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The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. The Political Economy of Human Rights

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... z.B. Church Report 1975;Chomsky/Herman 1979;Dorfman 2003;Müller-Plantenberg 2003;Sanabria 2007;Alonso 2008;Poole 2008: 2;Galeano 2009). Dies lässt sich daran ablesen, dass wenige Tage nach dem Putsch in Chile wieder die Kredite flossen, wie in vielen anderen Ländern, in denen US-genehme Regierungen an die Macht gelangten, wobei Aspekte wie "Menschenrechte", "Bürgerrechte" oder "Demokratie" für die Vergabepraxis von Krediten irrelevant waren (vgl. ...
... Zugleich schützt eine solche Perspektive davor, in die umgekehrte, genauso falsche These zu fallen, das chilenische "Volk" sei Opfer der USA geworden, und die agency der AkteurInnen vor Ort auszuschließen. Es würde auch von der Heterogenität menschlicher Gesellschaft absehen, davon, dass viele ChilenInnen den Putsch be- Bartsch et al. 1974, Chomsky/Herman 1979oder Huber 1987, sagt man heute eher "autoritär" oder "nachautoritär", womit die anderen Lager Pinochets Regime bezeichneten. Dabei, macht man es sich einfach, sind lexikalische Definitionen eindeutig. ...
... Their investment and divestment decisions may moderate local values and establish patterns of work and community life that may be harmful to local citizens, yet be of insufficient interests to local or distant political leaders. For Pilger (2003), this trajectory is a form of empire building with dangerous consequences, a view shared by Chomsky and Herman (1979, George (2010), Barsamian (2011, 2013) and others. ...
... Religious pluralism, argues Eck (2005), provides the opportunity for positive engagement through which to seek understanding, commitment, and respect for differences. Inter-religious dialog provides an opportunity for leadership in a world of grave disparities where love for the marginalized is often difficult to detect in the secular and often economically driven institutional logics being amplified globally since World War II (Chomsky and Herman 1979). Kumar (2013) draws attention to the reconceptualization of the world post World War II as a world of two halves: ...
Article
In the context of intensifying globalization, and emanating from their responsibilities in large or small businesses, leaders, managers, and people-of-faith must respond to the impacts of increasing competition for resources, jobs, and liveable environments along with everybody else. These competitive dynamics exacerbate tensions among individuals, communities, organizations, and nations. Such tensions are often given religious attributions. Encouragement to express religious influences openly may further exacerbate such tensions. Paradoxically perhaps, we advocate for greater engagement with religious diversity as a source of value rather than a driver of divisions. Managers must ensure such value is realized. We posit that dangerous competitiveness must be transformed to life-sustaining ways of being human. We encourage management educator and practitioner participation in conversations at the conceptual level in order to contribute pragmatically to the confluence of faith, hope, and love to achieve organizational well-being based on ideals of universal justice, environmental restoration, and global peace.
... Moreover, simple correlations show that only a few of the five scores capture similar underlying processes, and, even then, they are not identical. 8 Whether journal of P E A C E RESEARCH volume 42 / number 6 / november 2005 684 5 Also see Chomsky & Herman (1979), Claude & Jabine (1992), Oloka-Onyango & Udagama (2000), and Richards, Gelleny & Sacko (2001). 6 Others have made similar arguments. ...
... The focus (F) variables are selected on the basis of some general degree of theoretical consensus among scholars that a certain process or institution is influencing government repression in important ways. Among scholars of human rights, almost all agree that economic resources and domestic political institutions that regulate governing elites' authority are centrally and causally related to government repression (Strouse & Claude, 1976;Chomsky & Herman, 1979;Mitchell & McCormick, 1988;Henderson, 1991;Davenport, 1996). Governments regulated by democratic institutions and possessing adequate resources are more likely to protect human rights than autocratic or impoverished states. ...
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A growing number of studies provide quantitative evidence that economic globalization encourages government protection of human rights: trade and investment advance civil and political rights and encourage governments to refrain from violations of the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person. Other studies provide evidence that globalization promotes government repression of human rights: the arbitrary arrest, torture, forced disappearance, or extra-judicial killing of citizens, activists, or dissidents by state security forces under the control of ruling state elites. This article employs a variant of Extreme Bounds Analysis in order to analyze the robustness of this growing body of important but contradictory inferences. It argues that (1) we can make robust empirical claims about the relationship between certain trade and investment indicators and government repression, but shows that (2) cumulative knowledge across studies nevertheless remains limited by the sensitivity of many indicators to conditioning sets of information. This problem stems from vaguely specified theoretical mechanisms linking economic processes to government repression and is of potentially great consequence for scholarship seeking to explain the causes of human rights violations, in particular, and the effects of economic globalization, in general.
... Los trabajos de Armand Mattelart (2002) abordaron, también, de forma sistemática esta articulación entre comunicación y cultura, como parte de una guerra que no se identificaba únicamente como Este-Oeste, sino como Sur-Norte, donde la clave está en el modo en el que opera y se expande el capital. Se suman a esta línea los escritos de Chomsky y Herman (2000, 1979, en particular los trabajos sobre propaganda y expansión de EE.UU. hacia la periferia, en continuidad con los aportes de Selser (2010), desde el periodismo de investigación. ...
Article
Atilio Boron, experto en política y geopolítica latinoamericana e internacional y Francisco Sierra Caballero, uno de los referentes de la economía política de la comunicación, comparten sus ideas en una entrevista sobre comunicación y geopolítica en la que, desde una perspectiva crítica, abordan: la noción de paz y guerra en un contexto de presión por parte de EE.UU. (cuya hegemonía se ve debilitada por el avance de otras potencias), el rol de los medios de comunicación en esta realidad y su impronta en el modo en que es relatada; las nuevas tecnologías, el capitalismo de plataforma y las derechas en América Latina y la Unión Europea.
