War Sociology

A remarkable analysis linking the assassination of JFK and 9/11, and how both events were used to influence war policy. Peter Dale Scott examines the many ways in which war policy has been driven by “accidents” and other events in the field, in some cases despite moves toward peace that were directed by presidents. This book explores the “deep politics” that exerts a profound but too-little-understood effect on national policy outside the control of traditional democratic processes.

For the last two decades, Sidney Tarrow has explored "contentious politics" - disruptions of the settled political order caused by social movements. These disruptions range from strikes and street protests to riots and civil disobedience to revolution. In War, States, and Contention, Tarrow shows how such movements sometimes trigger, animate, and guide the course of war and how they sometimes rise during war and in war's wake to change regimes or even overthrow states.

Author Dirk Eldredge demonstates how the drug war has led only to overcrowded courts and prisons, rising crime, official corruption, eroded civil rights and race relations, and new public-health crises. He makes the case for an alternative strategy: tightly controlled legalization accompanied by expanded drug education, prevention, research, and treatment programs.

Dr Kelsy Burke has spent the last five years researching and interviewing internet pornography’s opponents and its sympathizers. In The Pornography Wars, Burke does a deep dive into the long history of pornography in America and then turns her gaze on our present society to examine the ways this industry touches on the most intimate parts of American lives. She offers a complete understanding of the major players in the debates around porn's place in society.

Societies have struggled with pandemics for thousands of years. Plague and cholera, smallpox and influenza; deadly diseases spring up, kill thousands, if not millions, and we still don’t learn. We make the same mistakes again and again. Defeating an infectious agent should not be complicated. The principles of public health are straightforward and have not changed for more than a hundred years.

At this point, all we can do is hope that we will all one day find happiness by doing what we know to be good, which is possibly subterfuge, paying penance for our inhumanities, the mistakes it takes to grow as a person, as people, evolve as a species. Some are mechanized as sheer predators, and others as sheer prey. Life, all life, seeks to survive. The mechanics of the mind is why we go to war. We are built to survive, love, feel, kill, eat, prey, and play. The cosmic recipe of our existence copulates the need for war.