Routledge Handbook of African Security

Africa is home to most of the world's current conflicts, and security is a key issue. However, African security can only be understood by employing different levels of analysis: the individual (human security), the state (national/state security), and the region (regional/international security). Each of these levels provides analytical tools for understanding what could be called the "African security predicament" and these debates are animated by the "new security" issues: immigration, small arms transfers, gangs and domestic crime, HIV/AIDS, transnational crime, poverty, and environmental degradation. African security therefore not only presents concrete challenges for international security but provides a real-world context for challenging conventional conceptions of security.

Drawing together contributions from a wide range of key thinkers in the field, the Routledge Handbook of African Security engages with these debates, and is organized into four parts:

Part I: The African security predicament in the twenty-first century;
Part II: Understanding conflict in Africa;
Part III: Regionalism and Africa;
Part IV: External influences.
This Handbook will be of great interest to students of African politics, human security, global security, war and conflict studies, peacebuilding, and IR in general.



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Changing Times for Black Professionals (Framing 21st Century Social Issues)

This book is a study of the challenges, issues, and obstacles facing black professional workers in the United States. Though they have always been a part of the U.S. labor force, black professionals have often been overlooked in media, research, and public opinion. Ironically, however, their experiences offer a particularly effective way to understand how race shapes social life, opportunities, and upward mobility. As the 21st century continues to usher in increasing demographic, social, and economic change to the United States, it is critical to consider the impact this will have on an important sector of the labor force. In this book, I examine the reasons why sociological study of black professional workers is important and valuable, review the literature that examines their experiences in the workplace, and consider the issues and challenges they are likely to face in a rapidly shifting social world.

The goal of this new, unique Series is to offer readable, teachable "thinking frames" on today’s social problems and social issues by leading scholars, all in short 60 page or shorter formats, and available for view on http://routledge.customgateway.com/routledge-social-issues.html

For instructors teaching a wide range of courses in the social sciences, the Routledge Social Issues Collection now offers the best of both worlds: originally written short texts that provide "overviews" to important social issues as well as teachable excerpts from larger works previously published by Routledge and other presses.



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Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture

Katrina Hazzard-Gordon offers the first analysis of the development of the jook—an underground cultural institution created by the black working class—together with other dance arenas in African-American culture. Beginning with the effects of African slaves’ middle passage experience on their traditional dances, she traces the unique and virtually autonomous dance culture that developed in the rural South. Like the blues, these secular dance forms and institutions were brought north and urbanized by migrating blacks. In northern cities, some aspects of black dance became integrated into white culture and commercialized. Focusing on ten African-American dance arenas from the period of enslavement to the mid-twentieth century, this book explores the jooks, honky-tonks, rent parties, and after-hours joints as well as the licensed membership clubs, dance halls, cabarets, and the dances of the black elite.

Jook houses emerged during the Reconstruction era and can be viewed as a cultural response to freedom. In the jook, Hazzard-Gordon explains, an immeasurable amount of core black culture including food, language, community fellowship, mate selection, music, and dance found a sanctuary of expression when no other secular institution flourished among the folk. The jook and its various derivative forms have provided both entertainment and an economic alternative (such as illegal lotteries and numbers) to people excluded from the dominant economy. Dances like the Charleston, shimmy, snake hips, funky butt, twist, and slow drag originated in the jooks; some can be traced back to Africa.

Social dancing links black Americans to their African past more strongly than any other aspect of their culture. Citing the significance of dance in the African-American psyche, this study explores the establishments that nurtured ancestral as well as communal links for African-Americans, vividly describing black dances, formal rituals, such as debutante balls, and the influence of black dance on white culture.



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Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Race, Realism, and the U.S. Literary Marketplace

Augusta Rohrbach broadens our understanding of the American literary tradition by showing how African American literature and culture greatly influenced the development of realism. Rohrbach traces the influences of the slave narratives—such as the use of authenticating details, as well as dialect, and a frank treatment of the human body—in writings by Howells, Wharton, and others, and explores questions about the shifting relationship between literature and culture in the US from 1830-1930. Beginning with the question, “How might slave narratives—heralded as the first indigenous literature by Theodore Parker—have influenced the development of American Literature?” Rohrbach develops connections between an emerging literary marketplace, the rise of the professional writer, and literary realism.