... Another tension in the field of BHR is indicated by Chomsky and Herman (1979), when arguing about the existence of a relationship between the deterioration of human rights and the growth of the US economic structure and political system; and by Sen (2005), when stating that the declarations and documents relating to human rights are more an imperialist imposition of the West, as they do not consider Asian peoples in terms of their cultures, favoring Western cultures. Sen's argument is echoed in Maher's (2019) and Fasterling's (2017) discussion about the drawing together of business and human rights having focused on the creation of corporate initiatives geared toward human rights management. ...
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This essay aims to critically analyze the recent field of studies known as Business and Human Rights, which addresses the negative impacts of human rights violations at the corporate level, covering theoretical discussions, principles, guidelines, standards, and regulations. We developed the essay focusing on three key topics: the business activities of transnational corporations negatively impact human rights all around the world; the initiatives created in order to address the impacts of business over human rights are discursive and, therefore, distant from the practices; companies and corporations make various attempts to abstain from their responsibility, even if they make symbolic and material reparations. For this, we illustrate the abstention from corporate responsibility through the human rights violations in the case of João Alberto de Freitas’ murder committed by Carrefour security guards in the parking lot of one of its stores in Porto Alegre, in 2020. Throughout the text, we argue that this field reveals the tensions between business and respect for human rights, understanding that this involves a minefield susceptible to being contested. Our contribution lies in indicating paths for the heavier involvement of researchers from the field of management with the real problems that challenge societies, such as human rights violations at the organizational level.
... Dua kajian terkemuka memeriksa tentang dampak faktorfaktor ekonomi ekternal terhadap hak asasi 82 manusia. Mitchell dan McCormick (1988) memperkenalkan suatu argumentasi Marxis yang diambil dari argumentasi Chomsky dan Herman bahwa negara-negara kapitalis, didorong oleh kepentingan ekonominya, lebih menginginkan adanya stabilitas politik di negara-negara berkembang dan oleh karenanya memperkuat rejim-rejim yarlg ada walaupun pada saat represi pemerintahan bersifat endemik (Chomsky dan Herman 1979). Ketika pemerintah negara berkembang di Dunia Ketiga menerima bantuan ekonomi dari negara kapitalis yang tujuan utamanya adalah untuk mempertahankan kondisi yang lebih menguntungkan bagi investasi, kemungkinan terjadinya pelanggaran hak asasi manusia meningkat. ...
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The authors examine the impact of the international human rights regime on governments' human rights practices. They propose an explanation that highlights a "paradox of empty promises". Their core arguments are that the global institutionalization of human rights has created an international context in which (1) governments often ratify human rights treaties as a matter of window dressing, radically decoupling policy from practice and at times exacerbating negative human rights practices, but (2) the emergent global legitimacy of human rights exerts independent global civil society effects that improve states' actual human rights practices. The authors' statistical analyses on a comprehensive sample of government repression from 1976 to 1999 find support for their argument.
... 257, author's emphasis). In an analysis closely paralleling Noam Chomsky's recent book, 13 he sees the spread of military regimes as a consequence of the crisis of peripheral capitalism. Boorstein presents two somewhat contradictory conclusions. ...
... Until then, the term 'terrorist' was circumscribed to the exercise of indiscriminate violence by non-state actors (Sluka 2000). In the end of the 1970s, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman introduced the concept of 'state terrorism' to qualify the political violence exercised from the state by National Security regimes under the influence of the United States which, in the context of the 'Cold War', sought to protect the capitalist regime through the legal and illegal use of force against enemies classified as subversives and terrorists against civil society (Chomsky and Herman 1979). 1 The classification of 'genocide' was based on the interpretation that specific groups were being victimized-religious, ethnic and socio-professionalalthough the report did not provide evidence of this. Instead, it provided evidence of persecution carried out for political reasons (Crenzel 2019). ...
... Critical approaches to terrorism are not a new take on terrorism studies and did not appear after 9/11. In the 1970s, left-wing scholars developed political-economy approaches to violence, whose contribution was marked by the affirmation that terrorism, seen as a strategy, could be employed by both state and non-state actors (Chomsky and Herman 1979;Herman 1982;Herman and O'Sullivan 1989;Gold-Biss 1994). However, after 9/11, CTS carved its clear space and footprint in the field of terrorism studies, as some scholars felt frustrated with the way 'terrorism' was understood and depicted. ...
Article
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The attacks of 11 September 2001 have profoundly impacted the field of terrorism studies. In this article we aim to trace, in particular, the impact of this date on the establishment of critical terrorism studies (CTS) as a school of thought. Such an endeavour aims to create an ‘umbrella-term’ to gather scholars from diverse backgrounds, in an attempt to provide a counter-narrative to the dominant, mainstream understanding of terrorism and counter-terrorism. CTS scholarship offers alternative approaches to state-centred, ahistorical, and ‘problem-solving’ standpoints, which have been at the origin of numerous atrocities committed, for example, under the Global War on Terror banner. This article explores the key debates stirred by CTS scholarship over the years, its recent advancements, and existing gaps.
