BiblioVault - Books about Human Rights

Immigrant Agency

Hmong American Movements and the Politics of Racialized Incorporation

Yang Sao Xiong

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Through a sociological analysis of Hmong former refugees’ grassroots movements in the United States between the 1990s and 2000s, Immigrant Agency shows how Hmong, despite being one of America’s most economically impoverished ethnic groups, were able to make sustained claims on and have their interests represented in public policies. The author, Yang Sao Xiong argues that the key to understanding how immigrants incorporate themselves politically is to understand how they mobilize collective action and make choices in circumstances far from racially neutral. Immigrant groups, in response to political threats or opportunities or both, mobilize collective action and make strategic choices about how to position themselves vis-à-vis other minority groups, how to construct group identities, and how to deploy various tactics in order to engage with the U.S. political system and influence policy. In response to immigrants’ collective claims, the racial state engages in racialization which undermines immigrants’ political standing and perpetuates their marginalization.

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Implementing Inequality

The Invisible Labor of International Development

Rebecca Warne Peters

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Implementing Inequality argues that the international development industry’s internal dynamics—between international and national staff, and among policy makers, administrators, and implementers—shape interventions and their outcomes as much as do the external dynamics of global political economy. Through an ethnographic study in postwar Angola, the book demonstrates how the industry’s internal social pressures guide development’s methods and goals, introducing the innovative concept of the development implementariat: those in-country workers, largely but not exclusively “local” staff members, charged with carrying out development’s policy prescriptions. The implementariat is central to the development endeavor but remains overlooked and under-supported as most of its work is deeply social, interactive, and relational, the kind of work that receives less recognition and support than it deserves at every echelon of the industry. If international development is to meet its larger purpose, it must first address its internal inequalities of work and professional class.

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The Impossible Machine

A Genealogy of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Adam Sitze

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Adam Sitze meticulously traces the origins of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission back to two well-established instruments of colonial and imperial governance: the jurisprudence of indemnity and the commission of inquiry. This genealogy provides a fresh, though counterintuitive, understanding of the TRC’s legal, political, and cultural importance. The TRC’s genius, Sitze contends, is not the substitution of “forgiving” restorative justice for “strict” legal justice but rather the innovative adaptation of colonial law, sovereignty, and government. However, this approach also contains a potential liability: if the TRC’s origins are forgotten, the very enterprise intended to overturn the jurisprudence of colonial rule may perpetuate it. In sum, Sitze proposes a provocative new means by which South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission should be understood and evaluated.

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Imprisoned Minds

Lost Boys, Trapped Men, and Solutions from Within the Prison

Erik S. Maloney

Rutgers University Press, 2024

In Imprisoned Minds, Erik Maloney tells the stories of men in prison that few people ever hear. Six gripping, first-person narratives of incarcerated men form his imprisoned mind concept: the men’s unimaginable childhood trauma and neglect set them on a pathway for prison or death. Maloney interviews his fellow prisoners with candor and savviness. He can do this because he is in prison alongside them—incarcerated for life at the age of 21. Joined by a correctional scholar, Maloney presents a unique and informed perspective that blends lived experience with academic knowledge. A trauma-informed corrections can empower men to acknowledge and repair the harms of their past to regain control over their minds and their futures. Maloney has broken free from the mindset—and others can, too. Imprisoned Minds reminds us of the humanity of the nearly two million people behind bars in the United States, and encourages solutions from within that can break the cycle of intergenerational incarceration.

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Impunity, Human Rights, and Democracy

Chile and Argentina, 1990-2005

By Thomas C. Wright

University of Texas Press, 2014

Universal human rights standards were adopted in 1948, but in the 1970s and 1980s, violent dictatorships in Argentina and Chile flagrantly defied the new protocols. Chilean general Augusto Pinochet and the Argentine military employed state terrorism in their quest to eradicate Marxism and other forms of “subversion.” Pinochet constructed an iron shield of impunity for himself and the military in Chile, while in Argentina, military pressure resulted in laws preventing prosecution for past human rights violations. When democracy was reestablished in both countries by 1990, justice for crimes against humanity seemed beyond reach.

Thomas C. Wright examines how persistent advocacy by domestic and international human rights groups, evolving legal environments, unanticipated events that impacted public opinion, and eventual changes in military leadership led to a situation unique in the world—the stripping of impunity not only from a select number of commanders of the repression but from all those involved in state terrorism in Chile and Argentina. This has resulted in trials conducted by national courts, without United Nations or executive branch direction, in which hundreds of former repressors have been convicted and many more are indicted or undergoing trial.