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Police State: How America's Cops Get Away with Murder

How does America, founded on the promise of freedom for all, find itself poised to become a police state? In Police State, legendary "country lawyer" Gerry Spence reveals the unnerving truth of our criminal justice system. In his more than sixty years in the courtroom, Spence has never represented a person charged with a crime in which the police hadn't themselves violated the law. Whether by hiding, tampering with, or manufacturing evidence; by gratuitous violence and even murder, those who are charged with upholding the law too often break it. Spence points to the explosion of brutality leading up to the murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, insisting that this is the way it has always been: cops get away with murder. Nothing changes. Police State narrates the shocking account of the Madrid train bombings - how the FBI accused an innocent man of treasonous acts they knew he hadn't committed. It details the rampant racism within Chicago's police department, which landed teenager Dennis Williams on death row. It unveils the deliberately coercive efforts of two cops to extract a false murder confession from frightened and mentally fragile Albert Hancock, along with other appalling evidence from eight of Spence's most famous cases. We all want to feel safe. But how can we be safe when the very police we pay to protect us instead kill us, maim us, and falsify the evidence against us? Can we accept the argument that cops may occasionally overstep their boundaries, but only when handling guilty criminals and never with us? Can we expect them to investigate and prosecute themselves when faced with allegations of misconduct? Can we believe that they are acting for our own good? Too many innocent are convicted; too many are wrongly executed. The cost has become too high for a free people to bear. In Police State, Spence issues a stinging indictment of the American justice system. Demonstrating that the way we select and train our police guarantees fatal abuses of justice, he also prescribes a challenging cure that stands to restore America's promise of liberty and justice for all. Download Link

Extremist for Love: Martin Luther King Jr., Man of Ideas and Nonviolent Social Action

In an era where people are often sorted into the categories of 'thinker' and 'doer', Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stands out - a rare mix of the deeply profound thinker and intellect who put the fruit of that reflection into the service of direct social action. In this helpful telling of King's life, Dr. Rufus Burrow knits together the story of King's family, his intellectual journey, and his experience of the pervasive racism of America in that era in a way that highlights the onnections between King's thought and his actions. The result is a renewed understanding of the roots of King's actions and a fresh appreciation for how intellectual activity can impact our world in surprisingly direct ways. Download Link

The Art of Central Africa: Masterpieces from the Berlin Museum

The Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin is one of the world's foremost museums of anthropology, and the art of Central Africa is only one of the many strengths of its extensive African holdings. Although these important works have long been known and admired by scholars and collectors of African art through the museum's comprehensive program of publications, they have only occasionally been on public display in its galleries since 1945. The exhibition highlights the Museum für Völkerkunde's collection of Central African sculpture. The Museum für Völkerkunde is now part of the comprehensive seven-museum complex of the Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Dahlem, West Berlin, and was formed in the 1870s and 1880s, decades that saw the creation of many of the world's premier museums of art, natural history, and anthropology. In contrast, The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired its first African sculpture in 1950, and the Museum of Primitive Art, whose collection merged with ours in 1978 and 1979, was founded in 1954. Thus, the African collection at the Metropolitan Museum was not begun until more than seventy years after the creation of the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, and consequently it is vastly different in size and scope. Central Africa in particular is one of the areas in which our own collection is not as rich. This show presented a more complete view of Central Africa's major sculptural traditions to our visitors. [This book was originally published in 1990 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.] Download Link

You're Dead—So What?: Media, Police, and the Invisibility of Black Women as Victims of Homicide

Though numerous studies have been conducted regarding perceived racial bias in newspaper reporting of violent crimes, few studies have focused on the intersections of race and gender in determining the extent and prominence of this coverage, and more specifically how the lack of attention to violence against women of color reinforces their invisibility in the social structure. This book provides an empirical study of media and law enforcement bias in reporting and investigating homicides of African American women compared with their white counterparts. The author discusses the symbiotic relationship between media coverage and the response from law enforcement to victims of color, particularly when these victims are reported missing and presumed to be in danger by their loved ones. Just as the media are effective in helping to increase police response, law enforcement officials reach out to news outlets to solicit help from the public in locating a missing person or solving a murder. However, a deeply troubling disparity in reporting the disappearance and homicides of female victims reflects racial inequality and institutionalized racism in the social structure that need to be addressed. It is this disparity this important study seeks to solve. Download Link

Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South

From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes' removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory. The tribes formulated racial and gender ideologies that justified this practice and marginalized free black people in the Indian nations well after the Civil War and slavery had ended. Through the end of the nineteenth century, ongoing conflicts among Choctaw, Chickasaw, and U.S. lawmakers left untold numbers of former slaves and their descendants in the two Indian nations without citizenship in either the Indian nations or the United States. In this groundbreaking study, Barbara Krauthamer rewrites the history of southern slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native American slaveholders and the black people they enslaved. Krauthamer's examination of slavery and emancipation highlights the ways Indian women's gender roles changed with the arrival of slavery and changed again after emancipation and reveals complex dynamics of race that shaped the lives of black people and Indians both before and after removal. Download Link

The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics

The historical significance of Barack Obama's triumph in the presidential election of 2008 scarcely requires comment. Yet it contains an irony: he won a victory as an African American only by denying that he should discuss issues that target the concerns of African Americans. Obama's very success, writes Fredrick Harris, exacted a heavy cost on black politics. In The Price of the Ticket, Harris puts Obama's career in the context of decades of black activism, showing how his election undermined the very movement that made it possible. The path to his presidency began just before passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, when black leaders began to discuss strategies to make the most of their new access to the ballot. Some argued that black voters should organize into a cohesive, independent bloc to promote both targeted and universal polices; others urged a more race-neutral approach, working together with other racial minorities as well as like-minded whites. This has been the fundamental divide within black politics ever since. At first, the gap did not seem serious. But the post-civil-rights era has accelerated a shift towards race-neutral politics. Obama made a point of distancing himself from older race-conscious black leaders, such as Jesse Jackson- and leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus-even though, as Harris shows, he owes much to Jackson's earlier campaigns for the White House. Unquestionably Obama's approach won support among whites, but Harris finds the results troublesome. The social problems targeted by an earlier generation of black politicians--racial disparities in income and education, stratospheric incarceration and unemployment rates--all persist, yet Obama's election, ironically, marginalized those issues, keeping them off the political agenda. Meanwhile, the civil-rights movement's militancy to attack the vestiges of racial inequality is fading. Written by one of America's leading scholars of race and politics, The Price of the Ticket will reshape our understanding of the rise of Barack Obama and the decline of a politics dedicated to challenging racial inequality head on. Download Link

The Quest for Citizenship: African American and Native American Education in Kansas, 1880-1935

In The Quest for Citizenship, Kim Cary Warren examines the formation of African American and Native American citizenship, belonging, and identity in the United States by comparing educational experiences in Kansas between 1880 and 1935. Warren focuses her study on Kansas, thought by many to be the quintessential free state, not only because it was home to sizable populations of Indian groups and former slaves, but also because of its unique history of conflict over freedom during the antebellum period. After the Civil War, white reformers opened segregated schools, ultimately reinforcing the very racial hierarchies that they claimed to challenge. To resist the effects of these reformers' actions, African Americans developed strategies that emphasized inclusion and integration, while autonomy and bicultural identities provided the focal point for Native Americans' understanding of what it meant to be an American. Warren argues that these approaches to defining American citizenship served as ideological precursors to the Indian rights and civil rights movements. This comparative history of two nonwhite races provides a revealing analysis of the intersection of education, social control, and resistance, and the formation and meaning of identity for minority groups in America. Download Link

Black Muslims and the Law: Civil Liberties from Elijah Muhammad to Muhammad Ali

Black Muslims and the Law: Civil Liberties From Elijah Muhammad to Muhammad Ali examines the Nation of Islam’s quest for civil liberties as what might arguably be called the inaugural and first sustained challenge to the suppression of religious freedom in African American legal history. Borrowing insights from A. Leon Higgonbotham Jr.’s classic works on American slavery jurisprudence, Black Muslims and the Law reveals the Nation of Islam’s strategic efforts to engage governmental officials from a position of power, and suggests the federal executive, congressmen, judges, lawyers, law enforcement officials, prison administrators, state governments, and African American civic leaders held a common understanding of what it meant to be and not to be African American and religious in the period between World War II and the Vietnam War. The work raises basic questions about the rights of African descended people to define god, question white moral authority, and critique the moral legitimacy of American war efforts according to their own beliefs and standards. Download Link