... How human rights records can affect the distribution of income through ODA flows is less clear cut. While some studies document that human rights violations reduce aid flows into countries (Cingranelli and Pasquarello 1985;Neumayer 2003aNeumayer , 2003b, which can adversely affect conditions of poverty, others show the opposite, i.e. aid flows into countries are not influenced by human rights records (Chomsky and Herman 1979;Schoultz 1981;Carleton and Stohl 1987;McCormick and Mitchell 1988). Neumayer (2003aNeumayer ( , 2003b notes that respect for civil/political rights plays a statistically significant role for most donors at the aid entitlement stage. ...
... On the topic of human rights violations, the discourse of the American media has reflected paramount concern about the situation in Iran, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, but repression and human rights violations by oil-rich allies of the United States such as the Egypt of el Sisi, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia were generally given marginal coverage (Al-Jenaibi 2014). The United States authorized its allies in the Middle East to escalate human rights violations by offering training and equipment to their intelligence and police agencies (Chomsky and Herman 1999). For example, the 2011 Human Rights Watch report on Saudi Arabia clearly condemned Saudi Arabia for pursuing merely "symbolic" reforms for improving "the visibility of women" and establishing freedom of expression. ...
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This study chronicles the portrayal of the Middle East in various American media that have received scholarly attention, centering on the print and broadcast media. The time frame of the media review in the United States towards the Middle East is from the September 11 th attacks in 2001 until 2019. The article draws on the theory of orientalism to reveal a facet of the media that perpetuates false stereotypes of the Middle East as a threat to US interests, culture, and security. It finds that although the media in America have paid detailed attention to many issues in the Middle East during the last two decades, there are grounds to assume it has failed to comprehend the sociopolitical and economic reasons behind such issues. Coverage of the Middle East in American media during the 21 st century has paralleled the government's official viewpoints and interests in the region.
... 111), which can be directed against both domestic and foreign targets. Chomsky and Herman (1979) defined state terrorism as terrorism practiced by states (or governments) and their agents and allies. All these analysts concluded that state terrorism accounts for most of the terrorist actions in the world, and most of the deaths. ...
... According to a UN report, the School of the Americas "has graduated over 500 of the worst human rights abusers in the hemisphere" (Gareau 2004:24). Of all the countries that had death squads in Latin America, they were all US "client states" (Herman and Chomsky 2014). But the US government has given more aid to Israel than any other country, approximately $3billion/year, in essence, financing apartheid and genocide against the Palestinian people (Gareau 2004). ...
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This work seeks to challenge the benign language employed in the discourse surrounding historic and contemporary white violence, particularly against African Americans. In so doing, this work develops language that more adequately captures the genocidal social control mechanisms designed to create terror through the physical and psychological brutality of white violence. Specifically, this work introduces the theoretical construct of Savage White American Terror (SWAT) which we correlate to historic patterns of violent atrocities such as lynching to contemporary police violence against African Americans.
... Contrary to what one might expect based on the claims of Finkel et al. (2007: 424), Jordan -recipient of around $100 million in US democracy and governance funding between 2011 and 2014 alone -has throughout the entire indicated time frame displayed a consistently low 'freedom rating' of 5.5 ('not free') (Freedom House, 2018). In order to better understand this coexistence of impressive democracy promotion portfolios and stable levels of authoritarianism, I suggest scholars of democracy promotion need to pay more attention to the latter's constitutive effects (for critical work on similar paradoxes during the Cold War see, for instance, Chomsky and Herman, 2015). The task of this article is thus to uncover how democracy promoters' ways of making sense of their own 'failure' may (re-)constitute parts of the very foundation for external interventions in the name of democracy to begin with. ...
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The Jordanian parliament is widely recognised as a patronage provider and means for authoritarian upgrading. Despite, or precisely because of this, it has over the past years become a linchpin of US and European attempts at parliamentary strengthening. The parliament’s highly marginalised position notwithstanding, this article suggests that such efforts provide us with an insightful opportunity to better understand the reconfiguration of authoritarian power via external intervention in the name of democracy. Discussing the contradictory effects of parliamentary strengthening programmes in Jordan, the article tries to shift the discussion of democracy promotion away from a concern with policy, conceptual debates and intentions to one with democracy promotion’s constitutive effects. As such, the article investigates the framing of Jordanian politics within a market rationale as central mechanism for the de-politicisation of uneven power relations. Further, it explores the ways in which democracy promotion serves to seemingly reconfirm interveners’ desired self-understandings via the maintenance of assumptions of cultural ‘difference’. Ultimately, it is suggested that decentring the study of democracy promotion by paying more attention to its constitutive effects provides us with a better understanding of why and how increasing democracy promotion portfolios have, in Jordan, had the effect of strengthening authoritarianism.
... 111), which can be directed against both domestic and foreign targets. Chomsky and Herman (1979) defined state terrorism as terrorism practiced by states (or governments) and their agents and allies. All these analysts concluded that state terrorism accounts for most of the terrorist actions in the world, and most of the deaths. ...
Article
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Hardly a week goes by in the United States (and to varying degrees, in the rest of the world) that the word terrorism does not appear in the collective consciousness, as represented, channeled, and shaped by the mass media in its many print, broadcast, and internet manifestations. While relatively few children worldwide (and even fewer children domestically in the United States) have been the specific targets for acts of terrorism, some have, and most are growing up in a world in which terrorism in its many aspects is a salient cultural phenomenon. This paper explores the impact of growing up in a world with terrorism on children and youth. It considers both the direct traumatic effects of being a victim and the indirect effects of living in communities and societies in which the threat of terrorism is on the minds of children, but perhaps more importantly, of adults generally, and parents and policy makers in particular. It also considers policy initiatives and programmatic responses
... Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman led the way in developing a meticulously defended argument, that US support for state terrorism during the Cold War was part of a process of organising under US sponsorship "a neo-colonial system of client states ruled mainly by terror and serving the interests of a small local and foreign business and military elite" Herman 1979b, ix, 1979a). Indeed, the national security states across Latin America during the Cold War used violence on an industrial scale, disappearing hundreds of thousands of people, torturing political dissenters all with substantial US military and political support (Chomsky and Herman 1979b;Dinges 2004;Doyle and Kornbluh 1997;Esparza, Huttenbach, and Feierstein 2009;Galeano 1973;Huggins 1998;Koonings 1999;Koonings and Kruijt 2004;McClintock 1992). The same was true in Philippines and Vietnam (Welch 1974, 233-253;Valentine 2000;Chomsky and Herman 1979a). ...