Impunity, Human Rights, and Democracy draws on extensive research, including interviews, to trace the erosion and collapse of the former repressors’ impunity—a triumph for human rights advocates that has begun to inspire authorities in other Latin American countries, including Peru, Uruguay, Brazil, and Guatemala, to investigate past human rights violations and prosecute their perpetrators.

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In Plain Sight

Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand

Tyrell Haberkorn

University of Wisconsin Press, 2019

Following a 1932 coup d’état in Thailand that ended absolute monarchy and established a constitution, the Thai state that emerged has suppressed political dissent through detention, torture, forced reeducation, disappearances, assassinations, and massacres. In Plain Sight shows how these abuses, both hidden and occurring in public view, have become institutionalized through a chronic failure to hold perpetrators accountable. Tyrell Haberkorn’s deeply researched revisionist history of modern Thailand highlights the legal, political, and social mechanisms that have produced such impunity and documents continual and courageous challenges to state domination.

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In Protest

150 Poems for Human Rights

Edited by Helle Abelvik-Lawson, Anthony Hett, and Laila Sumpton

University of London Press, 2013

In Protest: 150 Poems for Human Rights is an anthology of new poetry exploring human rights and social justice themes. This collection, a collaboration between the Human Rights Consortium at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and the Keats House Poets, brings together writing that is often very moving, frequently touching, and occasionally humorous. The 150 poems included here come from over 16 countries, and provide a rare insight into experiences of oppression, discrimination, and dispossession - and yet they also offer strong messages of hope and solidarity. This anthology brings you contemporary works that are truly outstanding for both their human rights and poetic content. Arranged across thirteen themes - Expression, History, Land, Exile, War, Children, Sentenced, Slavery, Women, Regimes, Workers, Unequal, and Protest - you will find within this collection a poem that inspires and engages you.

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Indigenous (In)Justice

Human Rights Law and Bedouin Arabs in the Naqab/Negev

Ahmad Amara

Harvard University Press, 2013

The indigenous Bedouin Arab population in the Naqab/Negev desert in Israel has experienced a history of displacement, intense political conflict, and cultural disruption, along with recent rapid modernization, forced urbanization, and migration. This volume of essays highlights international, national, and comparative law perspectives and explores the legal and human rights dimensions of land, planning, and housing issues, as well as the economic, social, and cultural rights of indigenous peoples. Within this context, the essays examine the various dimensions of the “negotiations” between the Bedouin Arab population and the State of Israel.

Indigenous (In)Justice locates the discussion of the Naqab/Negev question within the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict and within key international debates among legal scholars and human rights advocates, including the application of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the formalization of traditional property rights, and the utility of restorative and reparative justice approaches. Leading international scholars and professionals, including the current United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, are among the contributors to this volume.

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Inhuman Conditions

On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights

Pheng Cheah

Harvard University Press, 2006

Globalization promises to bring people around the world together, to unite them as members of the human community. To such sanguine expectations, Pheng Cheah responds deftly with a sobering account of how the "inhuman" imperatives of capitalism and technology are transforming our understanding of humanity and its prerogatives. Through an examination of debates about cosmopolitanism and human rights, Inhuman Conditions questions key ideas about what it means to be human that underwrite our understanding of globalization. Cheah asks whether the contemporary international division of labor so irreparably compromises and mars global solidarities and our sense of human belonging that we must radically rethink cherished ideas about humankind as the bearer of dignity and freedom or culture as a power of transcendence. Cheah links influential arguments about the new cosmopolitanism drawn from the humanities, the social sciences, and cultural studies to a perceptive examination of the older cosmopolitanism of Kant and Marx, and juxtaposes them with proliferating formations of collective culture to reveal the flaws in claims about the imminent decline of the nation-state and the obsolescence of popular nationalism. Cheah also proposes a radical rethinking of the normative force of human rights in light of how Asian values challenge human rights universalism.

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Innocence and Victimhood

Gender, Nation, and Women’s Activism in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina

Elissa Helms

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

The 1992–95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina following the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia became notorious for “ethnic cleansing” and mass rapes targeting the Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) population. Postwar social and political processes have continued to be dominated by competing nationalisms representing Bosniacs, Serbs, and Croats, as well as those supporting a multiethnic Bosnian state, in which narratives of victimhood take center stage, often in gendered form. Elissa Helms shows that in the aftermath of the war, initiatives by and for Bosnian women perpetuated and complicated dominant images of women as victims and peacemakers in a conflict and political system led by men. In a sober corrective to such accounts, she offers a critical look at the politics of women’s activism and gendered nationalism in a postwar and postsocialist society.

