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By Paul Fussell

In his thought-provoking book "Class," Paul Fussell delves into the intricate world of social hierarchies and distinctions. Through keen observation and meticulous analysis, Fussell explores how class permeates every aspect of society, from language and fashion to education and values. Drawing on examples from literature, history, and everyday life, he uncovers the unspoken rules and codes that govern social interactions and shape our perceptions of one another. A fascinating and insightful read, "Class" challenges readers to reflect on their own place within the complex tapestry of social class.

Simon and Schuster, 1992, 239 pages

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By Fritz Redl and David Wineman

"Children Who Hate," co-authored by Fritz Redl and David Wineman, delves into the complex and often misunderstood world of childhood aggression and hatred. Drawing from their extensive research and experience in child psychology, the authors provide insightful analysis and practical strategies for understanding and addressing these challenging behaviors. Through real-life case studies and compassionate guidance, Redl and Wineman offer a valuable resource for parents, educators, and mental health professionals seeking to support and empower children struggling with intense negative emotions. "Children Who Hate" is a compelling and enlightening read that sheds light on the roots of childhood hostility and offers hope for fostering healthier, more positive relationships with young individuals.

The Free Press, 1966, 288 pages

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Edited by JOSEPH and BARRIE KLAITS

Animals and Man in Historical Perspective edited by Joseph and Barrie Klaits provides a comprehensive exploration of the complex relationship between humans and animals throughout history. This collection of essays delves into various historical periods, offering insightful perspectives on how animals have influenced and been influenced by human societies. From ancient civilizations to modern times, the book examines the ways in which animals have been perceived, treated, and utilized by humans in different cultural contexts. The editors, renowned scholars in their field, have curated a thought-provoking anthology that sheds light on the intricate interplay between animals and mankind, making it essential reading for anyone interested in understanding our shared history.

Harper & Row, 1974, 169 pages

Edited by  Lia Kent, Joanne Wallis and Claire Cronin

"Over the last two decades, civil society has helped catalyse responses to the legacies of violent conflicts and oppressive political regimes in Asia and the Pacific. Civil society has advocated for the establishment of criminal trials and truth commissions, monitored their operations and pushed for take-up of their recommendations. It has also initiated community-based transitional justice responses. Yet, there has been little in-depth examination of the breadth and diversity of these roles. This book addresses this gap by analysing the heterogeneity of civil society transitional justice activity in Asia and the Pacific. Based upon empirically grounded case studies of Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Bougainville, Solomon Islands and Fiji, this book illustrates that civil society actors can have different – and sometimes competing – priorities, resources and approaches to transitional justice. Their work is also underpinned by diverse understandings of ‘justice’. By reflecting on the richness of this activity, this book advances contemporary debates about transitional justice and civil society. It will also be a valuable resource for scholars and practitioners working on Asia and the Pacific."

Canberra: ANU Press The Australian National University. 2019, 258pg

By Katherine Sorrels, Lora Arduser, Danielle Bessett, Vanessa Carbonell, Michelle McGowan, and Edward Wallace

In early March of 2020, Americans watched with uncertain terror as the novel coronavirus pandemic unfolded. One week later, Ohio announced its first confirmed cases. Just one year later, the state had over a million cases and 18,000 Ohioans had died. What happened in that first pandemic year is not only a story of a public health disaster, but also a story of social disparities and moral dilemmas, of lives and livelihoods turned upside down, and of institutions and safety nets stretched to their limits. Ohio under COVID tells the human story of COVID in Ohio, America’s bellwether state. Scholars and practitioners examine the pandemic response from multiple angles, and contributors from numerous walks of life offer moving first-person reflections. Two themes emerge again and again: how the pandemic revealed a deep tension between individual autonomy and the collective good, and how it exacerbated social inequalities in a state divided along social, economic, and political lines. Chapters address topics such as mask mandates, ableism, prisons, food insecurity, access to reproductive health care, and the need for more Black doctors. The book concludes with an interview with Dr. Amy Acton, the state’s top public health official at the time COVID hit Ohio. Ohio under COVID captures the devastating impact of the pandemic, both in the public discord it has unearthed and in the unfair burdens it has placed on the groups least equipped to bear them.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2023, 341pg

By Cara Ebert, Janina Isabel Steinert:

We study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on domestic violence against women in Germany in 2020. The analysis draws on three data sources: (1) longitudinal administrative data on the volume of help requests to helplines, shelters and counselling services, (2) cross-sectional survey data collected during the first wave of the pandemic, and (3) a qualitative online survey with counsellors and domestic violence experts. The number of violence-related requests at helplines increased significantly by 29% with the first physical distancing measures, whereas ambulatory care services such as shelters experienced a 19% increase in help requests only after physical distancing restrictions were lifted. Our results indicate that individuals substituted help services away from ambulatory care towards helplines. We do not observe exacerbated violence in states with greater mobility reductions, lower daycare capacity for childcare or higher COVID-19 infection numbers. Our findings highlight the importance of providing easily accessible online counselling offers for survivors of violence and governmental financial relief packages.

