Private Armies in the Culture of Capitalism

Private Armies in the Culture of Capitalism PDF Author: Stan C. Weeber
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1450009344
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description
This book explores an alternative perspective for evaluating the phenomenon of contemporary private armies in the Americas, Central Asia and the Middle East. I proceed with the basic assumption that there is a worldwide culture of capitalism—whose goal is uninterrupted economic growth—that is the milieu for the creation and development of such armies. The advance or decline of such entities may be related to economic factors and/or the resistance of state structures. While many private armies are antisystemic, a response to the rapidly changing worldwide capitalism and the uncertainties that such changes entail, there are also prosystemic private armies such as Blackwater, USA whose job is to maintain a milieu for sustained economic growth throughout the world, wherever hot spots may arise. Private armies can be employed to uphold an economic system as well as to disrupt it.

Private Armies in the Culture of Capitalism

Private Armies in the Culture of Capitalism PDF Author: Stan C. Weeber
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1450009344
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 119

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores an alternative perspective for evaluating the phenomenon of contemporary private armies in the Americas, Central Asia and the Middle East. I proceed with the basic assumption that there is a worldwide culture of capitalism—whose goal is uninterrupted economic growth—that is the milieu for the creation and development of such armies. The advance or decline of such entities may be related to economic factors and/or the resistance of state structures. While many private armies are antisystemic, a response to the rapidly changing worldwide capitalism and the uncertainties that such changes entail, there are also prosystemic private armies such as Blackwater, USA whose job is to maintain a milieu for sustained economic growth throughout the world, wherever hot spots may arise. Private armies can be employed to uphold an economic system as well as to disrupt it.

America's Culture of Terrorism

America's Culture of Terrorism PDF Author: Jeffory A. Clymer
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807861510
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Although the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 shocked the world, America has confronted terrorism at home for well over a century. With the invention of dynamite in 1866, Americans began to worry about anonymous acts of mass violence in a way that differed from previous generations' fears of urban riots, slave uprisings, and mob violence. Focusing on the volatile period between the 1886 Haymarket bombing and the 1920 bombing outside J. P. Morgan's Wall Street office, Jeffory Clymer argues that economic and cultural displacements caused by the expansion of industrial capitalism directly influenced evolving ideas about terrorism. In America's Culture of Terrorism, Clymer uncovers the roots of American terrorism and its impact on American identity by exploring the literary works of Henry James, Ida B. Wells, Jack London, Thomas Dixon, and Covington Hall, as well as trial transcripts, media reports, and the cultural rhetoric surrounding terrorist acts of the day. He demonstrates that the rise of mass media and the pressures of the industrial wage-labor economy both fueled the development of terrorism and shaped society's response to it. His analysis not only sheds new light on American literature and culture a century ago but also offers insights into the contemporary understanding of terrorism.

Imperialism and Postcolonialism

Imperialism and Postcolonialism PDF Author: Barbara Bush
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317870107
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This account of imperialism explores recent intellectual, theoretical and conceptual developments in imperial history, including interdisciplinary and post-colonial perspectives. Exploring the links between empire and domestic history, it looks at the interconnections and comparisons between empire and imperial power within wider developments in world history, covering the period from the Roman to the present American empire. The book begins by examining the nature of empire, then looks at continuity and change in the historiography of imperialism and theoretical and conceptual developments. It covers themes such as the relationship between imperialism and modernity, culture and national identity in Britain. Suitable for undergraduates taking courses in imperial and colonial history.

How Will Capitalism End?

How Will Capitalism End? PDF Author: Wolfgang Streeck
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784784028
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The provocative political thinker asks if it will be with a bang or a whimper In How Will Capitalism End? the acclaimed analyst of contemporary politics and economics Wolfgang Streeck argues that capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth is giving way to secular stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the capitalist money economy has all but evaporated. Capitalism’s shotgun marriage with democracy since 1945 is breaking up as the regulatory institutions restraining its advance have collapsed, and after the final victory of capitalism over its enemies no political agency capable of rebuilding them is in sight. The capitalist system is stricken with at least five worsening disorders for which no cure is at hand: declining growth, oligarchy, starvation of the public sphere, corruption and international anarchy. In this arresting book Wolfgang Streeck asks whether we are witnessing a long and painful period of cumulative decay: of intensifying frictions, of fragility and uncertainty, and of a steady succession of “normal accidents.”

