Author: Achin Vanaik
Samir Amin/Several Contributors
Translator(s)/ Editors(s): Leo Panitch/Colin Leys
Publisher: LeftWord
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 277
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9788187496793
Description
Is this a new age of barbarism? The scale and pervasiveness of violence today calls urgently for serious analysis of:
- the 'war on terror' and counter-insurgencies
- terror and counter-terror
- suicide bombing and torture
- urban gang warfare and
- the persistence of chronic violence against women.
Such violence entails human tragedies on a scale comparable to those of the two world wars. The fact that millions of people are living in fear of violent death is an appalling indictment of the nirvana of global capitalism that now prevails.
The opening essay offers an overview of the scale and variety of contemporary violence while also taking up once again the question of socialism versus barbarism. Other essays analyse the nature and roots of paradigmatic cases of violence around the world. And several of the concluding essays deal, from various different standpoints, with the still important question of whether violence has any place in socialist strategy in the context of today's actually-existing barbarism.
CONTRIBUTORS:
Samir Amin
John Berger
Henry Bernstein
Michael Brie
Vivek Chibber
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Philip Green
Barbara Harriss-White
Steffen Jensen
Sofiri Joab-Peterside
Colin Leys
Tania Murray Li
Ulrich Oslender
Leo Panitch
Dennis Rodgers
Lynne Segal
Joe Sim
Steve Tombs
Achin Vanaik
Anna Zalik
Contents
Leo Panitch Preface
Colin Leys
Henry Bernstein Reflections on violence today
Colin Leys
Leo Panitch
Vivek Chibber American militarism and the US political establishment: the real lessons of the invasion of Iraq
Philip Green On-screen barbarism: violence in US visual culture
Ruth Wilson Race, prisons and war: scenes from the history of US violence
Gilmore
Joe Sim State talk state silence: work and ‘violence’ in the UK
Steve Tombs
Lynne Segal Violence’s victims: the gender landscape
Barbara Girls as disposable commodities in India
Harriss-White
Achin Vanaik India’s paradigmatic communal violence
Tania Murray Li Reflections on Indonesian violence: two tales and three silences
Ulrich Oslender Colombia: old and new patterns of violence
Sofiri Joab-Peterside The commodification of violence in the Niger Delta
Anna Zalik
Dennis Rodgers Revolutionaries, barbarians or war machines? Ganga in Nicaragua and South Africa
Steffen Jensen
Michael Brie Emancipation and the left: the issue of Violence
Samir Amin The defence of humanity requires the radicalization of popular struggles
John Berger Human shield