Search results for ""Author Liam Downey""

A damning examination of how violence serves to maintain social order and elite power in the United States The Violent Underpinnings of American Life boldly asserts that violence—far from going against American ideals—is as American as apple pie, central to the country’s social order and the dominance of its most powerful groups. Drawing from extensive research and analysis of key social, political, and cultural events, Liam Downey investigates the myriad ways violence maintains the American way of life. Through compelling case studies, Downey identifies four main ways in which violence produces and maintains the American social hierarchy: the creation of divisions among non-elite social groups; the reinforcement of dominant discourses in multiple social arenas; the aligning of marginalized group identities with dominant institutional practices; and the selective promotion of the interests of specific, non-elite groups. This is the first book to argue that violence is both a negative, coercive power and a positive, productive one that helps produce not only social order but also consent, discipline, discourse, identity, subjectivity, and embodied knowledge, among other things. The Violent Underpinnings of American Life is an audacious work that argues violence is absolutely central to social life in America, and that Americans cannot effectively fight against the inequalities that surround them without accepting this reality.

Read more less

Winner, American Sociological Association Section on Environment and Technology Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award The world currently faces several severe social and environmental crises, including economic under-development, widespread poverty and hunger, lack of safe drinking water for one-sixth of the world’s population, deforestation, rapidly increasing levels of pollution and waste, dramatic declines in soil fertility and biodiversity, and global warming. Inequality, Democracy, and the Environment sheds light on the structural causes of these and other social and environmental crises, highlighting in particular the key role that elite-controlled organizations, institutions, and networks play in creating these crises. Liam Downey focuses on four topics—globalization, agriculture, mining, and U.S. energy and military policy—to show how organizational and institutional inequality and elite-controlled organizational networks produce environmental degradation and social harm. He focuses on key institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Military and the World Trade Organization to show how specific policies are conceived and enacted in order to further elite goals. Ultimately, Downey lays out a path for environmental social scientists and environmentalists to better understand and help solve the world’s myriad social and environmental crises. Inequality, Democracy and the Environment presents a passionate exposé of the true role inequality, undemocratic institutions and organizational power play in harming people and the environment.

Read more less