IZA DP No. 16793 Bonn, Germany: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, 2024. 47p.

By John Feffer

In a post-Trump world, the right is still very much in power. Significantly more than half the world’s population currently lives under some form of right-wing populist or authoritarian rule. Today’s autocrats are, at first glance, a diverse band of brothers. But religious, economic, social and environmental differences aside, there is one thing that unites them - their hatred of the liberal, globalised world. This unity is their strength, and through control of government, civil society and the digital world they are working together across borders to stamp out the left. In comparison, the liberal left commands only a few disconnected islands - Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain and Uruguay. So far they have been on the defensive, campaigning on local issues in their own countries. This narrow focus underestimates the resilience and global connectivity of the right. In this book, John Feffer speaks to world’s leading activists to show how international leftist campaigns must come together if they are to combat the rising tide of the right. A global Green New Deal, progressive trans-European movements, grassroots campaigning on international issues with new and improved language and storytelling are all needed if we are to pull the planet back from the edge of catastrophe. This book is both a warning and an inspiration to activists terrified by the strengthening wall of far-right power.

London: Pluto Press, 2021.

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.

By Amy Lai

In this book, Amy Lai examines the current free speech crisis in Western universities. She studies the origin, history, and importance of freedom of speech in the university setting, and addresses the relevance and pitfalls of political correctness and microaggressions on campuses, where laws on harassment, discrimination, and hate speech are already in place, along with other concepts that have gained currency in the free speech debate, including deplatforming, trigger warning, and safe space. Looking at numerous free speech disputes in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, the book argues for the equal application of the free speech principle to all expressions to facilitate respectful debates. All in all, it affirms that the right to free expression is a natural right essential to the pursuit of truth, democratic governance, and self-development, and this right is nowhere more important than in the university.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023. 306p.

By Victoria Guillén-Nieto

Hate speech creates environments that are conducive to hate crimes and broad-scale conflict. This book discusses the mechanics of hate speech and its expression from a linguistic perspective. The author addresses the challenges that legal practitioners and linguists meet when dealing with hate speech, especially with the advent of social media, and offers the reader a comprehensive linguistic approach to the legal problem of hate speech.

Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2023. 190p.

By Munira Mustaffa

The policy brief makes the case that policymakers and practitioners need to consider who the state defines as ‘extremists.’ In the West, terrorism and violent extremism are seen as the most radical expressions of anti-government resistance. Things, however, look different in the Global South where some governments effectively foster extremists of their own while targeting legitimate and often nonviolent opposition. Echoes of such an approach are also present in Europe where certain (semi-) authoritarian governments securitise their responses to political dissent while seemingly drawing inspiration from more autocratic regimes outside this continent. Thus, in their case, an attempt to counter real or imagined extremism could consequently and likewise lead them to foster extremists of their own. This policy brief will focus on the case of Malaysia, where cyber troopers, or cytros, i.e., groups of coordinated trolling individuals (either paid or voluntary), are deployed for political messaging or conduct online malign influence operations to manipulate and manage the public opinion on domestic political issues. The red-ragging tactic brands individuals or groups as communists or terrorists to justify coercive actions against them or creates some green scares that could focus on individuals who allegedly belong to the Islamist extremist milieu. Ironically, these strategies, which seem to target extremists, nurture a peculiar brand of pro-government extremism themselves. Using Malaysia as a case study, this policy brief hopes to demonstrate how the ethno-nationalist political actors and their agents use polarising hate speech, the weaponisation of conspiracy theories, and religious supremacy as a criterion for belonging to manage democratic constituents by exploiting existing socio-political divisions.

The Hague: The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) , 2024. 18p.

By Michael Nishimura

As opposed to limiting the scope of anti-Asian violence to “hate,” this article frames anti-Asian violence as inextricable from U.S. empire. Building on Go (2020) American Journal of Sociology 125 (5):1193, I theorize what I call the “imperial feedback loop” to conceptualize anti-Asian violence within a postcolonial and transnational context. Using a series of life history interviews, I chart the pathways of two Cambodian American refugees along the migration-to-school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline. I find that cyclical and intergenerational trauma, the criminalization of Cambodian youth, and refugee deportability sustains the psychological and structural violence of the imperial feedback loop. I relate these findings to Du Boisian scholarship on criminality and imperialism and Asian Americanist scholarship on refugee subjectivity. I conclude by suggesting the interruption of the imperial feedback loop through anti-PIC and anti-border organizing and scholarship that critiques the roots of imperial violence and builds toward abolitionist democratic futures.

