front cover of Landscape as Weapon
Landscape as Weapon
Cultures of Exhaustion and Refusal
John Beck
Reaktion Books, 2021
Once the playgrounds and raw material for the avantgarde, abandoned places and things—decommissioned military sites, postindustrial spaces, contested and forgotten edgelands—are now just as likely to be seen as assets for entrepreneurs or connoisseurs of the authentically worn-out. This is the age of patina, where the material remains of times past—the fields and factories, test sites, back alleys, machines, and statues—are coveted, adored, mourned, and commemorated, as well as sometimes despised. Through an exploration of a wide range of recent film, photography, art, and writing about place, Landscape as Weapon argues that these abandoned sites are a critical arena for debate about the meaning of space and time under late capitalism.
[more]

front cover of Weapon of Choice
Weapon of Choice
Fighting Gun Violence While Respecting Gun Rights
Ian Ayres and Fredrick E. Vars
Harvard University Press, 2020

How ordinary Americans, frustrated by the legal and political wrangling over the Second Amendment, can fight for reforms that will both respect gun owners’ rights and reduce gun violence.

Efforts to reduce gun violence in the United States face formidable political and constitutional barriers. Legislation that would ban or broadly restrict firearms runs afoul of the Supreme Court’s current interpretation of the Second Amendment. And gun rights advocates have joined a politically savvy firearms industry in a powerful coalition that stymies reform.

Ian Ayres and Fredrick Vars suggest a new way forward. We can decrease the number of gun deaths, they argue, by empowering individual citizens to choose common-sense gun reforms for themselves. Rather than ask politicians to impose one-size-fits-all rules, we can harness a libertarian approach—one that respects and expands individual freedom and personal choice—to combat the scourge of gun violence.

Ayres and Vars identify ten policies that can be immediately adopted at the state level to reduce the number of gun-related deaths without affecting the rights of gun owners. For example, Donna’s Law, a voluntary program whereby individuals can choose to restrict their ability to purchase or possess firearms, can significantly decrease suicide rates. Amending red flag statutes, which allow judges to restrict access to guns when an individual has shown evidence of dangerousness, can give police flexible and effective tools to keep people safe. Encouraging the use of unlawful possession petitions can help communities remove guns from more than a million Americans who are legally disqualified from owning them. By embracing these and other new forms of decentralized gun control, the United States can move past partisan gridlock and save lives now.

[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Weapon of the Strong
Conversations on US State Terrorism
Jon Bailes and Cihan Aksan
Pluto Press, 2012
The term ‘terrorism’ is often applied exclusively to non-state groups or specific ‘rogue states’. Far less attention is given to state terrorism carried out or sponsored by democracies, most notably the United States. History shows that this state terrorism has been responsible for the deaths of millions of people.

Weapon of the Strong analyses the forms of US state terrorism through exclusive, never before published interviews with leading commentators and theorists, including Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Richard A. Falk, Judith Butler, Ted Honderich, Norman Finkelstein and Gilbert Achcar. The interviews explore the different aspects of state terrorism: its functions, institutional supports and the legal and moral arguments surrounding it, and consider specific case studies in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.

Weapon of the Strong makes an indispensable contribution to contemporary debates on terrorism and constructs a damning critique of US foreign policy from World War Two to the present day.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter