Флориан Гроссе0.0 During the cold war, the US government sought to establish an overseas military presence in the Indian Ocean. This graphic novel is a shocking account of British complicity in the forced exodus of the Chagos Islanders from their homeland to make that plan possible. Between 1965 and 1973 the inhabitants of the Chagos archipelago were forcibly removed from their homeland and dumped in Mauritius and Seychelles. Diego Garcia, the largest island in the group, was leased to the USA by the United Kingdom to accommodate the largest US military airbase outside the US mainland. The agreement continues until 2036.
Florian Grosset’s searing account of the eviction, and the harsh life faced by the Chagossians after their displacement, looks back to the first generation of slaves who arrived on the archipelago and the lives of their descendants. It charts the present-day diaspora of Chagossians, their fight for the right to return through protests and court cases, and the different strategies still being used to keep them away from their land. Although in 2016, the British government denied the right of the Chagossians to return to the islands, the islanders continue to fight for the right to return, many of them now to a homeland they never knew. In February 2019, the International Court of Justice ruled that the UK decolonisation process of the Chagos islands was unlawful and that the UK should end its control of the Indian Ocean archipelago, which includes a US military base.
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Abolishing the Police is both a contribution to this conversation and an invitation to join it. It provides rigorous and accessible analyses of why we might want to abolish the police, what abolishing them would involve, and how it might be achieved, introducing readers to the rich existing traditions of anti-police theory and practice.
Its authors draw on their diverse on-the-ground experiences of political organising, protest, and resistance to policing in the UK, France, Germany, and the United States, as well as their original research in academic fields ranging from law to security studies, political theory to sociology to public health.
Without assuming any prior specialist knowledge, they present the critical tools and insights these disciplines have to offer to ongoing struggles against the injustices of policing (and consider, in turn, what these disciplines must learn from these struggles.)
They examine the police’s history to understand its role in constructing today’s profoundly unequal and crisis-ridden social order. They explore the tensions between policing on the one hand and values like freedom, equality, and democracy on the other. They expose policing’s ongoing and complex entanglements with war and militarism, neo-colonial domination, and the politics of the far right. And they engage with concrete alternatives for preventing and responding to harms (such as sexual abuse and intimate partner violence – which police claim to deal with but in fact further entrench) in ways that move beyond the logic of crime and punishment and towards visions of justice that are both social and transformative.
Сяо-Хун Пай0.0 A searing exposé of the netherworld of exploited migrant labour that holds Europe aloft.
In 2013 Ousmane Diallo, a 26-year-old Senegalese olive harvester, lost his life when a gas canister exploded in a Sicilian field. As an African migrant, he was little mourned. But though they’ve been deliberately forgotten, neither the events of Ousmane’s life nor his tragic death are uncommon.
Across Italy today, African workers toil in the fields that make it one of Europe’s largest exporters of fruit and vegetables. Having fled home countries devastated by colonialism and global capitalism, those who survive the journey across the Mediterranean arrive on European shores only to find themselves systematically segregated and exploited. They have been subject to anti-migrant policies over decades, from administrations across the political spectrum. Trapped in a chokehold of subhuman living and working conditions, they are the dehumanised Other, invisible by design—the people hidden behind foods and goods branded ‘Made in Italy’.
Ciao Ousmane is the story of this subordinated class. Through the lives and stories of Italy’s migrant workers, Hsiao-Hung Pai exposes the open secret of how state and society create ‘necessary outcasts’. This is a bitter, frank and moving tale of racial capitalism, against which workers constantly find new ways to organise and fight back.
Гарги Бхаттачарья0.0 We are in a moment of profound overlapping crises. The landscape of politics and entitlement is being rapidly and unpredictably remade. As movements against colonial legacies and state violence coincide with the rise of new authoritarian regimes, it is the analytical lens of racism, and the politics of race, that offers the sharpest focus.
In Empire's Endgame, eight leading scholars make a powerful collective intervention in debates around racial capitalism and political crisis in the British context. While the 'Hostile Environment' policy and Brexit Referendum have thrown the centrality of race into sharp relief, discussions of racism have too often focused on individual attitudes and behaviours. Foregrounding instead the wider political and economic context, the authors of Empire's Endgame trace the ways in which the legacies of empire have been reshaped by global capitalism, the digital environment and the instability of the nation-state.
Engaging with contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, Empire's Endgame offers both an original perspective on race, media, the state and criminalisation, and a vision of a political infrastructure that might include rather than expel in the face of crisis.
Райан Э. Джонс, Мэттью Браун0.0 Paint Your Town Red tells the story of how one city in the north of England decided to level up without waiting for Whitehall.
Over the last decade, Preston City Council and its partners have earned Preston the title of Most Improved City by generating and democratising wealth at a local level. Through the experience of Preston City Council's leader Matthew Brown, a main advocate of the new Democratic Economy and the driving-force behind the world-recognized Preston Model, this book explores how local actions can meaningfully transfer economic, social and political power back to communities.
But beyond Preston, Community Wealth-Building is a significant and growing movement in the UK and across the world. Using analysis, interviews and case studies to examine how a variety of local communities are applying similar principles to take control of their own circumstances, Paint Your Town Red gives us a blueprint for the wholesale transformation of our currently failing economic system.
