Showing titles in Political Science

When human rights lawyer Philippe Sands received an invitation to deliver a lecture in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv, he began to uncover a series of extraordinary historical coincidences. It set him on a quest that would take him halfway around the world in an exploration of the origins of international law and the pursuit of his own secret family history, beginning and ending with the last day of the Nuremberg Trials.

The biggest news and political stories of the day with a commitment to in-depth reporting that consistently seeks to hold our leaders accountable.

CEW Bean's wartime reports and photographs mythologised the Australian soldier and helped spawn the notion that the Anzacs achieved something nation-defining on the shores of Gallipoli and the battlefields of western Europe. In his quest to get the truth, Bean often faced death beside the Diggers in the trenches of Gallipoli and the Western Front – and saw more combat than many. But did Bean tell Australia the whole story of what he knew?

Allies at War is a fast-paced, narrative history, based on material drawn from over a hundred archives. Using vivid, first-hand accounts and unpublished diaries, we enter the rooms where the critical decisions were made while going beyond the confines of the Grand Alliance to examine, among other themes, the doomed Anglo-French alliance, fractious relations with General de Gaulle and the Free French, and interactions with Poland, Greece and Nationalist China.

The United States we thought we knew is gone. And it isn’t coming back. Every week on After America, Dr Emma Shortis examines the second Trump presidency, what’s happening in global politics, and how Australia can help shape our rapidly changing world for the better. Presented by the Australia Institute.

Published on the 15th anniversary of the Six-Day War that culminated in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Pappe offers a comprehensive exploration of one of the world's most prolonged and tragic conflicts. Using recently declassified archival material, Pappe analyses the motivations and strategies of the generals and politicians-and the decision-making process itself - that laid the foundation of the occupation. Pappe paints a picture of what is to all intents and purposes the world's largest "open prison".

This is a study of how intellectuals as a class affect modern societies by shaping the climate of opinion in which official policies develop, on issues ranging from economics to law to war and peace. You will hear a withering and clear-eyed critique about (but not for) intellectuals that explores their impact on public opinion, policy, and society at large.

As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism’s roots have been present in the United States for more than a century.

The Bolsheviks promised that they were building a new society, a workers’ paradise that would change the nature of mankind itself. What they ended up constructing was the largest prison the world had ever seen: a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that spanned half the globe.

Throughout history, the concept of command—as both a way to achieve objectives and as an assertion of authority—has been essential to military action and leadership. But, as Sir Lawrence Freedman shows, it is also deeply political. Military command has been reconstructed and revolutionized since the Second World War by nuclear warfare, small-scale guerrilla land operations and cyber interference. Freedman takes a global perspective, systematically investigating its practice and politics since 1945 through a wide range of conflicts.

Rodrigo Duterte was elected President of the Philippines in 2016. In his first 18 months in office, 12,000 people were murdered on the streets, gunned down by police officers and vigilante citizens - all with his encouragement. Duterte is a serial womanizer and a self-confessed killer, who has called both Barack Obama and Pope Francis "sons of whores." He is on record as saying he does not "give a shit" about human rights. Yet he is beloved of the 16.6 million Filipinos who voted for him, seen as vulgar but honest, a breath of fresh air, and an iconoclastic, anti-imperialist rebel.

Passing from lip to ear, the philosophies of Hermes Trismegistus have been passed down through thousands of years. Listen as this tradition continues in this audio compilation of The Kybalion, Corpus Hermeticum, The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, and The Life and Teachings of Hermes Trismegistus. This unprecedented collection will provide the foundation of the Hermetic Philosophy.

We hear all the time that we're moments from doomsday. Around us, crises interlock and escalate, threatening our collective survival. Protestors and politicians repeatedly call for action, but still we continue to drift towards disaster. We need to do something. But what if the only way for us to prevent catastrophe is to assume that it has already happened - to accept that we're already five minutes past zero hour? Too Late to Awaken sees Slavoj Žižek forge a vital new space for a radical emancipatory politics that could avert our course to self-destruction.

Myth is our wild way of telling the truth, of sharing stories that have our living earth speaking through them. There is an old insistence that we each have a twin we know nothing about. A wild, curious twin that was thrown out the window the night we were born, taking much of our energy with them. This story is a quest to find and court our wild twin, for they have something important to tell us. If there was something we were here to do in our few, brief years, we can be sure that the wild twin is holding the key.

China and Japan have cultural and political connections that stretch back 1,500 years. But today, their relationship is strained. China's military buildup deeply worries Japan, while Japan's brutal occupation of China in World War II remains an open wound. In recent years, less than 10 percent of each population had positive feelings toward the other, and both countries insist that the other side must deal openly with its history before relations can improve. Ezra Vogel's China and Japan examines key turning points in Sino-Japanese history.

Charlie Wilson's War is the untold story behind the last battle of the Cold War and how it fueled the rise of militant Islam. George Crile tells how Charlie Wilson, a maverick congressman from east Texas, conspired with a rogue CIA operative to launch the biggest, meanest, and most successful covert operation in the agency's history.

Kamal Ravikant knows misery well. In 2011, the company Kamal had spent the last 10 years of his life nurturing and growing suddenly and embarrassingly went under. He experienced a profound depression, the kind that made him physically ill and bedridden. The only source of light in this darkest moment was a meditation, a chant that came to him and provided the only source of comfort he could muster: I love myself.

Following Marx’s death in 1883, Engels was able to step into the breach and, drawing on Marx’s extensive notes and writings, complete volume 2 of Capital, leading to its publication in 1885. Here, Marx turns his attention to the money owner, the money lender, the wholesale merchant, the trader and the entrepreneur or 'functioning capitalist.'

The definitive insider narrative and the most fully characterised account yet of the chaos, scandal and destruction of Trump's first term, from two Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalists. Drawing on nearly three years of reporting, hundreds of hours of interviews and more than 200 sources, including some of the most senior members of the administration, friends and firsthand witnesses who have never spoken before, Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig take us inside some of the most controversial moments of Trump's presidency.

Virtually all human societies were once organized tribally, yet over time most developed new political institutions which included a central state that could keep the peace and uniform laws that applied to all citizens. Some went on to create governments that were accountable to their constituents. We take these institutions for granted, but they are absent or are unable to perform in many of today’s developing countries—with often disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.