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Latin America experienced an epochal cycle of revolutionary upheavals and insurgencies during the twentieth century, from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 through the mobilizations and terror in Central America, the Southern Cone, and the Andes during the 1970s and 1980s. In his introduction to A Century of Revolution, Greg Grandin argues that the dynamics of political violence and terror in Latin America are so recognizable in their enforcement of domination, their generation and maintenance of social exclusion, and their propulsion of historical change, that historians have tended to take them for granted, leaving unexamined important questions regarding their form and meaning. The essays in this groundbreaking collection take up these questions, providing a sociologically and historically nuanced view of the ideological hardening and accelerated polarization that marked Latin America’s twentieth century. Attentive to the interplay among overlapping local, regional, national, and international fields of power, the contributors focus on the dialectical relations between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary processes and their unfolding in the context of U.S. hemispheric and global hegemony. Through their fine-grained analyses of events in Chile, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru, they suggest a framework for interpreting the experiential nature of political violence while also analyzing its historical causes and consequences. In so doing, they set a new agenda for the study of revolutionary change and political violence in twentieth-century Latin America.

Contributors. Michelle Chase, Jeffrey L. Gould, Greg Grandin, Lillian Guerra, Forrest Hylton, Gilbert M. Joseph, Friedrich Katz, Thomas Miller Klubock, Neil Larsen, Arno J. Mayer, Carlota McAllister, Jocelyn Olcott, Gerardo Rénique, Corey Robin, Peter Winn

Welcome to Milton High School, where fear is a teacher’s best tool and every student is a soldier in the war on terror. A struggling public school outside the nation’s capital, Milton sat squarely at the center of two trends: growing fear of resurgent terrorism and mounting pressure to run schools as job training sites. In response, the school established a specialized Homeland Security program. 

A Curriculum of Fear takes us into Milton for a day-to-day look at how such a program works, what it means to students and staff, and what it says about the militarization of U.S. public schools and, more broadly, the state of public education in this country. Nicole Nguyen guides us through a curriculum of national security–themed classes, electives, and internships designed through public-private partnerships with major defense contractors like Northrop Grumman and federal agencies like the NSA. She introduces us to students in the process of becoming a corps of “diverse workers” for the national security industry, learning to be “vigilant” citizens; and she shows us the everyday realities of a program intended to improve the school, revitalize the community, and eliminate the achievement gap. 

With reference to critical work on school militarization, neoliberal school reform, the impact of the global war on terror on everyday life, and the political uses of fear, A Curriculum of Fear maps the contexts that gave rise to Milton’s Homeland Security program and its popularity. Ultimately, as the first ethnography of such a program, the book provides a disturbing close encounter with the new normal imposed by the global war on terror—a school at once under siege and actively preparing for the siege itself.

Part reportage and part protest, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb is an inquiry into the cultural logic and global repercussions of the war on terror. At its center are two men convicted in U.S. courts on terrorism-related charges: Hemant Lakhani, a seventy-year-old tried for attempting to sell a fake missile to an FBI informant, and Shahawar Matin Siraj, baited by the New York Police Department into a conspiracy to bomb a subway. Lakhani and Siraj were caught through questionable sting operations involving paid informants; both men received lengthy jail sentences. Their convictions were celebrated as major victories in the war on terror. In Amitava Kumar’s riveting account of their cases, Lakhani and Siraj emerge as epic bunglers, and the U.S. government as the creator of terror suspects to prosecute. Kumar analyzed the trial transcripts and media coverage, and he interviewed Lakhani, Siraj, their families, and their lawyers. Juxtaposing such stories of entrapment in the United States with narratives from India, another site of multiple terror attacks and state crackdowns, Kumar explores the harrowing experiences of ordinary people entangled in the war on terror. He also considers the fierce critiques of post-9/11 surveillance and security regimes by soldiers and torture victims, as well as artists and writers, including Coco Fusco, Paul Shambroom, and Arundhati Roy.

This highly acclaimed study describes Aum Shinrikyo’s history, examines the various conflicts it was involved in, and discusses the contents of Asahara’s sermons and prophecies. Reader suggests that the Aum case is not unique but similar to other cases of religious violence.

