Edited by Giacomo Loperfido

Extremism does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, extremism is a relative concept that often emerges in crisis situations, taking shape within the tense and contradictory relations that tie marginal spaces, state orders, and mainstream culture. This collected volume brings together leading anthropologists and cultural analysts to offer a concise look at the narratives, symbolic, and metaphoric fields related to extremism, systematizing an approach to extremism, and placing these ideologies into historical, political, and geo-systemic contexts.

New York; Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books 2021. 194p.

By Derek Hirst

FROM THE PREFACE: “The series of which this volume is a part is intended to provide a narrative history of modern England. A narrative is particularly suited to relating political history - all the more so, perhaps, in a period of civil war and revolution, when so many actions and initia- tives turn out to have been largely reactions to other events in a continuing crisis. Other developments too can appropriately be dis- cussed i na narrative framework. Economic depression, or works of political thought, for example, have claims to inclusion in a narrative history of the period which produced them as legitimate as those they have to inclusion in the thematic surveys in which they more frequently figure. The supremely important developments in Scotland and Ireland in this period can also be integrated. Certain enduring features of English life - social and economic, religious and intellec- tual, even political - do, however, seem unsuited to such treatment. The narrative in this book is therefore prefaced by three detailed introductory chapters which are intended to set the course of events in a broader context….”

Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press. 1986. 398p. USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP.

By Hussein Solomon

What are the factors which have made South Africa so appealing to terrorist and radical islamic organisations? What role has South Africa played within global Jihad? This book examines how South Africa has come to play a major role in global terror networks stemming from growing criminality and corruption within state structures. It also examines the interaction between local and foreign extremist elements which undermine South Africa’s security. The author brings the discussion beyond the usual mundane academic treatise to the sharp reality of the global dangers of politicised Islam – a muslim talking candidly about Islam.

Bloemfontein,  UJ Press, 2013. 149p.

By Christina Parolin

Radical Spaces explores the rise of popular radicalism in London between 1790 and 1845 through key sites of radical assembly: the prison, the tavern and the radical theatre. Access to spaces in which to meet, agitate and debate provided those excluded from the formal arenas of the political nation–the great majority of the population–a crucial voice in the public sphere. Radical Spaces utilises both textual and visual public records, private correspondence and the secret service reports from the files of the Home Office to shed new light on the rise of plebeian radicalism in the metropolis. It brings the gendered nature of such sites to the fore, finding women where none were thought to gather, and reveals that despite the diversity in these spaces, there existed a dynamic and symbiotic relationship between radical culture and the sites in which it operated. These venues were both shaped by and helped to shape the political identity of a generation of radical men and women who envisioned a new social and political order for Britain.

Canberra: ANU Press, 2010. 352p.

By  Jacob Davey, Cécile Simmons, Mario Peucker

The re-emergence of Australia’s far-right in the mid-2010s saw an unprecedented level of online mobilisation and a wave of street protests across the country which were often met with counter-protests by anti-racist and anti-fascist networks, most of them associated with far-left groups. This often resulted in clashes, sometimes violent, between opposed political groups. Potentially violent threats associated with the far-right and, to a significantly lower degree, far-left mobilisation in Australia have become the subject of growing concern for government- and public authorities in recent years.  This demonstrates a shift in understanding of the radical, extremist and terrorist landscape beyond what Australia’s intelligence apparatus now refers to as religiously motivated violent extremism. However, evidence of threats posed by far-left actions remains limited, while the full extent and impact of far-right fringe and extremist activity continues to be investigated by researchers.

Beirut; Berlin; London; Paris; Washington DC : Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), 2022. 19p.

By Batalis, Steph; Puglisi, Anna B.

From the document: "From existing diseases to new and emerging threats, a secure vaccine supply protects a broad range of U.S. interests including public health, economic stability, and biosecurity. Routine vaccinations--from measles and influenza to polio and shingles--keep the American public healthy while increasing life expectancy and decreasing hospitalizations for preventable diseases. Healthy workers contribute to a stable economy by working more productively for longer, and American-made vaccines further advance economic interests by contributing to the growing U.S. bioeconomy. Vaccines are also key to biosecurity, ensuring that our military personnel and communities are protected in the event of a biological attack. Despite the necessity of a resilient vaccine supply, this report identifies two vulnerabilities that threaten the American public's access to vaccines: limited domestic manufacturing and a lack of manufacturing redundancy. A reliance on foreign biomanufacturing means that the United States cannot control vaccine production levels during a public health emergency. Nonredundant manufacturing further increases the risk of vaccine shortages if a vaccine's sole manufacturing facility is disrupted."

