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317 books about Human Rights and 28 start with C
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Callous Objects: Designs against the Homeless
Robert Rosenberger
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Uncovering injustices built into our everyday surroundings

Callous Objects unearths cases in which cities push homeless people out of public spaces through a combination of policy and strategic design. Robert Rosenberger examines such commonplace devices as garbage cans, fences, signage, and benches—all of which reveal political agendas beneath the surface. Such objects have evolved, through a confluence of design and law, to be open to some uses and closed to others, but always capable of participating in collective ends on a large scale. Rosenberger brings together ideas from the philosophy of technology, social theory, and feminist epistemology to spotlight the widespread anti-homeless ideology built into our communities and enacted in law.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

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Catastrophe: Law, Politics, and the Humanitarian Impulse
Austin Sarat
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
Library of Congress KF3750.S27 2009 | Dewey Decimal 344.7305348

From 9/11 to Katrina, from Darfur to the Minnesota bridge collapse, ours is an "age of catastrophe." In this era, catastrophic events seem to have a revelatory quality: they offer powerful reminders of the fragility of our social and institutional architectures, making painfully evident vulnerabilities in our social organization that were otherwise invisible. By disrupting the operation of fundamental mechanisms and infrastructures of the social order, they lay bare the conditions that make our sense of normalcy possible.

At a time when societies are directing an unprecedented level of resources and ingenuity to anticipating and mitigating catastrophic events, Catastrophe: Law, Politics, and the Humanitarian Impulse examines the tests that catastrophe poses to politics and humanitarianism as well as to the law. It explores legal, political, and humanitarian responses during times when the sudden, discontinuous, and disastrous event has become, perhaps paradoxically, a structural component of our political imagination. It asks whether law, politics, and humanitarianism live up to the tests posed by disaster, and the role all of them play in creating a more resilient world.

Taken together the essays in this book ask us to see through and beyond the myths that surround catastrophe and our responses to it. They ask us to rethink our understanding of catastrophe and to imagine new legal, political, and humanitarian responses.

In addition to the editors, contributors include Thomas Birkland, Michele Landis Dauber, Kim Fortun, Edward Rackley, Peter Redfield, Peter H. Schuck, and Susan Sterett.
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Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics: Subversive Kin
Devon G. Peña
University of Arizona Press, 1998
Library of Congress F802.R4C47 1998 | Dewey Decimal 304.20978952

Until recently, mainstream American environmentalism has been a predominantly white, middle-class movement, essentially ignoring the class, race, and gender dimensions of environmental politics. In this provocative collection of original essays, the environmental dimensions of the Chicana/o experience are explicitly expressed and debated.

Employing a variety of genres ranging from poetry to autobiography to theoretical and empirical essays, the voices in this collection speak to the most significant issues of environmentalism and social justice, recognizing throughout the need for a pluralism of Chicana/o philosophies. The contributors provide an excellent basis for understanding how multiple Chicana/o views on the environment play out in the context of dominant social, political and economic views. Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics examines a number of Chicana/o ecological perspectives. How can the ethics of reciprocity present in Chicana/o agropastoral life be protected and applied on a broader scale? How can the dominant society, whose economic structure is invested in "placeless mobility," take note of the harm caused to land-based cultures, take responsibility for it, and take heed before it is too late? Will the larger society be "ecologically housebroken" before it destroys its home?

Grounded in actual political struggles waged by Chicana/o communities over issues of environmental destruction, cultural genocide, and socioeconomic domination, this volume provides an important series of snapshots of Chicana/o history. Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics illuminates the bridges that exist—and must be understood—between race, ethnicity, class, gender, politics, and ecology.

CONTENTS
Part 1: IndoHispano Land Ethics
Los Animalitos: Culture, Ecology, and the Politics of Place in the Upper R¡o Grande, Devon G. Peña
Social Action Research, Bioregionalism, and the Upper Río Grande, Rubén O. Martínez
Notes on (Home)Land Ethics: Ideas, Values, and the Land, Reyes García
Part 2: Environmental History and Ecological Politics
Ecological Legitimacy and Cultural Essentialism: Hispano Grazing in Northern New Mexico, Laura Pulido
The Capitalist Tool, the Lawless, and the Violent: A Critique of Recent Southwestern Environmental History, Devon G. Peña and Rubén O. Martínez
Ecofeminism and Chicano Environmental Struggles: Bridges across Gender and Race, Gwyn Kirk
Philosophy Meets Practice: A Critique of Ecofeminism through the Voices of Three Chicana Activists, Malia Davis
Part 3: Alternatives to Destruction
The Pasture Poacher (a poem), Joseph C. Gallegos
Acequia Tales: Stories from a Chicano Centennial Farm, Joseph C. Gallegos
A Gold Mine, an Orchard, and an Eleventh Commandment, Devon G. Peña
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Child Soldiers in the Age of Fractured States
Scott Gates
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010
Library of Congress HQ784.W3C487 2010 | Dewey Decimal 303.66083091724

Current global estimates of children engaged in warfare range from 200,000 to 300,000. Children's roles in conflict range from armed and active participants to spies, cooks, messengers, and sex slaves. Child Soldiers in the Age of Fractured States examines the factors that contribute to the use of children in war, the effects of war upon children, and the perpetual cycle of warfare that engulfs many of the world's poorest nations.

The contributors seek to eliminate myths of historic or culture-based violence, and instead look to common traits of chronic poverty and vulnerable populations. Individual essays examine topics such as: the legal and ethical aspects of child soldiering; internal UN debates over enforcement of child protection policies; economic factors; increased access to small arms; displaced populations; resource endowments; forced government conscription; rebel-enforced quota systems; motivational techniques employed in recruiting children; and the role of girls in conflict.

The contributors also offer viable policies to reduce the recruitment of child soldiers such as the protection of refugee camps by outside forces, “naming and shaming,” and criminal prosecution by international tribunals. Finally, they focus on ways to reintegrate former child soldiers into civil society in the aftermath of war.
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Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination: From Patriots to Victims
Rosen, David M
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Library of Congress UB418.C45R68 2014 | Dewey Decimal 355.0083

When we hear the term “child soldiers,” most Americans imagine innocent victims roped into bloody conflicts in distant war-torn lands like Sudan and Sierra Leone. Yet our own history is filled with examples of children involved in warfare—from adolescent prisoner of war Andrew Jackson to Civil War drummer boys—who were once viewed as symbols of national pride rather than signs of human degradation.
 
In this daring new study, anthropologist David M. Rosen investigates why our cultural perception of the child soldier has changed so radically over the past two centuries. Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination reveals how Western conceptions of childhood as a uniquely vulnerable and innocent state are a relatively recent invention. Furthermore, Rosen offers an illuminating history of how human rights organizations drew upon these sentiments to create the very term “child soldier,” which they presented as the embodiment of war’s human cost.
 
