The inspiring people and grassroots organizations that are on the front lines of the battle to save the planet

As the world's scientists have come together and declared a "climate emergency," the fight to protect our planet's ecological resources and the people that depend on them is more urgent than ever. But the real battles for our future are taking place far from the headlines and international conferences, in mostly forgotten American communities where the brutal realities of industrial pollution and environmental degradation have long been playing out.

The World We Need provides a vivid introduction to America's largely unsung grassroots environmental groups-often led by activists of color and the poor-valiantly fighting back in America's so-called sacrifice zones against industries poisoning our skies and waterways and heating our planet. Through original reporting, profiles, artwork, and interviews, we learn how these activist groups, almost always working on shoestring budgets, are devising creative new tactics; building sustainable projects to transform local economies; and organizing people long overlooked by the environmental movement-changing its face along the way.

Capturing the riveting stories and hard-won strategies from a broad cross section of pivotal environmental actions-from Standing Rock to Puerto Rico-The World We Need offers a powerful new model for the larger environmental movement, and inspiration for concerned citizens everywhere.

India will soon be the world's most populated country and its political development will shape the world of the 21st century. Yet Hindu nationalism - at the helm of contemporary Indian politics - is not well understood outside of India, and its links to the global neoliberal trajectory have not been explored.

Covering 30 years of Indian politics, this book shows for the first time the importance of education in propagating the acceptance of Hindu nationalism within a neolberal system, including the reframing of the concept of Indian citizenship.

The first five years of Modi rule failed to bring about the development that had been promised and have seen India's rapid change from a largely inclusive society to one where religious minorities are denied their basic rights.

An ambitious and shocking expose of America's hidden empire in Liberia, run by the storied Firestone corporation, and its long shadow

In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world's automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world's rubber. But only one percent of the world's rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation's explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic.

Empire of Rubber tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed Liberia into America's rubber empire.

Historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman scoured remote archives to unearth a history of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land. Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America-on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war.

A riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, Empire of Rubber uncovers the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present.

The Portuguese produced the earliest records for regions in West Africa, none more important than the Gold Coast. This edited volume provides a unique collection of sources written in Portuguese, Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish for Africa's Gold Coast, from the late 15th to 17th century. Students, scholars, and professionals with an avid interest in early modern African, Atlantic, and world history will benefit from the English translations, many appearing for the first time. These sources add to the handful of existing translations, but especially illuminate the late 15th to 17th century relations between the Portuguese empire and the Gold Coast and offer comparative materials for other European interlocutors-Spanish, French, English, and Dutch-garrisoned on the coast or offshore in their vessels. Over that concentrated period, and especially where no other European-supplied records exist, these uncomprehending Portuguese outsiders archived important local ideas, personalities, polities, and cultural forms animating Gold Coast-Portuguese relations.

This book investigates Turkey's departure from a 'flawed democracy' under Kemalist secularism, and its transitioning into Islamist authoritarian Erdoganism, through the lenses of informal law, legal pluralism, and legal hybridity. In doing so, it examines the attempts of Turkey's ruling party (AKP) at social engineering and gradual Islamisation of the Turkish state and society, by using informal Islamist laws.

To that end, the book argues that the AKP has paved the way for Islamist legal hybridity where society, state, and law, are being gradually Islamised on an ad hoc basis. Informal law and legal pluralism in Turkey have had a non-state characteristic which have permitted Muslims to solve disputes by seeking the opinions of religio-legal scholars. Yet under the AKP rule, this informal legal system has become increasingly dominated by conservatives, sometimes radical Islamists, which the governing party has taken advantage of by either formalizing some partsof the informal Islamist law, or using it informally to mobilize its supporters against the opposition.

The importance of environmentally sustainable public utilities in the Middle East is an improbable topic for a Washington think tank study. Yet, many countries in the Middle East face serious challenges providing utilities in any manner to their populations, and the failure to do so is an increasing flashpoint for public dissatisfaction. This study finds that providing more environmentally sustainable services in the Middle East would be an effective way to address many citizens' grievances which go beyond the reliability of those services. It would also help ameliorate deep dissatisfaction with the quality of governance and help build trust between citizens and their governments.

This study examines three sectors-power, water and sanitation, and solid waste-in Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia. While the three countries are different in many ways, each faces increasing challenges providing services to their citizens. Providing these services in an environmentally sustainable way would also crucially increase each country's resilience and diminish their vulnerability in a chronically unstable region.

Gueltan Kisanak, a Kurdish journalist and former MP, was elected co-mayor of Diyarbakir in 2014. Two years later, the Turkish state arrested and imprisoned her. Her story is remarkable, but not unique. While behind bars, she wrote about her own experiences and collected similar accounts from other Kurdish women, all co-chairs, co-mayors and MPs in Turkey; all incarcerated on political grounds.

The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics is a one-of-a-kind collection of prison writings from more than 20 Kurdish women politicians. Here they reflect on their personal and collective struggles against patriarchy and anti-Kurdish repression in Turkey; on the radical feminist principles and practices through which they transformed the political structures and state offices in which they operated. They discuss what worked and what didn't, and the ways in which Turkey's anti-capitalist and socialist movements closely informed their political stances and practices.

Demonstrating Kurdish women's ceaseless political determination and refusal to be silenced - even when behind bars - the book ultimately hopes to inspire women living under even the most unjust conditions to engage in collective resistance.

Contemporary articulations of dissent to social order and its production of truth cannot be ignored any longer. Hamburg during the G20 gathering; Washington, D.C., on the day of Trump's inauguration; the squares and streets of Paris and Tunis at the end of 2018. Public space is temporarily taken by those who rise against the powers that keep structural oppression and social order in its place. Not only riots, but collective social centres, protest camps and temporary as well as permanent occupations of lands and buildings are other, utopian spatial alternatives created by autonomous social movements to prefigure a horizontal social organization.

This book discusses spatial practices of autonomous social movements, the movements who 'see their everyday experiences and creations as the revolution they are making', together with these movements and in taking the diversity of their articulations into account. Sites of Dissent is thus the story of a daring attempt to create research practices for radical transformation which requires a radical transformation of research practices. During this attempt, methodological rules of scientific research are broken, and methodological heresy and wild experimentation with research practices take place.

Sites of Dissent aims at opening new possibilities of including diverse ways of knowing and speaking into a collective knowledge creation process, at overcoming the individualized isolation in which the researcher produces knowledge about the outside world; and it aims to create a space for collective learning about spatial practices of autonomous social movements, to learn with and from the movements.

This book aspires to face the challenge of analyzing with due academic rigor, always in the paradigm of security and advanced sciences, but without forgetting the ethical questions that our world raises every day. The work is divided into two main sections: the first section is focused on the cyber world, with not only technical but also legal derivations given the expansion of vulnerabilities and our technological dependence. The second section, with a more interdisciplinary nature, runs through undeniably topical issues such as territorial problems and the potential decline of the traditional States, the communicational impact of information management and false news, or the commitment to essential freedoms for the West.

This book connects advanced technologies and ethical issues and includes discussions on recent crises such as COVID-19. It also provides an interdisciplinary view on the ethical issues for security technologies.