When we want to deepen our knowledge of arms trafficking, military training and human rights, these are some of the resources we reach for. If you decide to buy a copy for yourself on Amazon* by following the links below, a portion of your purchase will support our work. This is made possible through our partnership with Alonovo.
From U.S. soldiers having to fight children in Afghanistan and Iraq to juvenile terrorists in Sri Lanka to Palestine, the new, younger face of battle is a terrible reality of 21st century warfare.
The landmark bestselling memoirs of a young boy caught in the brutal war in Sierra Leone. Ishmael Beah was a 12 years old when his village in Sierra Leone was overrun
by rebels. Separated from his family, he wandered both alone and with other
boys in a country wracked by civil war. Eventually he ended up in the Army
(at 13) and found he was capable of things he'd never imagined.
"Hutus kill Tutsis, then Tutsis kill Hutus--if that's really all there is to it, then no wonder we can't be bothered with it," Philip Gourevitch writes, imagining the response of somebody in a country far from the ethnic strife and mass killings of Rwanda. But the situation is not so simple, and in this complex and wrenching book, he explains why the Rwandan genocide should not be written off as just another tribal dispute.
The backbone of the report consists of a series of concise overviews of the most pressing human rights issues in countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, with particular focus on the role-positive or negative-played in each country by key domestic and international actors.
In December 1981 soldiers of the Salvadoran Army's select, American-trained Atlacatl Battalion entered the village of El Mozote, where they murdered hundreds of men, women, and children. When Mark Danner's reconstruction of these events first appeared in The New Yorker, it sent shock waves through the news media and the American foreign-policy establishment.
During the three years (1993-1996) Samantha Power spent covering the grisly events in Bosnia and Srebrenica, she became increasingly frustrated with how little the United States was willing to do to counteract the genocide occurring there. After much research, she discovered a pattern: "The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred," she writes. This powerful book is a call to make such indifference a thing of the past.
Illicit activities are exploding worldwide. The onslaught of globalization has unleashed a tidal wave of bad stuff--everything from arms trafficking, human smuggling, and money laundering to music bootlegging. Here is the dark side of globalization: the mushrooming underground economy. Moisés Naím unties the connections between the Colombian cocaine dealer, the New York banker steering money to offshore tax havens, the Albanian forcing women into prostitution, and the Chinese market stall-holder selling counterfeit DVDs.
This disturbing book names the players in the arms trade and charts the impact that it has had on war, human rights, and development. The financial and trade mechanisms that permit the arms trade to continue are revealed, amid sordid tales of bribery and corruption. Gideon Burrows concludes his examination by reviewing the ways in which this trade can be controlled or even abolished.
Whether it is Africa, Sri Lanka, or even Chechnya and Afghanistan, it is not heavy weaponry or hi-tech devices that kill the most people, but the flood of cheap, easy to get, small arms that has swept over so many countries in the 80s and 90s. This important and readable new book seeks to advance our understanding of the illegal arms traffic. What precisely is involved? How is it conducted? Who are the players? What are the impacts? What needs to be done?
*Book and movie descriptions are excerpted from reviews and product descriptions published on Amazon.