Filled with shocking historical accounts and facts—and revealing the reasons why one cannot spell “infantry” without “infant”—Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination seeks to shake us out of our pervasive historical amnesia. It challenges us to stop looking at child soldiers through a biased set of idealized assumptions about childhood, so that we can better address the realities of adolescents and pre-adolescents in combat. Presenting informative facts while examining fictional representations of the child soldier in popular culture, this book is both eye-opening and thought-provoking.   
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Child Survivors of the Holocaust: The Youngest Remnant and the American Experience
Cohen, Beth B
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Library of Congress E184.355.C64 2018 | Dewey Decimal 940.5318092273

2017 Wiener Library Ernst Fraenkel Prize (WLEFP) Finalist

The majority of European Jewish children alive in 1939 were murdered during the Holocaust. Of 1.5 million children, only an estimated 150,000 survived. In the aftermath of the Shoah, efforts by American Jews brought several thousand of these child survivors to the United States. In Child Survivors of the Holocaust, historian Beth B. Cohen weaves together survivor testimonies and archival documents to bring their story to light. She reveals that even as child survivors were resettled and “saved,” they struggled to adapt to new lives as members of adoptive families, previously unknown American Jewish kin networks, or their own survivor relatives. Nonetheless, the youngsters moved ahead. As Cohen demonstrates, the experiences both during and after the war shadowed their lives and relationships through adulthood, yet an identity as “survivors” eluded them for decades. Now, as the last living link to the Holocaust, the voices of Child Survivors are finally being heard. 
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Chile and the Inter-American Human Rights System
Edited by Karinna Fernández, Cristian Peña, and Sebastián Smart
University of London Press, 2017

This book reflects on the relationship between Chile and the Inter-American Human Rights System, focusing on an interdisciplinary and detailed examination of the consequences of recent cases decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights against the Chilean state. These cases illustrate central challenges in the areas of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex rights, as well as shedding light on torture and indigenous rights in Chile and the Americas as a whole.
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China's Quest for Liberty: A Personal History of Freedom
Promise Hsu
St. Augustine's Press, 2014
Library of Congress BR1288.H78 2014 | Dewey Decimal 275.1083

China’s Quest for Liberty is a personal story of a young man fully engaged in understanding the world he was born into and working toward making that world into a better and freer place to life. It is about an unexpected journey a Chinese journalist has taken to pursue freedom, involving such diverse fields or disciplines as politics, business, humanities, science and technology, government agencies and non-governmental organizations. Some took place as daily life, and some occurred in detentions or disasters.

It is about a world whose dimensions have been basically obscured not only in China but also in the global public square, and walk with this young journalist, step by step, to find, paradoxically, the hope in the depth of hopelessness, the strength in acknowledging weakness, the change in substance by, among other things, keeping the form unchanged for at least a while, the youth in growing up despite growing old, the invisible in the visible, the imperishable in the perishable, the reality in the shadow of numerous fake realities, and the freedom gained not mainly through human efforts but as mercy and grace from the one who created humans and other beings.

As well as digging out the overlooked Christian background in the rise of the sanctity of human life, creative culture, constitutionalism, work as a vocation, modern management, servant leadership, and catchphrases like “the global village” and “The medium is the message”, the author tells of insider observations about the rise of Christianity in China generally and about Shouwang Church in particular. Through sharing these findings, this book aims to show how the one who made the universe rules the world and how this creator sets his creatures free by himself.

China’s Quest for Liberty is a fascinating work of nuance and surprise.
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Citizens against Crime and Violence: Societal Responses in Mexico
Trevor Stack
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Library of Congress HN120.M53C58 2022 | Dewey Decimal 303.6097237

Mexico has become notorious for crime-related violence, and the efforts of governments and national and international NGOs to counter this violence have proven largely futile. Citizens against Crime and Violence studies societal responses to crime and violence within one of Mexico’s most affected regions, the state of Michoacán. Based on comparative ethnography conducted over twelve months by a team of anthropologists and sociologists across six localities of Michoacán, ranging from the most rural to the most urban, the contributors consider five varieties of societal responses: local citizen security councils that define security and attempt to influence its policing, including by self-defense groups; cultural activists looking to create safe 'cultural' fields from which to transform their social environment; organizations in the state capital that combine legal and political strategies against less visible violence (forced disappearance, gender violence, anti-LGBT); church-linked initiatives bringing to bear the church’s institutionality, including to denounce 'state capture'; and women’s organizations creating 'safe' networks allowing to influence violence prevention.
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Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness
Benjamin N. Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens, editors
Duke University Press, 2017
Library of Congress JF801.C573525 2016

Citizenship is often assumed to be a clear-cut issue—either one has it or one does not. However, as the contributors to Citizenship in Question demonstrate, citizenship is not self-evident; it emerges from often obscure written records and is interpreted through ambiguous and dynamic laws. In case studies that analyze the legal barriers to citizenship rights in over twenty countries, the contributors explore how states use evidentiary requirements to create and police citizenship, often based on fictions of racial, ethnic, class, and religious differences. Whether examining the United States’ deportation of its own citizens, the selective use of DNA tests and secret results in Thailand, or laws that have stripped entire populations of citizenship, the contributors emphasize the political, psychological, and personal impact of citizenship policies. Citizenship in Question incites scholars to revisit long-standing political theories and debates about nationality, free movement, and immigration premised on the assumption of clear demarcations between citizens and noncitizens.
 
Contributors. Alfred Babo, Jacqueline Bhabha, Jacqueline Field, Amanda Flaim, Sara L. Friedman, Daniel Kanstroom, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Beatrice McKenzie, Polly J. Price, Rachel E. Rosenbloom, Kim Rubenstein, Kamal Sadiq, Jacqueline Stevens, Margaret D. Stock
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Civil Obedience: Complicity and Complacency in Chile since Pinochet
Michael J. Lazzara
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
Library of Congress F3100.L394 2018 | Dewey Decimal 983.065

Since the fall of General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in 1990, Chilean society has shied away from the subject of civilian complicity, preferring to pursue convictions of military perpetrators. But the torture, murders, deportations, and disappearances of tens of thousands of people in Chile were not carried out by the military alone; they required a vast civilian network. Some citizens actively participated in the regime's massive violations of human rights for personal gain or out of a sense of patriotic duty. Others supported Pinochet's neoliberal economic program while turning a blind eye to the crimes of that era.

Michael J. Lazzara boldly argues that today's Chile is a product of both complicity and complacency. Combining historical analysis with deft literary, political, and cultural critique, he scrutinizes the post-Pinochet rationalizations made by politicians, artists, intellectuals, bystanders, former revolutionaries-turned-neoliberals, and common citizens. He looks beyond victims and perpetrators to unveil the ambiguous, ethically vexed realms of memory and experience that authoritarian regimes inevitably generate.
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Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Harvard University Press, 2020
Library of Congress HV8599.U6+ | Dewey Decimal 363.254

Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Silver Gavel Award Finalist


“A sobering history of how American communities and institutions have relied on torture in various forms since before the United States was founded.”
—Los Angeles Times

“That Americans as a people and a nation-state are violent is indisputable. That we are also torturers, domestically and internationally, is not so well established. The myth that we are not torturers will persist, but Civilizing Torture will remain a powerful antidote in confronting it.”
—Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell

“Remarkable…A searing analysis of America’s past that helps make sense of its bewildering present.”
—David Garland, author of Peculiar Institution

Most Americans believe that a civilized state does not torture, but that belief has repeatedly been challenged in moments of crisis at home and abroad. From the Indian wars to Vietnam, from police interrogation to the War on Terror, US institutions have proven far more amenable to torture than the nation’s commitment to liberty would suggest.

Civilizing Torture traces the history of debates about the efficacy of torture and reveals a recurring struggle to decide what limits to impose on the power of the state. At a time of escalating rhetoric aimed at cleansing the nation of the undeserving and an erosion of limits on military power, the debate over torture remains critical and unresolved.