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The conventional wisdom among US foreign policymakers is that drones enable precise strikes, and therefore limit collateral damage. In contrast, critics point out that many civilian casualties have ensued, and they variously cite poor intelligence and imprecision of the strikes as reasons for this. Critics have also raised concerns that the US and its allies are engaging in “lawfare” to legitimise violations of human rights law. As such, some have questioned whether academic engagement with the legal questions surrounding targeted killings amount to collusion with state attempts to legitimise human rights violations. This article will argue that by conceptualising the targeted killings programme as a form of state terrorism, we are better equipped to provide a critical analysis of the drones programme within the context of a long history of violence and terrorism which has underpinned the imperial and neo-imperial projects of the UK and US. The article will then argue that there are important similarities between the targeted killings programme, and previous UK and US counterinsurgency operations, including prior uses of air power, and operations involving the internment of terror suspects, and the targeting of specific individuals for interrogation and torture or disappearance. Common to these programmes is that they are forms of policing aimed at crushing rebellions, stifling disorder and constructing or maintaining particular political economies, through terror. Also common to these programmes are the attempts made either to conceal illicit actions, or in the event they are exposed, to shroud them in a veil of legitimacy. The article concludes by offering some brief reflections on why we should not abandon the quest to resolve the thorny legal questions around the targeted killings programme.
... Firstly, this work questions a state-centric framing, preferring instead a historical materialist approach which pays attention to capitalist relations of production that structure the international system and have a significant bearing on the exercise of foreign policy. Secondly, it seeks to shine a light on how the use and sponsorship of state terrorism and violence by various agents of liberal democratic states, whether the executive, the military, the security services, or indeed private actors hired in for specific operations, serves a purpose in shoring up capital and maintaining particular configurations of power in world politics, especially US hegemony (Blakeley, 2009;Chomsky & Herman, 1979b, 1979aGeorge, 1991;Raphael, 2009;Sluka, 2000b;Stohl & Lopez, 1984, 1988. It is in this vein that we sought to investigate the workings of the CIA's RDI programme, as well as the involvement of other (neo-) imperial powers in 'War on Terror' abuses, situating their involvement within the context of their historical uses of violence and terror, including torture. 4 A further risk of the development of new methods is that it reinforces a divide between fairly well-resourced academics and human rights practitioners operating in the relative comfort and prosperity of the Global North, and academics and practitioners in some regions of the Global South. ...
Article
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This paper is aimed at exploring how to conduct effective research into state complicity in human rights abuses, in ways that can help contribute to state accountability. This type of research is challenging: the secretive nature of state complicity in abuses presents considerable difficulties for the researcher, both in terms of access to evidence, and in terms of safety and security for the researcher and for the victims. However, recent developments in the methods and the types of data available present new opportunities for strengthening the quality and scope of research that is possible. Drawing on our own experience of research into state complicity in human rights abuses, specifically our work to map the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation (RDI) programme, we aim to show how we have tried to navigate the difficult terrain of human rights investigation. The paper begins by exploring a number of the challenges involved. We then discuss recent developments in human rights investigation techniques, and the opportunities these present, as well as the emerging body of critical scholarship that is beginning to shape this kind of work among practitioners and academics alike. We consider some of the imbalances of power that affect this type of research. We then demonstrate how we tried to embrace new opportunities, while being mindful of the risks involved and the limitations of what we can achieve. We close with some reflections on ways forward for this type of research.
... Critical political theorists explain the ideology and praxis of such influence through the notion of neo-colonialism(Sartre 2001;Chomsky & Herman 1979) as well dependency theories that arose to counter modernization theories of development. ...
Thesis
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Through a series of three standalone yet related essays, this thesis theorizes effects of the government administration context in developing countries on situated IT-enabled practices. It develops arguments on the capacity of the institutional logics perspective for explaining complex interactions between the broader social context and IT-enabled practices carried out by situated actors in the public administration of developing countries. We theorize IT-enabled rationalization—a process through which inefficiencies, and dysfunctional institutionalized practices are transformed through IT—as the hybridizing outcomes from the resolutions in practice of often incompatible institutional logics of administration with those introduced by IT. Through a case study of IT modernization initiatives at Ghana’s customs organization, these arguments are developed by identifying historically formed administration logics and the consequences of their interplay with idealtypic public administration logics introduced through IT. We find that rather than forcing out dysfunctional practices and replacing them with IT-driven ones i.e., replacing old logics with new, as is often an implicit goal of IT adoption in such settings, the two sets of incompatible logics are instead comingled in practice through a process identified as blending. This suggests that IT adoption in the public administration of developing countries might enable rationalization, although not independently of countervailing broader institutional context.
... The book was also reviewed in the Washington Post. Books the four papers ignored included two major works co-authored with economist Edward Herman: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Chomsky and Herman 1979a) and After the Cataclysm (Chomsky and Herman 1979b). Perhaps the stridency of the titles and their by now familiar themes made the editors put the books to the side. ...
