93 books match the query 'Political violence' and 7 start with r

cover of Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy

Radical American Partisanship

Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy

Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason

University of Chicago Press, 2022

Radical partisanship among ordinary Americans is rising, and it poses grave risks for the prospects of American democracy.
 
Political violence is rising in the United States, with Republicans and Democrats divided along racial and ethnic lines that spurred massive bloodshed and democratic collapse earlier in the nation’s history. The January 6, 2021 insurrection and the partisan responses that ensued are a vivid illustration of how deep these currents run. How did American politics become so divided that we cannot agree on how to categorize an attack on our own Capitol?

For over four years, through a series of surveys and experiments, Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason have been studying radicalism among ordinary American partisans. In this groundbreaking book, they draw on new evidence—as well as insights from history, psychology, and political science—to put our present partisan fractiousness in context and to explain broad patterns of political and social change. Early chapters reveal the scope of the problem, who radical partisans are, and trends over time, while later chapters identify the conditions that partisans say justify violence and test how elections, political violence, and messages from leaders enflame or pacify radical views. Kalmoe and Mason find that ordinary partisanship is far more dangerous than pundits and scholars have recognized. However, these findings are not a forecast of inevitable doom; the current climate also brings opportunities to confront democratic threats head-on and to create a more inclusive politics. Timely and thought-provoking, Radical American Partisanship is vital reading for understanding our current political landscape.
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cover of Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture

Radical Sensations

World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture

Shelley Streeby

Duke University Press, 2013

The significant anarchist, black, and socialist world-movements that emerged in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth adapted discourses of sentiment and sensation and used the era's new forms of visual culture to move people to participate in projects of social, political, and economic transformation. Drawing attention to the vast archive of images and texts created by radicals prior to the 1930s, Shelley Streeby analyzes representations of violence and of abuses of state power in response to the Haymarket police riot, of the trial and execution of the Chicago anarchists, and of the mistreatment and imprisonment of Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón and other members of the Partido Liberal Mexicano. She considers radicals' reactions to and depictions of U.S. imperialism, state violence against the Yaqui Indians in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the failure of the United States to enact laws against lynching, and the harsh repression of radicals that accelerated after the United States entered the First World War. By focusing on the adaptation and critique of sentiment, sensation, and visual culture by radical world-movements in the period between the Haymarket riots of 1886 and the deportation of Marcus Garvey in 1927, Streeby sheds new light on the ways that these movements reached across national boundaries, criticized state power, and envisioned alternative worlds.
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cover of Radicalizing Men: Fascist Desires, Great Replacement Propaganda, and Political Violence

Radicalizing Men

Fascist Desires, Great Replacement Propaganda, and Political Violence

Jessica Johnson

Duke University Press, 2026

Ideological terms such as “Christian nationalism” or “far right” serve as shorthand for religious and political extremism but do not offer insight into why some men perpetrate political violence while others do not. Radicalizing Men analyzes radicalization as a social process, the networking of fascist desires, imaginaries, and feelings through great replacement propaganda enacted in sermons, during school board meetings, on campuses, and on digital platforms through algorithms, rhetoric, and memes. Jessica Johnson considers the affective—bodily, sensory, and emotional—processes of radicalization constitutive of political subjectivity and collective action to reassess medias, technologies, shootings, and policies that create and target racialized, religious, and gendered threats to imaginary white Christian homelands. Johnson explores how fascist desires move bodies in decentralized yet coordinated ways by examining the socioeconomic, infrastructural, and affective connections between neoliberal capitalism and militarized nationalism that proliferate citizen-soldiers and inspire them to commit transnationally linked acts of political violence as multiracial, multiethnic, and multifaith antifascist coalitions emerge to fight them.
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cover of Recording Memories from Political Violence: A Film-maker's Journey

Recording Memories from Political Violence

A Film-maker's Journey

Cahal McLaughlin

Intellect Books, 2010

Based on work the author has carried out with survivor groups in Northern Ireland and South Africa, Recording Memories from Political Violence draws on written and audiovisual texts to describe and analyze the use of documentary filmmaking in recording experiences of political conflict. A variety of issues relevant to the genre are addressed at length, including the importance of ethics in the collaboration between the filmmaker and the participant and the effect of location on the accounts of participants. Cahal McLaughlin draws on the diverse fields of film and cultural studies, as well as nearly twenty years of production experience, in this informed and instructive contribution to documentary filmmaking and post-conflict studies.