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Colonialism Is Crime
Marianne Nielsen
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Library of Congress HV6322.7.N53 2019 | Dewey Decimal 362.8808

There is powerful evidence that the colonization of Indigenous people was and is a crime, and that that crime is on-going. Achieving historical colonial goals often meant committing acts that were criminal even at the time. The consequences of this oppression and criminal victimization is perhaps the critical factor explaining why Indigenous people today are overrepresented as victims and offenders in the settler colonist criminal justice systems. This book presents an analysis of the relationship between these colonial crimes and their continuing criminal and social consequences that exist today. The authors focus primarily on countries colonized by Britain, especially the United States. Social harm theory, human rights covenants, and law are used to explain the criminal aspects of the historical laws and their continued effects. The final chapter looks at the responsibilities of settler-colonists in ameliorating these harms and the actions currently being taken by Indigenous people themselves.
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The Coming Good Society: Why New Realities Demand New Rights
William F. Schulz and Sushma Raman
Harvard University Press, 2020
Library of Congress K460.S388 2020 | Dewey Decimal 342.085

Two authors with decades of experience promoting human rights argue that, as the world changes around us, rights hardly imaginable today will come into being.

A rights revolution is under way. Today the range of nonhuman entities thought to deserve rights is exploding—not just animals but ecosystems and even robots. Changes in norms and circumstances require the expansion of rights: What new rights, for example, are needed if we understand gender to be nonbinary? Does living in a corrupt state violate our rights? And emerging technologies demand that we think about old rights in new ways: When biotechnology is used to change genetic code, whose rights might be violated? What rights, if any, protect our privacy from the intrusions of sophisticated surveillance techniques?

Drawing on their vast experience as human rights advocates, William Schulz and Sushma Raman challenge us to think hard about how rights evolve with changing circumstances, and what rights will look like ten, twenty, or fifty years from now. Against those who hold that rights are static and immutable, Schulz and Raman argue that rights must adapt to new realities or risk being consigned to irrelevance. To preserve and promote the good society—one that protects its members’ dignity and fosters an environment in which people will want to live—we must at times rethink the meanings of familiar rights and consider the introduction of entirely new rights.

Now is one of those times. The Coming Good Society details the many frontiers of rights today and the debates surrounding them. Schulz and Raman equip us with the tools to engage the present and future of rights so that we understand their importance and know where we stand.

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Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson
Jane E. Calvert
University of Delaware Press, 2011

The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, vol. 1 inaugurates a multivolume documentary edition that will, for the first time ever, provide the complete collection of everything Dickinson published on public affairs over the course of his life. The documents include essays, articles, broadsides, resolutions, petitions, declarations, constitutions, regulations, legislation, proclamations, songs and odes. Among them are many of the seminal state papers produced by the first national congresses and conventions. Also included are correspondences between Dickinson and some of the key figures of his era. This edition should raise Dickinson to his rightful place among America’s founding fathers, rivaled in reputation only by Benjamin Franklin before 1776. Dickinson was celebrated throughout the colonies, as well as in England and France, as the great American spokesman for liberty, and the documents in this edition evidence his tireless political work and unmatched corpus.
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The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide
Timothy Williams
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Library of Congress HV6322.7.W547 2020 | Dewey Decimal 304.663

Why do people participate in genocide? Timothy Williams presents an interdisciplinary model that shows how complex and diverse, but also how ordinary and mundane most motivations for participating in genocide are. The book draws on empirical examples from the Holocaust and Rwanda and introduces new data from interviews with perpetrators of genocide in Cambodia.
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Conflicted Memory: Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Peru
Cynthia E. Milton
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

Cynthia E. Milton reveals how Peru's military has engaged in a tactical cultural campaign—via books, films, museums—to shift public opinion, debate, and memories about the role it played in the nation's recent violent past. Milton calls attention to fabrications and goes further to deeply explore the ways members of the Peruvian military see their past, how they actively commemorate and curate it in the present, and why they do so. Her nuanced approach upends frameworks of memory studies that reduce military and ex-military to a predictable role of outright denial.
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Conflicted Memory: Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Peru
Cynthia E. Milton
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
Library of Congress F3448.5.M55 2018 | Dewey Decimal 985.063

What happens when concepts of "truth," "memory," and "human rights" are taken up and adapted by former perpetrators of violence? Peru has moved from the 1980s–90s conflict between its armed forces and Shining Path militants into an era of open democracy, transitional justice, and truth and reconciliation commissions. Cynthia Milton reveals how Peru's military has engaged in a tactical cultural campaign—via books, films, museums—to shift public opinion, debate, and memories about the nation's violent recent past and its part in it.

Milton calls attention to fabrications of our post-truth era but goes further to deeply explore the ways members of the Peruvian military see their past, how they actively commemorate and curate it in the present, and why they do so. Her nuanced approach upends frameworks of memory studies that reduce military and ex-military to a predictable role of outright denial.
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Constructing the Maya: Ethnicity, State Formation, and Material Culture in Yucatán, Chiapas, and Guatemala, Volume 55
Paul K. Eiss, special issue editor
Duke University Press

This special issue of Ethnohistory is a significant contribution to the history and anthropology of the Maya in both Mexico and Guatemala. Utilizing a comparative analytic framework, these essays explore the ethnic dimensions—indigeneity, indigenismo, mestizaje, racial subjugation—of state formation as well as state practice in indigenous regions. The contributors emphasize how the material aspects of state formation—roads and infrastructure; model villages; restored ruins; portrait photography; highland marketplaces; modern improvements; traditional cultural performances, artifacts, and dress—become theaters for the construction and reconstruction of ethnic and political entities and relationships. Taken as a whole, the collection challenges a tendency toward the segmentation of the discussion of the Maya into distinct disciplines (anthropology and history), national historiographies (Mexican and Guatemalan), and, within Mexico, distinct regional historiographies (Yucatán and Chiapas).

Contributors: David Carey Jr., Paul K. Eiss, Ben Fallaw, Stephen E. Lewis, Walter E. Little, John M. Watanabe

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Corporate Social Responsibility?: Human Rights in the New Global Economy
Edited by Charlotte Walker-Said and John D. Kelly
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Library of Congress HD60.C6936 2015 | Dewey Decimal 658.408

With this book, Charlotte Walker-Said and John D. Kelly have assembled an essential toolkit to better understand how the notoriously ambiguous concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) functions in practice within different disciplines and settings. Bringing together cutting-edge scholarship from leading figures in human rights programs around the United States, they vigorously engage some of the major political questions of our age: what is CSR, and how might it render positive political change in the real world?
           