Slavery in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1787-1865: A History of Human Bondage in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin

Ordinance in 1787 banned African American slavery in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, making the new territory officially "free," slavery in fact persisted in the region through the end of the Civil War. Slaves accompanied presidential appointees serving as soldiers or federal officials in the Upper Mississippi, worked in federally supported mines, and openly accompanied southern travelers. Entrepreneurs from the East Coast started pro-slavery riverfront communities in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota to woo vacationing slaveholders. Midwestern slaves joined their southern counterparts in suffering family separations, beatings, auctions, and other indignities that accompanied status as chattel. This revealing work explores all facets of the "peculiar institution" in this peculiar location and its impact on the social and political development of the United States. Download Link

The 3-1-2-1 Diet: Eat and Cheat Your Way to Weight Loss--up to 10 Pounds in 21 Days

Want to finally lose the weight and keep it off? Want to be able to eat the foods you love? Reaching your goals can only happen when you don't feel deprived and you continue to stay motivated. Now, celebrity trainer and star of the hit reality series The Biggest Loser, Dolvett Quince, tells you how to do all of that and more in his revolutionary program, THE 3-1-2-1 DIET. This 21-day program works by manipulating your body's natural tendency to slow its metabolic rate in response to calorie restriction. It takes a new approach to getting lean-one scientifically based on changing up food and calories to tap into your body's potential to burn fat. This unconventional plan results in greater muscle and less fat than any other diet you've ever tried. Dolvett's effective eating plan is as easy as 3-1-2-1: three days of clean eating, one day of cheating, two more days of clean eating, and one final reward meal at the end of the week. No foods are off limits and you will never feel deprived because the plan is flexible enough to fit into any lifestyle. You'll lose weight fast-10 pounds or more in just 21 days-and you won't plateau. Dolvett's simple meal plans and delicious, easy-to-prepare recipes, together with his fast and effective workouts that combine cardio and body-shaping moves, will have you back in your skinny jeans in less than three weeks! Dowload Link

Project Fatherhood: A Story of Courage and Healing in One of America's Toughest Communities

A group of former gang members come together to help one another answer the question “How can I be a good father when I’ve never had one?” In 2010, former gang leader turned community activist Big Mike Cummings asked UCLA gang expert Jorja Leap to co-lead a group of men struggling to be better fathers in Watts, South Los Angeles, a neighborhood long burdened with a legacy of racialized poverty, violence, and incarceration. These men, black and brown, from late adolescence to middle age, are trying to heal themselves and their community, and above all to build their identities as fathers. Each week, they come together to help one another answer the question “How can I be a good father when I’ve never had one?” Project Fatherhood follows the lives of the men as they struggle with the pain of their own losses, the chronic pressures of poverty and unemployment, and the unquenchable desire to do better and provide more for the next generation. Although the group begins as a forum for them to discuss issues relating to their roles as parents, it slowly grows to mean much more: it becomes a place where they can share jokes and traumatic experiences, joys and sorrows. As the men repair their own lives and gain confidence, the group also becomes a place for them to plan and carry out activities to help the Watts community grow as well as thrive. By immersing herself in the lived experiences of those working to overcome their circumstances, Leap not only dramatically illustrates the realities of fathers trying to do the right thing, but she also paints a larger sociological portrait of how institutional injustices become manifest in the lives of ordinary people. At a time in which racial justice seems more elusive than ever—stymied by the generational cycles of mass incarceration and the cradle-to-prison pipeline—the group’s development over time demonstrates real-life movement toward solutions as the men help one another make their families and their community stronger. Dowload Link

The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery

In his influential and widely debated Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams examined the relation of capitalism and slavery in the British West Indies. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, his study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that has set the tone for an entire field. Williams’s profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development and has been widely debated since the book’s initial publication in 1944. The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery now makes available in book form for the first time his dissertation, on which Capitalism and Slavery was based. The significant differences between his two works allow us to rethink questions that were considered resolved and to develop fresh problems and hypotheses. It offers the possibility of a much deeper reconsideration of issues that have lost none of their urgency—indeed, whose importance has increased. Download Link