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Select Book --New-- --New-- Angola Architect of Global Jihad Balkan Strongmen The Barbarisation of Warfare The British Consul Changing Clothes in China Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing Crossroads of Eurasia Culture Troubles Cultures of Confinement Cultures of Voting Elusive Compromise Empire of the Mind The Enigma of Islamist Violence Frontier of Faith Ghost Plane Global Vigilantes Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe Hamas Independent Diplomat Inside the Global Jihad Iran and the Bomb Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop The Libyan Paradox The Mask of Anarchy (revised and updated edition) Not Breaking the Rules, Not Playing the Game Peace at Any Price Peace Operations Seen from Below Playing Politics with Terrorism A Postcolonial People Purify and Destroy Qigong Fever Remaking Israeli Judaism Rescuing Afghanistan The Resilience of the State The Role of France in the Rwandan Genocide Russia and the Balkans Sarajevo Saudi Arabia in the Balance Shopping for Bombs Suicide in Palestine Things Modern To Be An Arab In Israel Turkey: From Empire to Revolutionary Republic Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan's Past Angola The Weight of History Nuno Vidal and PATRICK CHABAL “This book’s great strength is to put the contemporary, postwar condition of Angola into a historical context and to show how the present cannot be understood without this highly particular past. It is also very useful as a basis for the comparative analysis of African polities and economies.” —Chris Cramer, School of Oriental and African Studies Provides an introduction to the history of Angola and analyzes its economic, political, and social evolution.  More... 256pp  Apr 2007 Hardback 9781850658801 £45.00 Buy Now Paperback 9781850658849 £17.99 Buy Now Architect of Global Jihad The Life of Al-Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus'ab Al Suri BRYNJAR LIA 'Al-Suri, the Syrian ideologue, is the subject of a fascinating study by the Norwegian scholar  Brynjar Lia. ... Al-Suri is the most articulate exponent of the modern jihad and its most sophisticated strategist.' Malise Ruthven, New York Review of Books 'What’s most eerie about al-Suri’s book is not so much its content as its form. The Call is a military manual written in a strikingly secular – at times even avant-garde – idiom. His aim in writing is no different from what it was when he trained mujahedin at camps in Afghanistan: to produce better, smarter fighters, and to defeat the enemy. Most of his arguments, he emphasises, are not drawn from religious ‘doctrines or the laws about what is forbidden (haram) and permitted (halal)’in Islam, but from ‘individual judgments based on lessons drawn from experience’: ‘Reality,’ not God, ‘is the greatest witness.’ Though he embroiders his arguments with the occasional quote from the Koran, he clearly prefers to discuss the modern literature of guerrilla warfare. Jihadis who fail to learn from Western sources are ridiculed for their inability to ‘think outside the box’. Just as weirdly familiar is al-Suri’s celebration of nomadic fighters, mobile armies, autonomous cells, individual actions and decentralisation, which recalls not only Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux, but the idiom of‘flexible’ capitalism in the age of Google and call centres. His vision of jihadis training themselves in mobile camps and houses, presumably from their laptops, is not so far removed from our own off-site work world. Guerrilla life has rarely seemed so sterile, so anomic, so unlikely to promote esprit de corps. The constraints of the New World Order make jihad a rather grim, lonely crusade, a form of private combat cut off from the movement’s – mostly imagined – following. Al-Suri seems to acknowledge this when he says that the best kind of training occurs on the battlefield, which ‘has a particular fragrance’.On 31 October 2005, after breaking the Ramadan fast with a group of bearded men, he smelled that fragrance for the last time during a gunfight in Quetta with his former allies in Pakistan intelligence. At least one of al-Suri’s dinner companions was killed but he was unharmed. There had been strict orders from above: the Americans wanted to talk to him. He hasn’t been heard from since, and in spite of the objections of prosecutors like the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who was on to al-Suri long before the Americans had heard of him, the CIA refuses to say where he’s being held.' — London Review of Books   More... 525pp  Dec 2007 Hardback 9781850658566 £27.50 Buy Now Balkan Strongmen Dictators and Authoritarian Rulers of Southeast Europe BERND FISCHER (ed.) 'Southeastern Europe has had no shortage of strongmen. To put it another way, the region has produced more of them than it could consume locally – to paraphrase Saki, the British satirical author of the Edwardian era, who applied that observation to Crete and its history.   