Prague through the lens of the secret police
Author: Anna Pavlíková
Publisher:
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 285
ISBN-13: 9788087211113
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Informers Up Close
Author: Mark A. Drumbl
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2024-05-02
Total Pages: 273
ISBN-13: 0192667246
DOWNLOAD EBOOKInformers are generally reviled. After all, 'snitches get stitches.' Informers who report to repressive regimes are particularly disdained. While informers may themselves be victims enlisted by the state, their actions cause other individuals to suffer significant harm. Informers, then, are central to the proliferation of endemic human rights abuses. Yet, little is known about exactly why ordinary people end up informing on--at times betraying--other people to state authorities. Through a case-study of Communist Czechoslovakia (1945-1989) that draws from secret police archives, oral histories, and a broad gamut of secondary sources, this book unearths what fuels informers to speak to the secret police in repressive times and considers how transitional justice should approach informers once repression ends. This book unravels the complex drivers behind informing and the dynamics of societal reactions to informing. It explores the agency of both informers and secret police officers. By presenting informers up close, and the relationships between informers and secret police officers in high resolution, this book centres the role of emotions in informer motivations and underscores the value of dignity and reconciliation in transitional reconstruction. This book also leverages research from informing in repressive states to better understand informing in so-called liberal democratic states, which, after all, also rely on informers to maintain law and preserve order.
Justice in Conflict
Author: Mark Kersten
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-08-04
Total Pages: 273
ISBN-13: 0191082945
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat happens when the international community simultaneously pursues peace and justice in response to ongoing conflicts? What are the effects of interventions by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on the wars in which the institution intervenes? Is holding perpetrators of mass atrocities accountable a help or hindrance to conflict resolution? This book offers an in-depth examination of the effects of interventions by the ICC on peace, justice and conflict processes. The 'peace versus justice' debate, wherein it is argued that the ICC has either positive or negative effects on 'peace', has spawned in response to the Court's propensity to intervene in conflicts as they still rage. This book is a response to, and a critical engagement with, this debate. Building on theoretical and analytical insights from the fields of conflict and peace studies, conflict resolution, and negotiation theory, the book develops a novel analytical framework to study the Court's effects on peace, justice, and conflict processes. This framework is applied to two cases: Libya and northern Uganda. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the core of the book examines the empirical effects of the ICC on each case. The book also examines why the ICC has the effects that it does, delineating the relationship between the interests of states that refer situations to the Court and the ICC's institutional interests, arguing that the negotiation of these interests determines which side of a conflict the ICC targets and thus its effects on peace, justice, and conflict processes. While the effects of the ICC's interventions are ultimately and inevitably mixed, the book makes a unique contribution to the empirical record on ICC interventions and presents a novel and sophisticated means of studying, analyzing, and understanding the effects of the Court's interventions in Libya, northern Uganda - and beyond.
The Handbook of Photography Studies
Author: Gil Pasternak
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-08-13
Total Pages: 610
ISBN-13: 100021141X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Handbook of Photography Studies is a state-of-the-art overview of the field of photography studies, examining its thematic interests, dynamic research methodologies and multiple scholarly directions. It is a source of well-informed, analytical and reflective discussions of all the main subjects that photography scholars have been concerned with as well as a rigorous study of the field’s persistent expansion at a time when digital technology regularly boosts our exposure to new and historical photographs alike. Split into five core parts, the Handbook analyzes the field’s histories, theories and research strategies; discusses photography in academic disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts; draws out the main concerns of photographic scholarship; interrogates photography’s cultural and geopolitical influences; and examines photography’s multiple uses and continued changing faces. Each part begins with an introductory text, giving historical contextualization and scholarly orientation. Featuring the work of international experts, and offering diverse examples, insights and discussions of the field’s rich historiography, the Handbook provides critical guidance to the most recent research in photography studies. This pioneering and comprehensive volume presents a systematic synopsis of the subject that will be an invaluable resource for photography researchers and students from all disciplinary backgrounds in the arts, humanities and social sciences.
Report on the Foreign Policy of the Czech Republic 2009
Author:
Publisher: Ministerstvo zahraničních věcí České republiky
Published: 2010-12-01
Total Pages: 600
ISBN-13: 8074410005
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNot the Met
Author: Janel Halpern
Publisher: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.
Published: 2013-08-23
Total Pages: 184
ISBN-13: 9781455618682
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPeek into some of New York City's other museums. Travel to museums and experience exhibits through the authors' eyes with this informative vignettes. Readers will enjoy having a profile of the city's art community in the palms of their hands. Eighty-one museums are featured along with photographs, directions, helpful tips, and the authors' impressions. From the Museum of American Illustration to the Rubin Museum of Art, visitors and natives alike will delight in these unique gems.
The Jew in Czech and Slovak Imagination, 1938-89
Author: Hana Kubátová
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2018-01-29
Total Pages: 285
ISBN-13: 9004362444
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Jew in Czech and Slovak Imagination,1938-89 is the first critical inquiry into the nature of anti-Jewish prejudices in both main parts of former Czechoslovakia. The authors identify anti-Jewish prejudices over almost fifty years of the twentieth century, focusing primarily on the post-Munich period and the Second World War (1938–45), the post-war reconstruction (1945–48), as well as the Communist rule with both its thaws and returns to hardline rule (1948–89). It is a provocative examination of the construction of the image of ‘the Jew’ in the Czech and Slovak majority societies, the assigning of character and other traits – real or imaginary – to individuals or groups. The book analyses the impact of these constructed images on the attitudes of the majority societies towards the Jews, and on Holocaust memory in the country. "This meticulously researched study covers the late 1930s to the 1960s in Czechoslovakia, then when Slovakia became a separate country under Nazi domination during WW II and much of the Czech Republic was a German 'protectorate.'...Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty, professionals." - R.M. Seltzer, emeritus, Hunter College, CUNY, in: CHOICE 55.12 (2018)
The Prague Cemetery
Author: Umberto Eco
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-11-08
Total Pages: 481
ISBN-13: 0547577613
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Prague Cemetery is the #1 international bestselling historical novel from the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco. Nineteenth-century Europe—from Turin to Prague to Paris—abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. Conspiracies rule history. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if behind all of these conspiracies, both real and imagined, lay one lone man? “Choreographed by a truth that is itself so strange a novelist need hardly expand on it to produce a wondrous tale... Eco is to be applauded for bringing this stranger-than-fiction truth vividly to life.” —The New York Times
The Power of the Powerless
Author: Vaclav Havel
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-16
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 1315487357
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBooks of great political insight and novelty always outlive their time of birth and this reissued work, initially published in 1985, is no exception. Written shortly after the formation of Charter 77, the essays in this collection are among the most original and compelling pieces of political writing to have emerged from central and Eastern Europe during the whole of the post-war period. Václav Havel’s essay provides the title for the book. It was read by all the contributors who in turn responded to the many questions which Havel raises about the potential power of the powerless. The essays explain the anti-democratic features and limits of Soviet-type totalitarian systems of power. They discuss such concepts as ideology, democracy, civil liberty, law and the state from a perspective which is radically different from that of people living in liberal western democracies. The authors also discuss the prospects for democratic change under totalitarian conditions. Steven Lukes’ introduction provides an invaluable political and historical context for these writings. The authors represent a very broad spectrum of democratic opinion, including liberal, conservative and socialist.