Georgetown University. Walsh School Of Foreign Service. Center For Security And Emerging Technology. 2023. 29p.

By Denis Judd

FROM THE COVER: The British Empire radically altered the modern world. At its height it governed over a quarter of the human race, encompassed more than one fifth of the globe and provided the British people with profits and a sense of international purpose. For the people it dominated and controlled, however, the Empire represented arbitrary power, gunboat diplomacy and the disruption of local customs. Yet while it rested upon military force and direct rule, it also pulsated with ideals - of freedom, democracy and even equality.

London. Phoenix Press. 1996. 567p. USED BOOK. CONTAINS MARK-UP

Edited by Korinna Schönhärl, Gisela Hürlimann and Dorothea Rohde

Tax evasion, tax avoidance and tax resistance are widespread phenomena in political, economic, social and fiscal history from antiquity through medieval, early modern and modern times. Histories of Tax Evasion, Avoidance and Resistance shows how different groups and individuals around the globe have succeeded or failed in not paying their due taxes, whether in kind or in cash, on their properties or on their crops. It analyses how, throughout history, wealthy and poor taxpayers have tried to avoid or reduce their tax burden by negotiating with tax authorities, through practices of legal or illegal tax evasion, by filing lawsuits, seeking armed resistance or by migration, and how state authorities have dealt with such acts of claim making, defiance, open resistance or elusion. It fills an important research gap in tax history, addressing questions of tax morale and fairness, and how social and political inequality was negotiated through taxation. …

London; New Yori: Routledge, 2023. 284p.

  Edited by Armin Lange, Kerstin Mayerhofer, Dina Porat, and Lawrence H. Schiffman  

The five volumes provide a compendium of the history of and discourse about antisemitism - both as a unique cultural and religious category. Antisemitic stereotypes function as religious symbols that express and transmit a belief system of Jew-hatred, which are stored in the cultural and religious memories of the Western and Muslim worlds. This volume explores the phenomenon from the perspectives of Philosophy and Social Sciences.

Berlin; Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2022.

Volume 1. Comprehending and Confronting Antisemitism: A Multi-Faceted Approach. 619p.

Volume 2. Confronting Antisemitism from the Perspectives of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. 353p.

Volume 3. Comprehending Antisemitism through the Ages: A Historical Perspective. 484p.

 Volume  4 . Confronting Antisemitism from Perspectives of Philosophy and Social Sciences. 423p.

Volume 5. Confronting Antisemitism in Modern Media, the Legal and Political Worlds. 447p.

By Laura J. Feller

Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 recodified the state’s long-standing racial hierarchy as a more rigid Black-white binary. Then, Virginia officials asserted that no Virginia Indians could be other than legally Black, given centuries of love and marriage across color lines. How indigenous peoples of Virginia resisted erasure and built their identities as Native Americans is the powerful story this book tells. Spanning a century of fraught history, Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia describes the critical strategic work that tidewater Virginia Indians, descendants of the seventeenth-century Algonquian Powhatan chiefdom, undertook to sustain their Native identity in the face of deep racial hostility from segregationist officials, politicians, and institutions. Like other Southeastern Native groups living under Jim Crow regimes, tidewater Native groups and individuals fortified their communities by founding tribal organizations, churches, and schools; they displayed their Indianness in public performances; and they enlisted whites, including well-known ethnographers, to help them argue for their Native distinctness. Describing an arduous campaign marked by ingenuity, conviction, and perseverance, Laura J. Feller shows how these tidewater Native people drew on their shared histories as descendants of Powhatan peoples, and how they strengthened their bonds through living and marrying within clusters of Native Virginians, both on and off reservation lands. She also finds that, by at times excluding African Americans from Indian organizations and Native families, Virginian Indians themselves reinforced racial segregation while they built their own communities. Even as it paved the way to tribal recognition in Virginia, the tidewater Natives’ sustained efforts chronicled in this book demonstrate the fluidity, instability, and persistent destructive power of the construction of race in America.

Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, [2022] 275p.

