In North Africa popular movements have sprung up challenging entrenched dictatorial regimes with the eyes of the world watching. Less known, at least in the West, are similar movements that swept Asia in the 1980s and '90s -- in Bangladesh, Taiwan, Indonesia, South Korea, Nepal, the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, and beyond. George Katsiaficas discusses the impulse behind the uprisings in Egypt and Asia and considers why they have often ended up strengthening the regimes they sought to overthrow.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the US engineered its conquest of the Philippines. According to Alfred McCoy, the security and surveillance methods introduced and refined by the US in the Philippines were brought home to these shores, for use in domestic policing, intelligence, and other repressive techniques and systems that had profound consequences for civil liberties.