Human Rights Politics

From the nature of democracy to our place in the natural world, from intellectual politics to the politics of language, Powers and Prospects provides a scathing critique of orthodox views and government policy and outlines other paths that can lead to better understanding and more constructive action.

"The Other America: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Call for Economic Justice and Unity" is a powerful exploration of one of Dr. King’s most urgent and socially critical speeches. Delivered at Stanford University in 1967, The Other America goes beyond the struggle for civil rights and exposes the deep economic and racial inequalities that persist in society. In this audiobook, Dr. King’s vision unfolds against the backdrop of a nation divided—one of prosperity and privilege, the other of poverty and neglect.

In 2000, Rebekah Robertson gave birth to twin boys, George and Harry. But as they grew older, their preferences began to show, and by the age of three it was clear Georgie was drawn to anything that was pretty or had a skirt that could swirl. Before long Georgie began to insist that she was a girl and became distressed that she had to hide who she really was when she started school. Soon the bullying started, and she would come home in floods of tears, begging her mother to help her.

After decades of significant progress, the prospects of women and girls in Afghanistan are once again dependent on radical Islamists who reject gender equality. When the United States announced the end of their twenty-year occupation and the Taliban seized control of the country on August 15, 2021, a steep regression of social, political, and economic freedoms for women in the country began.

Tanya Talaga, the best-selling author of Seven Fallen Feathers and the 2017-2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy, calls attention to an urgent global humanitarian crisis among Indigenous Peoples - youth suicide.

Since the revolution-turned-civil war in Syria began in 2011, over 500,000 civilians have been killed and more than 12 million Syrians have been displaced. Rania Abouzeid, one of the foremost journalists on the topic, follows two pairs of sisters from opposite sides of the conflict to give listeners a firsthand glimpse of the turmoil and devastation this strife has wrought.

Think today's anti-abortion ideas are rooted in religious prohibitions or arguments about where life begins? Wrong: today's anti-abortion movements is largely financed and planned by far-right extremists. Many of them are avowedly fascist and white supremacist, afraid of a "great replacement" of the world's white population by other races, who are working hard to reshape governments and policies across Europe, North America, and around the world. Much of this far-right organizing and funding network, however, has been overlooked by today's feminist and left movements.

Two authors with decades of experience promoting human rights argue that, as the world changes around us, rights hardly imaginable today will come into being.

In a story that has never been told, Going to the Mountain tells the tale of how Nelson Mandela steered his grandson Ndaba from his reckless youth (shirking school, fighting in gangs) to his maturation into a fully realized and principled adulthood - all as an often-single parent in his years after political imprisonment and through his landmark presidency of South Africa. On a scale both intimate and epic, the book will detail the gripping arc of Ndaba's own extraordinary journey, which mirrors that of South Africa's.

Making the Future presents more than 50 concise and persuasively argued commentaries on U.S. politics and policies, written between 2007 and 2011. Taken together, Chomsky's essays present a powerful counter-narrative to official accounts of the major political events of the past four years: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the U.S. presidential race; the ascendancy of China; Latin America's leftward turn; the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea; Israel's invasion of Gaza and more.

The massacre of the Yazidi people by ISIS was nothing less than genocide. In refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, the authors brought a skilled team to interview more than a hundred ISIS survivors and document what they experienced and saw. These former slaves observed their torturers and knew from the inside the secret facilities that ISIS has kept hidden from the world. What their testimony reveals is an organization whose ambition is power, regardless of their claim to be "soldiers of God."

In What Women Want, Deborah L. Rhode, one of the nation's leading scholars on women and law, brings to the discussion a broad array of interdisciplinary research as well as interviews with heads of leading women's organizations. Is the women's movement stalled? What are the major obstacles it confronts? What are its key priorities and what strategies might advance them? In addressing those questions, the audiobook explores virtually all of the major policy issues confronting women.

In The Forever Prisoner, Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy recount dramatic scenes inside multiple black sites around the world through the eyes of those who were there, trace the twisted legal justifications, and chart how enhanced interrogation, a key “weapon” in the global “War on Terror,” metastasized over seven years, encompassing dozens of detainees in multiple locations, some of whom died. Ultimately that war has cost 8 trillion dollars and 900,000 lives, while the U.S. Senate judged enhanced interrogation was torture and had produced zero high-value intelligence.

Asserting that you have the moral right to be in control of your life, Think Right or Wrong, Not Left or Right (2nd Expanded Edition advocates that neither today’s political left nor right have your best interests at hand. Their alluring promise of a cradle-to-grave safety net is deceptive, because in reality, it transfers control of your life from you to society, one government program, one tax, and one regulation at a time. The book shows why the traditional political left-to-right spectrum presents you with two false alternatives.

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.

Covering diversity and equality, globalization, human rights, modern urban living and the role of work and institutions, The Sociology Book looks at the big questions of how we cooperate: What is society? What makes it tick? Why do we interact in the way that we do with our friends, co-workers, and rivals?

More than five years in the making, Mark Gevisser’s The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers is a globetrotting exploration of how the human rights frontier around sexual orientation and gender identity has come to divide - and describe - the world in an entirely new way over the first two decades of the 21st century. No social movement has brought change so quickly and with such dramatically mixed results.

Centering Black voices and the narratives of enslaved people, Breaking the Chains offers a thoroughly researched account of the ways people in bondage were themselves a driving force behind their own emancipation.

In his more than 30 years as an NCIS special agent and counterintelligence officer, Mark Fallon has investigated some of the most significant terrorist operations in US history, including the first bombing of the World Trade Center and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. He knew well how to bring criminals to justice, all the while upholding the Constitution. But in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, it was clear that America was dealing with a new kind of enemy.

Punjab was the arena of one of the first major armed conflicts of postcolonial India. During its deadliest decade, as many as 250,000 people were killed. This audiobook makes an urgent intervention in the history of the conflict, which to date has been characterized by a fixation on sensational violence - or ignored altogether. Mallika Kaur unearths the stories of three people who found themselves at the center of Punjab’s human rights movement.