The book examines the diverse approaches to CSR, with a particular focus on how those approaches are siloed within discrete disciplines such as business, law, the social sciences, and human rights. Bridging these disciplines and addressing and critiquing all the conceptual domains of CSR, the book also explores how CSR silos develop as a function of the competition between different interests. Ultimately, the contributors show that CSR actions across all arenas of power are interdependent, continually in dialogue, and mutually constituted. Organizing a diverse range of viewpoints, this book offers a much-needed synthesis of a crucial element of today’s globalized world and asks how businesses can, through their actions, make it better for everyone. 
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Court of Remorse: Inside the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
Thierry Cruvellier
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
Library of Congress KTD454.C7813 2010 | Dewey Decimal 345.675710251

When genocidal violence gripped Rwanda in 1994, the international community recoiled, hastily withdrawing its peacekeepers. Late that year, in an effort to redeem itself, the United Nations Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to seek accountability for some of the worst atrocities since World War II: the genocide suffered by the Tutsi and crimes against humanity suffered by the Hutu. But faced with competing claims, the prosecution focused exclusively on the crimes of Hutu extremists. No charges would be brought against the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, which ultimately won control of the country. The UN, as if racked by guilt for its past inaction, gave in to pressure by Rwanda’s new leadership. With the Hutu effectively silenced, and the RPF constantly reminding the international community of its failure to protect the Tutsi during the war, the Tribunal pursued an unusual form of one-sided justice, born out of contrition.  
    Fascinated by the Tribunal’s rich complexities, journalist Thierry Cruvellier came back day after day to watch the proceedings, spending more time there than any other outside observer. Gradually he gained the confidence of the victims, defendants, lawyers, and judges. Drawing on interviews with these protagonists and his close observations of their interactions, Cruvellier takes readers inside the courtroom to witness the motivations, mechanisms, and manipulations of justice as it unfolded on the stage of high-stakes, global politics. It is this ground-level view that makes his account so valuable—and so absorbing. A must-read for those who want to understand the dynamics of international criminal tribunals, Court of Remorse reveals both the possibilities and the challenges of prosecuting human rights violations.
 
 
A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association for School Libraries and the Public Library Association

Best Books for High Schools, selected by the American Association for School Libraries
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The Coveted Westside: How the Black Homeowners' Rights Movement Shaped Modern Los Angeles
Jennifer Mandel
University of Nevada Press, 2022
Library of Congress HD7288.76.U52M355 2022 | Dewey Decimal 363.50979494

From the middle of the nineteenth century, as Euro-Americans moved westward, they carried with them long-held prejudices against people of color. By the time they reached the West Coast, their new settlements included African Americans and recent Asian immigrants, as well as the indigenous inhabitants and descendants of earlier Spanish and Mexican settlers. The Coveted Westside deals with the settlement and development of Los Angeles in the context of its multiracial, multiethnic population, especially African Americans.

Mandel exposes the enduring struggle between Whites determined to establish their hegemony and create residential heterogeneity in the growing city, and people of color equally determined to obtain full access to the city and the opportunities, including residential, that it offered. Not only does this book document the Black homeowners’ fight against housing discrimination, it shares personal accounts of Blacks’ efforts to settle in the highly desirable Westside of Los Angeles. Mandel explores the White-derived social and legal mechanisms that created this segregated city and the African American-led movement that challenged efforts to block access to fair housing.
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Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach
Martha C. Nussbaum
Harvard University Press, 2011
Library of Congress HM671.N868 2011 | Dewey Decimal 303.372

If a country’s Gross Domestic Product increases each year, but so does the percentage of its people deprived of basic education, health care, and other opportunities, is that country really making progress? If we rely on conventional economic indicators, can we ever grasp how the world’s billions of individuals are really managing?

In this powerful critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect. For the past twenty-five years, Nussbaum has been working on an alternate model to assess human development: the Capabilities Approach. She and her colleagues begin with the simplest of questions: What is each person actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them?

The Capabilities Approach to human progress has until now been expounded only in specialized works. Creating Capabilities, however, affords anyone interested in issues of human development a wonderfully lucid account of the structure and practical implications of an alternate model. It demonstrates a path to justice for both humans and nonhumans, weighs its relevance against other philosophical stances, and reveals the value of its universal guidelines even as it acknowledges cultural difference. In our era of unjustifiable inequity, Nussbaum shows how—by attending to the narratives of individuals and grasping the daily impact of policy—we can enable people everywhere to live full and creative lives.

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Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet
Leshu Torchin
University of Minnesota Press, 2012
Library of Congress PN1995.9.D6T63 2012 | Dewey Decimal 070.18

Since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, more than 300,000 lives have been lost in Darfur. Players of the video game Darfur Is Dying learn this sobering fact and more as they work to ensure the survival of a virtual refugee camp. The video game not only puts players in the position of a struggling refugee, it shows them how they can take action in the real world.

Creating the Witness examines the role of film and the Internet in creating virtual witnesses to genocide over the last one hundred years. The book asks, how do visual media work to produce witnesses—audiences who are drawn into action? The argument is a detailed critique of the notion that there is a seamless trajectory from observing an atrocity to acting in order to intervene. According to Leshu Torchin, it is not enough to have a camera; images of genocide require an ideological framework to reinforce the messages the images are meant to convey. Torchin presents wide-ranging examples of witnessing and genocide, including the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust (engaging film as witness in the context of the Nuremburg trials), and the international human rights organization WITNESS and its sustained efforts to use video to publicize human rights advocacy and compel action.

From a historical and comparative approach, Torchin’s broad survey of media and the social practices around it investigates the development of popular understandings of genocide to achieve recognition and response—both political and judicial—ultimately calling on viewers to act on behalf of human rights.




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Crossing the Digital Divide: Applying Technology to the Global Refugee Crisis
Culbertson
RAND Corporation, 2019

Amid a growing global forced displacement crisis, refugees and the organizations that assist them have turned to technology as an important resource in solving problems in humanitarian settings. This report analyzes technology uses, needs, and gaps, as well as opportunities for better using technology to help displaced people and improving the operations of responding agencies.
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Cultural Genocide
Davidson, Lawrence
Rutgers University Press, 2012
Library of Congress HM1121.D375 2012 | Dewey Decimal 305.8009

Most scholars of genocide focus on mass murder. Lawrence Davidson, by contrast, explores the murder of culture. He suggests that when people have limited knowledge of the culture outside of their own group, they are unable to accurately assess the alleged threat of others around them. Throughout history, dominant populations have often dealt with these fears through mass murder. However, the shock of the Holocaust now deters today’s great powers from the practice of physical genocide. Majority populations, cognizant of outside pressure and knowing that they should not resort to mass murder, have turned instead to cultural genocide as a “second best” politically determined substitute for physical genocide.

In Cultural Genocide, this theory is applied to events in four settings, two events that preceded the Holocaust and two events that followed it: the destruction of American Indians by uninformed settlers who viewed these natives as inferior and were more intent on removing them from the frontier than annihilating them; the attack on the culture of Eastern European Jews living within Russian-controlled areas before the Holocaust; the Israeli attack on Palestinian culture; and the absorption of Tibet by the People’s Republic of China.

In conclusion, Davidson examines the mechanisms that may be used to combat today’s cultural genocide as well as the contemporary social and political forces at work that must be overcome in the process.

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Cultural Heritage Under Siege: Laying the Foundation for a Legal and Political Framework to Protect Cultural Heritage at Risk in Zones of Armed Conflict
James Cuno
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2020

The fourth volume of the J. Paul Getty Trust Occasional Papers in Cultural Heritage Policy series is the result of a multi-day discussion on the issue of cultural heritage under siege. It features an edited collection of papers and discussions by nineteen scholars and practitioners of different specialties in the field of cultural heritage. This paper, along with the other Occasional Papers, is free and downloadable online.
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Cultures of Resistance: Collective Action and Rationality in the Anti-Terror Age
Heidi Reynolds-Stenson
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Library of Congress JC571.R4878 2022 | Dewey Decimal 323.044

Cultures of Resistance provides new insight on a long-standing question: whether government efforts to repress social movements produce a chilling effect on dissent, or backfire and spur greater mobilization. In recent decades, the U.S. government’s repressive capacity has expanded dramatically, as the legal, technological, and bureaucratic tools wielded by agents of the state have become increasingly powerful. Today, more than ever, it is critical to understand how repression impacts the freedom to dissent and collectively express political grievances. Through analysis of activists’ rich and often deeply moving experiences of repression and resistance, the book uncovers key group processes that shape how individuals understand, experience, and weigh these risks of participating in collective action. Qualitative and quantitative analyses demonstrate that, following experiences of state repression, the achievement or breakdown of these group processes, not the type or severity of repression experienced, best explain why some individuals persist while others disengage. In doing so, the book bridges prevailing theoretical divides in social movement research by illuminating how individual rationality is collectively constructed, mediated, and obscured by protest group culture.

