Patricia Marchak – författare

When Pax Americana began to disintegrate in the late 1960s, economic leaders in corporate America joined with their counterparts in Western Europe and Japan to develop a self-interested strategy for dealing with the political and social impacts of a changing global economy. As Marchak shows, the political agenda of the emerging New Right the dismantling of the welfare state was supported by corporate-funded think-tanks which influenced public policy and by media campaigns which swayed public opinion. The New Right promoted the resurgence of laissez-faire political and economic ideas which Marchak traces back to the theories of Adam Smith. Marchak describes the changes such strategies created in the world economy and examines their effects on the United States and Canada, Western and Eastern Europe, Japan, the newly industrializing nations, and the increasingly impoverished third world countries. She includes chapters on the silicon revolution, Japanese expansion, the automobile industry, special export zones, the debt crisis, environmental issues, and international organizations.

Patricia Marchak examines issues particular to the northern and southern regions and the global effects of trends in each region, using British Columbia, Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, and Thailand as full case studies and Malaysia, Myanmar, and other south-east Asian regions as shorter case studies. She also examines Japanese forestry and the Japanese paper industry. Logging the Globe provides in-depth analyses of the restructuring of the global division of labour; the effect of Japanese demand for pulp; changes in employment, production, land policies, and markets in northern countries; deforestation; plantation forestry; and the influence of European, North American, and Japanese companies on tropical forests and peoples. Marchak considers whether industrial forestry is sustainable and suggests ways in which global demand for forest products can be met in more efficient and more nearly sustainable ways. Logging the Globe presents a global picture of a critically important environmental and social issue. It will be of great interest to professionals in the industry, policy makers and environmental activists, and those concerned with environmental and social issues.

The debate was about sexism and racism, academic freedom and due process. But it also raised fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of universities, meritocracy versus inclusivity, and who should wield power over the curriculum, students, and the cultural agenda for society. Patricia Marchak presents a remarkably fair and balanced account of events. In a documentary-style narrative she reports the circumstances and gives a sympathetic reading to the very different perceptions of what happened. The focus is on the wider social and cultural context that gave rise to this painful episode. Racism, Sexism, and the University is not simply about specific events at a particular institution. The issues addressed here are vital to universities everywhere; the political science affair at UBC brings them to the fore in a wide-ranging and hard-hitting debate.

God''s Assassins tells the story of state terrorism in Argentina through interviews with participants on all sides of this issue. They include military officers, "third world" priests, Catholic church officers who supported military objectives and methods, former members of guerrilla movements, survivors of prison camps, journalists, trade unionists, and others who experienced state terrorism in Argentina. Patricia Marchak combines excerpts from these interviews with documents and media reports from the time and her own insightful study of Argentina''s history to provide an analysis of the process as well as the causes of state terrorism. The graphic and moving interviews in God''s Assassins show the complexity of these causes and indicate that there is no simple explanation of the period. Was the head of a major guerrilla movement a double agent? Did the intelligence service actually believe it was engaged in the third world war? Why did the Catholic church turn on its own priests? Through her interviews, Marchak reveals much that will never appear in official documents.

Marchak departs significantly from mainstream explanations of genocide, rejecting racism as a fundamental cause and disputing a wide range of other explanations that cite racist and religious ideologies, perception of threat, authoritarianism, and unique historical circumstances as primary causes. She argues that while these variables may be contributing factors, states move toward human rights crimes because their governments can no longer sustain a particular social hierarchy. Reasons for their paralysis may be economic, environmental, demographic, or purely political. In an attempt to re-establish the former status quo, they turn against groups low on the hierarchical scale, some of which may be defined in ethnic terms. If governments come into power as revolutionary forces, they may commit such crimes in order to establish a new social hierarchy. Other necessary but insufficient conditions for state crimes include the military capacity for committing mass murder, the creation of ideology that justifies such action, and the failure of independent institutions such as the mass media and universities to counter ideological and military forces. Reigns of Terror is highly accessible and aimed at an audience of senior undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty in the social sciences, as well as a more general reading public concerned about the many state-sponsored crimes against humanity still occurring in the world.

The UN has adopted a "responsibility to protect" mandate for humanitarian intervention in civil wars - but there is no institutional basis for carrying out that mandate. Patricia Marchak argues that unless would-be interveners have an understanding of local issues, agents who speak local languages, and a military force fully prepared to undertake both peaceful and military missions on short notice, UN and other attempts to intervene are unlikely to succeed. While UN-sponsored international criminal courts have been successful in obliging leaders to accept responsibility for their actions during bitter internal wars, Marchak argues that they may not be the best means of bringing truth and reconciliation to survivors. Based on the principle of individual responsibility, they are not designed to deal with collective crimes against humanity and genocide, nor are they good instruments for dealing with the breakdown of societies. Bringing together her own field interviews, documentary material, and secondary sources, Marchak critically assesses the recent history of international interventions and criminal prosecutions. She examines three cases in detail: Cambodia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia in its current forms of Bosnia and Serbia, considers their international context prior to and during internal wars, and argues that each case has to be understood in its own context and history - there is no common pattern and no easy fix that could mend broken societies after the wars. No Easy Fix is of interest to anyone concerned with how the international community deals with civil wars that involve serious crimes against humanity.