Accumulating Insecurity examines the relationship between two vitally important contemporary phenomena: a fixation on security that justifies global military engagements and the militarization of civilian life, and the dramatic increase in day-to-day insecurity associated with contemporary crises in health care, housing, incarceration, personal debt, and unemployment.Contributors to the volume explore how violence is used to maintain conditions for accumulating capital. Across world regions violence is manifested in the increasingly strained, often terrifying, circumstances in which people struggle to socially reproduce themselves. Security is often sought through armaments and containment, which can lead to the impoverishment rather than the nourishment of laboring bodies. Under increasingly precarious conditions, governments oversee the movements of people, rather than scrutinize and regulate the highly volatile movements of capital. They often do so through practices that condone dispossession in the name of economic and political security.

Product Description: We’ve all asked, “What is the world coming to?” But we seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” In this startling new book, the bestselling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse...read more

We’ve all asked, “What is the world coming to?” But we seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” In this startling new book, the bestselling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse. In fact, we may be living in the most peaceable era yet.Evidence of a bloody history has always been around us: the genocides in the Old Testament and crucifixions in the New; the gory mutilations in Shakespeare and Grimm; the British monarchs who beheaded their relatives and the American founders who dueled with their rivals.Now the decline in these brutal practices can be quantified. Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate in medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then were suddenly abolished. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the numbers they did a few decades ago. Rape, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse―all substantially down.How could this have happened, if human nature has not changed? Pinker argues that the key to explaining the decline of violence is to understand the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away. Thanks to the spread of government, literacy, trade, and cosmopolitanism, we increasingly control our impulses, empathize with others, debunk toxic ideologies, and deploy our powers of reason to reduce the temptations of violence.Pinker will force you to rethink your deepest beliefs about progress, modernity, and human nature. This gripping audiobook is sure to be among the most debated of the century so far.

Product Description: Daemon in the Sanctuary explores the uncanny contradiction between the phenomenological experience of home as a site of nurture and security and the empirical reality that people are far more likely to be hurt and even killed in their own homes by their intimates, rather than at the hands of strangers...read more

Product Description: Dynamics of Political Violence examines how violence emerges and develops from episodes of contentious politics. By considering a wide range of empirical cases, such as anarchist movements, ethno-nationalist and left-wing militancy in Europe, contemporary Islamist violence, and insurgencies in South Africa and Latin America, this pathbreaking volume of research identifies the forces that shape radicalization and violent escalation...read more

In Frames of War, Judith Butler explores the media’s portrayal of state violence, a process integral to the way in which the West wages modern war. This portrayal has saturated our understanding of human life, and has led to the exploitation and abandonment of whole peoples, who are cast as existential threats rather than as living populations in need of protection. These people are framed as already lost, to imprisonment, unemployment and starvation, and can easily be dismissed. In the twisted logic that rationalizes their deaths, the loss of such populations is deemed necessary to protect the lives of ‘the living.’ This disparity, Butler argues, has profound implications for why and when we feel horror, outrage, guilt, loss and righteous indifference, both in the context of war and, increasingly, everyday life.This book discerns the resistance to the frames of war in the context of the images from Abu Ghraib, the poetry from Guantanamo, recent European policy on immigration and Islam, and debates on normativity and non-violence. In this urgent response to ever more dominant methods of coercion, violence and racism, Butler calls for a re-conceptualization of the Left, one that brokers cultural difference and cultivates resistance to the illegitimate and arbitrary effects of state violence and its vicissitudes.

Product Description: With trademark precision and razor-sharp wit, Inga Muscio explores the impacts of passive violence, abuse, war, and cultural trauma on our most intimate lives in order to uncover a path toward healthy and imaginative sex and love...read more

What can the analysis of violence and terror tell us about the modern world? Why is violence often used to achieve religious, cultural or political goals? Can we understand the search for the extreme that increasingly shapes violence today?  From 1960s student movements to today's global jihad, this text explores the factors and debates shaping violence and terrorism in our contemporary society. Each chapter confronts examples of disturbing terrorist acts and events of mass violence from recent history and uses these to examine key questions, theories and concepts surrounding this sensitive and controversial topic. In particular, the book:- identifies core tools for the analysis of public violence - explores the processes that mutate social movements into violent groups- describes the cultural, embodied, experiential and imagined dimensions of violence- highlights different periods and varying forms of terrorist violence - examines the role of globalization, media, technology and the visual in violence and terror today.Our Violent World shows how the social sciences can contribute to an understanding of violence and responses to terror, as well as the construction of a social world less dominated by fear of the other. It is a must-read for students and citizens.

Product Description: Time transforms the way we see world politics and insinuates itself into the ways we act. In this groundbreaking volume, Agathangelou and Killian bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to tackle time and temporality in international relations...read more

In this compelling and timely book, Violence and Society, Larry Ray offers a wide-ranging and integrated account of the many manifestations of violence in society. He examines violent behavior and its meanings in contemporary culture and throughout history.Introducing the major theoretical debates, the book examines different levels of violence - interpersonal, institutional and collective - and different forms of violence such as racist crime, homophobic crime and genocide. It provides readers with a succinct and comprehensive overview of its nature and effects, and the solutions and conflict resolutions involved in responses to violence. Interdisciplinary in its approach, the text draws on evidence from sociology, criminology, primate studies and archaeology to shed light on arguments about the social construction and innate nature of violence.

Product Description: Violence and Society features a multidisciplinary collection of readings by leading national and international experts that set a new agenda for our understanding of interpersonal and state violence in contemporary society. Features contributions from leading international experts in collective, state, and interpersonal violence Develops innovative interdisciplinary theorizations based on new empirical studies on violence and society Incorporates within an emerging analytical framework issues of war, domestic and gender-based violence, fighting, honor and shame, violence and identity, and politics and violence Allows us to better understand the world we live in...read more

Product Description: Violence: Do We Know It When We See It?: A Reader is designed to be used with Why Violence?. This two-volume set explores the many ways in which violence is understood and manifest in contemporary society. This reader provides primary source materials in support of the key discussion points featured in the text, reflecting multidisciplinary, cross-cultural, and historical perspectives...read more

Product Description: This book analyses the role of war and violence (in both its physical and symbolic forms) for social work in a time of neoliberal globalisation from a social justice perspective. It argues that the consequences of wars, in both their old and new forms, and the exercise of symbolic violence for the practices of social work at national and global levels have been ignored...read more