By Niall Ferguson

FROM THE COVER: Niall Ferguson's Empire is one of the most successful and controversial history books of recent years. Brilliantly re-telling the story of Britain's imperial past, it shows how agang of buccaneers and gold-diggers from a rainy island in the North Atlantic came to build the most powerful empire in all history, how it ended, and how - for better or worse - it made our world what it is today.

London. Penguin. 2004. 453p. USED BOOK. CONTAINS MARK-UP.

By Vladimir Shlapentokh and Joshua Woods

Do Americans live in a liberal capitalist society, or a society in which big money, private security, and personal relations determine key social outcomes? Shlapentokh and Woods argue that the answer to these questions cannot be found among the conventional models. Offering a new analytical tool, the authors present a provocative explanation of the nature of contemporary society by comparing its essential characteristics to those of medieval European societies. Their feudal model emphasizes five elements: the weakness of the state to protect its citizens, conflict and collusion between and within organizations that involve corruption and other forms of illegal or semilegal actions, the dominance of personal relations in political and economic life, the prevalence of an elitist ideology, and the use of private agents and organizations to provide safety and security. Feudal America urges readers to look for explanations of contemporary social problems in medieval European history.

University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2011.

By Eric Wilson

"Eric Wilson’s work poses crucial challenges to social theory, unsettling our understanding of the nature of the liberal democratic state. In The Spectacle of the False Flag, he urges the reader to examine the, often unconsidered, deep state practices that confound conventional notions of the state as monolithic or uniform. This compelling volume traces deep state conflicts and convergences through central cases in the development of American political economic power — JFK/Dallas, LBJ/Gulf of Tonkin, and Nixon/Watergate. Rigorously documented and unflinchingly analyzed, “The Spectacle of the False Flag” provides a stunning example of a new criminological practice—one that takes the state seriously, making the inner workings of the state rather than its effects the primary object of study. Drawing upon a wealth of historical records and developing the theoretical insights of Guy Debord’s writings on spectacular society, Wilson offers a glimpse into a necessary criminology to come."

Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2014. 348p.

By Arie Perliger, Catherine Stevens, and Eviane Leidig

Despite the growing complexity of the online misogynist landscape and important efforts to study some misogynist groups through singular case studies, scholars have a limited understanding of the distinctions between the various relevant misogynist communities in terms of their rhetorical, operational, and social facets. The current research aims to address this gap by employing a multi-layered analytical framework of different misogynist communities. We begin with a comprehensive literature review conceptualising extreme misogyny with an overview of the current misogynist spaces and ideological narratives. Consequently, we sample the online ecosystem of extreme misogyny both within and across these communities while utilising a multi-categorical tool in order to identify the discursive, organisational, and operational distinctions between various misogynist communities. Our findings reflect substantial differences between the various misogynist communities in terms of their legitimacy to violence, the conceptualisation of their adversaries, ideological vision’s time orientation, and overall operational discourse.The 

The Hague: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), 2023. 36p

Edited by Anders Sevelsted and Jonas Tougol

This Open Access book explores the role of morality in social movements. Morality has always been central to social movements whether it be in the form of the moral foundations of movement claims, politics and ideologies, the values motivating participation, the new moral principles envisioned and practiced among movement participants, or the overall struggle over society’s moral values that movements engage in. This is evident in movements emerging from recent interlinked crises: the crisis of human rights, the climate crisis, and the developing crisis of democracy. In analyzing these current events through a variety of theoretical, methodological, and empirical lenses, this book brings morality to the forefront of the discussion, allowing for a rethinking of its role. The book is divided into five parts. The first part introduces and explores the central concept of the book, outlining the dominant existing approaches to morality and ethics in the extant movement and civil society literature. The following three parts investigate morality in relation to topics and movements that are either prominent to contemporary politics or salient to the question of morality. In these empirically informed parts, the authors apply a diverse selection of methods spanning fieldwork, historiography, traditional and novel statistical analytical methods, and big data analysis to a diverse selection of data. Topics discussed include refugee solidarity movements, male privilege and anti-feminism movement, environmental and climate justice movements, and religious activism. The fifth and closing part of the book focuses on the more abstract theoretical question of the relationship between morality and ethics and activist practices and points to future research agendas. This book will be of general interest to students, scholars and academics within the disciplines of political sociology, -science and -anthropology and of particular interest to academics in the subfields of social movement and civil society studies.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2023. 334p.