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cover of Regimes and Repertoires

Regimes and Repertoires

Charles Tilly

University of Chicago Press, 2006

The means by which people protest—that is, their repertoires of contention—vary radically from one political regime to the next. Highly capable undemocratic regimes such as China's show no visible signs of popular social movements, yet produce many citizen protests against arbitrary, predatory government. Less effective and undemocratic governments like the Sudan’s, meanwhile, often experience regional insurgencies and even civil wars. In Regimes and Repertoires, Charles Tilly offers a fascinating and wide-ranging case-by-case study of various types of government and the equally various styles of protests they foster.

Using examples drawn from many areas—G8 summit and anti-globalization protests, Hindu activism in 1980s India, nineteenth-century English Chartists organizing on behalf of workers' rights, the revolutions of 1848, and civil wars in Angola, Chechnya, and Kosovo—Tilly masterfully shows that such episodes of contentious politics unfold like loosely scripted theater. Along the way, Tilly also brings forth powerful tools to sort out the reasons why certain political regimes vary and change, how the people living under them make claims on their government, and what connections can be drawn between regime change and the character of contentious politics.

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cover of Resilience and the Localisation of Trauma in Aceh, Indonesia

Resilience and the Localisation of Trauma in Aceh, Indonesia

Catherine Smith

National University of Singapore Press, 2017

Aceh is a region that is no stranger to violent conflict and tragedy. This special territory of Indonesia has faced occupation, fallen into civil war, and was brutalized by the deadly 2004 tsunami. While these forces have altered the lives of the Aceh people, their very experiences of suffering and recovery have changed thanks to the globalization of psychiatry.

In this book, Catherine Smith examines the global reach of the contested, yet compelling, concept of trauma. She explores how what is considered “trauma” has expanded well beyond the bounds of therapeutic practice to become a powerful cultural idiom shaping the ways people understand the effects of violence and imagine possible responses to suffering. In Aceh, conflict survivors have incorporated the ideas of trauma into their local languages, healing practices, and political imaginaries. The appearance of this idiom of distress into the Acehnese medical-moral landscape provides an ethnographic perspective on suffering and recovery, and contributes to our contemporary debates about the international reach of psychiatry and the cultural consequences as it spreads beyond the domain of medicine.
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cover of Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law, and Violence in Northern Thailand

Revolution Interrupted

Farmers, Students, Law, and Violence in Northern Thailand

Tyrell Haberkorn; Foreword by Thongchai Winichakul

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

In October 1973 a mass movement forced Thailand’s prime minister to step down and leave the country, ending nearly forty years of dictatorship. Three years later, in a brutal reassertion of authoritarian rule, Thai state and para-state forces quashed a demonstration at Thammasat University in Bangkok. In Revolution Interrupted, Tyrell Haberkorn focuses on this period when political activism briefly opened up the possibility for meaningful social change. Tenant farmers and their student allies fomented revolution, she shows, not by picking up guns but by invoking laws—laws that the Thai state ultimately proved unwilling to enforce.
    In choosing the law as their tool to fight unjust tenancy practices, farmers and students departed from the tactics of their ancestors and from the insurgent methods of the Communist Party of Thailand. To first imagine and then create a more just future, they drew on their own lived experience and the writings of Thai Marxian radicals of an earlier generation, as well as New Left, socialist, and other progressive thinkers from around the world. Yet their efforts were quickly met with harassment, intimidation, and assassinations of farmer leaders. More than thirty years later, the assassins remain unnamed.
    Drawing on hundreds of newspaper articles, cremation volumes, activist and state documents, and oral histories, Haberkorn reveals the ways in which the established order was undone and then reconsolidated. Examining this turbulent period through a new optic—interrupted revolution—she shows how the still unnameable violence continues to constrict political opportunity and to silence dissent in present-day Thailand.

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