Human rights Books

At 300 pages and 105,000 words, it blows open the Waitangi debate by investigating the events leading up to the Treaty, and what Maori really believed they were signing. The Great Divide, working from the original documents from 200 years ago, directly challenges the findings of books like Michae...

Parihaka has become a byword for Maori refusal to yield land, culture and dignity to New Zealand's colonial government. Well after the end of the New Zealand Wars, the people of this small settlement at the foot of Mt Taranaki held out against the encroachments of Pakeha settlers in a struggle that ...

Daniel Domscheit-Berg An explosive and deeply revealing exposé of the ‘World’s Most Dangerous Website,’ by former WikiLeaks insider and spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Since its launch in 2006, WikiLeaks has rapidly grown into the most powerful a...

Why is Australia's current attitude towards freedom of speech harmful to democracy? Australia is the land of the 'fair go'. But does this attitude extend to freedom of speech? Unlike the US, Australia has no Bill of Rights to protect our right to free speech, yet most Australians take this right for...

This account begins before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 and tells the story to the present day. This edition covers the challenges and settlements of the last decade of the 20th century, and includes photographs, paintings and drawings. Copies of the Treaty are included.

Bible & Treaty: Missionaries among the Maori is a complex and colourful adventure of faith, bravery, perseverance and betrayal that seeks to recover lost connections in the story of modern New Zealand. It brings a fresh perspective to the missionary story, from the lead-up to Samuel Marsden's fi...

Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a qu...

The State of Maori Rights brings together a set of articles written between 1994 and 2009. It places on record the Maori view of events and issues that took place over these years, issues that have been more typically reported to the general public from a 'mainstream' media perspective. It is an im...

This is a collection of papers that examine the current place of the Treaty of Watangi in core public policy areas. The authors analyse the tensions and dynamics in the relationship between Maori and the Crown in their areas of expertise, detail the key challenges being faced, and provide insights o...

 Does free information mean free people? At the start of the twenty-first century we were promised that the internet would liberate the world. We could come together as never before, and from Iran's 'twitter revolution' to Facebook 'activism', technological innovation would spread democracy...

Since the Treaty of Waitangi was signed by Maori chiefs and Governor Hobson in 1840 it has become the defining document in New Zealand history. From the New Zealand Wars to the 1975 Land March, from the Kingitanga to the Waitangi Tribunal, from Captain Cook to Hone Harawira, The Treaty of Waitang...

Today the Treaty has come to signify what both joins and divides the people of this country. It had different meanings also to those present at the 1840 signing -the new arrivals and the tangata whenua then occupying the land. To the British, it was the means by which they gained sovereignty over th...

New Zealand is at a watershed in its constitutional and political arrangements. There are three events looming in the short term which suggest that the status of Maori in Parliament is in for significant challenge. The first is the impending review of constitutional issues and the Maori seats as par...

Weeping Waters is a must read for anyone who wants to be informed about the current debate regarding the Treaty of Waitangi and a constitution for Aotearoa New Zealand. The book features essays from eighteen well-known and respected Maori figures including Professor Margaret Mutu, Bishop Muru Walter...

A comprehensive history of the struggle for women's suffrage in New Zealand, including short biographies of the main people involved. New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the vote, in 1893, an achievement of which we are justly proud. Respected historian Megan Hutching record...

This ground-breaking collection of essays by leading scholars - Bryan Gilling, James Belich, John C. Weaver, Alan Ward, Michael Allen, Mark Hickford, Vincent O'Malley, Judith Binney, Dion Tuuta, Alex Frame and Richard S. Boast - examines the confiscation of Maori land in nineteenth-century New Zeala...

Using a vast body of documentary materials, noted scholar and editor Clayborne Carson creates a book that remarkably approximates a self-portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. Delving into all aspects of this man's life, the work covers his boyhood, his education as a minister, and his emergence as a l...

Raised a Muslim but increasingly outraged by her religion's hostility towards women, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has now become one of today's most talked-about, admired and controversial political figures because of her desire to free women from an oppressive Muslim culture. Her bestselling collection of essay...

Geoffrey Robertson's Crimes Against Humanity is a superb and highly influential account of the history of the human rights movement up to the present day. From the French Revolution and the Nuremberg trials to 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, Robertson traces the developing concept of human rights and...

AccoladesShortlisted for New Zealand Book Award Fiction Category 1994.

Waris Dirie, whose name means "desert flower", was born in Somalia of nomadic parents. She underwent extreme female circumcision at the age of five, and when she was 13 her father sold her into marriage with a 60-year-old for five camels, at which time she ran away. She was discovered by a fashion p...

