Why do Peace Corps volunteers often return having lost their idealism? In The Death of Idealism, Meghan Elizabeth Kallman details the combination of social forces and organizational pressures that depoliticizes Peace Corps volunteers, channels their idealism toward professionalization, and leads to cynicism or disengagement.
Black Skin, White Masks offers a radical analysis of the psychological effects of colonization on the colonized. Fanon witnessed the effects of colonization first hand both in his birthplace, Martinique, and again later in life when he worked as a psychiatrist in another French colony, Algeria.
How does a state control its citizens? Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish answers this question by investigating the prison system. Foucault argues that prison created and merged into a wider system of surveillance that extends throughout society.