As the political climate of the United States moves rightward, effective and visionary voices from the left become both rarer and more essential. Here, scholar-activist Joy James provides such a voice. Taking the convergence of race, gender, and class as fundamentals trajectories.

African American scholar-activist Joy James offers a stimulating and iconoclastic account of a world in which the United States functions as the political-police center. Resisting State Violence is a clear-sighted and uncompromising guidebook for those who want to understand the forces that hinder social change, and to effectively move beyond them.

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada. While highlighting the ubiquity of Black resistance, Policing Black Lives traces the still-living legacy of slavery across multiple institutions, shedding light on the state’s role in perpetuating contemporary Black poverty and unemployment, racial profiling, law enforcement violence, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and low graduation rates. Emerging from a critical race feminist framework that insists that all Black lives matter, Maynard’s intersectional approach to anti-Black racism addresses the unique and understudied impacts of state violence as it is experienced by Black women, Black people with disabilities, as well as queer, trans, and undocumented Black communities. A call-to-action, Policing Black Lives urges readers to work toward dismantling structures of racial domination and re-imagining a more just society.

New ethnographic data leads to insights into the widespread yet understudied phenomenon of criminal extortion in Latin America.

The most violent places in the world today are not at war. More people have died in Mexico in recent years than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. These parts of the world are instead buckling under a maelstrom of gangs, organized crime, political conflict, corruption, and state brutality. Such devastating violence can feel hopeless, yet some places—from Colombia to the Republic of Georgia—have been able to recover. In this powerfully argued and urgent book, Rachel Kleinfeld examines why some democracies, including our own, are crippled by extreme violence and how they can regain security. Drawing on fifteen years of study and firsthand field research—interviewing generals, former guerrillas, activists, politicians, mobsters, and law enforcement in countries around the world—Kleinfeld tells the stories of societies that successfully fought seemingly ingrained violence and offers penetrating conclusions about what must be done to build governments that are able to protect the lives of their citizens. Taking on existing literature and popular theories about war, crime, and foreign intervention, A Savage Order is a blistering yet inspiring investigation into what makes some countries peaceful and others war zones, and a blueprint for what we can do to help.

Political Invisibility and Mobilization explores the unseen opportunities available to those considered irrelevant and disregarded during periods of violent repression. In a comparative study of three women’s peace movements, in Argentina, the former Yugoslavia, and Liberia, the concept of political invisibility is developed to identify the unexpected beneficial effects of marginalization in the face of regime violence and civil war. Each chapter details the unique ways these movements avoided being targeted as threats to regime power and how they utilized free spaces to mobilize for peace. Their organizing efforts among international networks are described as a form of field-shifting that gained them the authority to expand their work at home to bring an end to war and rebuild society. The robust conceptual framework developed herein offers new ways to analyze the variations and nuances of how social status interacts with opportunities for effective activism. This book presents a sophisticated theory of political invisibility with historical detail from three remarkable stories of courage in the face of atrocity. With relevance for political sociology, social movement studies, women’s studies, and peace and conflict studies, it contributes to scholarly understanding of mobilization in repressive states while also offering strategic insight to movement practitioners. Winner of the ASA Peace, War and Social Conflict Section's 2021 Outstanding Book Award.