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The essential “on the ground” report on the fastest-growing new threat in the Middle East from the Winner of the 2014 Foreign Affairs Journalist of The Year Award. Out of the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring and Syria, a new threat emerges. While Al-Qaeda is weakened, new jihadi movements, especially ISIS, are starting to emerge. In military operations in June 2014 they were far more successful that Al Qaeda ever were, taking territory that reaches across borders and includes the city of Mosul. The reports of their military coordination and brutality to their victims are chilling. While they call for the formation of a new caliphate once again the West becomes a target. How could things have gone so badly wrong? In The Rise of Islamic State, Cockburn analyses the reasons for the unfolding of US and the West’s greatest foreign policy debacle and the impact that it has on the war torn and volatile Middle East.

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An impassioned manifesto from the author of Booker-winner God of Small Things, one of the most vocal campaigners in the world. India is a nation of 1.2 billion, but the country’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India’s gross domestic product. The rest of the population are ghosts within a system beyond their control. This includes the millions that live on less than $2 a day; or the hundreds of thousands of farmers who commit suicide, unable to escape ruinous debts; where dalits are driven from their villages because the owners want to turn the land to agribusiness. These are examples of a ‘gush up’ economy that has corrupted contemporary India. Capitalism: A Ghost Story examines the dark side of democracy, and shows how the demands of globalized capitalism has subjugated billions of people to racism and exploitation. It is a ferocious attack on the mega corporations that treat India’s natural resources like robber barons, and how they have been able to influence every part of the nation from the government to the army in the rush for profit. But, as Arundhati Roy passionately argues, capitalism is in crisis. The cracks are starting to show in its façade.

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Lefebvre's classic analysis of daily life under capitalism in one complete volume. The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now available for the first time in one complete volume. Written at the birth of post-war consumerism, Critique was an inspiration for the 1968 student revolution in France. It is a founding text of cultural studies and a major influence on the fields of contemporary philosophy, geography, sociology, architecture, political theory and urbanism. Lefebvre takes as his starting point and guide the 'trivial' details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet remaining the only source of resistance and change. This is an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.

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Chilling account ofthe end of party democracy, by the leading political scientist In the long-established democracies of Western Europe, electoral turnouts are in decline, membership is shrinking in the major parties, and those who remain loyal partisans are sapped of enthusiasm. Peter Mair's new book weighs the impact of these changes, which together show that, after a century of democratic aspiration, electorates are deserting the political arena. Mair examines the alarming parallel development that has seen Europe's political elites remodel themselves as a homogeneous professional class, withdrawing into state institutions that offer relative stability in a world of fickle voters. Meanwhile, non-democratic agencies and practices proliferate and gain credibility—not least among them the European Union itself, an organization contributing to the depoliticization of the member states and one whose notorious “democratic deficit” reflects the deliberate intentions of its founders. Ruling the Void offers an authoritative and chilling assessment of the prospects for popular political representation today, not only in the varied democracies of Europe but throughout the developed world.

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Dissecting how facile accusations of “anti-Semitism” are used to stifle dissent. Since the inception of the “War on Terror”, Israel has become increasingly important to Western imperial strategy and ever more aggressive in its policies towards the Palestinians. A key ideological weapon in this development is the cynical and unjustified accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’ to silence protest and dissent.For historical reasons, this tactic has been deployed most forcefully in France, and in the first of the two essays in this book French writers Alain Badiou and Eric Hazan demolish the ‘anti-Semitism is everywhere’ claim used to bludgeon critics of the Israeli state and those who stand in solidarity with the ‘banlieue’ youth. In “The Philo-Semitic Reaction”, Ivan Segré undertakes a meticulous deconstruction of a rampant reactionary trend that identifies Jewish interests with the ‘democratic’ West. Segré’s aim is to uphold a universalist position and to defend Jewish tradition from Zionist ideological distortion.