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317 books about Human Rights and 28 317 books about Human Rights
 28
 start with C  start with C
Callous Objects
Designs against the Homeless
Robert Rosenberger
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Uncovering injustices built into our everyday surroundings

Callous Objects unearths cases in which cities push homeless people out of public spaces through a combination of policy and strategic design. Robert Rosenberger examines such commonplace devices as garbage cans, fences, signage, and benches—all of which reveal political agendas beneath the surface. Such objects have evolved, through a confluence of design and law, to be open to some uses and closed to others, but always capable of participating in collective ends on a large scale. Rosenberger brings together ideas from the philosophy of technology, social theory, and feminist epistemology to spotlight the widespread anti-homeless ideology built into our communities and enacted in law.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

[more]

Catastrophe
Law, Politics, and the Humanitarian Impulse
Austin Sarat
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
From 9/11 to Katrina, from Darfur to the Minnesota bridge collapse, ours is an "age of catastrophe." In this era, catastrophic events seem to have a revelatory quality: they offer powerful reminders of the fragility of our social and institutional architectures, making painfully evident vulnerabilities in our social organization that were otherwise invisible. By disrupting the operation of fundamental mechanisms and infrastructures of the social order, they lay bare the conditions that make our sense of normalcy possible.

At a time when societies are directing an unprecedented level of resources and ingenuity to anticipating and mitigating catastrophic events, Catastrophe: Law, Politics, and the Humanitarian Impulse examines the tests that catastrophe poses to politics and humanitarianism as well as to the law. It explores legal, political, and humanitarian responses during times when the sudden, discontinuous, and disastrous event has become, perhaps paradoxically, a structural component of our political imagination. It asks whether law, politics, and humanitarianism live up to the tests posed by disaster, and the role all of them play in creating a more resilient world.

Taken together the essays in this book ask us to see through and beyond the myths that surround catastrophe and our responses to it. They ask us to rethink our understanding of catastrophe and to imagine new legal, political, and humanitarian responses.

In addition to the editors, contributors include Thomas Birkland, Michele Landis Dauber, Kim Fortun, Edward Rackley, Peter Redfield, Peter H. Schuck, and Susan Sterett.
[more]

Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics
Subversive Kin
Devon G. Peña
University of Arizona Press, 1998
Until recently, mainstream American environmentalism has been a predominantly white, middle-class movement, essentially ignoring the class, race, and gender dimensions of environmental politics. In this provocative collection of original essays, the environmental dimensions of the Chicana/o experience are explicitly expressed and debated.

Employing a variety of genres ranging from poetry to autobiography to theoretical and empirical essays, the voices in this collection speak to the most significant issues of environmentalism and social justice, recognizing throughout the need for a pluralism of Chicana/o philosophies. The contributors provide an excellent basis for understanding how multiple Chicana/o views on the environment play out in the context of dominant social, political and economic views. Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics examines a number of Chicana/o ecological perspectives. How can the ethics of reciprocity present in Chicana/o agropastoral life be protected and applied on a broader scale? How can the dominant society, whose economic structure is invested in "placeless mobility," take note of the harm caused to land-based cultures, take responsibility for it, and take heed before it is too late? Will the larger society be "ecologically housebroken" before it destroys its home?

Grounded in actual political struggles waged by Chicana/o communities over issues of environmental destruction, cultural genocide, and socioeconomic domination, this volume provides an important series of snapshots of Chicana/o history. Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics illuminates the bridges that exist—and must be understood—between race, ethnicity, class, gender, politics, and ecology.

CONTENTS
Part 1: IndoHispano Land Ethics
Los Animalitos: Culture, Ecology, and the Politics of Place in the Upper R¡o Grande, Devon G. Peña
Social Action Research, Bioregionalism, and the Upper Río Grande, Rubén O. Martínez
Notes on (Home)Land Ethics: Ideas, Values, and the Land, Reyes García
Part 2: Environmental History and Ecological Politics
Ecological Legitimacy and Cultural Essentialism: Hispano Grazing in Northern New Mexico, Laura Pulido
The Capitalist Tool, the Lawless, and the Violent: A Critique of Recent Southwestern Environmental History, Devon G. Peña and Rubén O. Martínez
Ecofeminism and Chicano Environmental Struggles: Bridges across Gender and Race, Gwyn Kirk
Philosophy Meets Practice: A Critique of Ecofeminism through the Voices of Three Chicana Activists, Malia Davis
Part 3: Alternatives to Destruction
The Pasture Poacher (a poem), Joseph C. Gallegos
Acequia Tales: Stories from a Chicano Centennial Farm, Joseph C. Gallegos
A Gold Mine, an Orchard, and an Eleventh Commandment, Devon G. Peña
[more]

Child Soldiers in the Age of Fractured States
Scott Gates
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010
Current global estimates of children engaged in warfare range from 200,000 to 300,000. Children's roles in conflict range from armed and active participants to spies, cooks, messengers, and sex slaves. Child Soldiers in the Age of Fractured States examines the factors that contribute to the use of children in war, the effects of war upon children, and the perpetual cycle of warfare that engulfs many of the world's poorest nations.

The contributors seek to eliminate myths of historic or culture-based violence, and instead look to common traits of chronic poverty and vulnerable populations. Individual essays examine topics such as: the legal and ethical aspects of child soldiering; internal UN debates over enforcement of child protection policies; economic factors; increased access to small arms; displaced populations; resource endowments; forced government conscription; rebel-enforced quota systems; motivational techniques employed in recruiting children; and the role of girls in conflict.

The contributors also offer viable policies to reduce the recruitment of child soldiers such as the protection of refugee camps by outside forces, “naming and shaming,” and criminal prosecution by international tribunals. Finally, they focus on ways to reintegrate former child soldiers into civil society in the aftermath of war.
[more]

Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination
From Patriots to Victims
Rosen, David M
Rutgers University Press, 2015
When we hear the term “child soldiers,” most Americans imagine innocent victims roped into bloody conflicts in distant war-torn lands like Sudan and Sierra Leone. Yet our own history is filled with examples of children involved in warfare—from adolescent prisoner of war Andrew Jackson to Civil War drummer boys—who were once viewed as symbols of national pride rather than signs of human degradation.
 
In this daring new study, anthropologist David M. Rosen investigates why our cultural perception of the child soldier has changed so radically over the past two centuries. Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination reveals how Western conceptions of childhood as a uniquely vulnerable and innocent state are a relatively recent invention. Furthermore, Rosen offers an illuminating history of how human rights organizations drew upon these sentiments to create the very term “child soldier,” which they presented as the embodiment of war’s human cost.
 