Article
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As a contribution to the scholarship on the US media's reporting of dissidence, this article assesses the treatment of Noam Chomsky's books on politics and media in four US newspapers. It documents and explains the fluctuations in attention over time. A content analysis shows that a sizeable majority of reviews were negative, but also that the press reception was quite varied. A qualitative assessment demonstrates that reviewers largely failed to provide substantive counterarguments to Chomsky's research and frequently praised it. The article discusses the newspapers’ weak and surprisingly positive reactions to Chomsky's media criticism. Then it draws parallels between the criticisms and marginalization of Chomsky in the press and academia, and highlights the evidence that confirms his analyses.
... Kohen provided Professor Noam Chomsky, the renowned linguist and political activist, with a 40 page memo and 100 pages of documentation for a chapter in a book, The Political Economy of Human Rights. The book, co-authored with Edward Herman, gave prominence to East Timor, which became a signature issue of Chomsky (Chomsky & Herman, 1979). Chomsky's profile brought the East Timor question into universities around the world, informing many people about the atrocities and their misrepresentation by governments and the media. ...
Article
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This paper examines early warning of, and political responses to, mass atrocities in East Timor in the late 1970s. Using newly-declassified intelligence and diplomatic records, it describes Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975 and its three year military campaign to crush the East Timorese resistance. It shows that the campaign resulted in mass deaths due to famine and disease, and considers the United Nations’ response to the unfolding crisis. It evaluates the level of international awareness of the humanitarian crisis in East Timor by inspecting contemporaneous eyewitness reports by foreign diplomats from states with a keen interest in Indonesia: Australia, the United States, New Zealand and Canada. In contrast to a popular, highly lauded view, the paper shows that these states did not “look away”; rather, they had early warning and ongoing knowledge of the catastrophe but provided military and diplomatic assistance to Indonesia. The paper contrasts a counter-productive effort by civil society activists with a very effective one, and thus demonstrates the role that robust scholarship can play in terminating atrocities.
... Democratically-elected governments in Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973) were also overthrown as a result of CIA-supported coups (see Black, 1977) and thousands of men, worsen and children were tortured and/or disappeared as a result of this "democratization" process. The horror continues in Chile under General Pinochet as it does in many other Latin American countries whose secret police have been trained by CIA-front organizations in the United States (for detailed documentation see Chomsky and Herman, 1979 -the examples sketched here could be multiplied tenfold). ...
Book
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... During the Cold War, US foreign policy strategy was dominated by the use of repression (see Blum, 2003;Blakeley, 2006). As Chomsky and Herman (1979) demonstrated in their study of US relations with the South, the US was organising under its sponsorship a system of allied states, which ruled their populations primarily by terror. ...
Article
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Orthodox terrorism studies tend to focus on the activities of illiberal non-state actors against the liberal democratic states in the North. It thus excludes state terrorism, which is one of a number of repressive tools that great powers from the North have used extensively in the global South in the service of foreign policy objectives. I establish the reasons for the absence of state terrorism from orthodox accounts of terrorism and argue that critical–normative approaches could help to overcome this major weakness.
... Corporate strategies to ensure 'safe havens' for their investment included obtaining US government support for dictatorial regimes, violent reprisals using state military and police to suppress dissent, and bribes and kickbacks to political elites. Because violence was deployed in these states of exception, both governments and corporations were able to kill with impunity: Colombia in 1929, when the military gunned down striking United Fruit workers killing at least 400 (Kepner and Soothill 1935), and the US-backed military coup in Guatemala in 1954, where more than 200 union leaders were killed, are two of the more widely publicized cases involving violence and multinational capital (Chomsky and Herman 1979). ...
Article
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In this paper I develop the concept of necrocapitalism, defined as contemporary forms of organizational accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death. I examine how different forms of power - institutional, material, and discursive - operate in the political economy and the violence and dispossession that result. I describe some contemporary forms of organizational accumulation that involve dispossession and death and could therefore be described as necrocapitalist practices - for example, the impact of the resources industry in developing countries and the privatization of war and the military. I conclude by discussing some possibilities of resistance and outlining directions for future research.
... In this paper I aim to explore and discuss the right to education from a sociological perspective by looking at the restructuring of education in the context of neoliberal transformation since the 1970s. I adopt a political economy approach (Chomsky and Herman, 1980;Benton, 1993Benton, , 2006Evans, 1998;Morris, 2006:17-19) for the analysis of the right to education in which as Lydia Morris says 'an emphasis is placed on the holistic understanding of a social formation, through a focus on the political and economic relationships that underpin social life' (Morris, 2006:17). The political economy approach requires an analysis of power relations and structural inequalities in capitalist society (Benton, 2005;Evans, 1998). ...
... Prior to 9/11, work on torture focused on several key themes, including the history of torture (Beccaria [1764(Beccaria [ ] 1995Peters 1985), torture as a tool for punishment (Beccaria [1764(Beccaria [ ] 1995Foucault 1977), torture by totalitarian and authoritarian states (Arendt 1966;Rejali 1991Rejali , 1994, the role of the individual in torture (Cohen 2001;Huggins 1998;Huggins et al. 2002;Milgram 1974), and torture as a tool of war or counter-terrorism. The latter included excellent studies on torture by the French in Algeria (Vidal-Naquet 1963, 1972, the British in Northern Ireland (Conroy 2001), the US in Vietnam (Valentine 2000), and torture in the Latin American national security states during the Cold War (Chomsky and Herman 1979;Huggins 1998;Huggins et al. 2002). Human rights NGOs, particularly Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have a long history of reporting on the use of torture globally. ...
