors. Chungmoo Choi, Chin Sung Chung, Norma Field, Yuki Fujime, Tok-kyong Kang, Chi-ha Kim, Hyun Sook Kim, Daisil Kim-Gibson, Jin Kyung Lee, Sasha Y. Lee, Yong Soon Min, Kenzaburo Oe, Kerry Ross, Yoshiko Shimada, Youn Ok Song, Won Soon Park, Kyung sik Suh, Taeko Tomiyama, Melissa Wender, Hyanah Yang

Controlling Anger examines the dilemmas facing rural people who live within the broader context of political instability. Following Uganda’s independence from Britain in 1962, the Bagisu men of Southeastern Uganda developed a reputation for extreme violence.

Drawing on a wide range of historical sources including local court records, statistical survey analysis, and intensive fieldwork, Suzette Heald portrays and analyzes the civil violence that grew out of intense land shortage, the marginalization of the Gisu under British rule, and the construction of male gender identity among the Gisu. Now available in a paperback edition with a new preface by the author, Controlling Anger is an important contribution to rural sociology in Africa.

In Cruel Modernity, Jean Franco examines the conditions under which extreme cruelty became the instrument of armies, governments, rebels, and rogue groups in Latin America. She seeks to understand how extreme cruelty came to be practiced in many parts of the continent over the last eighty years and how its causes differ from the conditions that brought about the Holocaust, which is generally the atrocity against which the horror of others is measured. In Latin America, torturers and the perpetrators of atrocity were not only trained in cruelty but often provided their own rationales for engaging in it. When "draining the sea" to eliminate the support for rebel groups gave license to eliminate entire families, the rape, torture, and slaughter of women dramatized festering misogyny and long-standing racial discrimination accounted for high death tolls in Peru and Guatemala. In the drug wars, cruelty has become routine as tortured bodies serve as messages directed to rival gangs.

Franco draws on human-rights documents, memoirs, testimonials, novels, and films, as well as photographs and art works, to explore not only cruel acts but the discriminatory thinking that made them possible, their long-term effects, the precariousness of memory, and the pathos of survival.