By Joseph Litvak

In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls “comic cosmopolitanism,” an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the “uncooperative” witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to “name names”.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. 306p.

By Haroon Sheikh; Corien Prins; Erik Schrijvers

This open access book offers a strategic perspective on AI and the process of embedding it in society. After decades of research, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now entering society at large. Due to its general purpose character, AI will change society in multiple, fundamental and unpredictable ways. Therefore, the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) characterizes AI as a system technology: a rare type of technologies that have a systemic impact on society. Earlier system technologies include electricity, the combustion engine and the computer. The history of these technologies provides us with useful insights about what it takes to direct the introduction of AI in society. The WRR identifies five key tasks to structurally work on this process: demystification, contextualisation, engagement, regulation and positioning. By clarifying what AI is (demystification), creating a functional ecosystem (contextualisation), involving diverse stakeholders (engagement), developing directive frameworks (regulation) and engaging internationally (positioning), societies can meaningfully influence how AI settles. Collectively, these activities steer the process of co-development between technology and society, and each representing a different path to safeguard public values. Mission AI - The New System Technology was originally published as an advisory report for the government of the Netherlands. The strategic analysis and the outlined recommendations are, however, relevant to every government and organization that aims to take up 'misson AI' and embed this newest system technology in our world.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2023. 410p.

By Suvi Keskinen

This book provides an original approach to the connections of race, racism and neoliberalisation through a focus on ‘postethnic activism,’ in which mobilisation is based on racialisation as non-white or ‘other’ instead of ethnic group membership. Developing the theoretical understanding of political activism under the neoliberal turn in racial capitalism and the increasingly hostile political environment towards migrants and racialised minorities, the book investigates the conditions, forms and visions of postethnic activism in three Nordic countries (Denmark, Sweden and Finland). It connects the historical legacies of European colonialism to the current configurations of racial politics and global capitalism. The book compellingly argues that contrary to the tendencies of neoliberal postracialism to de-politicise social inequalities the activists are re-politicising questions of race, class and gender in new ways. The book is of interest to scholars and students in sociology, ethnic and racial studies, cultural studies, feminist studies and urban studies.

London; New York: Routledge, 2022. 164p.

By Joseph .J. Ellis

From the Preface: The pages that follow are concerned with the American Revolution, with the generation of Americans that came of age during the revolutionary crisis, with the expectations they harbored for the future of American culture, and with their responses when that future failed to materialize. After attempting to identify the rapidly changing social conditions and values of revolutionary America, I try to tell thestory offour men whoselives grew out of thatsocial context: Charles Willson Peale, an artist; Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a novelist; William Dunlap, a dramatist and theater manager; and Noah Webster, an educator, linguist, and all-purpose polemicist. Each of these men believed that the American Revolution was more than a war for colonial independence. Each expected the Revolution to alter American society in fundamental ways. Each thought that the Revolution would remove long-standing constraints to national development and thereby unleash vast reservoirs of untapped energy within American society and within individual personalities…….Expectations this excessive, you might say, are doomed from the start……

NY. W.W. Norton. 1979. 267p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

Biden, Joseph R., Jr.

From the document: "Hate and the violence it fuels are on the rise in America. Hate crimes, targeted violence, and acts of harassment--including online abuse--have increased in recent years, eroding our democracy, decreasing public trust, and putting so many American communities at risk. We have seen this unfold from bomb threats at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, to rising hate crimes against Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPIs) fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, to escalating threats against women and LGBTQI+ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex and other] Americans, to persistent bias and violence against Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian communities, to harassment of Jews and attacks on Jewish communities. Antisemitism is often called 'the oldest hatred,' yet it remains all too present today--including in America. [...] While antisemitism most directly and intensely affects the American Jewish community, antisemitism also threatens the democracy, values, safety, and rights of all Americans. [...] This strategy represents the most comprehensive and ambitious U.S. government effort to counter antisemitism in American history. To implement this strategy, executive agencies will take a broad array of actions to address antisemitism. But the federal government cannot address antisemitism alone. This strategy also calls on Congress to act and play its part in countering antisemitism. It urges action from all of society--state and local authorities, civil society, community and faith leaders, the private sector, individual citizens."

United States. White House Office. 2023. 60p.