Dangerous Citizens

This book simultaneously tells a story—or rather, stories—and a history. The stories are those of Greek Leftists as paradigmatic figures of abjection, given that between 1929 and 1974 tens of thousands of Greek dissidents were detained and tortured in prisons, places of exile, and concentration camps. They were sometimes held for decades, in subhuman conditions of toil and deprivation. The history is that of how the Greek Left was constituted by the Greek state as a zone of danger. Legislation put in place in the early twentieth century postulated this zone. Once the zone was created, there was always the possibility—which came to be a horrific reality after the Greek Civil War of 1946 to 1949—that the state would populate it with its own citizens. Indeed, the Greek state started to do so in 1929, by identifying ever-increasing numbers of citizens as “Leftists” and persecuting them with means extending from indefinite detention to execution. In a striking departure from conventional treatments, Neni Panourgiá places the Civil War in a larger historical context, within ruptures that have marked Greek society for centuries. She begins the story in 1929, when the Greek state set up numerous exile camps on isolated islands in the Greek archipelago. The legal justification for these camps drew upon laws reaching back to 1871—originally directed at controlling “brigands”—that allowed the death penalty for those accused and the banishment of their family members and anyone helping to conceal them. She ends with the 2004 trial of the Revolutionary Organization 17 November. Drawing on years of fieldwork, Panourgiá uses ethnographic interviews, archival material, unpublished personal narratives, and memoirs of political prisoners and dissidents to piece together the various microhistories of a generation, stories that reveal how the modern Greek citizen was created as a fraught political subject. Her book does more than give voice to feelings and experiences suppressed for decades. It establishes a history for the notion of indefinite detention that appeared as a legal innovation with the Bush administration. Part of its roots, Panourgiá shows, lie in the laboratory that Greece provided for neo-colonialism after the Truman Doctrine and under the Marshall Plan.

Citizens in Latin American cities live in constant fear, amidst some of the most dangerous conditions on earth. In that vast region, 140 thousand people die violently each year, and one out of three citizens have been directly or indirectly victimized by violence. Citizens of Fear, in part, assembles survey results of social scientists who document the pervasiveness of violence. But the numbers tell only part of the story.

Develops a novel theory of war and revenge with far-reaching implications for the role of individuals in international relations.

There is tremendous controversy across the United States (and beyond) when a police officer uses deadly force against an unarmed citizen, but often the conversation is devoid of contextual details. These details matter greatly as a matter of law and organizational legitimacy. In this short book, authors Jon Shane and Zoë Swenson offer a comprehensive analysis of the first study to use publicly available data to reveal the context in which an officer used deadly force against an unarmed citizen. Although any police shooting, even a justified shooting, is not a desired outcome—often termed "lawful but awful" in policing circles—it is not necessarily a crime. The results of this study lend support to the notion that being unarmed does not mean "not dangerous," in some ways explaining why most police officers are not indicted when such a shooting occurs. The study’s findings show that when police officers used deadly force during an encounter with an unarmed citizen, the officer or a third person was facing imminent threat of death or serious injury in the vast majority of situations. Moreover, when police officers used force, their actions were almost always consistent with the accepted legal and policy principles that govern law enforcement in the overwhelming proportion of encounters (as measured by indictments). Noting the dearth of official data on the context of police shooting fatalities, Shane and Swenson call for the U.S. government to compile comprehensive data so researchers and practitioners can learn from deadly force encounters and improve practices. They further recommend that future research on police shootings should examine the patterns and micro-interactions between the officer, citizen, and environment in relation to the prevailing law. The unique data and analysis in this book will inform discussions of police use of force for researchers, policymakers, and students involved in criminal justice, public policy, and policing.

Citizens Against Crime and Violence considers societal responses to crime and violence in six contrasting localities of one of Mexico's most affected regions, the state of Michoacán. The comparative ethnographic approach offers insights that are sensitive to local specifics but generalizable to other parts of the world affected by crime and violence.

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.

Exploring the intersection between Thai politics, urban poverty, religion, and global humanitarianism from the perspective of “slum children” in Bangkok, this fascinating, engaging and illuminating study offers startling new insights into how ideas of “parenthood” and “infantilization” shape Thai political culture.

This brief serves to educate readers about the sovereign citizen movement, presenting relevant case studies and offering suggestions for measures to address problems caused by this movement. Sovereign citizens are considered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to be a prominent domestic terrorist threat in the United States, and are broadly defined as a loosely-afflicted anti-government group who believes that the United States government and its laws are invalid and fraudulent. Because they consider themselves to be immune to the consequences of American law, members identifying with this group often engage in criminal activities such as tax fraud, “paper terrorism”, and in more extreme cases, attempted murder or other acts of violence. Sovereign Citizens is one of the first scholarly works to explicitly focus on the sovereign citizen movement by explaining the movement’s origin, interactions with the criminal justice system, and ideology.