1st Edition

Radicalization The Life Writings of Political Prisoners

By Melissa Dearey Copyright 2010
    304 Pages
    by Routledge-Cavendish

    304 Pages
    by Routledge-Cavendish

    Expanding the influence of auto/biography studies into cultural criminology, Radicalization: The Life Writings of Political Prisoners addresses the origins, processes and cultures of terrorist criminality and political resistance in a globalized world.

    Criminologists and penologists have long been aware of the sheer volume of autobiography emerging from our prisons. Political prisoners, POWs, freedom fighters and terrorists have been consistently and strongly represented in this corpus of work, including such authors as Bobby Sands, Wole Soyinka, Nelson Mandela, Moazzam Begg, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Angela Davis, George Jackson, and Aung San Suu Kyi among others. For many of those who have been detained for ostensibly politically motivated crimes, life writing has proven to be indispensable in explaining the causes and processes which account for their situation. Embedded with these life writings are narratives of radicalization or resistance. Melissa Dearey here undertakes an international and comparative analysis of such narratives, where the 'life story' is considered as a mode of expressing and transmitting 'radical' cultural values.

    1. What is Radicalization? From the Civil Society to the Enemy Within  2. Using Auto/Biographical Methodologies to Analyze Radicalization  3. ‘There are So Many Roots…’: Sex, Sexuality, Gender and the Body in Political Prisoner Radicalization Narratives  4. ‘I Felt Myself Turning Cold like the Bottle of Coke’: Children, Childhood and ‘The Child’ in Political Prisoner Radicalization Narratives  5. Is Radicalization a Family Affair? A Tale of Two Families

    Biography

    Melissa Dearey is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Hull