Maze Of Injustice

More then 1 in 3 Native American or Alaska native women will raped at some point in their lives. Most do not seek justice as they know they will be met with inaction or indifference. Sexual violence against women is not only a criminal or social issue, it is a human rights issue. This report unravels some of the reasons why indegenous women in the USA are at such a risk and why survivors are so frequently denied justice. The voices of indigenous women in this report send a message of courage and hope.

"Sexual violence against American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/ AN) women is at epidemic proportions in the USA and survivors are frequently denied justice. Despite piecemeal efforts to address this, the USA is failing in its obligation to protect AI/ AN women from sexual violence and is actively restricting tribal governments from doing so. The high rates of violence faced by AI/AN women have been compounded by the USA's steady erosion of tribal government authority and refusal to untangle the complex jurisdictional maze that survivors face. Further, the federal government has exacerbated matters by chronically under resourcing law enforcement agencies and Indigenous health service providers. Amnesty International first reported on the crisis of sexual violence against AI/AN women in 2007, with the publication of a report entitled Maze of Injustice: The failure to protect Indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA. Nearly 15 years later, there has been no significant decrease in sexual violence against AI/AN women."--Executive summary.

Self-determination is on the agenda of Indigenous peoples all over the world. This analysis by an Indigenous feminist scholar challenges the United Nations–based human rights agendas and colonial theory that until now have shaped Indigenous models of self-determination. Gender inequality and gender violence, Dian Million argues, are critically important elements in the process of self-determination. Million contends that nation-state relations are influenced by a theory of trauma ascendant with the rise of neoliberalism. Such use of trauma theory regarding human rights corresponds to a therapeutic narrative by Western governments negotiating with Indigenous nations as they seek self-determination. Focusing on Canada and drawing comparisons with the United States and Australia, Million brings a genealogical understanding of trauma against a historical filter. Illustrating how Indigenous people are positioned differently in Canada, Australia, and the United States in their articulation of trauma, the author particularly addresses the violence against women as a language within a greater politic. The book introduces an Indigenous feminist critique of this violence against the medicalized framework of addressing trauma and looks to the larger goals of decolonization. Noting the influence of humanitarian psychiatry, Million goes on to confront the implications of simply dismissing Indigenous healing and storytelling traditions. Therapeutic Nations is the first book to demonstrate affect and trauma’s wide-ranging historical origins in an Indigenous setting, offering insights into community healing programs. The author’s theoretical sophistication and original research make the book relevant across a range of disciplines as it challenges key concepts of American Indian and Indigenous studies.

An Egyptian comedy of errors. Partly autobiographical, it is in the form of a diary by a young public prosecutor posted to a village in rural Egypt. Imbued with the ideals of a European education, he encounters a world of poverty and backwardness, red tape and incompetence of state officials.

The Maze Prison shows how an establishment built to hold those involved in terrorism, atrocities, murder and allied crimes became a pawn in the partisan conflict that was Northern Ireland. There followed a breakdown of norms, values and control as the last of these shifted from Governors to Ministers, outside officials and even prisoners. This led to the (often random) killing of prison officers and countless allegations, denials and obfuscations, as Prison Rules came into conflict with claims to be treated as prisoners-of-war or be given Special Category status. A social document par excellence, this stark slant on The Troubles and Peace Process cuts through the propaganda and base politics to reveal the truth about the H-Blocks, hunger-strikes, escapes and power struggles. Based on actual records and personal accounts, it challenges myths and legends to warn how easily a community can descend into what the author calls anomie. An invaluable record of ‘One of the most dangerous prisons in the world’. 'A must read for those interested in the legacy of our troubled past—Tom Murtagh restores the balance, exposes the truth and gives a unique insight into the mind-set of the terrorist godfathers incarcerated in the Maze'-- The Rt Hon Sir Jeffrey Donaldson MP 'This book gives an accurate account of events as I recall them'-- John Semple, Former Deputy Director of Operations, Northern Ireland Prison Service 'This is an important book'-- Phillip Wheatley, former Director, National Offender Management Service