United States, Sociological Inquiry. 2023, 22pg

By Malik Almaliki

Cyberhate against a person or a group based on their apparent identity, such as ethnicity, religion or nationality, on social media platforms is quickly growing and spreading. This has negative effects on both the online-generated content quality and the users of these platforms. Fortunately, the interest of computer science researchers in finding ways to stop cyberhate spread on social media platforms has been increasing recently. However, and to the best knowledge of the author, no studies have yet provided an overview and categorization of the various forms of conducted research on this subject, despite the increased interest in the subject. The author attempts to address this gap by performing a systematic mapping of the literature to generate an inclusive view of the subject in the last ten years (2012-2022). As a result, 274 primary studies were identified that fulfilled the devised criteria for including and excluding articles related to the context of this study. Following that, a grouping of these primary studies into categories based on their research type, contribution type, and research focus was conducted. The findings showed that the majority of the studies focused on offering cyberhate detection solutions. The findings also show that evaluation and validation of cyberhate detection solution, employing digital intervention approaches for reducing cyberhate dissemination by users, and the prevention and management of cyberhate propagation are all areas where research is lacking. The goal of this study is to assist practitioners and domain researchers in identifying current research gaps and promising areas for future research. 

New York City, IEEE Access. 2023, 8pg

By Gabriel Ahmanideen

In the aftermath of the war on terror, mosques have become targets for hate groups, leveraging online platforms to amplify global anti-mosque campaigns. These groups link local protestors with international hate networks, fuelling both online and offline (i.e., onsite) anti-mosque campaigns. Thoroughly reviewing the literature addressing the interaction between online and offline Islamophobia and introducing an anti-mosque social media page instilling the public with online and offline anti-mosque hate, this article suggests a strong interaction between online and offline Islamophobia. In the provided case study from the Stop Mosque Bendigo (SMB), purposeful sampling was used to collect postings before and after the Christchurch Mosque attacks to analyse the evolution of online anti-mosque campaigns in tandem with real-life hate cases. The literature and the case study reveal the interaction between local and global, digital, and physical realms, as well as the convergence of everyday racism with extremist far-right ideologies like the Great Replacement theory. Relying on the present literature and indicative findings, the article advocates for systematic investigations to uncover the direct connection between online hate and physical attacks and urges closer monitoring and accountability for those online platforms and social media pages apparently contributing to onsite hate-driven actions.

Australia, Sociology Compass. 2023, 14pg

By Vidisha Bajaj

Amidst high-profile incidents of hate violence against religious and caste minorities, the Indian Supreme Court laid down a series of guidelines to address mob violence and lynching in its July 2018 Tehseen Poonawalla order. The order mandated a police supervisory structure and stronger official accountability, more stringent penal provisions, victim and witness protection, and more expansive compensation and rehabilitation schemes. It also recommended the enactment of anti-lynching legislation. This article contributes to the conversation about the order’s implementation by drawing from the empirical work conducted by Jindal Global Law School’s (JGLS) legal clinic on hate crimes. It focuses on how the police deploy their official discretion in investigating and prosecuting incidents of mob violence and lynching. First, based on detailed interviews of police officials, the article shows how the ambiguity of the category of lynching continues to plague the implementation of the order. Second, taking a case study of a potential hate crime investigation, it shows how the police structures investigations and charges to undermine the goals of criminal law. This article shows that police officials use their discretion to construct lynching — during various stages of investigation and charging — to obscure and invisibilise the crime. This quotidian exercise of discretion is shaped by broader systemic problems in India’s criminal justice system, especially its lack of independence, inadequate training, and institutional bias. The article advocates that these systemic concerns must be integrated in a meaningful response to mob lynching and hate crimes in India.

India, Jindal Global Law Review. 2020, 34pg

By Wojciech Kaczkowski

Suicide, including firearm suicide, remains a substantial public health concern in the United States. During the previous 2 decades, overall suicide rates and firearm suicide rates have risen by approximately one third, approaching 50,000 overall suicides during 2022, including approximately 27,000 firearm suicides (1). Firearm suicides account for approximately one half of all suicides, and this proportion has been increasing (2,3). This analysis includes national firearm suicide data from 2019 through the end of 2022, categorized by race and ethnicity, presented both annually and by month (or quarterly) to track subannual changes.

