Torture Papers or Citizen and Subject

Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib

Author: Karen J Greenberg

The Torture Papers document the so-called 'torture memos' and reports which US government officials wrote to prepare the way for, and to document, coercive interrogation and torture in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib. These documents present for the first time a compilation of materials that prior to publication have existed only piecemeal in the public domain. The Bush Administration, concerned about the legality of harsh interrogation techniques, understood the need to establish a legally viable argument to justify such procedures. The memos and reports document the systematic attempt of the US Government to prepare the way for torture techniques and coercive interrogation practices, forbidden under international law, with the express intent of evading legal punishment in the aftermath of any discovery of these practices and policies.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

The book is necessary, if grueling, reading for anyone interested in understanding the back story to those terrible photos from Saddam Hussein's former prison, and abuses at other American detention facilities.

Books about: Questions of Taste or In the Kitchen with Papa Wiltz

Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism

Author: Mahmood Mamdani

In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post- independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy--a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either "direct" (French) or "indirect" (British), with a third variant--apartheid--as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a "customary" mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa.

Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa.

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
I	Introduction: Thinking through Africa's Impasse	3
Pt. I	The Structure of Power	35
II	Decentralized Despotism	37
III	Indirect Rule: The Politics of Decentralized Despotism	62
IV	Customary Law: The Theory of Decentralized Despotism	109
V	The Native Authority and the Free Peasantry	138
Pt. II	The Anatomy of Resistance	181
VI	The Other Face of Tribalism: Peasant Movements in Equatorial Africa	183
VII	The Rural in the Urban: Migrant Workers in South Africa	218
VIII	Conclusion: Linking the Urban and the Rural	285
	Notes	303
	Index	339