The March 1995 gas attack on the Tokyo subway system killed 12 people and injured thousands. Massive police raids and the subsequent investigation linked this attack (plus a variety of other criminal activities including murders) to Aum Shinrikyo, a small religious movement whose leader, Asahara Shoko, had prophesied that Armageddon was at hand.

Many questions have been raised by the Aum affair. What were Aum's spiritual roots and the focus of Asahara's teaching? Why did a religious movement ostensibly focused on yoga, meditation, asceticism and the pursuit of enlightenment become involved in violent activities? What factors brought Aum into conflict with society at large, caused it to believe it was the victim of a huge conspiracy to destroy it, and impelled it to experiment with making nerve gasses, build weapons and form its own 'alternative government'?

Ian Reader examines these questions by describing Aum's history, examining the various conflicts it was involved in, and discussing the contents of Asahara's sermons and prophesies. In so doing, he points to a combination of factors which together took Aum down a path of violence. Suggesting that the Aum case is not unique, he shows how it displays similarities with other cases of violence and conflict among religious and political movements in Japan and elsewhere.

In this scholarly work, Zirakzadeh argues that there is a calculated reasoning behind ETA's political violence that is often overlooked by researchers. His book is a comprehensive account of the Basque region's grassroots politics.

An unflinching account of Russia's brutal war in Chechnya by a reporter who was assassinated because of her work

Chechnya, a 6,000-square-mile corner of the northern Caucasus, has struggled under Russian domination for centuries. The region declared its independence in 1991, leading to a brutal war, Russian withdrawal, and subsequent "governance" by bandits and warlords. A series of apartment building attacks in Moscow in 1999, allegedly orchestrated by a rebel faction, reignited the war, which continues to rage today. Russia has gone to great lengths to keep journalists from reporting on the conflict; consequently, few people outside the region understand its scale and the atrocities—described by eyewitnesses as comparable to those discovered in Bosnia—committed there.

Anna Politkovskaya, a correspondent for the liberal Moscow newspaper Novaya gazeta, was the only journalist to have constant access to the region. Her international stature and reputation for honesty among the Chechens allowed her to continue to report to the world the brutal tactics of Russia's leaders used to quell the uprisings. A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya is her second book on this bloody and prolonged war. More than a collection of articles and columns, A Small Corner of Hell offers a rare insider's view of life in Chechnya over the past years. Centered on stories of those caught-literally-in the crossfire of the conflict, her book recounts the horrors of living in the midst of the war, examines how the war has affected Russian society, and takes a hard look at how people on both sides are profiting from it, from the guards who accept bribes from Chechens out after curfew to the United Nations. Politkovskaya's unflinching honesty and her courage in speaking truth to power combine here to produce a powerful account of what is acknowledged as one of the most dangerous and least understood conflicts on the planet.

 

Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated in Moscow on October 7, 2006.

 

"The murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya leaves a terrible silence in Russia and an information void about a dark realm that we need to know more about. No one else reported as she did on the Russian north Caucasus and the abuse of human rights there. Her reports made for difficult reading—and Politkovskaya only got where she did by being one of life's difficult people."—Thomas de Waal, Guardian

In the course of a few years, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—more commonly known as ISIS—has become classified as the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world. It is the subject of intense Western scrutiny, demonized by all, and shrouded in numerous myths and narratives.
 
Against these established narratives, Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou now presents his new theory of ISIS. Tracing the genealogy of ISIS and documenting its evolution in Iraq and Syria, he argues that ISIS has actually transcended Osama Bin Laden’s original scheme of Al Qaeda, mutating into a unprecedented hybrid between postcolonial violence, postmodernity, and postglobalization. A Theory of ISIS offers an original take on the militant group. Mohamedou explains the proliferation of terrorist attacks on the West and deepens our understanding of the group's impact on the very nature of contemporary political violence.
 

