While serving a 50-year prison sentence after being charged with involvement in an IRA bombing, Patrick Magee dedicated himself to the study of fiction dealing with the conflict in North Ireland. Out of those years comes this fascinating work, in which Magee critically assesses various literary representations of republicans and their struggle as an ideological and political tool of British propaganda. Magee invokes the necessity of reading these texts critically, as a reading that accepts these novels at face value continues to hinder resolution of the division of Ireland.
"Without this testimony, we simply cannot grasp what is going on . . . Americans would do well to read [Gangster Warlords]." --The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice From the author of El Narco, the shocking story of the men at the heads of cartels throughout Latin America: what drives them, what sustains their power, and how they might be brought down. In a ranch south of Texas, the man known as The Executioner dumps five hundred body parts in metal barrels. In Brazil's biggest city, a mysterious prisoner orders hit-men to gun down forty-one police officers and prison guards in two days. In southern Mexico, a meth maker is venerated as a saint while enforcing Old Testament justice on his enemies. A new kind of criminal kingpin has arisen: part CEO, part terrorist, and part rock star, unleashing guerrilla attacks, strong-arming governments, and taking over much of the world's trade in narcotics, guns, and humans. What they do affects you now--from the gas in your car, to the gold in your jewelry, to the tens of thousands of Latin Americans calling for refugee status in the U.S. Gangster Warlords is the first definitive account of the crime wars now wracking Central and South America and the Caribbean, regions largely abandoned by the U.S. after the Cold War. Author of the critically acclaimed El Narco, Ioan Grillo has covered Latin America since 2001 and gained access to every level of the cartel chain of command in what he calls the new battlefields of the Americas. Moving between militia-controlled ghettos and the halls of top policy-makers, Grillo provides a disturbing new understanding of a war that has spiraled out of control--one that people across the political spectrum need to confront now.
Gangsters and Revolutionaries is the first in-depth study of one of the 'people's armies' which emerged from the chaos at the close of World War II in Indonesia to join the struggle for Indonesian independence in 1945. It traces the story of the People's Militia of Greater Jakarta from its origins as a loose network of petty criminals and labor bosses in the slums of urban Jakarta and the feudal estates of the surrounding countryside, to its destruction at the hands of the Indonesian army in the late 1940s. This book examines the social basis of the Indonesian revolution, especially the ways in which the revolutionary forces made use of existing social structures in mobilizing a popular following. It also highlights the painful process by which the new Indonesian state discarded and suppressed groups which had been instrumental in its own rise to power. Archival records, contemporary newspapers and interviews with survivors have been used to shed new light on the early history of the Indonesian army, showing a tangled politics in which regular and irregular units, general staff officers and the Ministry of Defense vied for influence and struggled to formulate a strategy for guerrilla war. Gangsters and Revolutionaries introduces a host of unexpected but fascinating characters, from the cat-eating General Mustopo and the implacable Haji Darip to the gangster unit which saw service with the Dutch as Her Majesty's Irregular Troops. Robert Cribb is Senior Fellow in Indonesian History at the Australian National University. His research focuses on Indonesian national identity, mass violence, environmental politics and historical geography. He is the author of the Historical Atlas of Indonesia (2000).
The author asserts that much of what police, press, politicians, and the public understand about international crime is based on myth and misrepresentation.".
The experience of Central Americans in the United States is marked by a vicious contradiction. In entertainment and information media, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans are hypervisible as threatening guerrillas, MS-13 gangsters, maids, and “forever illegals.” Central Americans are unseen within the broader conception of Latinx community, foreclosing avenues to recognition. Yajaira M. Padilla explores how this regime of visibility and invisibility emerged over the past forty years—bookended by the right-wing presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump—and how Central American immigrants and subsequent generations have contested their rhetorical disfiguration. Drawing from popular films and TV, news reporting, and social media, Padilla shows how Central Americans in the United States have been constituted as belonging nowhere, imagined as permanent refugees outside the boundaries of even minority representation. Yet in documentaries about cross-border transit through Mexico, street murals, and other media, US Central Americans have counteracted their exclusion in ways that defy dominant paradigms of citizenship and integration.
This collection surveys the underside of American history through fifty of its most infamous characters from colonial times up through the twentieth century.
The President of Uruguay, José "Pepe" Mujica, has recently become a global icon. Among other things, he lives a notoriously austere lifestyle; eschews luxury and protocol like no other head of state; has legalized marijuana and same-sex marriage; has agreed to take in Guantánamo detainees and Syrian refugees, and more. According to Mujica himself, all of his conduct and ideology is rooted in his time as a guerrilla: as a Tupamaro. Beginning in the late 1960s, the uprising of the Tupamaros shook Uruguay and rippled across the Western world. Born in a middle-class, urbanized society, these guerrillas did not fight within the natural shelters of jungles and mountains, but rather in the concrete maze of the city. Infiltrating residences, bars, movie theaters, sewers, police stations, and mansions, the Tupamaros were everywhere and nowhere. Uruguay's under-resourced police had to face the world's most sophisticated urban insurgents. The Tupamaros employed diverse, though often contradictory, tactics: from hunger relief commandos and the armed propaganda that gave them the Robin Hood title, to taking hostages and descending into murderous terrorism. In doing so, they integrated women like no other guerrilla force before, and staged memorable prison escapes. This is the first complete English-language history of the Tupamaros and of Mujica, who under the codename Facundo was directly involved in many operations. As the president himself has said, the way to understand him as both man and politician is as a Tupamaro.
The Coronavirus pandemic is fueling conflict and fostering extremism while concurrently empowering gangs, cartels, and mafias in their quest for power and profit. In COVID-19, Gangs, and Conflict, Editors John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker bring together a curated collection of both new and previously published material to explore the trends and potentials of the global pandemic emergency. Topics include an exploration of proto-statemaking by criminal groups, the interaction of pandemics and conflict, as well as a comparison of gangs, criminal cartels, and mafias exploiting the crisis and exerting criminal governance in Brazil, El Salvador, Mexico, Colombia, and South Africa. Implications for national security, biosecurity, slums, transnational organized crime, and threats and opportunities in the contested pandemic space are assessed. SWJ
The Armed Conflict Survey provides in-depth analysis of the political, military and humanitarian dimensions of all major armed conflicts, as well as data on fatalities, refugees and internally displaced persons. Compiled by the IISS, publisher of The Military Balance, it is the standard reference work on contemporary conflict. The book assesses key developments in 36 high-, medium- and low-intensity conflicts, including those in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Israel–Palestine, Southern Thailand, Colombia and Ukraine. The Armed Conflict Survey features essays by some of the world’s leading experts on armed conflict, including Mats Berdal, Elisabeth Jean Wood, Julia Bleckner, Nelly Lahoud, William Reno and Carrie Manning. They write on: • UN peacekeeping; • conflict-related sexual violence; • the Islamic State’s shifting narrative; • the changing foundations of governance by armed groups; and • rebel-to-party transitions. The authors’ discussion of principal thematic and cross-national trends complements the detailed analysis of each conflict at the core of the book. The Armed Conflict Survey also includes maps, infographics and multi-year data, as well as the IISS Chart of Conflict.
