Most of the world’s population lives in cities in developing countries, where access to basic public services, such as water, electricity, and health clinics, is either inadequate or sorely missing. Water and Politics shows how politicians benefit politically from manipulating public service provision for electoral gain. In many young democracies, politicians exchange water service for votes or political support, rewarding allies or punishing political enemies. Surprisingly, the political problem of water provision has become more pronounced, as water service represents a valuable political currency in resource-scarce environments.

Water and Politics finds that middle-class and industrial elites play an important role in generating pressure for public service reforms.

“Nothing about us without us” has been a core principle of American disability rights activists for more than half a century. It represents a response by people with disabilities to being treated with scorn and abuse or as objects of pity, and to having the most fundamental decisions relating to their lives—where they would live; if and how they would be educated; if they would be allowed to marry or have families; indeed, if they would be permitted to live at all—made by those who were, in the parlance of the movement, “temporarily able-bodied.”

In What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement, Fred Pelka takes that slogan at face value. He presents the voices of disability rights activists who, in the period from 1950 to 1990, transformed how society views people with disabilities, and recounts how the various streams of the movement came together to push through the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the most sweeping civil rights legislation since passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Beginning with the stories of those who grew up with disabilities in the 1940s and '50s, the book traces how disability came to be seen as a political issue, and how people with disabilities—often isolated, institutionalized, and marginalized—forged a movement analogous to the civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights movements, and fought for full and equal participation in American society.

How do we select those who will be subject to capital punishment? How do we identify the worst of the worst and decide who among them can and should be executed? Today these questions are more pressing than they have ever been. As the number of people sentenced to death and executed declines in the United States, those who are executed stand out as distinctive kinds of criminals, distinctive kinds of people. Does a death sentence affirm or deny their humanity? Is such a sentence an act of revenge or a carefully calculated act of justice?

These are more than questions for policy and law. They are one way of getting a handle on how our culture understands what makes life worth preserving and of delving into its complex calculus of punishment and retribution. Who Deserves to Die? brings together a distinguished group of death penalty scholars to assess the forms of legal subjectivity and legal community that are supported and constructed by the doctrines and practices of punishment by death in the United States. They help us understand what we do and who we become when we decide who is fit for execution.

In addition to the editors, contributors include Vanessa Barker, Thomas L. Dumm, Daniel Markel, Linda Meyer, Ruth A. Miller, Ravit Reichman, Susan R. Schmeiser, Mateo Taussig-Rubbo, and Robert Weisberg.

Focusing on the experiences of women who are predominantly poor, nonwhite, rural-to-urban migrants with little or no formal education, The Woman in the Violence addresses a range of serious concerns. What types of violence do women experience at different stages in their lives? Which identities and roles are manifested throughout their lives, and do some of these increase their vulnerability to different forms of violence? What strategies do women employ to gain some power and control in these situations, and how can we conceptualize these strategies?

In examining these questions, The Woman in the Violence contributes to our understanding of violence, gender, race, resistance, and urbanism as it exposes and analyzes systemic violence against women. The everyday forms of resistance these women employ provide significant insight for students, scholars, and health professionals.

Based on interviews with seventy women refugees, Women, Violence and War is a book about war as it is seen, lived and interpreted by women who were citizens of the former Yugoslavia.

Many of the accounts portray the horrific experiences the victims had to face and the book addresses issues of sexual, physical and psychological violence, as well as problems of confinement, upheaval and family separation. In a completely new insight the book dispels the myth that many of the women were peasants, and shows that in fact they were educated, middle-class women with independent careers. The study also depicts how some of the victims attempt to come to terms with the aftermath of wartime abuse.

This probing, accurate and unique investigation of victimization is an unparalleled volume that presents a completely new perspective maintaining that violence against women in war is not independent of peace-time victimization and the imbalance of power between sexes.

This gripping account raises questions for healers, survivors, and readers striving to understand the reality of war and the aftermath of terror. Is it possible to find meaning after enduring crimes against humanity? Can people heal after trauma?

Human rights journalist Julia Lieblich takes the reader through Boskailo's early years under Tito to the wars when friends turned on friends. She documents his harrowing experiences in the camps, where the men he once joined for coffee murder his best friend from childhood.

But the story does not end there. Boskailo moves to the United States and decides to become a psychiatrist so he can guide survivors through the long-term process of restoring hope. Today, inspired by the late psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, Boskailo uses his own experience to help patients mourn their losses and find meaning in the aftermath of terror.

This gripping account raises questions for healers, survivors, and readers striving to understand the reality of war and the aftermath of terror. Is it possible to find meaning after enduring crimes against humanity? Can people heal after trauma?

Human rights journalist Julia Lieblich takes the reader through Boskailo's early years under Tito to the wars when friends turned on friends. She documents his harrowing experiences in the camps, where the men he once joined for coffee murder his best friend from childhood.

But the story does not end there. Boskailo moves to the United States and decides to become a psychiatrist so he can guide survivors through the long-term process of restoring hope. Today, inspired by the late psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, Boskailo uses his own experience to help patients mourn their losses and find meaning in the aftermath of terror.

A history of human rights that places writers and their ideas at its center.

At Amnesty International’s headquarters in London hangs a large copy of Seamus Heaney’s “From the Republic of Conscience,” a poem that touches on neither imprisonment nor torture but instead suggests that acts of literary creation are themselves a form of human rights work, important for bringing new things into the world rather than removing evil from it. Why does a poem about the power of creation stand at the center of an organization known for publicizing atrocity? What can it tell us about human rights?
 
Hadji Bakara’s Writing for Dark Times tells the story of the writer’s distinct place in the history of human rights. It argues that the relationship between the creative work of writing and the pursuit of universal rights is an important but misunderstood dimension of both literary and human rights history over the past century. Following a diverse cast of writers from the First World War through the end of the Cold War, including Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers, Archibald MacLeish, Albert Camus, Czeslaw Milosz, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Seamus Heaney, Nadine Gordimer, and J.M. Coetzee, Bakara shows how their efforts to theorize and support human rights were bound up with changing ideas about the place of their own work in the world––the work of writing. And across the twentieth century, the book reveals, two central ideas about writing took shape around the politics of human rights. Writing creates something new and inspires the will for change.

For those who study human rights, Writing for Dark Times offers both an archive and a method for better understanding the influence of writers on the historical development of the concept. For those in literary studies, the book provides a new account of how human rights shaped the politics of twentieth-century literature. Few books have made as vivid a case for literature’s relevance to our most exalted ideals and institutions.