An introduction to army ants, their habits, homes, the social aspects of their lives, and how they affect human beings.

Terror and Taboo is about the mythology of terrorism; it is an exploration of the ways we talk about terrorism. It offers incontestable evidence to support the idea that we give power to terrorism by the way we write and talk about it. According to Zulaika and Douglass, we make terrorism worse by the way we represent it in the media and in everyday conversation. Through their examination of terrorism, they propose to remove the taboos surrounding terrorism. Terror and Taboo is full of examples to ground the authors premise, ranging from specific examples, such as tendency to talk more about where Timothy McVeigh shopped for weapons than about the international traffic in arms by legitimate nations, to more theoretical interpretations that will be familiar to readers of cultural studies books.

From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. In Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe--the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency. Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism" -- a political hardening of wealthy states-- is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.

This book aims to reflect on how to translate “queer” in the context of Latin America. Queer theory is becoming consolidated on an international scale as an effort to understand dissident bodies and their inventions. But how can we utilize such a rich body of literature and proposals without merely applying in the Global South what has been formulated in the Global North? Through meetings between dissident bodies in the Global South, the book suggests that the theoretical-poetic inventions formulated in this part of the world cannot be forgotten and proposes a discussion on how to approach queer theory from a decolonial point of view. There is still only a scant body of literature that systematizes and approaches these questions from a Latin American point of view; or, to use the term that gives this book its name, the “tropics.” The book points out the necessity of staying aware of the connections between western modernity and colonial practices. The book therefore invites us to pass through borders, to question limits, and to allow ourselves to be affected by Others, a fundamental exercise in the context of social inequality as drastic as that in which the majority of the population live in Latin America and in the Global South in general. Theories, like bodies, travel; in being translated, they transform themselves. The movements and the bending of bodies and theories are disturbing and subversive. Queer in the Tropics arises from these translations, from this bending, and from these subversions.

In counterterrorism circles, the standard response to questions about the possibility of future attacks is the terse one-liner: “Not if, but when.” This mantra supposedly conveys a realistic approach to the problem, but, as Joseba Zulaika argues in Terrorism, it functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy. By distorting reality to fit their own worldview, the architects of the War on Terror prompt the behavior they seek to prevent—a twisted logic that has already played out horrifically in Iraq. In short, Zulaika contends, counterterrorism has become pivotal in promoting terrorism. Exploring the blind spots of counterterrorist doctrine, Zulaika takes readers on a remarkable intellectual journey. He contrasts the psychological insight of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood with The 9/11 Commission Report, plumbs the mindset of terrorists in works by Orianna Fallaci and Jean Genet, maps the continuities between the cold war and the fight against terrorism, and analyzes the case of a Basque terrorist who tried to return to civilian life. Zulaika’s argument is powerful, inventive, and rich with insights and ideas that provide a new and sophisticated perspective on the War on Terror.