Explosive Politics

The New Left was a broad, heterogeneous, transnational, anti-systemic movement of movements which pursued the radical transformation of power structures during the 1960s and the early 1970s. Its activists opposed all forms of oppression – class, racial, gender and so forth – and strove for the redistribution of power on a global scale. Their ideas fuelled the intense cycles of protest of the period and allowed for symbolically connecting movements all over the world.

This book reconstructs the dissemination of the characteristic ideas and traits of the New Left by analysing its most prominent magazines and journals. Through the analysis of US, European and Latin American publications, it reveals how the ideological framework of the New Left was conceived and disseminated by a series of critical communities of activists and intellectuals who communicated and debated across borders. The result of the joint efforts of a group of eminent specialists and young scholars from seven different countries, this pioneering work contributes valuable empirical evidence to the study of the processes of intellectual change occurring throughout the twentieth century.

The book addresses police brutality from an angle still unexplored in academia. In opting for an interactionist approach, it focuses on a multi-actor field, the police-government-justice nexus, to show how its dynamics impact on police brutality, deactivate its control and create political and legal disorder.

Crosschecking police officers’ motivational patterns with public discourses, the rationale of internal and criminal investigations, Court’s rulings and rank-and-file accountability-avoiding practices shows how their interaction ensures quasi-impunity that allows excessive force to become perennial.

Analysis of the manifestation and handling of police brutality in 136 cases is grounded, inter alia, on 128 interviews conducted with victims of excessive force – lawmakers, presspersons, attorneys, protesters, ordinary civilians, members of socially vulnerable groups – or their attorneys and eyewitnesses.