Human Rights Politics

Eye-opening accounts of heroic resistance to religious extremism. From Karachi to Tunis, Kabul to Tehran, across the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and beyond, these trailblazers often risked death to combat the rising tide of fundamentalism within their own countries. But this global community of writers, artists, doctors, musicians, museum curators, lawyers, activists, and educators of Muslim heritage remains largely invisible, lost amid the heated coverage of Islamist terror attacks on one side and abuses perpetrated against suspected terrorists on the other.

The Naked God is Howard Fast's public repudiation of the Communist Party, of which he was a devoted member for thirteen years until reading about the full scope of atrocities committed by the Soviet Union under Stalin. The best-selling author of Spartacus and Citizen Tom Paine, Howard Fast lent his writing talents and celebrity to the communist cause as a steadfast advocate and public figure. However, he felt increasingly ill at ease with the superior manner Party leaders took with rank-and-file members and with rumors of Soviet anti-Semitism.

In What Women Want, Deborah L. Rhode, one of the nation's leading scholars on women and law, brings to the discussion a broad array of interdisciplinary research as well as interviews with heads of leading women's organizations. Is the women's movement stalled? What are the major obstacles it confronts? What are its key priorities and what strategies might advance them? In addressing those questions, the audiobook explores virtually all of the major policy issues confronting women.

In April 2004, an illegally leaked U.S. Army report thrust CACI, an information technology company, into the international spotlight by casting suspicion on a CACI employee for being "either directly or indirectly responsible" for the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. At the same time, pictures from the abuses were shown on national television and tarnished anyone associated with Abu Ghraib - including CACI. What ensued was a media frenzy rarely seen by any company in recent decades.

Jesper Bengtsson presents a portrait of one of today’s most significant political activists. He chronicles her background as the daughter of Burma’s liberation hero Aung San, the years she spent in England and New York, and her return to Burma in the 1980s. First placed under house arrest by the military junta in 1989, she spent 15 of the subsequent 21 years in captivity, separated from her husband and two children. Throughout that period, she remained a unifying figure and activist for Burma’s democracy movement.

Under the current administration, not only are the civil rights of foreigners in jeopardy, but those of U.S. citizens. A public defender for 29 years, Steven Wax interweaves the stories of two men that he represented: Brandon Mayfield, an American-born lawyer and family man, arrested as a suspected terrorist after a fingerprint was incorrectly traced back to him by the FBI; and Adel Hamad, a Sudanese hospital administrator taken from his apartment to a Pakistani prison and then flown in chains to the United States military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

A groundbreaking collection of essays by celebrated international writers bears witness to the human cost of 50 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

In the 20th century, free people faced a number of mortal threats, ranging from despotism, fascism, and communism to the looming menace of global terrorism. While the struggle against some of these overt dangers continues, some insidious new threats seem to have slipped past our intellectual defenses. These often unchallenged threats are quietly eroding our hard-won freedoms and, in some cases, are widely accepted as beneficial. In New Threats to Freedom, editor and author Adam Bellow has assembled an all-star lineup of innovative thinkers to challenge these insidious new threats.

In the aftermath of Jo Cox's tragic death in 2016, her husband, Brendan Cox, urged us to remember Jo's life and what she stood for and not the manner of her death. In this moving and impassioned portrait of Jo - as daughter, mother, wife, sister, MP and activist - we see how much she gave and how much more she had to give, and her legacy of values and beliefs which will live on.

Where do journalists find the guts to keep telling the truth in places where truth-telling will get them murdered? Organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters sans frontières bring us the death toll from around the world, and that number is truly daunting: since 1992 more than 730 journalists have been killed - nearly three-quarters of them targeted and murdered. Over 85% of the fallen have been local journalists trying to unveil violence and corruption in their own back yards. Worse, 95% of the people who ordered their murder remain unpunished.

