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"Kenney, Padraic"
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Dance in chains : political imprisonment in the modern world
\"What part does the imprisoned activist play in the conflict between regimes and their opponents around the world? Political incarceration today seems to offer the clearest evidence of a repressive regime, and of a determined political opposition. Yet surely there are more effective alternatives, for both states and their opponents, than incarceration. Imprisoned opponents, like those of the African National Congress in South Africa, or of Solidarity in Poland, or of the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, may eventually claim or share power, while those who are executed or exiled will not pose the same threat. From the opposition's point of view, imprisonment, even though it deprives the movement of a valued contributor, is often a badge of honor. Our perceptions of political prisoners are awash in clichés and archetypes. We think of Nelson Mandela, or perhaps Václav Havel: good men, engaged in a moral struggle. But can that really be an acceptable definition, when Adolph Hitler too was a political prisoner? Can we understand what political prisoners are and what they do if we do not include those whose goals or ethics are different from our own? Dance in Chains--the title inspired by a song composed by a socialist on death row in a Warsaw prison 120 years ago--draws upon research in Poland, Ireland, South Africa and includes over a dozen different regimes over the last 150 years. These cases serve as pillars holding up a global investigation of the phenomenon. In each case, generations of political opponents have gone to prison since at least the turn of the twentieth century. Yet they also vary widely. Taken together, they yield a sufficiently wide spectrum to allow the reader to understand one of the central characters of modern political history\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
“I felt a kind of pleasure in seeing them treat us brutally.” The Emergence of the Political Prisoner, 1865–1910
The political prisoner is a figure taken for granted in historical discourse, with the term being used broadly to describe any individual held in captivity for oppositional activities. This article argues for understanding the political prisoner, for whom prison becomes a vehicle of politics, as the product of modern states and political movements. The earlier practices of the “imprisoned political,” for whom prison was primarily an obstacle to politics, gave way to prisoners who used the category creatively against the regimes that imprisoned them. Using the cases of Polish socialists in the Russian Empire, Fenians in Ireland, suffragettes in Britain, and satyagrahi in British South Africa, this article explains how both regimes and their prisoners developed common practices and discourses around political incarceration in the years 1865–1910.
Journal Article
The Ironies of Membership
We are at a very good moment in time for the study of the ruling Communist parties of Eastern Europe. Twenty-five years after the regimes they ruled have crumbled, they have become quite foreign, their cultural practices and mindsets exotic to anyone who did not live through them. Indeed, there are now historians of the Communist era who have written dissertations and books, and acquired positions at universities, who have no adult memories whatsoever of the Communist era, let alone of that mass institution at the center of that vanished political landscape. While of course that distance often enough allows
Book Chapter