Article
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The War on Terror has generated fierce debate on torture as a means of thwarting terrorist threats. The argument is polarized between those who take a utilitarian position and those who seek to uphold the absolute prohibition on torture. Within the utilitarian camp, there are those who argue that torture, while immoral, should be legalized for use in the fight against terrorism, so that it can be better controlled and regulated. This article will provide new insights through its analysis of the CIA Inspector General's 2004 Special Review of Counterterrorism, Detention and Interrogation Activities, declassified in 2009. This offers important evidence that counters the key assumptions of contemporary torture apologists. Specifically, the Inspector General's findings reinforce the argument that torture is not effective, that efforts to legalize its use under controlled conditions are futile, and that, even where torture is permitted by higher authorities, recriminations against the perpetrators are still likely to ensue. Furthermore, torture tends not to be aimed at thwarting imminent threats. Its use by the CIA in the War on Terror is no exception. In any case it has yielded little evidence that could not have been obtained through legitimate means.
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A partir da premissa de que o conceito oposto ao de objetividade jornalística é o de parcialidade, a proposta do artigo é apresentar e discutir duas obras fundamentais de uma das vertentes das Teorias do Jornalismo: as teorias da ação política, também denominadas estudos da parcialidade (news bias studies). Os livros escolhidos para empreender a análise crítica foram The media elite, publicado em 1986, de autoria de Lichter, Rothman e Lichter; e Manufacturing consent, de Herman e Chomsky, lançado em 1988. As duas obras apostam que os jornalistas realizam uma distorção sistemática dos fatos noticiados por causa de suas parcialidades políticas.
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En las últimas décadas, desde el sector de seguridad de gobiernos de países centrales, así como desde revistas especializadas, se viene desarrollando la noción de lawfare como guerra por la vía legal y como componente de guerras híbridas. En América Latina, se ha revelado como una herramienta de desestabilización que da cuenta de dinámicas novedosas a la vez que podría mostrar continuidades con eventos del pasado ¿es lo mismo golpe blando que lawfare?, ¿es el lawfare un componente de los “golpes blandos de Estado”? y ¿qué características coinciden con las intervenciones y golpes perpetrados, por ejemplo, durante la Guerra Fría? Se propone recurrir a la perspectiva histórica y al análisis documental para desentrañar los posibles vínculos del lawfare con procesos de desestabilización de gobiernos y golpes de Estado durante la Guerra Fría, principalmente aquellos donde prevaleció la guerra psicológica y política, el Operativo Éxito (PBSUCCESS) contra Jacobo Árbenz en Guatemala (1951-1954). Para plantear el contrapunto con la actualidad, se expondrán algunos ejemplos sobre la injerencia de EE.UU. en el Lava Jato, como caso paradigmático de lawfare en América Latina.
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A pesar de su confeso oportunismo (al que no es ajeno el hecho de haberse iniciado exactamente el mismo día en que Javier Milei juraba como presidente de Argentina y comenzaba su proyecto de reforma que afecta de lleno en la inversión y la investigación científica y tecnológica), el presente trabajo pretendía ser originariamente un ensayo de introducción crítica a la Inteligencia Artificial [IA] aplicada al modelado de ciertos aspectos de la economía basado en las últimas y más resonantes innovaciones de la tecnología: las paradojas del Aprendizaje Profundo [Deep Learning, DL], la masiva y decisiva disponibilidad de Datasets, las Redes Neuronales Convolucionales [CNN] y la familia de algoritmos conocidos como Redes Generativas Adversarias [GAN], fundados en una imaginativa implementación de la Teoría de Juegos de John von Neumann y Oskar Morgenstern y del modelo del equilibrio de John Nash incorporado a esta teoría. No me extenderé aquí sobre los pormenores técnicos del asunto, tratados en una ponencia presentada en la última conferencia sobre gestión del Cambio Climático dictada en la Universidad de La Guajira, Colombia (Reynoso 2023a, en línea) y en mi reciente libro en vísperas de acabarse de escribir Inteligencia Artificial Profunda y Ciencias Sociales Adversarias en el siglo XXI. Nuevos modelos de Redes Neuronales Convolucionales (Reynoso 2023b, en línea). Más me interesan por el momento, en cambio, las opiniones vertidas por Milei sobre los asuntos tecnológicos que podrían tener impacto positivo o negativo sobre la inversión, el efecto económico y el uso de los avances científicos en ese terreno, de los que se encuentra tratando con un puñado de figuras de primera magnitud (Cook…) como si estuviera familiarizado con esas cuestiones.
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Resumo O objetivo deste ensaio é analisar, criticamente, o recente campo de estudos denominado Negócios e Direitos Humanos ( Business and Human Rights ), que aborda os impactos negativos das violações de direitos humanos no âmbito corporativo, abrigando discussões teóricas, princípios, diretrizes, normativas e regulamentações. Desenvolvemos o ensaio concentrando-nos em três temas centrais: as atividades de negócios das corporações transnacionais impactam negativamente os direitos humanos em todo o mundo; as iniciativas criadas no sentido de abordar o impacto dos negócios sobre os direitos humanos são discursivas e, portanto, distantes das práticas; empresas e corporações utilizam-se de várias tentativas para a abstenção da responsabilidade, ainda que façam reparações simbólicas e materiais. Para isso, ilustramos com a abstenção da responsabilidade corporativa pelas violações de direitos humanos no caso do assassinato de João Alberto de Freitas cometido por seguranças do Carrefour no estacionamento de uma de suas lojas em Porto Alegre, no ano de 2020. Ao longo do texto, argumentamos que este campo revela as tensões entre negócios e respeito aos direitos humanos, entendendo que se trata de um campo minado e passível de ser contestado. Nossa contribuição reside em apontar caminhos para um envolvimento mais potente dos pesquisadores do campo da gestão, com os problemas reais que desafiam as sociedades, como as violações de direitos humanos no âmbito das organizações.
