Silenced, discredited, stripped of powers of moral appeal, and deprived of the interpersonal conditions necessary for maintaining self-respect, many people suffer from serious but subtle forms of oppression involving neither physical violence nor the use of law. In Civillized Oppression J.Harvey forcefully argues for the crucial role of morally distorted relationships in such oppression. While uncovering a set of underlying moral principles that account for the immorality of civilized oppression, Harvey's analyses provide frameworks for identifying morally problematic situations and relationships, criteria for evaluating them, and guidelines for appropriate responses. This book will be essential for both graduates and undergraduates in ethics, social theory, theory of justice, and feminist and race studies.

This book discusses how civilized oppression (the oppression that involves neither violence nor the law) can be overcome by re-examining our participation in it. Moral community, solidarity and education are offered as vibrant strategies to overcome the hurt and marginalization that stem from civilized oppression.

Hostis humani generis, meaning "enemy of humankind," is the legal basis by which Western societies have defined such criminals as pirates, torturers, or terrorists as beyond the pale of civilization. Sonja Schillings argues that the legal fiction designating certain persons or classes of persons as enemies of all humankind does more than characterize them as inherently hostile: it supplies a narrative basis for legitimating violence in the name of the state. The book draws attention to a century-old narrative pattern that not only underlies the legal category of enemies of the people, but more generally informs interpretations of imperial expansion, protest against structural oppression, and the transformation of institutions as "legitimate" interventions on behalf of civilized society. Schillings traces the Anglo-American interpretive history of the concept, which she sees as crucial to understanding US history, in particular with regard to the frontier, race relations, and the war on terror.

Explores the positive and negative relationship of civilization, taken in its broadest sense, to the oppression of the weak by the powerful. A set of distinctive essays offers fresh insights into the thought of political philosophers, including Locke, Montesquieu, Marx, Kant, Mill and Rawls, into the epistemology and psychology of subjection and into the postmodernist response of Foucault and his successors to the fact of the domination of human by human.

This anthology explores the many and varied connections between pacifism, politics, and feminism. Each topic is often thought about in academic isolation; however, when we consider how they intersect and interact, it opens up new areas for discussion and analysis.

Based on a fifteen year longitudinal cross-cultural analysis on the role of the body in identity construction process around the world, this analysis provides readers with a comparative theoretical exploration of piercing and other forms of body modification that international communities of defiance use to express their identity.