Rebels with a Cause : The Minds and Morality of Political Offenders

As the twenty-first century is ushered in, rebels, revolutionaries and political dissidents remain a major roadblock to the structuring of a new world order. Challenging their national or local institutions of authority- political or economic, social or religious- aggrieved individuals and disgruntled communities continue to wage their eternal struggles against those perceived as perverting the common good. Rebels with a Cause seeks to explain the minds, motives, means, and morality of those who espouse individual as well as communal dissent and resistance- violent or otherwise- in the name of some greater good. The ranks of political offenders vary widely: Civil Disobedients Conscientious Objectors Dissidents Fanatics Freedom Fighters Fundamentalists Militants Political Prisoners Pseudo-Politicals Rebels Resisters Revolutionaries and Terrorists. The cast of characters is equally diverse and colourful: from Rome's Brutus to South Africa's Nelson Mandela. From America's John Brown and Susan B. Anthony to John Wilkes Booth and Timothy J. McVeigh. From Cuba's Che Guevara to the anonymous heroes of Beijing's Tienaman Square. From the Soviet Union's Aleksander Solzhenistzen to Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi. Rebels portrays political offenders as products of three unorthodoxies. They constitute neither traditional political actors, nor common criminals or lawful belligerents. As players in the political arena, they refuse to abide by the rules and means of conventional politics- the ballot box and the rule of law. Offending against the prevailing law, they nevertheless disclaim the common criminal's venal goals to assert their own pursuit of altruistic communal and just objectives. Finally, as militant activists they act surreptiously, disclaim uniforms and insignias, proclaim allegiance to no sovereign and in their resort to indiscriminate violence they spurn the rules of lawful belligerency. This triple unorthodoxy has made the development of coherent public respon