African Security: Local Issues and Global Connections provokes new ways of thinking about solutions to African security—solutions that consider the eclectic and sometimes disparate natures of African conflicts and that address both their domestic and their external dimensions. The book centers on the concept of glocalized security, which draws from sociological critiques that point to localization within globalization. This edited collection brings the concept of glocalization into African security studies by examining the fusion of domestic and external drivers of conflicts and how that relationship creates a glocalized security situation across Africa. The chapters in this volume engage the literature on domestic and external causes of conflicts in Africa, most notably issues of patrimonialism, ethnicity, natural resources, climate change, and geopolitics. These conflict drivers are woven in with known theories on security, such as neocolonialism, liberal peace, responsibility to protect (R2P), and collective security. The book presents rich qualitative and historical data, convincingly analyzed and theorized. Contributors: Folahanmi Aina, Alfred Babo, Abu Bakarr Bah, Noamane Cherkaoui, Nikolas Emmanuel, Tenley K. Erickson, John Mwangi Githigaro, Michael Nwankpa, Norman Sempijja, and Akram Zaoui

Three years before the events of 9/11, Osama bin Laden sent al Qaeda suicide bombers on a coordinated attack to destroy the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. That day, August 7, 1998, more than two hundred people were killed and thousands were wounded. Responding immediately, the FBI launched the largest international investigation in its history. Within months, suspects were arrested in six countries. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York indicted twenty-two individuals, including the elusive bin Laden. In February 2001 a landmark trial of four of the accused was held in Manhattan in the shadow of the World Trade Center. Al Qaeda Declares War: The African Embassy Bombings and America’s Search for Justice explores the step-by-step procedures the United States employed in analyzing these attacks, identifying the suspects, tracking down and apprehending them, building a case, and prosecuting them. It is this case that established the legal basis for hunting down bin Laden, and the trial makes for a gripping courtroom drama, in which the robust principles of American justice confront the fanaticism of true believers. Tod Hoffman argues forcefully that the process after the 1998 incident stands in marked contrast to the illegal detention, torture, and abrogation of rights that followed 9/11. Indeed, reverberations from the African embassy bombings continue in the ongoing hunt for perpetrators still at large, and in targeted killings by drones. Al Qaeda Declares War dramatically recounts the terror and bloodshed of that day in Africa and shows that America’s search for justice afterward offers important lessons for today.

Aside from the election of Donald Trump, the most surprising political development of the past few years has been the rapid rise of the Alt-Right—the white nationalist, anti-feminist, far-right movement that provided much of the ground-level energy for Trump’s campaign and has been a focus of international media attention ever since. Yet we still rarely get a clear sense of who and what the Alt-Right actually are, and what their long-term effect is likely to be.
            Journalist Mike Wendling knows. He’s been following the Alt-Right closely for years, and with this book he shares the deep knowledge he’s gleaned. Media accounts to the contrary, the Alt-Right didn’t just burst out of nowhere in 2016—rather, they have been building their network quietly for years, using bulletin boards and social media to spread a toxic hybrid of technological utopianism, reactionary philosophy, and racial hatred. Wendling traces clearly the rise of the movement and the evolution of its ideas, and he introduces us to some of its key figures—many of whom he interviewed personally for the book. He explores links between Alt-Right rhetoric and hate crimes and terrorism, showing that the evidence connecting them is undeniable. Ultimately, however, he builds a strong case that the movement’s lack of a coherent base and its contradictory tendencies are already sapping its strength and will lead to its downfall.
            A shocking exposé of a movement whose emergence stunned the world, Alt-Right presents a disturbing picture of our current political moment.
 

Children have served as soldiers throughout history. They fought in the American Revolution, the Civil War, and in both world wars. They served as uniformed soldiers, camouflaged insurgents, and even suicide bombers. Indeed, the first U.S. soldier to be killed by hostile fire in the Afghanistan war was shot in ambush by a fourteen-year-old boy.

Does this mean that child soldiers are aggressors? Or are they victims? It is a difficult question with no obvious answer, yet in recent years the acceptable answer among humanitarian organizations and contemporary scholars has been resoundingly the latter. These children are most often seen as especially hideous examples of adult criminal exploitation.

In this provocative book, David M. Rosen argues that this response vastly oversimplifies the child soldier problem. Drawing on three dramatic examples-from Sierra Leone, Palestine, and Eastern Europe during the Holocaust-Rosen vividly illustrates this controversial view. In each case, he shows that children are not always passive victims, but often make the rational decision that not fighting is worse than fighting.

With a critical eye to international law, Armies of the Young urges readers to reconsider the situation of child combatants in light of circumstance and history before adopting uninformed child protectionist views. In the process, Rosen paints a memorable and unsettling picture of the role of children in international conflicts.