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Using the example of recent attempts to engineer the concept of conspiracy theory, I argue that philosophers should be far more circumspect in their approach to conceptual engineering than we have been – in particular, that we should pay much closer attention to the history behind and context that surrounds our target concept in order to determine whether it is a site of what I have elsewhere called ‘conceptual domination’. If it is, we may well have good reason to avoid engineering. In their recent ‘What is a Conspiracy Theory?’, M. Giulia Napolitano and Kevin Reuter argue that the disagreement between generalists and particularists in the literature on conspiracy theories is best characterized as a set of dueling conceptual engineering projects. While I agree with their turn to this metaphilosophical literature, I give a very different account of its applicability. Particularists, on my account, are better read as aiming to diagnose the ways in which many discussions of the concept of conspiracy theories are a form of conceptual domination, where this broader context should then prompt us to abandon or block any concept of conspiracy theory that treats its referents as inherently defective. Broader metaphilosophical lessons are drawn.
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Wole Soyinka, the first African writer Nobel Prize winner in literature in 1986, is famous universally, mostly for his plays. But one of his novels, The Interpreters (1965), has been acclaimed as well as criticized by many critics for some stylistic and ideological problems. The interpreters of Soyinka's novel are five intellectuals who have come back from abroad, mainly England, to their country, post-independence Nigeria. The critical perspectives of these interpreters towards predominant corruption and other social problems in most parts and institutions of Nigeria are clearly noticeable. The identity crisis, which is rampant throughout this novel, can be recognized as cultural and, in some cases, biological hybridity. Two social psychological identity problems, that is, identity and hybridity crisis, as well as 'neocolonialism' term, are the main concerns of this thesis. Neocolonialism, as a less debated term in comparison to two other dominant terms, postmodernism and postcolonialism, has been analyzed coherently. Having delineated the neocolonialism term and its connections with literature, this thesis has gone through the characters of this novel and has argued the manifestation of hybridity and identity in all aspects of their lives. Post-independence Nigerian as the context of this work reveals clearly these identity and hybridity crises through its characters. Destructive outcomes of identity and hybridity crisis, which left Nigeria a paralyzed country, and warning to avoid further crises is among Soyinka's concerns, as well as the main points which this thesis is searching to highlight. Not to be mesmerized by western culture and amalgamate it ineptly with one's own, as well as the highly valuable political intervention of literature to reflect psychological problems of supressed societies would be regarded as a significant finding of such research.
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El objetivo central de este capítulo es analizar cómo las sanciones económicas dinamizadas por la Administración Trump en América Latina incentivaron la presencia de potencias económicas extrarregionales en el continente. A partir de ahí, procuraremos identificar la acción de terceros países a través de su diplomacia económica: India, República Popular de China (RPCh) y Rusia. Las sanciones económicas impuestas de un Estado a otro tienen un objetivo político, el cual es modificar el comportamiento del segundo a partir de los intereses del primero. En este sentido, para que el objetivo político sea efectivo, es importante que el país presente dependencia económica y/o comercial. Sin embargo, ¿qué tan efectivo puede ser dicho instrumento cuando la respuesta de terceros países contrarresta el efecto deseado? Se tiene como hipótesis que las sanciones económicas impuestas por el Gobierno de los Estados Unidos al Gobierno de Nicolás Maduro no han sido ajenas para Rusia, la RPCh e India. Los dos primeros, por un lado, han respaldado al presidente venezolano, haciendo uso de su diplomacia económica a través de financiamiento y envío de recursos, así como apoyo en foros multilaterales. Por otro lado, Nueva Delhi ha mostrado una postura contraria, aunque en un primer momento se consideró a la India como nuevo destino principal para los barriles de Petróleo de Venezuela (PDVSA). Ante las sanciones a esta empresa, el país surasiático optó por suspender sus compras de crudo venezolano, suponiendo un duro golpe para la economía de este país. Ante lo planteado, es importante comprender no solo el actuar de estas tres potencias económicas, sino cuáles fueron los efectos de sus acciones en Venezuela y la relación de este último con Estados Unidos. El capítulo se divide en cuatro apartados. En el primero, se desarrollan las sanciones económicas de Estados Unidos hacia Venezuela con el propósito de influir en su política interna. En el segundo, se plantean los intereses de la República Popular de China en Venezuela a partir de la deuda establecida. En el tercero, se analiza la postura de Rusia frente a las sanciones económicas en la Administración Trump. En el cuarto, se examina el cambio de postura de la India con relación a la compra del crudo venezolano frente a las presiones estadounidenses. Finalmente, se esbozan algunas reflexiones.
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This book offers a fresh perspective on how to effectively address the issue of unequal access to healthcare. It analyses the human right to health from the underexplored legal principle of solidarity, proposing a non-commercial understanding of the positive obligations inherent in the right to health.
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This chapter sketches the broader context of these fictions of the African state under neoliberalism. It charts the neoliberal ‘counter-revolution’ against the achievements and aspirations of social democracy in the first world, ‘actually existing socialism’ in the second world and decolonisation in the third world. This period saw the preservation of the authoritarian states that much of Africa inherited from the European colonial empires. The expedient but cosmetic transformations of those states in the era of ostensible ‘democratisation’ and multi-party reforms are described. The chapter ends by looking at how the struggles and opportunities that characterised the initial period of decolonisation (encapsulated by the thought figure of ‘1968’) are manifested in subsequent African fiction.
