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Western intervention has become a ubiquitous feature of violent conflict in Africa. Humanitarian aid agencies, community peacebuilders, microcredit promoters, children’s rights activists, the World Bank, the International Criminal Court, the US military, and numerous others have involved themselves in African conflicts, all claiming to bring peace and human rights to situations where they are desperately needed. However, according to Adam Branch, Western intervention is not the solution to violence in Africa but, instead, can be a major part of the problem, often undermining human rights and even prolonging war and intensifying anti-civilian violence. Based on an extended case study of Western intervention into northern Uganda’s twenty-year civil war, and drawing on his own extensive research and human rights activism there, this book lays bare the reductive understandings motivating Western intervention in Africa, the inadequate tools it insists on employing, its refusal to be accountable to African citizenries, and, most important, its counterproductive consequences for peace, human rights, and justice. In short, Branch demonstrates how Western interventions undermine the efforts Africans themselves are undertaking to end violence in their own communities. The book does not end with critique, however. Motivated by a commitment to global justice, it proposes concrete changes for Western humanitarian, peacebuilding, and justice interventions as well as a new normative framework for re-orienting the Western approach to violent conflict in Africa around a practice of genuine solidarity.

What sorts of transportation technologies and methods of conveyance have political regimes associated with the movement of weapons, papers, or people for political subversion and revolt? In an era when much transfer of information moves across a wire-tappable medium, and much transport of goods and people occurs across a mapped network of tracks and checkpoints, what social history of the specter of subversive trafficking—and of the associated political fears this specter has been able to elicit—might help us better understand the retrenchment of an older range of possibilities for human mobility? This book pursues these lines of inquiry, focusing on several modes of transportation which have been perceived, in different times and places, as especially useful for clandestine, subversive logistics, and which have also become relatively marginalized and divested from over the past century and a half. The examples treated in the book are mostly animal-based forms of transportation (carrier pigeons, mules, elephants, camels, and sled-dogs) or water-based forms of transportation (especially canal and harbor boats). The book’s overall historical-geographic discussion is mainly concerned with the period from 1850 to 1950, though some examples are from well before or well after this period. The discussion extends to many parts of the world, most of them (with exceptions) places which were at some point in their history within the confines of the British Empire.

This book draws on literature and a never-before-seen cache of photographs taken by a member of the French Resistance (who is also the author's mother), immediately following the Allied bombing of Berlin and other German cities near the end of World War II. The book explores the representation of catastrophe through the gaze of the camera's lens. It uses the medium and witnessing of photography to question the ethics of targeting civilians during war.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of cool have informed the American ethos since at least the 1970s. Whether we strive for it in politics or fashion, cool is big business for those who can sell it across a range of markets and media. Yet the concept wasn’t always a popular commodity. Cool began as a potent aesthetic of post-World War II black culture, embodying a very specific, highly charged method of resistance to white supremacy and the globalized exploitation of capital. Way Too Cool follows the hollowing-out of “coolness” in modern American culture and its reflection of a larger evasion of race, racism, and ethics now common in neoliberal society. It revisits such watershed events as the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, second-wave feminism, the emergence of identity politics, 1980s multiculturalism, 1990s rhetorics of diversity and colorblindness, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, as well as the contemporaneous developments of rising mass incarceration and legalized same-sex marriage. It pairs the perversion of cool with the slow erasure of racial and ethical issues from our social consciousness, which effectively quashes our desire to act ethically and resist abuses of power. The cooler we become, the more indifferent we grow to the question of values, particularly inquiry that spurs protest and conflict. This book sounds an alarm for those who care about preserving our ties to an American tradition of resistance.

With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Our Beloved Kin recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and resistance during the “First Indian War” (later named “King Philip’s War”) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. King Philip’s War (1675-1678) is often viewed as the quintessential moment of colonial conquest and Native resistance, but these stories reveal a historical landscape much more complex than its original Puritan narrators conveyed. Our Beloved Kin also draws readers beyond the locus of most narratives of the war, southern New England, into the northern front, the vast interior of Wabanaki, where the war continued long beyond the death of “King Philip.” Beginning and ending at Caskoak, a place of diplomacy, the book explores the movement of survivors seeking refuge, captives taken in war, and Indigenous leaders pursuing diplomacy in vast Indigenous networks across the northeast. Supplemented by thirteen maps and an interactive website, Our Beloved Kin takes readers into Indigenous geographies, braiding together research in historical archives, including little-known revelatory documents, interpretive frameworks drawn from Indigenous languages, and place-based history which arises from reading “the archive of the land” to offer a compelling new interpretation of “King Philip’s War.”