When a naturalized American citizen turns up missing in Iraq, Brent Marks fights the Goliath US Government's Patriot Act with its own constitution. Santa Barbara accountant Ahmed Khury responds to the plea of his brother, Sabeen, a suspected money launderer in Iraq. Before Ahmed realizes what has happened to him, he is sent to Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp as a suspected terrorist and is subjected to torture to extract information he doesn't have.

In this dramatic first-person narrative, Greg Mortenson picks up where Three Cups of Tea left off in 2003, recounting his relentless, ongoing efforts to establish schools for girls in Afghanistan; his extensive work in Azad Kashmir and Pakistan after a massive earthquake hit the region in 2005; and the unique ways he has built relationships with Islamic clerics, militia commanders, and tribal leaders. He shares for the first time his broader vision to promote peace through education and literacy.

Barely a year after the self-immolation of a young fruit seller in Tunisia, a vast wave of popular protest has convulsed the Middle East, overthrowing long-ruling dictators and transforming the region’s politics almost beyond recognition. But the biggest transformations of what has been labeled as the “Arab Spring” are yet to come. An insider to both American policy and the world of the Arab public, Marc Lynch shows that the fall of particular leaders is but the least of the changes that will emerge from months of unrest.

How Sex Became a Civil Liberty is the first book to show how and why we have come to see sexual expression, sexual practice, and sexual privacy as fundamental rights. Using rich archival sources and oral interviews, historian Leigh Ann Wheeler shows how the private lives of women and men in the American Civil Liberties Union shaped their understanding of sexual rights as they built the constitutional foundation for the twentieth-century's sexual revolutions.

En janvier 1789, bravant l'interdit qui leur est fait d'exprimer leurs doléances, les femmes osent faire entendre leur voix. De Normandie, Madame B. B. écrit : "Étant démontré, avec raison, qu'un noble ne peut représenter un roturier ni celui-ci un noble, de même les femmes ne pourraient être représentées que par des femmes." Après 1791 et la Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, d'Olympe de Gouges, les femmes, toujours exclues de la citoyenneté, exigent leurs droits et les fondent sur les principes mêmes de la Révolution.

The 19th daughter of a local village leader in rural Afghanistan, Fawzia Koofi was left to die in the sun after birth by her mother. But she survived, and perseverance in the face of extreme hardship has defined her life ever since. Despite the abuse of her family, the exploitative Russian and Taliban regimes, the murders of her father, brother, and husband, and numerous attempts on her life, she rose to become the first Afghani woman Parliament speaker.

When Maziar Bahari left London in June 2009 to cover Iran's presidential election, he assured his pregnant fiancée, Paola, that he'd be back in just a few days, a week at most. Little did he know, as he kissed her good-bye, that he would spend the next three months in Iran’s most notorious prison, enduring brutal interrogation sessions at the hands of a man he knew only by his smell: Rosewater.

In this ground-breaking book, Ben Ramalingam shows that the linear, mechanistic models and assumptions on which foreign aid is built would be more at home in early-20th-century factory floors than in the dynamic, complex world we face today. All around us, we can see the costs and limitations of dealing economies and societies as if they are analogous to machines. The reality is that such social systems have far more in common with ecosystems: They are complex, dynamic, diverse, and unpredictable.

Mildred Jeter Loving and Richard Perry Loving wanted to live out their married life near family in Virginia, but the state refused to let them. The reason: Richard was white and Mildred was black. After being arrested and charged with a crime, the Lovings were forced to leave their home—until they turned to the legal system. In one of the country’s landmark legal battles, Loving v. Virginia, the Lovings secured their future when the Supreme Court struck down all state laws prohibiting mixed marriage.

Barrister Michael Mansfield, KC, has spent his career fighting injustice, persecution and corruption. And be it the Birmingham Six, Bloody Sunday, Stephen Lawrence, the Marchioness, Hillsborough or Grenfell, he has come to learn one thing - that people power is unstoppable. Michael draws upon his 50 years of fighting for justice and revisits his most important cases and clients, proving without doubt that when people get together they can make lasting and positive change.