Revenge was an all important part of the ancient Athenian mentality, intruding on all forms of life - even where we might not expect to find it today. Revenge was of prime importance as a means of survival for the people of early Greece and remained in force during the rise of the 'poleis'. The revenge of epic heroes such as Odysseus and Menalaus influences later thinking about revenge and suggests that avengers prosper. Nevertheless, this does not mean that all forms of revenge were seen as equally acceptable in Athens. Differences in response are expected depending on the crime and the criminal. Through a close examination of the texts, Fiona McHardy here reveals a more complex picture of how the Athenian people viewed revenge.

Focusing on South Africa during the period 1650–2000, this book examines the role of law in making democracy work in changing societies. The Legacies of Law sheds light on the neglected relationship between path dependence and the law. Meierhenrich argues that legal norms and institutions, even illiberal ones, have an important - and hitherto undertheorized - structuring effect on democratic outcomes. Under certain conditions, law appears to reduce uncertainty in democratization by invoking common cultural backgrounds and experiences. In instances where interacting adversaries share qua law reasonably convergent mental models, transitions from authoritarian rule are shown to be less intractable. Meierhenrich's historical analysis of the evolution of law - and its effects - in South Africa during the period 1650–2000, compared with a short study of Chile from 1830–1990, shows how, and when, legal norms and institutions serve as historical causes to both liberal and illiberal rule.

This is the Final Report of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its six-year investigation of the residential school system for Aboriginal youth and the legacy of these schools. This report, the summary volume, includes the history of residential schools, the legacy of that school system, and the full text of the Commission's 94 recommendations for action to address that legacy. This report lays bare a part of Canada's history that until recently was little-known to most non-Aboriginal Canadians. The Commission discusses the logic of the colonization of Canada's territories, and why and how policy and practice developed to end the existence of distinct societies of Aboriginal peoples. Using brief excerpts from the powerful testimony heard from Survivors, this report documents the residential school system which forced children into institutions where they were forbidden to speak their language, required to discard their clothing in favour of institutional wear, given inadequate food, housed in inferior and fire-prone buildings, required to work when they should have been studying, and subjected to emotional, psychological and often physical abuse. In this setting, cruel punishments were all too common, as was sexual abuse. More than 30,000 Survivors have been compensated financially by the Government of Canada for their experiences in residential schools, but the legacy of this experience is ongoing today. This report explains the links to high rates of Aboriginal children being taken from their families, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and high rates of suicide. The report documents the drastic decline in the presence of Aboriginal languages, even as Survivors and others work to maintain their distinctive cultures, traditions, and governance. The report offers 94 calls to action on the part of governments, churches, public institutions and non-Aboriginal Canadians as a path to meaningful reconciliation of Canada today with Aboriginal citizens. Even though the historical experience of residential schools constituted an act of cultural genocide by Canadian government authorities, the United Nation's declaration of the rights of aboriginal peoples and the specific recommendations of the Commission offer a path to move from apology for these events to true reconciliation that can be embraced by all Canadians.

"Bishop Paul Verryn knew he had a problem when xenophobic violence erupted in May 2008 and the threat of it spreading to Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg became very real. There were over a thousand migrants living in the church ... Verryn's open door policy had plenty of critics, both from within and outside the Church ..."--Back cover.

Protected areas have often been defined as the backbones of biodiversity conservation. Protected areas have often been defined as the backbones of biodiversity conservation. However, legitimate demands formulated by countries for their economic development, growing human populations, forest fragmentations, and needs of local communities for sustainable livelihoods are also pressing demands on protected areas, stringently pressuring conservation community to identify means to reconcile long term biodiversity conservation and communities’ livelihoods. Hence, integrating conservation activities within the global framework of economic development of countries with high biodiversity had become part of conservation paradigms. Integrated development as a route to conservation, strict protected areas, community managed areas, etc. have been tried but resulted in debatable outcomes in many ways. The lukewarm nature of these results brought ‘landscape approach’ at the front of biodiversity conservation in Central Africa. Since the late 1990s the landscape approach uses large areas with different functional attributes and shifts foundational biodiversity conservation paradigms. Changes are brought to the role traditionally attributed to local communities, aligning sustainable development with conservation and stretching conservation beyond the confines of traditional protected areas. These three shifts need a holistic approach to respond to different conservation questions. There are only a few instances where the landscape experience has been scientifically documented and lessons learnt drawn into a corpus of knowledge to guide future conservation initiatives across Central Africa. To subjugate one biodiversity conservation landscape as one case study emerged as a matter of urgency to present the potential knowledge acquired throughout the landscape experiment, including leadership and management, processes tried, results (at least partially) achieved, and why such and such other process or management arrangement were been chosen among many other alternatives, etc. The challenges of the implementation of the conservation landscape approach needed also to be documented. This book responds to the majority of these questions; drawing its content from the firsthand field knowledge, it discusses these shifts and documents what has been tried, how successful (unsuccessful) it was, and what lessons learnt from these trials. Theoretical questions such as threat index, and ecological services, etc. are also discussed and gaps in knowledge are identified.

Cities have always had a key role in warfare, as strategic centres which periodically suffered the horrors of siege and sack. With industrialisation, however, they were drawn ever closer to the front line and to direct and continuous experience of fighting and destruction. 'Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War' explores the cultural imprint of military conflict on metropolises world wide in the era of the First and Second World Wars. It brings together cultural and urban historians and scholars of related disciplines including anthropology, education, and geography. The volume examines how the emergence of 'total' warfare blurred the boundaries between home and front and transformed cities into battlefields. The logic of total mobilisation turned the social and cultural fabric of urban life upside down. Arranged so as to bring out the evolution of experience over time, the essays explore Eastern and Central Europe, Britain and Western Europe, and Japan and address several key themes. The first strand - scenarios - explores the apocalyptic imagination of intellectuals and experts in peacetime. Artists and writers anticipating doom presented the coming upheaval as an urban event - a commonplace of late-Victorian and post-1918 pessimism. On a different plane, civil servants and engineers materialised visions of urban chaos and devised countermeasures in case of emergencies. Both groups helped to furnish a repertoire of cultural forms which channelled and encoded the actual experience of war. The second strand deals with metropolitan experiences, notably mobilisation, deprivation, and destruction in wartime. Ruins and the repercussions of war is the central theme of the third strand - commemorations - which investigates post-war efforts to remember and forget. The quest for meaningful forms of commemoration was hard enough after the First World War; the Second World War, which saw whole cities disappear in flames, raised the possibility that the limits of representation had been reached. The central contention of this volume - that total war in the twentieth century has a significant but often overlooked metropolitan dimension - is fully addressed, thereby filling a conspicuous gap in the currently available literature.

God calls us to forgive those who have hurt us, but that's often easier said than done. Combining insights from his professional research and personal experience, Everett L. Worthington, Jr. shows what it takes (intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and relationally) to move toward and beyond forgiveness and to cross the bridge to reconciliation.