Drawing on revealing, in-depth interviews, Cecilia Menjívar investigates the role that violence plays in the lives of Ladina women in eastern Guatemala, a little-visited and little-studied region. While much has been written on the subject of political violence in Guatemala, Menjívar turns to a different form of suffering—the violence embedded in institutions and in everyday life so familiar and routine that it is often not recognized as such. Rather than painting Guatemala (or even Latin America) as having a cultural propensity for normalizing and accepting violence, Menjívar aims to develop an approach to examining structures of violence—profound inequality, exploitation and poverty, and gender ideologies that position women in vulnerable situations— grounded in women’s experiences. In this way, her study provides a glimpse into the root causes of the increasing wave of feminicide in Guatemala, as well as in other Latin American countries, and offers observations relevant for understanding violence against women around the world today.

Located in the war-torn eastern province of Sri Lanka, this book provides a rich ethnography of how Tamil-speaking communities in Batticaloa live through and make sense of a violence that shapes everyday life itself. The core of the book comes from the author’s two-year close interaction with a group of (mainly women) human rights activists in the area. The book describes how the activists work in clandestine, informal ways to support families whose loved ones have been threatened, disappeared or killed and how they build networks of trust within the context of everyday violence. As Sri Lanka faces up to the enormity of the task of ‘post-war reconciliation’, this book aims to create a wider conversation about grief, resistance and healing in the context of violence and its long afterlife.

The Third Edition of Violence: The Enduring Problem offers an interdisciplinary and reader-friendly exploration of the patterns and correlations of individual and collective violent acts using the most contemporary research, theories, and cases. Responding to the fear of pervasive violence in the world, authors Alex Alvarez and Ronet Bachman address the various legislative, social, and political efforts to curb violent behavior. They expertly incorporate a wide range of the most current cases to help readers interpret the nature and dynamics of a variety of different, yet connected, forms of violence. While most texts of this type simply cover individual acts of violence, this book offers readers a broader perspective, covering more collective violence activities such as terrorism, mob violence, and genocide.

A biography of Richard Bartlett Gregg (1885-1974), American writer and philosopher, considered to be "the first American to develop and substantial theory of non-violent practice." Gregg studied with Gandhi in the 1920s, the start of a long relationship. He influenced several generations of thinkers and activists including Martin Luther King, Jr. His books include Gandhiji's Satyagraha or Non-violent Resistance (1930) and The Power of Non-Violence (1934), the 1960 edition of which has a foreword by Martin Luther King, Jr. He reputation widened when he began writing about organic farming and voluntary simplicity beginning in the 1940s. He was associated with back-to-the-land icons Helen and Scott Nearing in the U.S., who became heroes of the Sixties counterculture.

What is the meaning of punishment today? Where is the limit that separates it from the cruel and unusual? In legal discourse, the distinction between punishment and vengeance—punishment being the measured use of legally sanctioned violence and vengeance being a use of violence that has no measure—is expressed by the idea of "cruel and unusual punishment." This phrase was originally contained in the English Bill of Rights (1689). But it (and versions of it) has since found its way into numerous constitutions and declarations, including Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the Amendment to the US Constitution. Clearly, in order for the use of violence to be legitimate, it must be subject to limitation. The difficulty is that the determination of this limit should be objective, but it is not, and its application in punitive practice is constituted by a host of extra-legal factors and social and political structures. It is this essential contestability of the limit which distinguishes punishment from violence that this book addresses. And, including contributions from a range of internationally renowned scholars, it offers a plurality of original and important responses to the contemporary question of the relationship between punishment and the limits of law.

The Power of Nonviolence, written by Richard Bartlett Gregg in 1934 and revised in 1944 and 1959, is the most important and influential theory of principled or integral nonviolence published in the twentieth century. Drawing on Gandhi's ideas and practice, Gregg explains in detail how the organized power of nonviolence (power-with) exercised against violent opponents can bring about small and large transformative social change and provide an effective substitute for war. This edition includes a major introduction by political theorist, James Tully, situating the text in its contexts from 1934 to 1959, and showing its great relevance today. The text is the definitive 1959 edition with a foreword by Martin Luther King, Jr. It includes forewords from earlier editions, the chapter on class struggle and nonviolent resistance from 1934, a crucial excerpt from a 1929 preliminary study, a biography and bibliography of Gregg, and a bibliography of recent work on nonviolence.

“A passionate, incisive critique of the many ways in which women and girls of color are systematically erased or marginalized in discussions of police violence.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow Invisible No More is a timely examination of how Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color experience racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement. By placing the individual stories of Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Dajerria Becton, Monica Jones, and Mya Hall in the broader context of the twin epidemics of police violence and mass incarceration, Andrea Ritchie documents the evolution of movements centered around women’s experiences of policing. Featuring a powerful forward by activist Angela Davis, Invisible No More is an essential exposé on police violence against WOC that demands a radical rethinking of our visions of safety—and the means we devote to achieving it.

This unique text challenges the notion that absence of conflict is the foundation and norm of a stable political environment. Combining complexity theory and the notion of signature with case studies, it argues that political processes need to be understood within their social and cultural contexts. It thus develops the idea of enduring conflict, referring to both the enduring nature of political conflict and the endurance of people in conflict-ridden societies, looking at countries involved in conflict transformation, such as Northern Ireland, Cambodia, Indonesia, and South Africa. Examining debates around trauma, memory, and reconciliation, the work shows how conflicts are so socially and culturally ingrained and protracted that political agreements alone cannot bring substantive change. In addition, key texts, such as peace agreements, along with interviews of politicians, participants, and NGOs help identify the conditions under which notions like peace, democracy, and conflict resolution can even be conceived - let alone implemented. This innovative text is a significant contribution to the literature as it highlights the limitations of conflict resolution strategies and identifies the issues that pertain to conflicts throughout global politics. Written in an accessible manner, it will be highly attractive to students in conflict processes, peace studies, and international relations theory.

From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning. Rooting the problem of escalation in negative group relationships, Schulman illuminates the ways cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how Supremacy behavior and Traumatized behavior resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference. This important and sure to be controversial book illuminates such contemporary and historical issues of personal, racial, and geo-political difference as tools of escalation towards injustice, exclusion, and punishment, whether the objects of dehumanization are other individuals in our families or communities, people with HIV, African Americans, or Palestinians. Conflict Is Not Abuse is a searing rejection of the cultural phenomenon of blame, cruelty, and scapegoating, and how those in positions of power exacerbate and manipulate fear of the "other" to achieve their goals. Sarah Schulman is a novelist, nonfiction writer, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and AIDS historian, and the author of eighteen books. A Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow, Sarah is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Her novels published by Arsenal include Rat Bohemia, Empathy, After Delores, and The Mere Future. She lives in New York. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.