Filled with shocking historical accounts and facts—and revealing the reasons why one cannot spell “infantry” without “infant”—Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination seeks to shake us out of our pervasive historical amnesia. It challenges us to stop looking at child soldiers through a biased set of idealized assumptions about childhood, so that we can better address the realities of adolescents and pre-adolescents in combat. Presenting informative facts while examining fictional representations of the child soldier in popular culture, this book is both eye-opening and thought-provoking.   
[more]

Child Survivors of the Holocaust
The Youngest Remnant and the American Experience
Cohen, Beth B
Rutgers University Press, 2018
2017 Wiener Library Ernst Fraenkel Prize (WLEFP) Finalist

The majority of European Jewish children alive in 1939 were murdered during the Holocaust. Of 1.5 million children, only an estimated 150,000 survived. In the aftermath of the Shoah, efforts by American Jews brought several thousand of these child survivors to the United States. In Child Survivors of the Holocaust, historian Beth B. Cohen weaves together survivor testimonies and archival documents to bring their story to light. She reveals that even as child survivors were resettled and “saved,” they struggled to adapt to new lives as members of adoptive families, previously unknown American Jewish kin networks, or their own survivor relatives. Nonetheless, the youngsters moved ahead. As Cohen demonstrates, the experiences both during and after the war shadowed their lives and relationships through adulthood, yet an identity as “survivors” eluded them for decades. Now, as the last living link to the Holocaust, the voices of Child Survivors are finally being heard. 
[more]

Chile and the Inter-American Human Rights System
Edited by Karinna Fernández, Cristian Peña, and Sebastián Smart
University of London Press, 2017
This book reflects on the relationship between Chile and the Inter-American Human Rights System, focusing on an interdisciplinary and detailed examination of the consequences of recent cases decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights against the Chilean state. These cases illustrate central challenges in the areas of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex rights, as well as shedding light on torture and indigenous rights in Chile and the Americas as a whole.
[more]

China's Quest for Liberty
A Personal History of Freedom
Promise Hsu
St. Augustine's Press, 2014
China’s Quest for Liberty is a personal story of a young man fully engaged in understanding the world he was born into and working toward making that world into a better and freer place to life. It is about an unexpected journey a Chinese journalist has taken to pursue freedom, involving such diverse fields or disciplines as politics, business, humanities, science and technology, government agencies and non-governmental organizations. Some took place as daily life, and some occurred in detentions or disasters.

It is about a world whose dimensions have been basically obscured not only in China but also in the global public square, and walk with this young journalist, step by step, to find, paradoxically, the hope in the depth of hopelessness, the strength in acknowledging weakness, the change in substance by, among other things, keeping the form unchanged for at least a while, the youth in growing up despite growing old, the invisible in the visible, the imperishable in the perishable, the reality in the shadow of numerous fake realities, and the freedom gained not mainly through human efforts but as mercy and grace from the one who created humans and other beings.

As well as digging out the overlooked Christian background in the rise of the sanctity of human life, creative culture, constitutionalism, work as a vocation, modern management, servant leadership, and catchphrases like “the global village” and “The medium is the message”, the author tells of insider observations about the rise of Christianity in China generally and about Shouwang Church in particular. Through sharing these findings, this book aims to show how the one who made the universe rules the world and how this creator sets his creatures free by himself.

China’s Quest for Liberty is a fascinating work of nuance and surprise.
[more]

Citizens against Crime and Violence
Societal Responses in Mexico
Trevor Stack
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Mexico has become notorious for crime-related violence, and the efforts of governments and national and international NGOs to counter this violence have proven largely futile. Citizens against Crime and Violence studies societal responses to crime and violence within one of Mexico’s most affected regions, the state of Michoacán. Based on comparative ethnography conducted over twelve months by a team of anthropologists and sociologists across six localities of Michoacán, ranging from the most rural to the most urban, the contributors consider five varieties of societal responses: local citizen security councils that define security and attempt to influence its policing, including by self-defense groups; cultural activists looking to create safe 'cultural' fields from which to transform their social environment; organizations in the state capital that combine legal and political strategies against less visible violence (forced disappearance, gender violence, anti-LGBT); church-linked initiatives bringing to bear the church’s institutionality, including to denounce 'state capture'; and women’s organizations creating 'safe' networks allowing to influence violence prevention.
[more]

Citizenship in Question
Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness
Benjamin N. Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens, editors
Duke University Press, 2017
Citizenship is often assumed to be a clear-cut issue—either one has it or one does not. However, as the contributors to Citizenship in Question demonstrate, citizenship is not self-evident; it emerges from often obscure written records and is interpreted through ambiguous and dynamic laws. In case studies that analyze the legal barriers to citizenship rights in over twenty countries, the contributors explore how states use evidentiary requirements to create and police citizenship, often based on fictions of racial, ethnic, class, and religious differences. Whether examining the United States’ deportation of its own citizens, the selective use of DNA tests and secret results in Thailand, or laws that have stripped entire populations of citizenship, the contributors emphasize the political, psychological, and personal impact of citizenship policies. Citizenship in Question incites scholars to revisit long-standing political theories and debates about nationality, free movement, and immigration premised on the assumption of clear demarcations between citizens and noncitizens.
 
Contributors. Alfred Babo, Jacqueline Bhabha, Jacqueline Field, Amanda Flaim, Sara L. Friedman, Daniel Kanstroom, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Beatrice McKenzie, Polly J. Price, Rachel E. Rosenbloom, Kim Rubenstein, Kamal Sadiq, Jacqueline Stevens, Margaret D. Stock
[more]

Civil Obedience
Complicity and Complacency in Chile since Pinochet
Michael J. Lazzara
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
Since the fall of General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in 1990, Chilean society has shied away from the subject of civilian complicity, preferring to pursue convictions of military perpetrators. But the torture, murders, deportations, and disappearances of tens of thousands of people in Chile were not carried out by the military alone; they required a vast civilian network. Some citizens actively participated in the regime's massive violations of human rights for personal gain or out of a sense of patriotic duty. Others supported Pinochet's neoliberal economic program while turning a blind eye to the crimes of that era.

Michael J. Lazzara boldly argues that today's Chile is a product of both complicity and complacency. Combining historical analysis with deft literary, political, and cultural critique, he scrutinizes the post-Pinochet rationalizations made by politicians, artists, intellectuals, bystanders, former revolutionaries-turned-neoliberals, and common citizens. He looks beyond victims and perpetrators to unveil the ambiguous, ethically vexed realms of memory and experience that authoritarian regimes inevitably generate.
[more]

Civilizing Torture
An American Tradition
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Harvard University Press, 2020

Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Silver Gavel Award Finalist


“A sobering history of how American communities and institutions have relied on torture in various forms since before the United States was founded.”
—Los Angeles Times

“That Americans as a people and a nation-state are violent is indisputable. That we are also torturers, domestically and internationally, is not so well established. The myth that we are not torturers will persist, but Civilizing Torture will remain a powerful antidote in confronting it.”
—Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell

“Remarkable…A searing analysis of America’s past that helps make sense of its bewildering present.”
—David Garland, author of Peculiar Institution

Most Americans believe that a civilized state does not torture, but that belief has repeatedly been challenged in moments of crisis at home and abroad. From the Indian wars to Vietnam, from police interrogation to the War on Terror, US institutions have proven far more amenable to torture than the nation’s commitment to liberty would suggest.

Civilizing Torture traces the history of debates about the efficacy of torture and reveals a recurring struggle to decide what limits to impose on the power of the state. At a time of escalating rhetoric aimed at cleansing the nation of the undeserving and an erosion of limits on military power, the debate over torture remains critical and unresolved.