From Ataturk to Zog, Balkan Strongmen profiles 13 prominent 20th-century rulers from seven countries. They include monarchs and Communist Party general secretaries, army officers and charismatic politicians. The reader is guided through the twists and turns of these rulers’ careers by a group of leading Balkan scholars most of whom are based in the United States. Each profile comes with a well-crafted, concise history of the relevant country’s political developments during the period in question. The result is an excellent introduction in the Balkan context to the dilemmas rulers face as they seek to assert their authority and overcome obstacles in the way of government. The volume also raises a number of questions. Foremost, why was the rule of strongmen so pervasive in both the interwar period and in the four decades after World War II? As these profiles reveal, part of the answer lies in the relative lack of democratic traditions in countries which had emerged, for the most part, from the Ottoman Empire during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Political instability, squabbling among rival groups or individuals and in some cases conditions of anarchy provided the breeding ground for the rise of tough leaders who would brook no opposition. At one time in the early 1920s, for example, before Ahmed Zog rose to the top to become president and then king of the Albanians, the position of minister of the interior was rotated each week to keep all the opposing factions satisfied. The result was that each incumbent spent his time in office doing little more than replacing his predecessor’s appointees with his own associates. Albania had been independent for barely 12 years when Zog was elected president with sweeping powers in 1925. Yet even a relatively long tradition of elected self-government was no guarantee against the appearance of a strongman. Greece had already been recognized as independent for more than a century when in 1936 Ioannis Metaxas installed his dictatorship after a period of intense instability, punctuated by inconclusive elections, conspiracies and coup attempts, against a background of bickering between monarchists and republicans. A generation later Greece had the misfortune of becoming the only established European democracy of the postwar era to succumb to a military dictatorship following the colonels’ coup in 1967. Another factor that encouraged the emergence of strongmen in the Balkans was the difficulty of holding together multiethnic states in an age of assertive, and often aggressive, nationalism. The royal dictatorship of Aleksandar I, proclaimed in Yugoslavia in 1929, was one of the clearest examples of an attempt to deal with interethnic disputes through non-democratic methods. In fact, all the strongmen from the former Yugoslavia featured in this volume – Ante Pavelic, Josip Broz Tito and Slobodan Milosevic – owed their rise to the top at least in part to their determination to deal with this problem, whether by subjecting other nations to their own, as in the case of the Croat Pavelic and the Serb Milosevic, or by attempting to balance competing claims, as Tito did. During the 1930s the apparent success of fascist regimes in Italy and Germany acted as an incentive to authoritarian-minded rulers to emulate in some ways the order, discipline and dynamism that Mussolini and Hitler brought to their countries. Even if Balkan strongmen lacked, for the most part, the ideological zeal or radical social programs pursued by the leaders of the fascist powers, their seizure of power was often inspired by the examples of Italy and Germany – or in the case of Carol II of Romania, to preempt the fascists of the Iron Guard. After World War II the inspiration and the model for authoritarian rulers was supplied by the Soviet brand of dictatorship, as Moscow extended its sphere of influence and, one by one, communist regimes seized power throughout the Balkans, apart from Greece and Turkey. Whether in the Soviet era or before, the relatively small Balkan countries were dependent on the great powers. As a result, many of their strongmen turn out, on closer inspection, to have been the puppets of their foreign patrons. Pavelic’s genocidal rule in Croatia could never have come about had he not been installed in power by Hitler and Mussolini. Todor Zhivkov’s servility to the Kremlin stretched so far as to encourage him to suggest in 1963 that Bulgaria should join the Soviet Union. Interestingly, though, several communist rulers in the Balkans managed to break free from Soviet control in a way that never proved possible for their counterparts in Eastern and Central Europe. Tito, Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu and Albania’s Enver Hoxha all managed to escape Moscow’s tutelage – the first two by