Chapter 1: A Plea for Defiance / Chapter 2: Just Liberal Violence / Chapter 3: Sweatshops / Chapter 4: Torture / Chapter 5: War / Chapter Six: Complicity / Bibliography / Index
Michael Neu is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton. He has published articles in International Relations, Social Theory and Practice and The Journal of International Political Thought.
Just Liberal Violence offers a much needed, carefully developed and
highly original critique of the inadequacies of contemporary
thinking about violence. Michael Neu masterfully succeeds where
most academics fail, writing eloquently about topics of utmost
political concern without sacrificing complexity and nuance. This
engaging book is political theory at its very best: scholarly, but
not scholastic; combative, but not polemical; timely, but not
faddish. Anybody interested in understanding and responding to
violence will have something to learn from it.
*Mathias Thaler, University of Edinburgh*
Michael Neu's critique of liberal approaches to violence is
damning. With calm, cool logic, he undermines the premises upon
which justifications for cruelty are based. His book is also a call
for a more politically effective resistance to complicity with
violence. Neu points to some productive ways forward.
*Joanna Bourke, Professor of History, Birkbeck College*
Just Liberal Violence is a superb example of applied philosophical
analysis to a key normative issue. Rarely have I read such a clear,
intelligent and convincing demolition of liberal justifications for
war, torture and sweat-shop labour. Anyone who thinks Western
military intervention or the structures of globalisation are
morally justified should read this book. The defenders of just war
theory should read it. In fact, anyone with a conscience should
read Just Liberal Violence. It is a book for our times.
*Richard Jackson, Director, National Centre for Peace and Conflict
Studies, University of Otago, New Zealand*
Michael Neu’s Just Liberal Violence brilliantly dissects the
self-serving conceits, twisted morality and limiting vision of
liberal thinking that help sustain pain, suffering and poverty in
our world. A tour-de-force, to be read by anyone concerned by the
complicity of contemporary intellectuals in providing succour for
the violence of ‘just’ wars, interrogational torture or sweatshops,
and a passionate plea for us all to critically engage in the
imagination of better futures.
*Mark McGovern, Professor of Sociology, Edge Hill University*
A must-read critique of liberal views on sweatshops, torture and
war. Just Liberal Violence not only diagnoses why analytic liberal
political philosophy is a flawed methodology, but also reveals how
it is complicit in maintaining injustice. A blistering ‘plea for
defiance,’ Just Liberal Violence is a necessary addition to any
heterodox political theory reading list.
*Maeve McKeown, Junior Research Fellow in Political Theory,
University of Oxford*
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