Robert A. Williams – författare

Robert Williams attempts to write Indians back into Indian law by developing a greater appreciation for the contributions of American Indian legal visions and demonstrating how ancient treaty visions can speak to the modern, multicultural age.Williams maintains there is an important need for a more complete account of the legal visions of the American Indians. In this work, he examines the Indians' role in the history of legal traditions which have determined Indian rights in the USA, including the Indian conceptions of justice, their traditions, and practices. Doing so is essential to protecting Indian tribalism's survival under US law. In addition, understanding how the American Indian legal traditions have worked to help perpetuate Indian tribalism might also assist in beginning to understand how US law may achieve racial justice more generally.

From one of the world's leading experts on Native American law and indigenous peoples' human rights comes an original and striking intellectual history of the tribe and Western civilization that sheds new light on how we understand ourselves and our contemporary society. Historical conflicts between the Western world and tribalism are said to be grounded in irreconcilable differences in culture, governing institutions, religion and worldview. Throughout the centuries, conquest, war, and unspeakable acts of violence and dispossession have all been justified by citing civilization's opposition to these differences represented by the tribe. Robert Williams, award-winning author, legal scholar, and member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe, proposes a wide-ranging reexamination of the history of the Western world, told from the perspective of civilization's war on tribalism as a way of life.Starting from the foundations of Western political theory and philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome to show how the West's war on tribalism influenced and shaped Christianity, the Renaissance and Enlightenment Eras, the African slave trade, Darwin's theory of evolution, the Vietnam War, and even today's environmental movement, Williams shows us how what we thought we knew about the rise of Western civilization over the tribe is in dire need of reappraisal.

Guided by Gramsci’s question of why so many victims support the labyrinth of their oppression, Robert A. Williams queries garrison state machinations in electioneering to promote hegemony. This pioneering ethnography explores the role and function of the U.S. garrison state in U.S. electioneering through participant observation of the United States’s largest third party—the Libertarian Party (LP)—as a window to wider sociocultural dynamics of covert power in U.S. politics. Some three decades of insider membership roles within Libertarian Party electioneering combined with two years of doctoral fieldwork provide an ethnographic window into cultural hegemony in U.S. electoral politics and sociological analysis of the information warfare that sustains it. Anchored in original and extensive participant observation including interviews and surveys, this ethnography of United States’s sociologically understudied Libertarian Party (LP) probes the power of cultural hegemony to constrain human agency in electioneering. Through a privileged membership point of view by becoming the phenomenon, the author provides a critically reflective analysis of the sociocultural context in which LP electioneering unfolds. Membership roles in Libertarian electioneering range from donors to candidates, from volunteers to party officials, and from anti-authoritarian libertarians to authoritarian conservatives. Exploring its transition from a radical anti-establishment party to a party more in line with mainstream opinion, Williams shows how a member’s relations of shared cultural logics constrain her or his behavior to ultimately reproduce garrison state social practices.

Nat Tracy-Spiritual Genius augments a tribute to a great man as contributing to education in general and especially to his genius with respect to his philosophical and theological world-views. It conveys his life, marking his childhood, education, early adulthood and vocation, first as pastor and ultimately as university professor. These include his commendation as chaplain in the United States Armed Forces during World War II, his successful pastorates, remarkable teaching tenure of twenty-five years, and founding and directing of the Conference on Spiritual Renewal. Precepts in his Christian world-view won him marked approbation by his students. Sixteen chapters convey his remarkable biblical insight that borders on theological genius unlike anything in print. These include three chapters on God, four on Christ, two on Man and the problem of Sin, two on the Christian Life, three on the Church, and two final chapters on Last Things, which deal with the Consummation and what we should do in light of the truths that have been presented throughout the book.