No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity provides an analysis of the role of gender ideology in the development of southern punishment after the Civil War, arguing that the carceral state circulated and entrenched ideas about gender that were critical to the making of Jim Crow. This book reveals how the criminal legal system crafted, reinforced, and required black female deviance as part of the broader constitution of Jim Crow modernity premised upon the devaluation of black life broadly. A study of imprisoned black women’s historical lives, experiences of violence and labor exploitation, practices of refusal and resistance, and visions of freedom and abolition, this book makes the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class central to the history of convict labor and Jim Crow modernity. No Mercy Here incorporates speculative historical narrative to highlight questions about black women’s interior lives and draws upon a wide array of archival documents to uncover black women’s experiences in local and state carceral institutions including mixed gender and all-women’s convict lease camps, chain gangs, and state prison farms. This study encompasses an analysis of a broad range of carceral technologies including criminalizing discourses, surveillance, arrest and prosecution, visual culture, reform legislation, and gendered racial terror. No Mercy Here examines black women’s organizational protest against convict leasing and examines the blues as a black feminist expressive culture within a black radical tradition, prefiguring the insights of critical race theory and asserting a black feminist abolition democracy through vivid and elaborate theorizations of racial, gendered, sexual, and economic justice and a world beyond prisons.

The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregation is the first complete study of the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, popularly known as the Southern Manifesto. On March 13, 1956, ninety-nine members of the Eighty-Fourth United States Congress promulgated the Southern Manifesto, formally stating opposition to Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the emerging Civil Rights Movement. This book explores a crucial aspect of post-war American history in general and the Civil Rights Movement in particular, most notably that of efforts by southern segregationists to construct a quasi-legal and political defense against the desegregation decisions of the Federal judiciary. This promulgation was also a response to the increasing support by American public opinion to advocates of desegregation, as well as the increasing isolation of the South and its traditional social structures. The Southern Manifesto was seminally important in creating the concerted and ultimately successful effort by white southerners to oppose the implementation of the Brown decision, a movement that came to be known as massive resistance. This study treats the Southern Manifesto as a document in and of itself, analyzing its text, its authors, its supporters and opponents. The Southern Manifesto, therefore, explains where the formation of the segregationist majority came from and how it became the standard for the South during this period, and thus creates a useful window through which to view the racial dynamics of postwar America.

A reimagining of liberal ideologies of selfhood, privilege, and consent is a significant legacy of nineteenth-century black feminist knowledge production. Yet, analyses of black women’s critical engagement with theliberal problematic—the disjunction between democratic promise and dispossession, between freedom and subjection in the American nation-state—remain incomplete. Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival repositions a spectrum of discourses, from canonical nineteenth-century American literary studies to black women’s history, to interrogate black women’s disruptions of the liberal problematic as a medium of resistance. It deploys African-Americanist and feminist literary criticism by scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Lindon Barrett, post-1960s histories of enslavement and black political consciousness by Stephanie M. H. Camp, and rhetorical theories developed by Shirley Wilson Logan and Vorris Nunley, to expand the bounds of contemporary critical inquiry in two key ways. First, Resistance Reimagined spotlights nineteenth-century black women’s intervention into the effects of liberalism as juridical, economic, and affective performance. This unsettles sedimented perspectives of black resistance as inherently militant, male, and vernacular, while problematizing how scholars have read nineteenth-century African-American women’s activism—against Sojourner Truth or Ida B. Wells-Barnett, for instance—as inauthentic or accommodationist. Second, the text juxtaposes early writers and thinkers, including Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper, with authors of modern neo-slave narrative, including Sherley Anne Williams, to grapple more effectively with the neoliberal present.