In The Twilight Of The Revolution

First published in 1983. Amilcar Cabral was one of Africa’s leading revolutionary figures. Universally recognised as the founding father at the independent state of Guiné-Bissau, he was also the first truly important political thinker to have emerged from Africa’s two decades of revolution. This book was the first publication to present a critical analysis of his standing as a political theorist. Born in 1925 in the then Portuguese colony of Guiné, Cabral devoted his life to the liberation of his people from colonialism and was instrumental in founding the PAIGC, the African Party for the Independence of Guiné and Cape Verde. He was assassinated early in 1973, but the PAIGC continued his task and Guiné-Bissau gained independence in September 1973. Guiné’s revolution came late, but it was a genuine revolution and, like all revolutions, was accompanied by a theory of its own. That theory is found in the writings of Cabral. In this study Jack McCulloch explains that, because of the conjunction of a number of historical factors, the revolution in Guiné assumed an importance for out of proportion to the size or economic significance of the country, and shows that consequently Cabral’s theory has come to have an historical significance of its own. This account of Cabral’s political theory demonstrates clearly that the effect of Cabral’s career was to help bring down the last of the great colonial empires in Africa and, in the realm of theory, to dismantle the central shibboleths of African socialism.

This book is a long-overdue history of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) and the rise of the Africanist ideology in South Africa. From its formation in 1959, the PAC underground inside South Africa and in exile shaped the dynamics of the anti-apartheid movement and liberation struggle by framing alternative ideologies. Kwandiwe Kondlo analyses the radical traditions, the structural contradictions and the internal conflicts of this rival to the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa's dominant liberation organisation. The contributions of some of the PAC leaders, including Robert Sobukhwe, Potlake Kitchener Leballo, Vusumzi Make and John Nyathi Pokela, are reconstructed as are the PAC's experiences in exile and the strategies pursued by its military wing, the Azanian People's Liberation Party (APLA). The role of the PAC in the power-sharing negotiations leading to the historic 1994 elections in South Africa round off the narrative. The PAC story is a highly controversial one, as the perspectives are wide and various. This book seeks to present a balanced picture which includes diverse views in a comprehensive narrative.

The dramatic secret history of our undeclared thirty-year conflict with Iran, revealing newsbreaking episodes of covert and deadly operations that brought the two nations to the brink of open war For three decades, the United States and Iran have engaged in a secret war. It is a conflict that has never been acknowledged and a story that has never been told. This surreptitious war began with the Iranian revolution and simmers today inside Iraq and in the Persian Gulf. Fights rage in the shadows, between the CIA and its network of spies and Iran's intelligence agency. Battles are fought at sea with Iranians in small speedboats attacking Western oil tankers. This conflict has frustrated five American presidents, divided administrations, and repeatedly threatened to bring the two nations into open warfare. It is a story of shocking miscalculations, bitter debates, hidden casualties, boldness, and betrayal. A senior historian for the federal government with unparalleled access to senior officials and key documents of several U.S. administrations, Crist has spent more than ten years researching and writing The Twilight War, and he breaks new ground on virtually every page. Crist describes the series of secret negotiations between Iran and the United States after 9/11, culminating in Iran's proposal for a grand bargain for peace-which the Bush administration turned down. He documents the clandestine counterattack Iran launched after America's 2003 invasion of Iraq, in which thousands of soldiers disguised as reporters, tourists, pilgrims, and aid workers toiled to change the government in Baghdad and undercut American attempts to pacify the Iraqi insurgency. And he reveals in vivid detail for the first time a number of important stories of military and intelligence operations by both sides, both successes and failures, and their typically unexpected consequences. Much has changed in the world since 1979, but Iran and America remain each other's biggest national security nightmares. "The Iran problem" is a razor-sharp briar patch that has claimed its sixth presidential victim in Barack Obama and his administration. The Twilight War adds vital new depth to our understanding of this acute dilemma it is also a thrillingly engrossing read, animated by a healthy irony about human failings in the fog of not-quite war.

This book launches an ambitious reexamination of the elite politics behind one of the most remarkable transformations in the late twentieth century. As the first part of a new interpretation of the evolution of Chinese politics during the years 1972-82, it provides a detailed study of the end of the Maoist era, demonstrating Mao's continuing dominance even as his ability to control events ebbed away. The tensions within the "gang of four," the different treatment of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, and the largely unexamined role of younger radicals are analyzed to reveal a view of the dynamic of elite politics that is at odds with accepted scholarship. The authors draw upon newly available documentary sources and extensive interviews with Chinese participants and historians to develop their challenging interpretation of one of the most poorly understood periods in the history of the People's Republic of China.

In this extraordinarily rich book, Madelyn Gutwirth examines over one hundred prints and paintings, dozens of texts, and the work of a great many cultural critics in order to consider how gender politics were played out during a highly volatile era. Finding evidence of a crisis in gender relations during the eighteenth century, she traces its evolution in the politics of rococo art, demographic trends, plans for the control of prostitution, maternal nursing and wet-nursing practices, folklore, the salon, and in the theater of Diderot and the polemics of Rousseau. Gutwirth shows how a hostile gender ideology consigned women to a solely mothering role before the political revolution began, and how women who struggled to participate in the nascent First French Republic found themselves hobbled by the representational practices of the revolutionaries, especially their use of allegory. The artificiality and anachronism of the Revolution's representation of women were ratified by the Napoleonic Code. Once depicted as erotic goddesses by the rococo, then as goddesses of liberty (Marianne), the dominant figuration of women around 1800 would become the dying waif. As modern republics began their struggle toward legitimacy, women's posture within them had been reduced, by representation, to feeble marginality. Gutwirth combines perspectives from literature, history, sociology, demography, psychology, and art history and criticism in her delineation of this crisis.

Fadreamas time is almost up The world of Fadreamas greatest enemy, Ralston Radburn, is making one last attempt to conquer everything and everyone. He hopes to do this by gaining control of the five Crystal Points located throughout the land. Only Dawn and her companions stand a fighting chance against Ralstons malice, but in stopping the evil, they may lose everything they have ever loved. Join Dawn, Alan, Evan, Ian and Mizu, as they battle to save Fadreama from the darkness, one last time.

Not only by sovereign governments but by global plebiscite," he writes. Today, there can be no more unreported Chernobyl disasters. There can be no more Pearl Harbor-like surprises. The vast migrations on every continent; the drive of informed peoples for self-determination; the collapse of the Soviet empire; the democratization of Latin America; the outburst of ethnic rivalries - all become understandable in the challenging light of Wriston's persuasive analysis.

Decolonisation and Regional Geopolitics argues that as much as the ‘Congo crisis’ (1960-1965) was a Cold War battleground, so too was it a battleground for Southern Africa’s decolonisation. This book provides a transnational history of African decolonisation, apartheid diplomacy, and Southern African nationalist movements. It answers three central questions. First, what was the nature of South African involvement in the Congo crisis? Second, what was the rationale for this involvement? Third, how did South Africans perceive the crisis? Innovatively, the book shifts the focus on the Congo crisis away from Cold War intervention and centres it around African decolonisation and regional geopolitics.