Ritual Ground

Ritual Ground PDF Author: Douglas C. Comer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520918702
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
From about 1830 to 1849, Bent's Old Fort, located in present-day Colorado on the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail, was the largest trading post in the Southwest and the mountain-plains region. Although the raw enterprise and improvisation that characterized the American westward movement seem to have little to do with ritual, Douglas Comer argues that the fort grew and prospered because of ritual and that ritual shaped the subsequent history of the region to an astonishing extent. At Bent's Old Fort, rituals of trade, feasting, gaming, marriage, secret societies, and war, as well as the "calcified ritual" provided by the fort itself, brought together and restructured Anglo, Hispanic, and American Indian cultures. Comer sheds new light on this heretofore poorly understood period in American history, building at the same time a powerfully convincing case to demonstrate that the human world is made through ritual. Comer gives his narrative an anthropological and philosophical framework; the events at Bent's Old Fort provide a compelling example not only of "world formation" but of a world's tragic collapse, culminating in the Sand Creek massacre. He also calls attention to the reconstructed Bent's Old Fort on the site of the original. Here visitors reenact history, staff work out personal identities, and groups lobby for special versions of history by ritual recasting of the past as the present.

Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing

Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing PDF Author: Kyle Grayson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317238974
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The deployment of remotely piloted air platforms (RPAs) - or drones - has become a defining feature of contemporary counter-insurgency operations. Scholarly analysis and public debate has primarily focused on two issues: the legality of targeted killing and whether the practice is effective at disrupting insurgency networks, and the intensive media and activist scrutiny of the policy processes through which targeted killing decisions have been made. While contributing to these ongoing discussions, this book aims to determine how targeted killing has become possible in contemporary counter-insurgency operations undertaken by liberal regimes. Each chapter is oriented around a problematisation that has shaped the cultural politics of the targeted killing assemblage. Grayson argues that in order to understand how specific forms of violence become prevalent, it is important to determine how problematisations that enable them are shaped by a politico-cultural system in which culture operates in conjunction with technological, economic, governmental, and geostrategic elements. The book also demonstrates that the actors involved - what they may be attempting to achieve through the deployment of this form of violence, how they attempt to achieve it, and where they attempt to achieve it - are also shaped by culture. The book demonstrates how the current social relations prevalent in liberal societies contain the potential for targeted killing as a normal rather than extraordinary practice. It will be of great use for academic specialists and graduate students in international studies, geography, sociology, cultural studies and legal studies.

Neoliberal Culture

Neoliberal Culture PDF Author: Patricia Ventura
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317089081
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Departing from the conventional understanding of neoliberalism as a set of economic and political policies favoring free markets, Neoliberal Culture presents a framework for analyzing neoliberalism in the United States as a culture-or structure of feeling- which shapes American everyday life. The book proposes five 'components' as the keys to any study of American neoliberal culture: biopower, corporatocracy, globalization, the erosion of welfare-state society, and hyperlegality, these five components enabling rich analyses of key artifacts of the neoliberal era, including the Iraq War, Las Vegas, welfare reform, Walmart, and Oprah's Book Club. Carefully organized according to its central themes and adopting a case study approach in order to allow for thorough, illustrated analyses, this book is an important tool for scholars and students of contemporary cultural studies, popular culture, American Studies, and sociology.

Ethnicity, Commodity, In/Corporation

Ethnicity, Commodity, In/Corporation PDF Author: George Paul Meiu
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025304796X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
In the economics of everyday life, even ethnicity has become a potential resource to be tapped, generating new sources of profit and power, new ways of being social, and new visions of the future. Throughout Africa, ethnic corporations have been repurposed to do business in mining or tourism; in the USA, Native American groupings have expanded their involvement in gaming, design, and other industries; and all over the world, the commodification of culture has sown itself deeply into the domains of everything from medicine to fashion. Ethnic groups increasingly seek empowerment by formally incorporating themselves, by deploying their sovereign status for material ends, and by copyrighting their cultural practices as intellectual property. Building on ethnographic case studies from Kenya, Nepal, Peru, Russia, and many other countries, this collection poses the question: Does the turn to the incorporation and commodification of ethnicity really herald a new historical moment in the global politics of identity?

Army History

Army History PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Military history
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description


Decentralisation and the Local State Under Peripherial Capitalism

Decentralisation and the Local State Under Peripherial Capitalism PDF Author: Tofail Ahmed
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Decentralization in government
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description