I study and write about political conflicts and social movements. I have done so in a wide range of online outlets. I am a fellow at the Independent Media Institute's Globetrotter project.
This section deals with books that I have authored or have chapters in, on these topics.
Co-authored with Joe Emersberger, Extraordinary Threat is out June 2021 from Monthly Review Press. Here’s the description:
In March 2015, President Obama initiated sanctions against Venezuela, declaring a “national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.” Each year, the U.S. administration has repeated this claim. But, as Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur ague in their timely book, Extraordinary Threat, the opposite is true: It is the U.S. policy of regime change in Venezuela that constitutes an “extraordinary threat” to Venezuelans. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans continue to die because of these ever-tightening U.S. sanctions, denying people daily food, medicine, and fuel. On top of this, Venezuela has, since 2002, been subjected to repeated coup attempts by U.S.-backed forces. In Extraordinary Threat, Emersberger and Podur tell the story of six coup attempts against Venezuela
This book deflates the myths propagated about the Venezuelan government’s purported lack of electoral legitimacy, scant human rights, and disastrous economic development record. Contrary to accounts lobbed by the corporate media, the real target of sustained U.S. assault on Venezuela is not the country’s claimed authoritarianism nor its supposed corruption. It is Chavismo, the prospect that twenty-first century socialism could be brought about through electoral and constitutional means. This is what the U.S. empire must not allow to succeed.
America’s Wars on Democracy in Rwanda and the DR Congo is published by Palgrave Macmillan in June 2020. Here’s the blurb:
This book examines US interventions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda — two countries whose post-independence histories are inseparable. It analyzes the US campaigns to prevent Patrice Lumumba from turning the DR Congo into a sovereign, democratic, prosperous republic on a continent where America’s ally apartheid South Africa was hegemonic; America’s installation of and support for Mobutu to keep the region under neo-colonial control; and America’s pre-emption of the Africa-wide movement for multiparty democracy in Rwanda and Zaire in the 1990s by supporting Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). In addition, the book discusses the concepts of African development, democracy, genocide, foreign policy, and international politics.
In my thriller novel Siegebreakers (Roseway 2019) a group of heroes battles to break the siege of Gaza.
My book Haiti's New Dictatorship: The Coup, the Earthquake, and the UN Occupation, was out October 20, 2012 from Pluto Press.
BOOK CHAPTERS
A chapter on Incompatible Objectives: Development and Counterinsurgency in Canada's Afghanistan Strategy, was part of the collection Empire's Ally, edited by Jerome Klassen and Greg Albo, in January 2013.
A chapter on Racism, Culture, and a Participatory Society is in Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century, by AK Press 2008. Edited by Chris Spannos.