bolstering their economies with Western credit, and the last by relying on Chinese assistance before embarking on a disastrous path leading to self-reliance and economic implosion. One reason for these leaders’ ability to pursue an independent line was that they benefited from their countries’ more autocratic national traditions, and more widespread acceptance of their right to rule without the consent of the people. By contrast, the strongmen of Central Europe (and Bulgaria) had been placed in their positions of authority by the Kremlin, and might not have survived for long without the continued backing of their Soviet patrons. No strongwoman has made it into this volume, but there are plenty of references to exceptionally powerful women. Indeed, it could be argued that Romania during the Ceausescu era and Serbia under the Milosevic regime were run by “strongcouples.” Elena Ceausescu accumulated key positions on Romania’s ruling institutions that made her, in effect, the No. 2 of the regime. By contrast, Milosevic’s wife, Mira Markovic, had no official functions of any significance, yet her influence behind the scenes was equally formidable, and was clearly manifested in the numerous telephone calls between the couple each day. True to the patriarchal culture of Balkan societies, these women owed their power not to their own success in achieving high office but to marriage to the rulers. Family bonds and other relationships were also instrumental in bestowing authority or influence on Hoxha’s wife Nexhmije and Zhivkov’s daughter Lyudmila; and on Eudoxia, the sister of King Boris III of Bulgaria, and Carol’s mistress, Helena Lupescu. Apart from their indirect contribution to promoting women’s rights by promoting their female relatives, did the Balkan strongmen achieve anything enduring? It is difficult to see anything noteworthy, with the major exception of Kemal Ataturk who founded a modern, secular, Western-looking Turkish state on the ruins of the Ottoman Turkish empire. Elsewhere the failures are much more prominent than the successes. The monarchies and right-wing dictatorships disappeared with World War II – although the Greek colonels’ coup marked a final fling in the 1960s. Communism collapsed ignominiously throughout the region by the early 1990s. Tito’s attempt to hold Yugoslavia together – robustly defended by Professor John Fine who even argues that Yugoslavia’s president-for-life acted “without sufficient rigor” in tackling nationalists – ended in failure a decade after his death. The wars of the Yugoslav succession and the uncertainty created by the fall of communism created favorable conditions for the rise of a new generation of strongmen in the early 1990s. Apart from Milosevic they do not figure in this book. A sequel could certainly include independent Croatia’s founding president, Franjo Tudjman; Milo Djukanovic, who recently started his fifth term as Montenegro’s prime minister; and Sali Berisha, whose authoritarian presidency in Albania was brought to an end by an uprising in 1997. Berisha returned to office as prime minister in 2005 and his subsequent transformation into a democratic leader signals that the first decade of the 21st century is not looking particularly auspicious for would-be strongmen. Why should that be so? Perhaps most importantly, the Balkans are stable once again – notwithstanding Serbia’s refusal to accept Kosovo’s independence, and some remaining interethnic disputes in Bosnia and Macedonia. Besides, Europe beckons with the promise of prosperity and freedom, along with the requirement that would-be European Union members need to consolidate democratic governance. For the time being, at least, the Balkan strongmen have been relegated to history.' — Transitions Online, reviewed by Gabriel Partos, BBC   More... 400pp  Jul 2006 Hardback 9781850657798 £45.00 Buy Now Paperback 9781850658283 £16.95 Buy Now The Barbarisation of Warfare GEORGE KASSIMERIS (ed.) 'This book shows us the true barbarism of warfare. It makes brilliant but unsettling reading. Viewed together, the essays offer as good a sustained critique of war as is available anywhere in print, combined with a passion and engagement that is all too rare in first rate scholarship. The book is to be greatly treasured as an important contribution in a field of study that remains depressingly relevant in the world today.' —Professor C. A. Gearty, London School of Economics With contributions from scholars, this book raises disturbing questions: Can warfare be anything other than barbaric? Are we all human, or are some of us less human than others in wartime? Can torture ever be justified? This book presents an analysis of the human misery and complex moral dimensions of modern warfare.   More... 321pp  Feb 2006 Hardback 9781850657996 £15.95 Buy Now   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | >>

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