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This article looks at the ways childhood, animality and emotions are imbricated in the Chinese Indonesian film director Edwin’s film: Babi buta yang ingin terbang/Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly (2008). By examining their entanglement, it demonstrates how the director’s use of childhood as a trope of becoming externalises the complex configuration of emotions embodied by Chinese in Indonesia. Further, this article explores this configuration as the subjective dimension of Sinophobia, here approached as the historical process of positioning Chinese Indonesians as an object of national disgust. Complementing this analysis, this article also examines Edwin’s employment of a pig-imaginary to visually convey the affective effects of contemporary racism in Indonesia. This article concludes arguing that, by employing both childhood and animality, Blind Pig effectively troubles what Chineseness is by means of visualising how it feels from the embodied perspective of a minoritised diasporic subject.
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At the level of political and legal discourse, human rights were established in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, ordinary citizens did not comprehend their social and political position in terms of human rights. International legal scholars seized upon human rights immediately but disagreed as to their nature, functions and position. Finnish legal scholars were also aware of the rise and significance of human rights in international and domestic law, but their position as legal arguments remained vague.
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The Indonesian massacre of 1965 became part of the global human rights discourse after Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing (2012, The Act of Killing [Motion Picture]. Final Cut For Real.) received widespread acclaim. Focusing on the perpetrators of the 1965-66 mass killings, The Act of Killing was framed and regarded as a film that broke the 50 years of silence in Indonesia. This paper examines how the narratives of discovery underpin the discourses around Oppenheimer’s films, The Act of Killing and its companion piece, The Look of Silence (2014. The Look of Silence. Final Cut For Real.), as well as the 1965–66 atrocities. While the films play an important role in enhancing the global visibility of the issue, the emphases on silence and secrecy have undermined the dissonance and friction in post-authoritarian Indonesia. The entrance of the 1965 massacre into the global stage could be seen as a reproduction of a paternalistic scenario that begins with the Western discovery of a ‘dark secret’ in the Third World. The status of Oppenheimer as a shorthand for the discovery of 1965, however, is mediated and preserved not only by the Western media but also local actors for their own strategic purposes. The political impacts of the Oppenheimer’s films need to be acknowledged along with the complexity of power and privilege in the politics of circulation of issues in the global human rights discourse.
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The local and transnational dimensions of the role that street art and graffiti play in challenging the apartheid conditions within the West Bank (Palestine) are an important piece of what is happening today in Palestine. By analyzing tensions in the Apartheid Wall as both an object to resist and a subject made to ‘speak’ through graffiti, social spaces and structures of social relations are revealed to be both enabled and constrained via this wall of separation. Based on interviews I conducted with Palestinians living within the Occupied Territories, as well as others among the Palestinian diasporic community living in exile, this thesis identifies and illustrates the significance of sumud, a distinct form of Palestinian cultural resistance, and graffiti’s place within it. Through research and first-hand experience, I find that spaces for Palestinian dissent, independent representation, and democratic politics taking place inside the Apartheid Wall are becoming increasingly circumscribed by the Israeli State’s methods of surveillance and censorship, which have been undermining Palestinian human security in the name of advancing Israel’s national security. Nevertheless, I argue that graffiti inside the Apartheid Wall continues to serve both to contest the meaning of space, and as a powerful, public practice, for reclaiming contested space. Furthermore, it serves as a potential resource (e.g., through what is often called conflict tourism) for Palestinian efforts to raise awareness within, and forge transnational ties of solidarity to, new audiences who are not directly embedded in the conflict.
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States use terror to achieve political ends, by employing violence to ensure compliance and to coerce populations away from dissent. Moreover, despite popular understandings of terrorism as a ‘strategy of the weak’ used against liberal democracies, an examination of the history of Western foreign policy shows that democracies have often returned to the use of state terror in order to cement their regional or global dominance. This chapter explores the use of state terror by the West, and seeks to provide an understanding of its underlying purposes. We argue that Western state terror is one of a number of coercive tools used to secure and maintain access to resources and markets, whether in colonial times, during periods of imperial decline, or as an adjunct to the more recent roll-out of neoliberal forms of globalisation.
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From Critical Studies to Critical Terrorism Studies: The emergence of a credible alternative ? Review of the inter/intra-paradigmatic debates at stake.
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In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism, eds. Claudia Verhoeven and Carola Dietze
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This article weaves social science discourse into the fabric of a genealogy of terrorism. The power struggles associated with the US lead global war on terrorism are producing many new objects of knowledge and possible lines of research (e.g., Islamic terrorists, jihadists, suicide bombers, experts on counterterrorism, and ISIS). This process is modeled as a cycle involving power struggles and power elite orchestrated political victimage rituals and a biopolitics of knowledge. This dynamic is explored in terms of social science discourse and the biopolitics of terrorism. The limits of current thinking in “counterterrorism” and the possibilities of future research are highlighted.
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In response to the conventional yet untested wisdom that a greater amount of mass media publicity contributes to the increasing legitimization of in surgent activities which in turn results in the prevalence of political violence, this study provides a systematic analysis of both quantity and quality media coverage of the terrorist violence of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the character of this violence, and the relationship between media publicity and this violence over time. This study suggests that the media are not willing conduits of terrorists' campaign for violence. However, the fact that they are not supportive of terrorism does not necessarily exonerate them from being considered useful by terrorists. The implica tions of this study to media institutions are discussed.
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