Essential reading for anyone with an interest in New Zealand's early history and implications of the Treaty of Waitangi. This new biography of Captain William Hobson is "immensely readable .. for everyone with an interest in New Zealand's crucial early history". Hobson, within two days ...

In the Robben Island prison register, Nelson Mandela was famously recorded as prisoner number 466/64. Number 468/64 was Ahmed Kathrada. Sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 in the infamous Rivonia Trial, Ahmed Kathrada spent twenty-six continuous years in jail for his political beliefs. During his...

The Treaty of Waitangi is the most important document in New Zealand's history. Current Treaty issues and Maori/Pakeha relationships can only be understood within the wider story of New Zealand. As we understand and honour our history, we can acknowledge the need for restoration, healing and right r...

 It was the biggest leak in history. WikiLeaks infuriated the world's greatest superpower, embarrassed the British royal family and helped cause a revolution in Africa. The man behind it was Julian Assange, one of the strangest figures ever to become a worldwide celebrity. Was he an internet me...

'Harrowing, spellbinding . . . nothing less than an indictment of the entire Bush era' Observer, 'Shocking' The Times In August, 2005, as Hurricane Katrina blew in, the city of New Orleans had been abandoned by most citizens. But resident Abdulrahman Zeitoun, though his wife and family had...

The author was the first to forecast (in 1997) the events that ruptured the global economy in 2008 by applying an analysis that exposes the fault lines in the structure of the market economy. Now, he extends his analysis to the future of the West, to evaluate fears from distinguished commentators wh...

Should contemporary citizens provide material redress to right past wrongs? There is a widespread belief that contemporary citizens should take responsibility for rectifying past wrongs. Nahshon Perez challenges this view, questioning attempts to aggregate dead wrongdoers with living people, and exa...

An unprecedented and timely collection that captures the global vision of Dr. King--in his own words Too many people continue to think of Dr. King only as "a southern civil rights leader" or "an American Gandhi," thus ignoring his impact on poor and oppressed people around the world. ""In a Single ...

The EU has limited legislative competence in the field of social law. However, the Member States are increasingly modernizing social services and social (welfare) protection, attempting to make social services more efficient by increasingly looking to the market for the provision of such services. T...

Building on recent human rights scholarship, childhood studies and child rights programming, this conceptual framework on children's rights proposes three key-notions: living rights, or the lived experiences in which rights take shape; social justice, or the shared normative beliefs that make rights...

Through redrafting the judgments of the ECHR, Diversity and European Human Rights demonstrates how the court could improve the mainstreaming of diversity in its judgments. Eighteen judgments are considered and rewritten to reflect the concerns of women, children, LGB persons, ethnic and religious mi...

This book seeks to demystify the causes of the Arab "revolutions", (which are still going on), that have been completely distorted by the first real 'media wars' in history, compared to which the media war launched on the occasion of the Iraq invasion seems just a dress rehearsal. Thus, with respect...

In December 2008 some 350 Chinese intellectuals published a manifesto calling for reform of the Chinese constitution and an end to one-party rule. Known as "Charter 08", the manifesto has since been signed by more than 10,000 people. One of its authors, Liu Xiaobo, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize ...

Human information and communication technology (ICT) implants have developed for many years in a medical context. Such applications have become increasingly advanced, in some cases modifying fundamental brain function. Today, comparatively low-tech implants are being increasingly employed in non-the...

This ethnography of the Russian North, first published in 2005, focuses on post-Soviet relations of domination between an indigenous minority and a non-indigenous majority in an urban setting. Patty Gray charts the political transformation in Chukotka as its administration sought to represent itself...

This book, first published in 2008, documents the corrosive effect of social exclusion on democracy and the rule of law. It shows how marginalization prevents citizens from effectively engaging even the best legal systems, how politics creeps into prosecutorial and judicial decision making, and how ...

"Patriotism and Public Spirit " is an innovative study of the formative influences shaping the early writings of the Irish-English statesman Edmund Burke and an early case-study of the relationship between the business of bookselling and the politics of criticism and persuasion. Through a radical re...

According to politics and the media, immigration and individualization are driving citizens apart but in neighbourhoods social life is often thriving, depending on the talents of particular citizens or the inventiveness of local institutions. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative research among hu...

American society has been long plagued by cycles of racial violence, most dramatically in the 1960s when hundreds of ghetto uprisings erupted across American cities. Though the larger, underlying causes of contentious race relations have remained the same, the lethality, intensity, and outcomes of t...