[more]

Colonialism Is Crime
Marianne Nielsen
Rutgers University Press, 2019
There is powerful evidence that the colonization of Indigenous people was and is a crime, and that that crime is on-going. Achieving historical colonial goals often meant committing acts that were criminal even at the time. The consequences of this oppression and criminal victimization is perhaps the critical factor explaining why Indigenous people today are overrepresented as victims and offenders in the settler colonist criminal justice systems. This book presents an analysis of the relationship between these colonial crimes and their continuing criminal and social consequences that exist today. The authors focus primarily on countries colonized by Britain, especially the United States. Social harm theory, human rights covenants, and law are used to explain the criminal aspects of the historical laws and their continued effects. The final chapter looks at the responsibilities of settler-colonists in ameliorating these harms and the actions currently being taken by Indigenous people themselves.
[more]

The Coming Good Society
Why New Realities Demand New Rights
William F. Schulz and Sushma Raman
Harvard University Press, 2020

Two authors with decades of experience promoting human rights argue that, as the world changes around us, rights hardly imaginable today will come into being.

A rights revolution is under way. Today the range of nonhuman entities thought to deserve rights is exploding—not just animals but ecosystems and even robots. Changes in norms and circumstances require the expansion of rights: What new rights, for example, are needed if we understand gender to be nonbinary? Does living in a corrupt state violate our rights? And emerging technologies demand that we think about old rights in new ways: When biotechnology is used to change genetic code, whose rights might be violated? What rights, if any, protect our privacy from the intrusions of sophisticated surveillance techniques?

Drawing on their vast experience as human rights advocates, William Schulz and Sushma Raman challenge us to think hard about how rights evolve with changing circumstances, and what rights will look like ten, twenty, or fifty years from now. Against those who hold that rights are static and immutable, Schulz and Raman argue that rights must adapt to new realities or risk being consigned to irrelevance. To preserve and promote the good society—one that protects its members’ dignity and fosters an environment in which people will want to live—we must at times rethink the meanings of familiar rights and consider the introduction of entirely new rights.

Now is one of those times. The Coming Good Society details the many frontiers of rights today and the debates surrounding them. Schulz and Raman equip us with the tools to engage the present and future of rights so that we understand their importance and know where we stand.

[more]

Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson
Jane E. Calvert
University of Delaware Press, 2011
The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, vol. 1 inaugurates a multivolume documentary edition that will, for the first time ever, provide the complete collection of everything Dickinson published on public affairs over the course of his life. The documents include essays, articles, broadsides, resolutions, petitions, declarations, constitutions, regulations, legislation, proclamations, songs and odes. Among them are many of the seminal state papers produced by the first national congresses and conventions. Also included are correspondences between Dickinson and some of the key figures of his era. This edition should raise Dickinson to his rightful place among America’s founding fathers, rivaled in reputation only by Benjamin Franklin before 1776. Dickinson was celebrated throughout the colonies, as well as in England and France, as the great American spokesman for liberty, and the documents in this edition evidence his tireless political work and unmatched corpus.
[more]

The Complexity of Evil
Perpetration and Genocide
Timothy Williams
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Why do people participate in genocide? Timothy Williams presents an interdisciplinary model that shows how complex and diverse, but also how ordinary and mundane most motivations for participating in genocide are. The book draws on empirical examples from the Holocaust and Rwanda and introduces new data from interviews with perpetrators of genocide in Cambodia.
[more]

Conflicted Memory
Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Peru
Cynthia E. Milton
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
Cynthia E. Milton reveals how Peru's military has engaged in a tactical cultural campaign—via books, films, museums—to shift public opinion, debate, and memories about the role it played in the nation's recent violent past. Milton calls attention to fabrications and goes further to deeply explore the ways members of the Peruvian military see their past, how they actively commemorate and curate it in the present, and why they do so. Her nuanced approach upends frameworks of memory studies that reduce military and ex-military to a predictable role of outright denial.
[more]

Conflicted Memory
Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Peru
Cynthia E. Milton
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
What happens when concepts of "truth," "memory," and "human rights" are taken up and adapted by former perpetrators of violence? Peru has moved from the 1980s–90s conflict between its armed forces and Shining Path militants into an era of open democracy, transitional justice, and truth and reconciliation commissions. Cynthia Milton reveals how Peru's military has engaged in a tactical cultural campaign—via books, films, museums—to shift public opinion, debate, and memories about the nation's violent recent past and its part in it.

Milton calls attention to fabrications of our post-truth era but goes further to deeply explore the ways members of the Peruvian military see their past, how they actively commemorate and curate it in the present, and why they do so. Her nuanced approach upends frameworks of memory studies that reduce military and ex-military to a predictable role of outright denial.
[more]

Constructing the Maya
Ethnicity, State Formation, and Material Culture in Yucatán, Chiapas, and Guatemala, Volume 55
Paul K. Eiss, special issue editor
Duke University Press
This special issue of Ethnohistory is a significant contribution to the history and anthropology of the Maya in both Mexico and Guatemala. Utilizing a comparative analytic framework, these essays explore the ethnic dimensions—indigeneity, indigenismo, mestizaje, racial subjugation—of state formation as well as state practice in indigenous regions. The contributors emphasize how the material aspects of state formation—roads and infrastructure; model villages; restored ruins; portrait photography; highland marketplaces; modern improvements; traditional cultural performances, artifacts, and dress—become theaters for the construction and reconstruction of ethnic and political entities and relationships. Taken as a whole, the collection challenges a tendency toward the segmentation of the discussion of the Maya into distinct disciplines (anthropology and history), national historiographies (Mexican and Guatemalan), and, within Mexico, distinct regional historiographies (Yucatán and Chiapas).

Contributors: David Carey Jr., Paul K. Eiss, Ben Fallaw, Stephen E. Lewis, Walter E. Little, John M. Watanabe

[more]

Corporate Social Responsibility?
Human Rights in the New Global Economy
Edited by Charlotte Walker-Said and John D. Kelly
University of Chicago Press, 2015
With this book, Charlotte Walker-Said and John D. Kelly have assembled an essential toolkit to better understand how the notoriously ambiguous concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) functions in practice within different disciplines and settings. Bringing together cutting-edge scholarship from leading figures in human rights programs around the United States, they vigorously engage some of the major political questions of our age: what is CSR, and how might it render positive political change in the real world?
           
The book examines the diverse approaches to CSR, with a particular focus on how those approaches are siloed within discrete disciplines such as business, law, the social sciences, and human rights. Bridging these disciplines and addressing and critiquing all the conceptual domains of CSR, the book also explores how CSR silos develop as a function of the competition between different interests. Ultimately, the contributors show that CSR actions across all arenas of power are interdependent, continually in dialogue, and mutually constituted. Organizing a diverse range of viewpoints, this book offers a much-needed synthesis of a crucial element of today’s globalized world and asks how businesses can, through their actions, make it better for everyone. 
[more]

Court of Remorse
Inside the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
Thierry Cruvellier
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
When genocidal violence gripped Rwanda in 1994, the international community recoiled, hastily withdrawing its peacekeepers. Late that year, in an effort to redeem itself, the United Nations Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to seek accountability for some of the worst atrocities since World War II: the genocide suffered by the Tutsi and crimes against humanity suffered by the Hutu. But faced with competing claims, the prosecution focused exclusively on the crimes of Hutu extremists. No charges would be brought against the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, which ultimately won control of the country. The UN, as if racked by guilt for its past inaction, gave in to pressure by Rwanda’s new leadership. With the Hutu effectively silenced, and the RPF constantly reminding the international community of its failure to protect the Tutsi during the war, the Tribunal pursued an unusual form of one-sided justice, born out of contrition.  
    Fascinated by the Tribunal’s rich complexities, journalist Thierry Cruvellier came back day after day to watch the proceedings, spending more time there than any other outside observer. Gradually he gained the confidence of the victims, defendants, lawyers, and judges. Drawing on interviews with these protagonists and his close observations of their interactions, Cruvellier takes readers inside the courtroom to witness the motivations, mechanisms, and manipulations of justice as it unfolded on the stage of high-stakes, global politics. It is this ground-level view that makes his account so valuable—and so absorbing. A must-read for those who want to understand the dynamics of international criminal tribunals, Court of Remorse reveals both the possibilities and the challenges of prosecuting human rights violations.
 
