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Conspiracy theories are unproven rumors built on guesswork and intuition. Their unrealistic stories typically require believers to ignore a lot of good evidence. For example, it's not possible to believe [...]

Political conservatives have increasingly characterized pacifism as a combination of political impotence and moral dogmatism, especially since the terrorist attacks of Sep 11, 2001. Violent response to these attacks has removed the Taliban from dominating Afghanistan and marginally improved the position of women in that country, but fighting continues at the cost of billions of dollars and as many as 137,000 civilian deaths. However, some analysts feel the antiwar left remains politically irresponsible and moralistic.

Tran Duc Thao was a Vietnamese Marxist philosopher who was silenced in 1956 after criticizing the Vietnamese Communist Party. The story of this incident and how it is remembered in Vietnam is crucial to the understanding of the way postcolonial societies remember their past.

Levinas's thought is considered from a Czech dissident perspective. Topics include the experience of living as a dissident under communism and participating in politics after 1989, exposure to the work of Levinas, his views on ethics, and themes of self and other, war and peace.

Dissent goes back as far as civilisation, and will persist in the future. It is necessary for the protection of social systems from corruption; but its relations with the establishment is inevitably based on conflict. Dissenters can destroy and can be destroyed in the pursuit of their goal of uncomfortable truth. Through a personal narrative, the author describes how he escaped this fate (so far) by being self-aware and detached, on the margin both of regular establishments and of dissenting establishments as well. Up to now dissent has flourished, by having clear targets in dogma and corruption; but in the bland Disneyfied world of consumerism and spectacle, real dissent will need to focus directly on fundamentals - a genuinely unpopular undertaking. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Hungarian intellectual dissident Janos Kis contends that the events of 1989-1990 in Eastern Europe comprised a revolutionary process. Despite the arguments of Western intellectuals that the events were not revolutionary in contrast to French and Russian revolution models, Kis argues that 1989 was a revolution, albeit, a bloodless one. The occurrence of the bloodless revolution was a result of the efforts of intellectual dissidents to overcome the repressive but ineffective communist rule.

Chinese dissenters seeking social justice and civil rights face an uphill task despite the death of Deng Xiaoping. Many dissenters from the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement are still fighting for human rights in China. They are helped by the attitudinal change of the Chinese people regarding the government and human rights. Increasing instances of workers' strikes indicate general dissatisfaction with the government's economic policy. Although most Chinese support democracy, many believe that a short-term period of authoritarianism is necessary to see the transition through.

Four arguments on behalf of conscience advanced by dissenting thinkers during the period of the English restoration church settlement between 1667 and 1672 are examined to reveal the nature of their radicalism and the religious and political views on which they based their arguments for conscience. The intense debate over the issue of conscience lead to a restoration crisis that affected all segments of society. The evaluation of these cases for conscience presented by nonconformist political thinkers, with special emphasis on the interpretation of the terms 'radical' and 'conscience,' suggest fresh perspectives on the historiography of the restoration.

China is unlikely to experience the demise of communism. The foundations of the ideology are too strong so that it is highly improbable that it will follow the fate of Russia, East Germany or Czechoslovakia. Although reforms are in the offing, the country will not succumb to complete privatization. Neither will it experience internal turmoil. Social cohesiveness has always been a part of Chinese tradition. Although the country's continuing human rights violation and Deng Xiaoping's death can pave the way for social unrest, the existing ideology will persist.

The voices of dissent proliferating in international studies over the past decade are frequently understood by negation, that is, in terms of their criticisms and refusals of positivist/empiricist commitments and political realist perspectives, so long dominant in the discipline. To understand contemporary discourses of dissent in this way, however, is to impose upon them an undue semblance of unity of perspective and purpose--one that mirrors the illusory unities of positivism and realism. It is to fail to acknowledge the variety of dissident voices that have called to account the given, axiomatic and taken-for-granted 'realities' of prevailing disciplinary discourses. Concentrating upon what might be called the 'agenda of dissent' in international studies, this paper celebrates that variety, that difference, among critical voices in international studies. In particular, it locates prominent themes in critical international relations thinking within the wider arc of debates in Western social theory--interdisciplinary, intercontinental debates whose questions include the Enlightenment concepts of history, rationality, and truth; the subject/object and agent/structure oppositions; the relationship between language and social meaning; the relationship between knowledge and power; the character and function of the human sciences; and the prospects for emancipatory politics today. These debates point to no necessary conclusion. They mandate no single position. Instead, they suggest the opening up of 'thinking space,' a space of thought that is exploited by a variety of dissident voices who would speak in reply to the dangers and opportunities of political life in the late twentieth century.