The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation (University of Toronto Press, 2019) 244pp
Confronting the truths of Canada’s Indian Residential School system has been likened to waking a sleeping giant. In this book, David B. MacDonald uses genocide as an analytical tool to better understand Canada’s past and present relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples. Starting with a discussion of how genocide is defined in domestic and international law, the book applies the concept to the forced transfer of Indigenous children to residential schools and the “Sixties Scoop,” in which Indigenous children were taken from their communities and placed in foster homes or adopted.
Based on archival research and extensive interviews with residential school survivors, officials at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and others, The Sleeping Giant Awakens offers a unique and timely perspective on the prospects for conciliation after genocide, exploring how moving forward together is difficult in a context where many settlers know little of the residential schools and the ongoing legacies of colonization, and need to have a better conception of Indigenous rights. It offers a detailed analysis of how the TRC approached genocide in its deliberations and in the Final Report.
Crucially, MacDonald engages critics who argue that the term genocide impedes understanding of the IRS system and imperils prospects for conciliation. By contrast, this book sees genocide recognition as an important basis for meaningful discussions of how to engage Indigenous-settler relations in respectful and proactive ways.
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Comparative Politics: Integrating Theories, Methods, and Cases, First Canadian Edition co-authored with T. Dickovick and J. Eastwood (Oxford University Press Canada, 2020), 608pp
Integrating theories, methods, and country cases with an emphasis on application and analysis.Combining thematic organization and a variety of country-specific case studies, Comparative Politics Integrating Theories, Methods, and Cases is an engaging and accessible introduction to comparative politics. Methodological tools are introduced early in the text and integrated throughout to helpstudents develop a systematic way of doing their own analyses of concepts and issues. These tools include theories, the basics of the comparative method, and manageable case materials for practice, all in the context of the big questions in comparative politics today.
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Populism and World Politics: Exploring Inter- and Transnational Dimensions Co-Edited (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 343pp
This volume is the first to analyze populism’s international dimension: its impact on, and interaction with, foreign policy and international politics. The contributions to this volume engage conceptual theoretical issues and overarching questions such as the still under-specified concept of populism or the importance of leadership and the mass media for populism’s global rise. They zoom in on populism’s effect on both different countries’ foreign policies and core international concerns, including the future of the liberal world order and the chances for international conflict and cooperation more generally.
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Introduction to Politics Second Edition Co-Authored (Oxford University Press Canada, 2016). 504pp
Now in its second Canadian edition, this truly international introduction to politics offers comprehensive coverage of key concepts and ideologies, institutions, and international relations. Balancing theory with a wealth of Canadian and international real-world examples, this text equips students with the knowledge required to think critically about the current state of global politics.
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Introduction to Politics First Edition Co-Authored (Oxford University Press Canada, 2012). 504pp
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Europe In Its Own Eyes, Europe In The Eyes Of The Other Co-Edited With Mary Decoste (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2014) 322 pp.
This collection of sixteen essays seeks to answer these questions by focusing on Europe as it is seen through its own eyes and through the eyes of others across a variety of cultural texts, including sport, film, literature, dance, cartography, and fashion. Contributors explore diverse understandings of what it means to be “other” to a country, a culture, a society, or a subgroup.
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Thinking History, Fighting Evil – Neoconservatives and the Perils of Analogy in American Politics (Lexington / Rowman & Littlefield; 2009) 219 pp.
Thinking History, Fighting Evil presents the most thorough exploration to date of how World War II analogies, particularly those focused on the Holocaust, have colored American foreign policy-making after 9/11. In particular, this book highlights how influential neoconservatives inside and outside the Bush administration used analogies of the ‘Good War’ to reinterpret domestic and international events, often with disastrous consequences. On the surface, World War II promotes a simple but compelling range of images and symbols: valiant Roosevelts and Churchills, appeasing Chamberlains, evil Hitlers, Jewish victims, European bystanders, and American liberators. However, the simplistic use of analogies was precisely what doomed the neoconservative project to failure. This book explores the misuse of ten key analogies arising from World War II and charts their problematic deployment after the 9/11 attacks. Divided into eight chapters, Thinking History, Fighting Evil engages with timely issues such as the moral legacies of the civil rights era, identity politics movements, the representation of the Holocaust in American life, the rise of victim politics on the neoconservative right, the instrumentalization of anti-American and anti-Semitic discourses, the trans-Atlantic rift between Europe and the United States, and the war on terror. While the book focuses on the post-9/11 security environment, it also explores the history of negative exceptionalism in U.S. history and politics, tracing back Manichean conceptions of good and evil to the foundation of the early colonies.
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The Ethics Of Foreign Policy Co-Edited With R.G. Patman And B. Mason-Parker (Ashgate Press, 2007) 249 Pp.
This ground-breaking volume considers the ethical aspects of foreign policy change through five interrelated dimensions: conceptual, security, economic, normative and diplomatic. Defining ethics and what an ethical foreign policy should be is highly contested. An impressive group of international scholars and practitioners, including a New Zealand Foreign Minister, a US National Security Advisor, and an ICJ Justice, makes this volume ideally suited to courses on international relations, security studies, ethics and human rights, philosophy, media studies and international law.
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Identity Politics In The Age Of Genocide: The Holocaust and Historical Representation (Routledge, 2008). 261 Pp.
In an era of globalization and identity politics, this book explores how Holocaust imagery and vocabulary have been appropriated and applied to other genocides. The author examines how the Holocaust has impacted on other ethnic and social groups, asking whether the Holocaust as a symbol is a useful or destructive means of reading non-Jewish history. This volume explores the Holocaust in relation to colonialism and Indigenous genocide, with case studies on America, Australia and New Zealand; analyzes the Holocaust in relation to war and genocide, with case studies on the Armenian genocide, the Rape of Nanking, Serbia and the Rwandan genocide; and examines how the Holocaust has been used to promote animal rights.
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Balkan Holocausts? Serbian And Croatian Victim Centered Propaganda and The War In Yugoslavia (Manchester University Press, 2002) 308 + Xii pp.
Balkan Holocausts? compares and contrasts Serbian and Croatian propaganda from 1986 to 1999, analyzing each group’s contemporary interpretations of history and current events. It offers a detailed discussion of Holocaust imagery and the history of victim-centered writing in nationalism theory, including the links between the comparative genocide debate, the so-called holocaust industry, and Serbian and Croatian nationalism. No studies on Yugoslavia have thus far devoted significant space to such analysis.
“[T]he author has succeeded in exploring his subject in a way which is both lively and genuinely informative. … extremely well written, based on a wide range of relevant sources and sensible and generally persuasive in its judgements …” – Professor James Mayall, Cambridge University
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