United States, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 2019-2022, 2pg

By Bennett Clifford

Abstract:

After a five-year period between 2014 and 2019 in which the frequency and lethality of domestic terrorism incidents in the United States substantially increased, federal counterterrorism authorities now view domestic violent extremism (DVE) as the foremost terrorist threat facing the country. In March 2021, the Office for the Director of National Intelligence released an assessment that the “most lethal domestic violent extremist threat[s]” to the United States were racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVE).1 This assessment mirrored similar findings by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) during the past half-decade, all of which point to RMVE as the principal domestic terrorism threat to the United States. Responding to RMVE-inspired terrorists will require a close, data-driven assessment of the nature and scope of the threat. To this end, this report evaluates 40 cases of individuals charged in United States federal courts between 2014 and 2019, who are alleged to have planned or conducted violent attacks in the United States in furtherance of RMVE causes or ideologies. By evaluating the demographic, ideological, and organizational backgrounds of the perpetrators, as well as their attack-planning methods and processes, this report evaluates the successes and failures of federal law enforcement in investigating and prosecuting RMVE attack planners. The report finds:

• RMVE attack planners in the U.S. had a wide range of demographic backgrounds, but tended to be older than other categories of violent extremist attack planners, and were predominantly male.

• Attack planners’ ideologies were situated across the RMVE spectrum, from affiliates of well-established white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups to members of relatively newer organizations. However, the most lethal RMVE attack planners were organizationally unaffiliated, and despite drawing from a variety of RMVE ideologies, did not have membership in any RMVE organization or group.

• RMVE attack planners tended to target religious institutions, particularly Jewish, Black, and Muslim places of worship. The most common attack-planning method involved the use of firearms; RMVEs also experimented with a range of other methods from bombings to arson and vehicular assault.

• Due in part to the lack of a federal domestic terrorism statute, the FBI and DOJ utilized a range of charges to investigate and prosecute RMVEs. This study finds that the patchwork of offenses used to investigate RMVE sometimes led to failures in interdicting attack planners

Based on these findings, the study recommends a data-driven reevaluation and reallocation of FBI and DOJ resources and staff dedicated to investigating and prosecuting RMVE. It also proposes broader information-sharing between federal, state, and local partners on RMVE threats, particularly between the FBI and local religious communities. Finally, the report argues that a federal statute that criminalizes acts of domestic terrorism, similar to 18 U.S. Code § 2332b, would be most applicable to prosecutions of attack planning cases involving RMVEs.

Washington, DC: Program on Extremism, George Washington University; and National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center, 2021. 37p.

By Jonathan Collins

Major social media platforms have recently taken a more proactive stand against harmful far-right content and pandemic-related disinformation on their sites. However, these actions have catalysed the growth of fringe online social networks for participants seeking right-wing content, safe havens, and unhindered communication channels. To better understand these isolated systems of online activity and their success, the study on Gab Social examines the mechanisms used by the far right to form an alternative collective on fringe social media. My analysis showcases how these online communities are built by perpetuating meso-level identity-building narratives. By examining Gab’s emphasis on creating its lasting community base, the work offers an experiential examination of the different communication devices and multimedia within the platform through a netnographic and qualitative content analysis lens. The emergent findings and discussion detail the far right’s virtual community-building model, revolving around its sense of in-group superiority and the self-reinforcing mechanisms of collective. Not only does this have implications for understanding Gab’s communicative dynamics as an essential socialisation space and promoter of a unique meso-level character, but it also reflects the need for researchers to (re)emphasise identity, community, and collectives in far-right fringe spaces.

United States, Terrorism and Political Violence. 2024

by Brittney Bringuez Kathryn Hampton Ranit Mishori Cynthia Pompa Barbara Robles Ramamurthy Vidya Ramanathan

When the news broke in 2018 that the U.S. government was forcibly separating thousands of parents and children as young as infants at the U.S.-Mexico border, nationwide outcry ensued due to the evident trauma caused by the separations. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) found that the cases of forcible family separation by the U.S. government that we documented constituted torture. PHR’s torture finding was cited by the Biden campaign during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. However, as the election passed, uproar and outrage around family separation abated, but parents and children who were eventually reunited struggle to recover from severe psychological effects of the trauma they endured. Parents who were deported and separated from their children for three or even four years continued to suffer and wait in desperation for the moment when they could be with their children again. 

This study documents the longer-term psychological impact of this inhumane policy of forced separation on parents who were deported by the United States government, most of them separated from their children for three to four years. The persistent and damaging psychological effects documented by PHR call out for acknowledgement, accountability, redress, and rehabilitation. This study also seeks to make visible the desires of the parents who were interviewed regarding means of redress owed to them by the U.S. government. In the context of a broad discussion about redress, it is essential that the views of affected communities be directly incorporated into research and policy recommendations.

New York: Physicians for Human Rights, 2022. 46p.

By John Dewey

NY. Henry Holt. 1922.