In Understanding Evil, Keith Doubt uses the horrors of the recent war in Bosnia to develop meaningfully adequate accounts of evil within the context of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Since the foundationsof the social are found in human action, evil's assault on these foundations results in the demise of the social. In Bosnia, not only were individuals, families, homes, and buildings destroyed, but entire towns and cities wereobliterated. Not only were individual human beings murdered, but so was the history and memory of vibrant communities. Crimes against humanity in Bosnia, Doubt argues, were sociocidal; they were systematic attacks on social life itself. The book develops the significance of sociocideas what evil is in order to understand the suffering and tragedy of the people and communities in Bosnia.
Wars have a destructive impact on society. The violence in the first case is domicide, in the second urbicide, in the third genocide, and in the fourth, the book introduces a neologism, sociocide, the killing of society. Through the lens of this neologism, Keith Doubt provides persuasive evidence of the social, political, and human consequences of today’s wars in countries such as Bosnia and Iraq. Sociocide: Reflections on Today’s Wars rigorously formulates, develops, and applies the notion of sociocide as a Weberian ideal type to contemporary wars. Drawing upon sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and literature, Doubt analyzes war crimes, scapegoating, and torture and concludes by examining capitalism in the face of the coronavirus pandemic as a sociocidal force. Embedded in the humanistic tradition and informed by empirical science, this book provides a clear conceptual account of today’s wars, one that is objective and moral, critical and humanistic.
Why does Hamas refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the state of Israel? What makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so intractable? Reflecting both Israeli and Palestinian points of view, this volume addresses the two powerful, bitterly contested, competing historical narratives that underpin the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Charles Derber introduces and vividly explains the idea of a sociopathic society and why the idea has become necessary to understand today s world.Sociopathic society is rooted in governments and economies, not psychiatry. The book offers a new sociology of societies organized around antisocial values, which ultimately lead to societal and planetary self-destruction. Most of the sociopathic behaviors are perfectly legal and are perpetrated by governments, financial institutions, and corporate capitalism.Focusing on the United States, Derber connects the dots of Wall Street meltdown, guns and murder, uninhibited greed, the 1% and the 99%, a new crisis of unemployable surplus people, Hurricane Sandy and global warming, cheating scandals, and more including the war on democracy itself.Although the book brings together a breathtaking set of stories of a system run wild, it also offers hope, showing pathways for confronting and avoiding the many ways a society can commit sociocide. FEATURES OF THE BOOK"
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the longest, ongoing hot-and-cold war of the 20th and 21st centuries. It has produced more refugees than any current conflict, generating fully one quarter of all refugees worldwide. Everyone knows that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is important itself, and is also fueling tensions throughout the Middle East. Yet most people shy away from this conflict, claiming it is “just too complicated” to understand. This book is written for people who want a point of entry into the conversation. It offers both a historic and analytic framework. Readers, whether acting as students, parishioners, neighbors, voters, or dinner guests will find in these pages an analysis of the most commonly heard Israeli positions, and a succinct account of the Palestinian voices we seldom hear. I argue that human rights standards have never been used as the basis on which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be resolved and that only these standards can produce a just and sustainable resolution. This book will be useful for classes in Middle East studies, peace and conflict studies, Middle East history, sociology of race, and political science. It can be helpful for church groups, labor groups, or other grass roots organizations committed to social justice, and for all readers who wish to be informed about this important topic. “Professor Spangler’s ... quest for historical and political understanding takes us on a brave and intimate journey into the consequences of Jewish privilege and Jewish victimhood, the agendas of imperial superpowers, and the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.” Alice Rothchild, MD, author of Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience, and producer and director of documentary film, Voices Across the Divide “[A] sharp, poignant, well-documented dossier [that] provides readers with all the most-needed facts to grasp the conflict and get involved.” – Sam Bahour, co-editor of Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians and business development consultant and activist based in Palestine “[T]his one is exceptional! It recounts a historical tale; it provides theoretical underpinnings; it does comparative work; it examines all the details and aspects of ongoing debates; and it brings all to life with real-life stories ... the wonder of this book is its insistence on hope – not a naïve, idealistic hope, but one accompanied by a tool-box for concrete action that might right the wrongs of this tragic tale.” Anat Biletzki, Professor of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University and Albert Schweitzer Professor of Philosophy, Quinnipiac University; Chairperson of B’Tselem, 2001–2006 Eve Spangler is a sociologist and a human and civil rights activist. For the last decade, her work has focused on the Israel/Palestine conflict; she argues that human rights are the neglected standards that could lead to a just and sustainable solution.
