In the 2025 James Backhouse Lecture, The seed is in all: a journey through the Quaker world,Tim Gee reflects on his journey and international friendships to share some ideas. “Quakers will have a future for as long as God has a purpose for us, and so long as we unite with that purpose”. Quakerism worldwide is energetic, dynamic, diverse, growing, and making change for peace. How can Quakers in different countries learn from one another?

Jesus was a revolutionary. He led an anti-colonial movement of the dispossessed which affirmed women's leadership, racial equality and sexual diversity. Yet within three centuries, Christianity began being used at the service of the very same forms of discrimination Jesus had spent his life opposing. Open for Liberation argues that the task of liberating humanity from oppression must involve liberating Christianity from the idea that oppression is consistent with faith. Tim Gee restores th...

Tim Gee tells the story of why he became a pacifist and what it means to him. Gee reflects on the lives of peacemakers past and present to provide responses to questions like “Don’t we have to hit back if we're hurt?”, “Don’t we need war to respond to evil?” and “Doesn’t religion justify wars?”. This is a critique of war, but more than that, it stakes a claim for pacifism's feminist and anti-racist qualities. This is a call for a more nonviolent world.

This timely book argues that no major movement has ever been successful without counterpower, or the power that the "have-nots" can use to remove the power of the "haves."Investigating the history and tactics of major movements of the past and today's global justice and human rights movements, Tim Gee demonstrates what works and what doesn't work. In showing how counterpower can be strategically applied, Gee has created an inspiration for activists and an invaluable resource for te...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction“Caroline Elkins has written an important book that can change our understanding not just of Africa but of ourselves. —Bill Berkeley, author of The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of AfricaA major work of history that for the first time reveals the violence and terror at the heart of Britain's civilizing mission in Kenya.As part of the A...

Democracy in South Africa turns twenty on 27 April 2014. In A Rumour of Spring, Max du Preez investigates and analyses the progress and lack of progress the country has made during these twenty years. A Rumour of Spring looks at the legacies of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki in an attempt to understand how we got here, and examines Jacob Zuma’s presidency to better understand where we are.In the context of blatant corruption, populism and tragedies such as the Marikana massacre, th...

For 30 years, the African National Congress, led by Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela, was the core of opposition to the white supremacist apartheid regime in South Africa. After organizing strikes and founding the armed military wing of the ANC, Mandela spent 27 years in jail before emerging as a worldwide symbol of human freedom.

In 2005 Michael Ignatieff left his life as a writer and professor at Harvard University to enter the combative world of politics back home in Canada. By 2008, he was leader of the country’s Liberal Party and poised—should the governing Conservatives falter—to become Canada’s next Prime Minister. It never happened. Today, after a bruising electoral defeat, Ignatieff is back where he started, writing and teaching what he learned.What did he take away from this crash course in politic...

The extraordinary story of the UN - its creation, the threats it has faced, and the possibilities it holds for the future.Can the world be governed by agreement rather than conflict? In 1945 the world's most powerful nation states came together to 'save succeeding generations from the scourge of war and reaffirm faith in the fundamental human rights'. Over sixty years later, the United Nations still doggedly pursues that mandate.Paul Kennedy's The Parli...

Updated edition, covering Brexit, Trump, Xi’s ambitions for China, and the geopolitical implications of the COVID-19 pandemicEverything Australia wants to achieve as a country depends on its capacity to understand the world outside and to respond effectively to it.In Fear of Abandonment, expert and insider Allan Gyngell tells the story of how Australia has shaped the world and been shaped by it since it established an independent foreign policy dur...

The one thing that looms largest in South Africa's future is South Africa's past – most especially the nearly five decades of division and conflict at the heart of one of the twentieth century's most infamous social experiments.Apartheid, An Illustrated History is a portrait of the defining experience of modern South Africa's transition from colonial state to democracy. What began in May 1948 as a vague, grimly ambitious project to interrupt history and engineer white supremacy at ...

Interest in international law has increased greatly over the past decade, largely because of its central place in discussions such as the Iraq War and Guantanamo, the World Trade Organisation, the anti-capitalist movement, the Kyoto Convention on climate change, and the apparent failure of the international system to deal with the situations in Palestine and Darfur, and the plights of refugees and illegal immigrants around the world. This Very Short Introduction explains what inte...