Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
2,893
result(s) for
"Applebaum, Anne"
Sort by:
Autocracy, Inc. : the dictators who want to run the world
\"From the Pulitzer-prize winning, New York Times bestselling author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them. We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America. International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don't stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren't linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan's essay calling for \"containment\" of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
A Transformed Political Landscape
In January 2013, British prime minister David Cameron, confronted by growing support for the far-right UK. Independence Party and by a rebellious Euroskeptic wing within his own Conservative party, pledged to hold a referendum on the United Kingdom's membership in the European Union. By all accounts, Cameron never expected that such a vote would actually be held. Rather, he considered the promise of a referendum as a way to appease Euroskeptics within Conservative ranks and to hold his fractured party together until the May 2015 general elections which Cameron was widely expected to lose. But Cameron won the elections, and he had to make good on his promise to hold an up-or-down vote on Britain's EU membership: Leave versus Remain. The effects of globalization have been felt with special force in the UK, which has one of the most internationally integrated economies in the world. The spread of free trade means that decisions that affect people in Britain may well be made in China, Texas, or Bahrain.
Journal Article
Red famine : Stalin's war on Ukraine
\"In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization--in effect a second Russian revolution--which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them\"--Provided by publisher.
BOOK
THE LENINIST ROOTS OF CIVIL SOCIETY REPRESSION
With bizarre Orwellian fury, communist youth activists descended on the club with hammers and smashed all the jazz records, and the building was given to something called the League of Soldiers' Friends, a state-run organization. [...]the Bolsheviks regarded all independent associations, trade unions, and guilds as \"separatist\" or \"caste\" divisions within society.
Journal Article
Iron curtain : the crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956
In the follow-up to her previous book \"Gulag,\" the author, a journalist, delivers a history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union, to its surprise and delight, found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Josef Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In this book, the author describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics is captured in the pages of this book.
BOOK
شفق الديمقراطية : سحر إغواء السلطوية : دراسة
من الولايات المتحدة وبريطانيا إلى أوروبا القارية وما وراءها، تتعرض الديمقراطية الليبرالية إلى الحصار، وفي الوقت نفسه تنتشر تيارات استبدادية قومية في هذه الدول تناقش آن أبلباوم في كتابها هذه الاتجاهات المعادية للديمقراطية الغربية، وكيفية صعود الأحزاب اليمينية، يسعى هذا الكتاب إلى إلقاء الضوء على الخلل الحاصل في الأنظمة الديمقراطية، وتمهيد طريق العودة أمام القيم الديمقراطية الحقيقية.
Book
Measuring social response to different journalistic techniques on Facebook
Recent studies have shown that online users tend to select information that adheres to their system of beliefs, ignore information that does not, and join groups that share a common narrative. This information environment can elicit tribalism instead of informed debate, especially when issues are controversial. Algorithmic solutions, fact-checking initiatives, and many other approaches have shown limitations in dealing with this phenomenon, and heated debate and polarization still play a pivotal role in online social dynamics (e.g. traditional vs. anti-establishment polarization). To understand the effect of different communication strategies able to smooth polarization, in this paper, together with Corriere della Sera , a major Italian news outlet, we measure the social response of users to different types of news framing. We analyse users’ reactions to 113 ad-hoc articles published on the newspaper’s Facebook page and the corresponding news articles on the topic of migration, published from March to December 2018. We examine different journalistic techniques and content types by analyzing their impact on user comments in terms of toxicity, criticism of the newspaper, and stance concerning migration. We find that visual pieces and factual news reports elicit the highest level of trust in the media source, while opinion pieces and editorials are more likely to be criticized. We also notice that data-driven pieces elicit an extremely low level of trust in the news source. Furthermore, coherently with the echo chambers behaviour, we find social conformity strongly affecting the commenting behaviour of users on Facebook.
Journal Article
Putin's Grand Strategy
Russia is at once powerful and weak. She describes evidence of corruption, manipulation of the media, a lack of democratic institutions and free speech as some of the things that allow Putin to maintain illegitimate control over the country. And, she also goes on to highlight problems with the economy and the threat European unity and democracy pose to his government. Applebaum describes Putin's role within the European setting and how he seeks to undermine the reach of democracy ideology.
Journal Article
Authoritarianism Goes Global (II): The Leninist Roots of Civil Society Repression
In the early part of the twentieth century, the small group of revolutionaries who became the Russian Bolsheviks developed an alternative theory of civil society. Burke, Tocqueville, and even Russian intellectuals believed that civil society was fundamental to democracy; Lenin believed that the destruction of civil society was crucial to totalitarian dictatorship. But by attempting to control every aspect of society, totalitarian regimes would eventually turn every aspect of society into a potential source of dissent, as in the cases of Czechoslovakia and Poland. Yet in many other societies heavily influenced by Soviet ideology—those in Belarus, Central Asia, China, Cuba, parts of Africa, and much of the Arab world—those in power remain attached to the old Bolshevik idea that independent civic institutions are a threat to the state.
Journal Article