Outrageously Priced, Rotten Provision of Information, April 16, 2010
Luis de Sousa, Barry Hindess, Peter Larmour
This is probably a very important book, but it will never be bought by most because it is outrageously priced (272 pages, this should be selling for $27.20 at most), and the publisher has been grievously irresponsible in failing to use the free Amazon tools to provide a sufficiency of information. The authors and the content are without question superb. How this book has been offered is itself a study in corruption.
WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.
Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
(2003- 2009: 139 journalists killed)
5.0 out of 5 stars Innovative and courageous social science
June 8, 2009
Eric Wilson and Tim Lindsey (eds)
In this recent volume by Pluto Press, Eric Wilson (Monash University) has assembled an all-stars team of politologists with the objective of changing the face of social analysis. This effort stems from the urgency to redefine the conceptual spaces within which we perforce corral our daily experience as citizens of what has become, in fact, an international polity of overwhelming, as well as highly disquieting, complexity. This is not at all to say, however, that the project limits itself to adding “epicycles,” as it were, to the Ptolemaic vulgate of British constitutionalism–i.e., the standard model of the “Liberal State”–which has imposed itself as the sole lens through which one is to contemplate the social dynamics for every single political reality of this world.
Government of the Shadows (GOS) represents in this regard an honest and brave swerve away from the mainstream in two fundamental respects.
First, it wishes to rethink political science entirely, by rejecting definitively the puritanical dichotomization of society into its predominant and “clean” edifice versus the latter's more or less corrupt “covert netherworld” (p. 228)–the prescriptive implication of conventional analysis being that delinquents need only be jailed, and their activities repressed, as the given regime is in the meantime steered (hopefully) toward the eventual and complete assimilation of Liberal institutions, which will naturally cure it of the criminal deviancy.
Second, and no less important, this project seeks to re-endow the movement for social justice of a unity of intent and of thought, which has lately been shattered by an excessive methodological preoccupation with multiplicity and diversity. By denouncing with reason and cogency the inequities suffered by a majority of innocents–throughout our recent history and all over the world–at the hands of identifiable, responsible parties within the power apparatuses in connivance with the world's mafias, and by ordering all such phenomenological mass into theory, this book, as a collective endeavor, acts as a vigorous reminder that realistic sociological analysis is also very much an instrument of pacific dissent. In this sense, GOS stands as a first and decisive installment of a modern anti-oligarchic theory.
To compass the reality of modern power games in its full spectrum, GOS innovates by proposing the new discipline of “parapolitics,” defined in Robert Cribb's introductory as “the study of criminal sovereignty, of criminals and sovereigns behaving as criminals in a systematic way” (p. 8).
Absolutely a Core Work for the Region and the UN Role in Enabling Peace–Future Oriented as Well
April 3, 2010
Susanne Jonas
I am stunned not to find numerous reviews of this excellent work, a fleshing out of the author's highly-regarded (within the United Nations and global peace-process circles) “The Mined Road to Peace in Guatemala,” (North-South Agenda Paper #38, September 1999. As of today, 3 April 2010, her paper and her book are still the core references for those who seek to extend the model elsewhere in Central and Latin America.
La Ideología Social Demócrata en Costa Rica (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana (EDUCA), 1984); and
Guatemala: Plan Piloto para el Continente (translation of Ph.D. dissertation) (San José,: EDUCA, 1981).
This author was at least a decade if not two decades ahead of her peers and the conventional idiocy in Washington, D.C. Everything she has ever thought, particularly with respect to migrating the process of peace toward a process of prosperity, is relevant right this minute.
The quality of this work overcomes what would normally be a one-star deduction for a lazy unprofessional publisher failing to list the table of contents and provide a sample chapter or even better, assuring Inside the Book information including the Index, one of Amazon's best offerings.
If and when the publisher provides the table of contents and a sample chapter (easy to upload using the standard publishing tools offered by Amazon Advantage) or works with Amazon to achieve Inside the Book access, I will consider buying this book.
In the meantime, I will observer that this book has been highly recommended by Berto Jongman, the top European observer of terrorism and the creator of the World Conflict & Human Rights map, and is so featured at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, where the Amazon reader can find an easy to access section on Jihad and Terrorism with all my reviews on this subject.
My one reservation about this book, lacking a sufficiency of Inside the Book information, is that it appears to assume that if one just does the “right things” such as kill leaders, terrorism will eventually die out. Robert Arkoff would turn in his grave over this thought. Terrorism is a tactic, a manifestation of discontent so grave as to indict the state as a failed state in relation to the needs of the segment adopting terrorism. Hence, this book may be more about doing the wrong things righter instead of doing the right things: assuring every group a prosperous world at peace.
Corruption, not terrorism, is in my view the primary curse of all governments and the global network of interests that seek to optimize wealth for the few at the expense of the many. Terrorism, in my view, is a logical in extremis response, a demand to be taken seriously that governments continue to treat at face value (violent crime) rather than as a root value being expressed (seriously angry people with brains and willpower).
Outrageously Priced, Rotten Provision of Information, April 16, 2010
Absolutely a Core Work for the Region and the UN Role in Enabling Peace–Future Oriented as Well
Needs Inside the Book for Fifth Star
