State Violence

Violence is part and parcel of human history and of human nature. It is one of our most distinctive traits, the one thing that all cultures and societies, across time, share in common. It has defined not only the ways in which individuals relate to each other, but also how collective entities and states have interacted with each other over the millennia. All societies are violent and all individuals have the capacity for violence. However, not all societies and not all individuals are equally violent, and nor does violence exist with the same intensity across cultures.

He was supposed to die. But now I have him where I want him, I can’t help but taste him a little. All of them. They've gotten under my skin. These Sacred Heart boys.

Peaceful Mickleburgh is the perfect English market town - or so it seems. In fact, it is a perfectly constructed façade, having successfully hidden the secrets of its inhabitants for generations. But the casual murder of a man trying to prevent an act of vandalism shatters the genteel appearance. Parents are forced to consider whether their children could be involved, friends avoid each other's eyes and partners word their conversations carefully. Somebody in the community is close to the murderer - someone with a past that threatens to resurface, bringing damage and devastation to a whole community.

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-Blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms, and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides listeners with the first comprehensive account of nearly 400 years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization, and punishment of Black lives in Canada. While highlighting the ubiquity of Black resistance, Policing Black Lives traces the still-living legacy of slavery across multiple institutions.

Awakening the sleeping dragon... Smooth expat Michael Nicholson is a fixer, getting on by doing favours for the rich and powerful in booming China. When he makes the mistake of getting too close to one of his clients, the wife of a leading Communist Party official, the ageing Lothario fears for his life as a vengeful husband decides to put his house in order.

Journalist and Jezebel staff writer Kylie Cheung exposes the insidious--and often unseen--connections among domestic abuse, state-based violence, political disenfranchisement, and the carceral state. For readers of The Revolution Starts at Home, Feminism for the 99%, and Good and Mad. Incisive...

American Indians remain familiar as icons, yet poorly understood as historical agents. In this ambitious book that ranges across Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and eastern California (a region known as the Great Basin), Ned Blackhawk places Native peoples squarely at the center of a dynamic and complex story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West.

Black Panther and Cuban exile, Assata Shakur, has inspired multiple generations of radical protest, including our contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing its title from one of America’s foremost revolutionaries, this collection of thought-provoking essays by award-winning Panther scholar Donna Murch explores how social protest is challenging our current system of state violence and mass incarceration. Assata Taught Me offers a fresh and much-needed historical perspective on the fifty years since the founding of the Black Panther Party.

The United States is the world's leading foreign aid donor. Yet there has been little inquiry into how such assistance affects the politics and societies of recipient nations. Jessica Trisko Darden challenges long-standing ideas about aid and its consequences, and highlights key patterns in the relationship between assistance and violence. She persuasively demonstrates that many of the foreign aid policy challenges the US faced in the Cold War era, such as the propping up of dictators friendly to US interests, remain salient today.

In 2007, three Muslim university students left the Canadian Prairies, seemingly without a trace. In the ensuing months, their disappearance raised fears that the men had become "radicalized," posing a grave threat to national security. From presidential briefings and targeted drone assassinations to a politically charged trial, the men's story sheds new light not only on the figure of the "radical," but also on the "moderate" Muslim, represented by a community forever changed by the men's departure.

La vérité a souvent un goût amer. Nous ne savons comment accepter nos histoires. Faut-il s'en tenir aux faits et dire la vérité ? Cet ouvrage monumental si richement documenté est précieux, il nous tire de l'oubli et du silence. Que savons-nous de l'esclavage au Canada ? Que savons-nous de la répression exercée sur les femmes et les hommes noirs ? Que savons-nous du racisme systémique ? Que savons-nous de la détresse des Autochtones, des sans-papiers, des personnes réfugiées ? Enfin fort peu...

El estado machista y sus decisiones, el covid-19, la crisis económica subsecuente y la violencia brutal se han ensañado con las mexicanas. Ante esto, la palabra y la sororidad, los datos irrefutables, la explicación, la inteligencia y el diálogo son sus armas. En esta obra, seis periodistas de primer nivel coordinadas por Nayeli Roldán ofrecen reportajes que retratan, con sensibilidad combativa, la situación actual de las mujeres, las consecuencias de las políticas públicas vigentes, el estado de las luchas feministas y los escenarios que se avizoran.

The revolutionary Ohio Valley is often depicted as a chaotic Hobbesian dystopia, in which Indians and colonists slaughtered each other at every turn. In Unsettling the West, Rob Harper overturns this familiar story. Rather than flailing in a morass, the peoples of the revolutionary Ohio Valley actively and persistently sought to establish a new political order that would affirm their land claims, protect them against attack, and promote trade.

In the 19th century, Texas’s advancing western frontier was the site of one of America’s longest conflicts between White settlers and native peoples. The Texas Hill Country functioned as a kind of borderland within the larger borderland of Texas itself, a vast and fluid area where, during the Civil War, the slave-holding South and the nominally free-labor West collided. As in many borderlands, Nicholas Roland argues, the Hill Country was marked by violence.

Jesus an anarchist? That doesn't sound like the Jesus preached by the political establishment, mega church pastors, or even most small town ministers. Nevertheless, Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of God that makes all other political loyalties inconsequential.