Drawing on ethnographic research spanning fifteen years, Innocence and Victimhood demonstrates how women’s activists and NGOs responded to, challenged, and often reinforced essentialist images in affirmative ways, utilizing the moral purity associated with the position of victimhood to bolster social claims, shape political visions, pursue foreign funding, and wage campaigns for postwar justice. Deeply sensitive to the suffering at the heart of Bosnian women’s (and men’s) wartime experiences, this book also reveals the limitations to strategies that emphasize innocence and victimhood.

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Inside a Class Action

The Holocaust and the Swiss Banks

Jane Schapiro

University of Wisconsin Press

On October 21, 1996, attorney Michael Hausfeld, with a team of lawyers, filed a class-action complaint against Union Bank of Switzerland, Swiss Bank Corporation, and Credit Suisse on behalf of Holocaust victims. The suit accused the banks of, among other things, acting as the chief financiers for Nazi Germany. Hausfeld wanted to use the suit to prove that the banks not only concealed and refused to return millions of dollars in dormant accounts, but that they acted as a conduit for looted assets and slave labor profits. Such behavior, he charged, violated the code of ethics known as customary international law. On August 12, 1998, the plaintiffs and banks reached a $1.25 billion settlement.
Through interviews with a wide range of people involved in the case and detailed research of documents and court transcripts, Jane Schapiro shows the ways that egos, personalities, and values clash in such a complex and emotionally charged case. Inside a Class Action provides an insider’s view of a major lawsuit from its inception to its conclusion, which will appeal to anyone interested in human rights, reparations, and international law.

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Inside Rwanda's /Gacaca/ Courts

Seeking Justice after Genocide

Bert Ingelaere

University of Wisconsin Press, 2018

After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, victims, perpetrators, and the country as a whole struggled to deal with the legacy of the mass violence. The government responded by creating a new version of a traditional grassroots justice system called gacaca. Bert Ingelaere offers a comprehensive assessment of what these courts set out to do, how they worked, what they achieved, what they did not achieve, and how they affected Rwandan society. Weaving together vivid firsthand recollections, interviews, and trial testimony with systematic analysis, he documents how the gacaca shifted over time from confession to accusation, from restoration to retribution. This is an authoritative account of one of the most important experiments in transitional justice after mass violence.

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Insincere Commitments

Human Rights Treaties, Abusive States, and Citizen Activism

Heather Smith-Cannoy

Georgetown University Press, 2012

Paradoxically, many governments that persistently violate human rights have also ratified international human rights treaties that empower their citizens to file grievances against them at the United Nations. Therefore, citizens in rights-repressing regimes find themselves with the potentially invaluable opportunity to challenge their government’s abuses. Why would rights-violating governments ratify these treaties and thus afford their citizens this right? Can the mechanisms provided in these treaties actually help promote positive changes in human rights?

Insincere Commitments uses both quantitative and qualitative analysis to examine the factors contributing to commitment and compliance among post-Soviet states such as Slovakia, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Heather Smith-Cannoy argues that governments ratify these treaties insincerely in response to domestic economic pressures. Signing the treaties is a way to at least temporarily keep critics of their human rights record at bay while they secure international economic assistance or more favorable trade terms. However, she finds that through the specific protocols in the treaties that grant individuals the right to petition the UN, even the most insincere state commitments to human rights can give previously powerless individuals—and the nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations that partner with them—an important opportunity that they would otherwise not have to challenge patterns of government repression on the global stage.

This insightful book will be of interest to human rights scholars, students, and practitioners, as well as anyone interested in the UN, international relations, treaties, and governance.

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Intellectual Empathy

Critical Thinking for Social Justice

Maureen Linker

University of Michigan Press, 2014

Intellectual Empathy provides a step-by-step method for facilitating discussions of socially divisive issues. Maureen Linker, a philosophy professor at the University of Michigan–Dearborn, developed Intellectual Empathy after more than a decade of teaching critical thinking in metropolitan Detroit, one of the most racially and economically divided urban areas, at the crossroads of one of the Midwest’s largest Muslim communities. The skills acquired through Intellectual Empathy have proven to be significant for students who pursue careers in education, social work, law, business, and medicine.

Now, Linker shows educators, activists, business managers, community leaders—anyone working toward fruitful dialogues about social differences—how potentially transformative conversations break down and how they can be repaired. Starting from Socrates’s injunction know thyself, Linker explains why interrogating our own beliefs is essential. In contrast to traditional approaches in logic that devalue emotion, Linker acknowledges the affective aspects of reasoning and how emotion is embedded in our understanding of self and other. Using examples from classroom dialogues, online comment forums, news media, and diversity training workshops, readers learn to recognize logical fallacies and critically, yet empathically, assess their own social biases, as well as the structural inequalities that perpetuate social injustice and divide us from each other.