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Passionate defense of “the political” by the author of The Democratic Paradox Political conflict in our society is inevitable, and the results are often far from negative. How then should we deal with the intractable differences arising from complex modern culture? Developing her groundbreaking political philosophy of agnostics—the search for a radical and plural democracy—Chantal Mouffe examines international relations, strategies for radical politics, the future of Europe and the politics of artistic practices. She shows that in many circumstances where no alternatives seem possible, agonistics offers a new road map for change. Engaging with cosmopolitanism, post-operaism, and theories of multiple modernities she argues in favor of a multipolar world with a real cultural and political pluralism.

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Groundbreaking exploration of the philosophy underpinning Western humanitarian intervention. The principle of the “lesser evil,” which asserts that it is acceptable to pursue an undesirable course of action in order to prevent a greater injustice, exercises a powerful influence on Western ethical philosophy and modern politics. In The Least of All Possible Evils , Eyal Weizman examines the dark side of this pragmatism, arguing that too often the end becomes a mechanism for perpetuating the means. Weizman traces a genealogy of the “lesser evil,” from classical ethics and Christian theology, through the political theory of Hannah Arendt to contemporary debates on humanitarianism. He examines the application of this principle through his signature forensic–architectural investigation of sites of contemporary conflict: the relief centres set up by Médecins Sans Frontières during its intervention in Ethiopia in the 1980s; the legal debates around the building of the separation wall in Israel–Palestine; and developments in the application of international human rights law in Bosnia, Palestine and Iraq. But it is in relation to Israel’s domination of the Gaza Strip that the theoretical and political reflections of the book converge. Gaza, where the principle of the lesser evil is invoked to justify a new type of humanitarian violence, is the proper noun for the horrors of our humanitarian present.

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The first book to explore the Occupy movement in depth, with reportage and analysis. In the fall of 2011, a small protest camp in downtown Manhattan exploded into a global uprising, sparked in part by the violent overreactions of the police. An unofficial record of this movement, Occupy! combines adrenalin-fueled first-hand accounts of the early days and weeks of Occupy Wall Street with contentious debates and thoughtful reflections, featuring the editors and writers of the celebrated n+1 , as well as some of the world’s leading radical thinkers, such as Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, and Rebecca Solnit. The book conveys the intense excitement of those present at the birth of a counterculture, while providing the movement with a serious platform for debating goals, demands, and tactics. Articles address the history of the “horizontalist” structure at OWS; how to keep a live-in going when there is a giant mountain of laundry building up; how very rich the very rich have become; the messages and meaning of the “We are the 99%” tumblr website; occupations in Oakland, Boston, Atlanta, and elsewhere; what happens next; and much more.

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Leading international voices condemn the brutalities of the Kashmir occupation. At home, the Kashmiri people’s ongoing quest for justice and self-determination is as much ignored by their venal politicians as it is rejected by Pakistan. Internationally, their struggle is forgotten, as the West refuses to bring pressure to bear on its regional ally India. Kashmir: The Case for Freedom is an impassioned attempt to redress this imbalance and to fill the gap in our moral imagination. Covering Kashmir’s past and present and the occupation’s causes and consequences, the authors issue a clarion call for the withdrawal of Indian troops and for Kashmir’s right to self-determination.

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Leading analysts of Egypt on repression, dissent and the dramatic revolution. The toppling of Hosni Mubarak marked the beginning of a revolutionary restructuring of Egypt’s political and social order. Jeannie Sowers and Chris Toensing bring together updated essays from Middle East Report—the premier journal covering the region—that offer unrivaled analysis of the major social and political trends that underpinned these tumultuous events. Starting with the momentous eighteen days of street protest that compelled Mubarak’s resignation, the volume moves back in time to plumb the state’s strategies of repression and examine the mounting dissent of workers, democracy advocates, anti-war activists, and social and environmental campaigners. Leading analysts of Egypt detail the demographic and economic trends that produced wealth for the few and impoverishment for the many. The collection brings clear-headed, first-hand understanding to bear on a moment of intense hope and uncertainty in the Arab world’s most populous nation.

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