 
A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association for School Libraries and the Public Library Association

Best Books for High Schools, selected by the American Association for School Libraries
[more]

The Coveted Westside
How the Black Homeowners' Rights Movement Shaped Modern Los Angeles
Jennifer Mandel
University of Nevada Press, 2022
From the middle of the nineteenth century, as Euro-Americans moved westward, they carried with them long-held prejudices against people of color. By the time they reached the West Coast, their new settlements included African Americans and recent Asian immigrants, as well as the indigenous inhabitants and descendants of earlier Spanish and Mexican settlers. The Coveted Westside deals with the settlement and development of Los Angeles in the context of its multiracial, multiethnic population, especially African Americans.

Mandel exposes the enduring struggle between Whites determined to establish their hegemony and create residential heterogeneity in the growing city, and people of color equally determined to obtain full access to the city and the opportunities, including residential, that it offered. Not only does this book document the Black homeowners’ fight against housing discrimination, it shares personal accounts of Blacks’ efforts to settle in the highly desirable Westside of Los Angeles. Mandel explores the White-derived social and legal mechanisms that created this segregated city and the African American-led movement that challenged efforts to block access to fair housing.
[more]

Creating Capabilities
The Human Development Approach
Martha C. Nussbaum
Harvard University Press, 2011

If a country’s Gross Domestic Product increases each year, but so does the percentage of its people deprived of basic education, health care, and other opportunities, is that country really making progress? If we rely on conventional economic indicators, can we ever grasp how the world’s billions of individuals are really managing?

In this powerful critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect. For the past twenty-five years, Nussbaum has been working on an alternate model to assess human development: the Capabilities Approach. She and her colleagues begin with the simplest of questions: What is each person actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them?

The Capabilities Approach to human progress has until now been expounded only in specialized works. Creating Capabilities, however, affords anyone interested in issues of human development a wonderfully lucid account of the structure and practical implications of an alternate model. It demonstrates a path to justice for both humans and nonhumans, weighs its relevance against other philosophical stances, and reveals the value of its universal guidelines even as it acknowledges cultural difference. In our era of unjustifiable inequity, Nussbaum shows how—by attending to the narratives of individuals and grasping the daily impact of policy—we can enable people everywhere to live full and creative lives.

[more]

Creating the Witness
Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet
Leshu Torchin
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, more than 300,000 lives have been lost in Darfur. Players of the video game Darfur Is Dying learn this sobering fact and more as they work to ensure the survival of a virtual refugee camp. The video game not only puts players in the position of a struggling refugee, it shows them how they can take action in the real world.

Creating the Witness examines the role of film and the Internet in creating virtual witnesses to genocide over the last one hundred years. The book asks, how do visual media work to produce witnesses—audiences who are drawn into action? The argument is a detailed critique of the notion that there is a seamless trajectory from observing an atrocity to acting in order to intervene. According to Leshu Torchin, it is not enough to have a camera; images of genocide require an ideological framework to reinforce the messages the images are meant to convey. Torchin presents wide-ranging examples of witnessing and genocide, including the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust (engaging film as witness in the context of the Nuremburg trials), and the international human rights organization WITNESS and its sustained efforts to use video to publicize human rights advocacy and compel action.

From a historical and comparative approach, Torchin’s broad survey of media and the social practices around it investigates the development of popular understandings of genocide to achieve recognition and response—both political and judicial—ultimately calling on viewers to act on behalf of human rights.




[more]

Crossing the Digital Divide
Applying Technology to the Global Refugee Crisis
Culbertson
RAND Corporation, 2019
Amid a growing global forced displacement crisis, refugees and the organizations that assist them have turned to technology as an important resource in solving problems in humanitarian settings. This report analyzes technology uses, needs, and gaps, as well as opportunities for better using technology to help displaced people and improving the operations of responding agencies.
[more]

Cultural Genocide
Davidson, Lawrence
Rutgers University Press, 2012

Most scholars of genocide focus on mass murder. Lawrence Davidson, by contrast, explores the murder of culture. He suggests that when people have limited knowledge of the culture outside of their own group, they are unable to accurately assess the alleged threat of others around them. Throughout history, dominant populations have often dealt with these fears through mass murder. However, the shock of the Holocaust now deters today’s great powers from the practice of physical genocide. Majority populations, cognizant of outside pressure and knowing that they should not resort to mass murder, have turned instead to cultural genocide as a “second best” politically determined substitute for physical genocide.

In Cultural Genocide, this theory is applied to events in four settings, two events that preceded the Holocaust and two events that followed it: the destruction of American Indians by uninformed settlers who viewed these natives as inferior and were more intent on removing them from the frontier than annihilating them; the attack on the culture of Eastern European Jews living within Russian-controlled areas before the Holocaust; the Israeli attack on Palestinian culture; and the absorption of Tibet by the People’s Republic of China.

In conclusion, Davidson examines the mechanisms that may be used to combat today’s cultural genocide as well as the contemporary social and political forces at work that must be overcome in the process.

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Cultural Heritage Under Siege
Laying the Foundation for a Legal and Political Framework to Protect Cultural Heritage at Risk in Zones of Armed Conflict
James Cuno
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2020
The fourth volume of the J. Paul Getty Trust Occasional Papers in Cultural Heritage Policy series is the result of a multi-day discussion on the issue of cultural heritage under siege. It features an edited collection of papers and discussions by nineteen scholars and practitioners of different specialties in the field of cultural heritage. This paper, along with the other Occasional Papers, is free and downloadable online.
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Cultures of Resistance
Collective Action and Rationality in the Anti-Terror Age
Heidi Reynolds-Stenson
Rutgers University Press, 2022

Cultures of Resistance provides new insight on a long-standing question: whether government efforts to repress social movements produce a chilling effect on dissent, or backfire and spur greater mobilization. In recent decades, the U.S. government’s repressive capacity has expanded dramatically, as the legal, technological, and bureaucratic tools wielded by agents of the state have become increasingly powerful. Today, more than ever, it is critical to understand how repression impacts the freedom to dissent and collectively express political grievances. Through analysis of activists’ rich and often deeply moving experiences of repression and resistance, the book uncovers key group processes that shape how individuals understand, experience, and weigh these risks of participating in collective action. Qualitative and quantitative analyses demonstrate that, following experiences of state repression, the achievement or breakdown of these group processes, not the type or severity of repression experienced, best explain why some individuals persist while others disengage. In doing so, the book bridges prevailing theoretical divides in social movement research by illuminating how individual rationality is collectively constructed, mediated, and obscured by protest group culture.

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