A peer-reviewed original collection of essays on how faith and religious traditions have been and are being translated, whether by language, culture, context, migration, or many other factors.
Nancy Pineda-Madrid re-conceives traditional Christian notions of salvation by closing attending to the experience of the embattled women of Ciudad Ju rez in Mexico, where hundreds have been slain and where survivors have found healing and salvation in solidarity and community practices that resist rather than acquiesce in the violence.
In this jarring look at contemporary warfare and political visuality, renowned anthropologist of violence Allen Feldman provocatively argues that contemporary sovereign power mobilizes asymmetric, clandestine, and ultimately unending war as a will to truth. Whether responding to the fantasy of weapons of mass destruction or an existential threat to civilization, Western political sovereignty seeks to align justice, humanitarian right, and democracy with technocratic violence and visual dominance. Connecting Guantánamo tribunals to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, American counterfeit killings in Afghanistan to the Baader-Meinhof paintings of Gerhard Richter, and the video erasure of Rodney King to lynching photography and political animality, among other scenes of terror, Feldman contests sovereignty’s claims to transcendental right —whether humanitarian, neoliberal, or democratic—by showing how dogmatic truth is crafted and terror indemnified by the prosecutorial media and materiality of war. Excavating a scenography of trials—formal or covert, orchestrated or improvised, criminalizing or criminal—Feldman shows how the will to truth disappears into the very violence it interrogates. He maps the sensory inscriptions and erasures of war, highlighting war as a media that severs factuality from actuality to render violence just. He proposes that war promotes an anesthesiology that interdicts the witness of a sensory and affective commons that has the capacity to speak truth to war. Feldman uses layered deconstructive description to decelerate the ballistical tempo of war to salvage the embodied actualities and material histories that war reduces to the ashes of collateral damage, the automatism of drones, and the opacities of black sites. The result is a penetrating work that marries critical visual theory, political philosophy, anthropology, and media archeology into a trenchant dissection of emerging forms of sovereignty and state power that war now makes possible.
Before there was economics, there was political economy, an interdisciplinary adventure boldly and critically seeking to understand capitalism. Over time, the social sciences evolved into specific disciplines - economics, sociology, political science - that less often questioned capitalist perspectives and the state. Contrasting three traditions - neoclassicism, Keynesianism, and neo-Marxism - Capitalism: Should You Buy It? traces the historical development of each and evaluates whether they view capitalism as the root cause of or the solution to the pressing problems now facing humanity. This accessible and hopeful book is a call to everyone - citizen, student, public intellectual - to revive the critical edge towards capitalism.
This book provides a sociological account of the events in Bosnia in the 1990s, including ethnic cleansing, mass rape, and the role of political journalists. Drawing upon a diverse group of social theorists, including Merton, Weber, and Baudrillard, Sociology After Bosnia constructs a social understanding of the experiences of people in Bosnia and the response of Western leaders to these experiences. Beyond looking at the social causes of these events, Doubt sheds light on why Bosnia and Kosovo have largely been ignored by sociologists. He shows why the personal and social tragedies of people in Bosnia and Kosovo and the world's tolerance of these tragedies challenge contemporary sociological knowledge. Doubt argues that sociologists must be willing not only to recognize this challenge, but also to respond to it in order to construct meaningfully adequate accounts of war and genocide in a postmodern era. Doing so, he contends, may yield an important and needed reconsideration of the existing body of sociologicial knowledge and a revision of how this knowledge is applied.