Journalist and Jezebel staff writer Kylie Cheung exposes the insidious--and often unseen--connections among domestic abuse, state-based violence, political disenfranchisement, and the carceral state. "An astonishingly original, powerfully honest vision for true survivor justice." —Kirkus, starred review For readers of The Revolution Starts at Home, Feminism for the 99%, and Good and Mad. Incisive, urgent, and written exactly for our post-Roe times, Survivor Injustice is the feminist frame-changing read we need now--for each of us, and for all that’s at stake. With an abolitionist lens, journalist and Jezebel staff writer Kylie Cheung shows how domestic abuse and state violence are systemic and interconnected. She shatters the harmful and convenient narrative that abuse is a “private matter” perpetrated by individual bad actors--and situates popular understandings of domestic abuse in an indictment of the racism, misogyny, and carcerality baked into U.S. culture and politics. Cheung explores: The links between capitalism and domestic abuse: how late-stage capitalism colludes with the state to incentivize forced birth and reproductive coercion Intimate partner violence as a tool of political silence and social control America’s tacit acceptance of sexual assault, from the home to the White House The interplay of race, power, gender, and sexuality in state-based violence How the United States runs on carcerality, and what that means for victims The way we view survival crimes, and our complicity in defining which acts are “violent” and whose actions are “criminal” How white feminism and carceral feminism fail us all Cheung plainly names all that goes unsaid when we, as a culture, talk about abuse: How state and society criminalize women, girls, and gender-oppressed people of color. That what happens behind closed doors affects whose voices we hear at the ballot box. What it means when we put predators--from every party--up for vote. That sex workers are more likely to be victimized by law enforcement than “saved” by them. That this is all by design. And that ultimately--with organizing, abolition, and beyond-the-ballot action--we can change it all for good.

Advances critical conversations in Native American literary studies by situating its subject in global, transnational, and modernizing contexts. Since the rise of the Native American Renaissance in literature and culture during the American civil rights period, a rich critical discourse has been developed to provide a range of interpretive frameworks for the study, recovery, and teaching of Native American literary and cultural production. For the past few decades the dominant framework has been nationalism, a critical perspective placing emphasis on specific tribal nations and nationalist concepts. While this nationalist intervention has produced important insights and questions regarding Native American literature, culture, and politics it has not always attended to the important fact that Native texts and writers have also always been globalized. The World, the Text, and the Indian breaks from this framework by examining Native American literature not for its tribal-national significance but rather its connections to global, transnational, and cosmopolitan forces. Essays by leading scholars in the field assume that Native American literary and cultural production is global in character; even claims to sovereignty and self-determination are made in global contexts and influenced by global forces. Spanning from the nineteenth century to the present day, these analyses of theories, texts, and methods—from trans-indigenous to cosmopolitan, George Copway to Sherman Alexie, and indigenous feminism to book history—interrogate the dialects of global indigeneity and settler colonialism in literary and visual culture.

It has been well-established that many of the injustices that people around the world experience every day, from food insecurity to unsafe labor conditions and natural disasters, are the result of wide-scale structural problems of politics and economics. These are not merely random personal problems or consequences of bad luck or bad planning. Confronted by this fact, it is natural to ask what should or can we do to mitigate everyday injustices? In one sense, we answer this question when we buy the local homeless street newspaper, decide where to buy our clothes, remember our reusable bags when we shop, donate to disaster relief, or send letters to corporations about labor rights. But given the global scale of injustices related to poverty, environmental change, gender, and labor, can these individual acts really impact the seemingly intractable global social, political, and economic structures that perpetuate and exacerbate them? Moreover, can we respond to injustices in the world in ways that do more than just address their consequences? In this book, Brooke A. Ackerly both answers the question of what should we do, and shows that it's the wrong question to ask. To ask the right question, we need to ground our normative theory of global justice in the lived experience of injustice. Using a feminist critical methodology, she argues that what to do about injustice is not just an ethical or moral question, but a political question about assuming responsibility for injustice, regardless of our causal responsibility and extent of our knowledge of the injustice. Furthermore, it is a matter that needs to be guided by principles of human rights. As she argues, while many understand human rights as political goals or entitlements, they can also guide political strategy. Her aims are twofold: to present a theory of what it means to take responsibility for injustice and for ensuring human rights, as well as to develop a guide for how to take responsibility in ways that support local and global movements for transformative politics. In order to illustrate her theory and guide for action, Ackerly draws on fieldwork on the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013, the food crisis of 2008, and strategies from 125 activist organizations working on women's and labor rights across 26 countries. Just Responsibility integrates these ways of taking political responsibility into a rich theory of political community, accountability, and leadership in which taking responsibility for injustice itself transforms the fabric of political life.

In the wake of the MeToo movement, revelations of sexual assault and harassment continue to disrupt sexual politics across the globe. Reports of widespread misconduct—in workplaces from doctors’ offices to factory floors—precipitate firings, legal actions, street protests, and policy punditry. Meenakshi Gigi Durham situates media culture as a place in which these broader social struggles are produced and reproduced. The media figures whose depravity sparked the #MeToo movement are symbols of the complexities of sexual desire and consent. Pop culture fuels controversies about rape culture; social media users have launched feminist resistance that turned to real-world activism; and investigative journalists have broken stories of assault, offering a platform for survivors to speak truth to patriarchal power. Arguing that the media are a linchpin in these events, Durham provides a feminist account of the interrelated contexts of media production, representation, and reception. She situates the media as the key site where the establishment of sexuality and social relations takes place, and traces the media's powerful role in both reifying and challenging rape culture. This timely and stimulating book will be of interest to students and scholars of media, communication, gender studies, and sociology, as well as to anyone concerned by the current state of sexual politics.​