Review

The opening page of this book reads like an unpleasant army thriller, full of mystery and gung-ho action. However repellent this may be, don't let it put you off, because it's not characteristic of most of the rest of Rodriguez's volume.

This is actually a detailed and often fascinating account of the runup to the attempted invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro forces backed by the US. The extent of this backing, and the depth of US hatred of any attempts at independence by states within…

Genocide, according to the UN Convention of 1948, is defined as any acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. This book represents a review of the various dimensions of a strategy that might lead to a genocide-free world.

The key strands identified include 1) Strengthening the institutions and actors like the UN and NGOs that are dedicated to the monitoring and the protection of human rights - including the…

In writing this book, former PN editor Howard Clark has drawn on his close involvement with Kosov@ for over a decade, and with nonviolent theory and action for several decades. Fascinated by a remarkable movement, he hoped to assist in the prevention of war (“Why was the war most warned about not prevented?” p213).

Clark provides a minutely detailed account of these unique developments throughout the decade up to the eruption of extreme violence of 1998-9. Using a wide…

Alice Ackerman's case for the Republic of Macedonia, as a rare - if not unique - example of conflict prevention by preventative diplomacy, makes a welcome addition to a relatively small body of literature which looks at how we can prevent war.

By way of introduction, she includes a brief survey of preventative diplomacy - and its critics - from cold-war attempts by the UN to keep the superpowers out of local conflicts, to the Boutros Ghali doctrine of preconflict prevention and early…

This interesting, engaging and often humorous CD is the edited recording of a lecture given in the summer of 1997 at Colorado College in the US by radical activist and academic Angela Davis.

At the core of this fairly simple lecture is the exposing of links between capitalism, racism and the prison system - and this is done fairly eloquently on the whole.

Drawing on her own prison experience and the experiences of her friends and comrades, combined with a professed ex-…

It's hard to know what the objective of this book is. The title and blurb make it sound like a book on women on death row. Actually, it's Kathleen O'Shea's autobiography, interspersed at paragraph intervals with excerpts from interviews with ten other women, all ofthem on death row in the USA.

When this format works it is very powerful; often it is a harrowing reminder that the social and psychological forces which result in some women - innocent or guilty - ending up on death row…

Is there a nonviolent alternative to military intervention in those situations which cry out for some kind of international response? In Bosnia, for example, or Kosova,or Rwanda? This is the main challenge which has led to recurrent attempts to undertake cross-border interventions and to establish a permanent peace brigade or “peace army”.

The attempts to date have met with varying degrees of success depending in part on the kind of situation being confronted and the methods adopted…

As an antimilitarist and probably a feminist, I rather liked this diary. While it has, in some ways, quite a US orientation (national holidays, significant events, the relationship between days and dates etc), it is still perfectly usable for anyone using the Christian-derived calendar.

It has a one week to a page display, plus a directory of WRI members, and a list of national (US) peace organisations and publications. However I think the best thing about this diary is the profiles…