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International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa

Responsibility to Protect, Prosecute, and Palliate

Kurt Mills

University of London Press, 2015

Since the end of World War II and the founding of the United Nations, genocide, crimes against humanity, and other mass atrocities have been explicitly illegal. When such crimes are committed, the international community has an obligation to respond, which has come to be known as “the responsibility to protect.”

Parallel to this responsibility, two related responsibilities have developed: to prosecute those responsible for the crimes, and to provide humanitarian relief to the victims—what Kurt Mills in this book calls the “responsibility to palliate.” While this rhetoric of protection is well used by the international community, its application in practice has been erratic at best. In International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa, Mills develops a typology of responses to mass atrocities, considering four cases in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and Darfur. Putting the cases into historical context and analyzing them according to this typology, Mills investigates the limitations of these responses and calls for such responses to be implemented in a more timely and thoughtful manner. Mills provides critical analysis of the possibilities for the international community to respond to humanitarian crises in the future.

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The International Rule of Law Movement

A Crisis of Legitimacy and the Way Forward

David Marshall

Harvard University Press

Promoting the rule of law at the national and international levels is at the heart of the United Nations’ mission and is a principle embedded throughout the Charter of the United Nations and most constitutions of nation-states. The 2012 “Declaration on the Rule of Law at the National and International Levels” adopted by the General Assembly reaffirmed that human rights, the rule of law, and democracy were interlinked and mutually reinforcing, and that they belonged to the universal and indivisible core values and principles of the United Nations. To some, the “Rule of Law” has become nothing more than empty rhetoric of individual Western states and intergovernmental bodies such as the UN, The World Bank, and the EU. In addition to conceptual uncertainty and perceived hidden agendas, there is mounting skepticism, particularly among donors, regarding rule of law promotion and its effectiveness in fragile states.

The International Rule of Law Movement critically evaluates rule of law initiatives from a contemporary global perspective. It seeks to fill the gap in knowledge among actors and to explain what has and has not been effective and why. It also proposes better models for promoting justice and the rule of law in fragile states.

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International Trade and Human Rights

Foundations and Conceptual Issues (World Trade Forum, Volume 5)

Frederick M. Abbott, Christine Breining-Kaufmann and Thomas Cottier, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2005

The World Trade Forum 2001 on Trade and Human Rights addressed some of the most controversial and challenging issues in the ongoing public debate on globalization: the relationship between institutions and norms regulating global economic activity and institutions and norms promoting and protecting human rights. Presenting a selection of the papers discussed at the Forum, this volume focuses on a significant, developing area of international law certain to become increasingly important in the years to come, as both scholarship and jurisprudence continue to explore the boundaries of the intersection of the two fields. With a diverse array of contributors, International Trade and Human Rights addresses the relationship between human rights and international trade from a unique and important interdisciplinary perspective.

The missing link between the international trade regime and human rights has become one of the key concerns of critics of the WTO. The World Trade Forum 2001 at the World Trade Institute in Berne provided a unique framework for considering the manifold issues relevant to this topic. This book goes beyond listing the different arguments in favor of or against globalization and offers recommendations to the international community for possible reforms so as to better account for the human rights interests affected by the process of globalization.

Frederick M. Abbott is the Edward Ball Eminent Scholar Professor of International Law at Florida State University College of Law. He is the editor of China in the World Trading System: Defining the Principles of Engagement (1998) and author of The International Intellectual Property System: Commentary and Materials (with Thomas Cottier and Francis Gurry, 1999).

Christine Breining-Kaufmann is Professor of Law at the University of Zurich and Senior Research Fellow as well as a member of the Board of the World Trade Institute in Berne. Her publications include Hunger als Rechtsproblem: Völkerrechtliche Aspekte eines Rechtes auf Nahrung (1991) and Globalization and Labour Rights: The Conflicting Relationship between Core Labour Rights and International Economic Institutions (2006).

Thomas Cottier is Managing Director of the World Trade Institute and Professor of Law at the University of Berne. He has co-edited the previous four volumes of the World Trade Forum series.

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Israel/Palestine and the Queer International

Sarah Schulman

Duke University Press, 2012

In this chronicle of political awakening and queer solidarity, the activist and novelist Sarah Schulman describes her dawning consciousness of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Invited to Israel to give the keynote address at an LGBT studies conference at Tel Aviv University, Schulman declines, joining other artists and academics honoring the Palestinian call for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. Anti-occupation activists in the United States, Canada, Israel, and Palestine come together to help organize an alternative solidarity visit for the American activist. Schulman takes us to an anarchist, vegan café in Tel Aviv, where she meets anti-occupation queer Israelis, and through border checkpoints into the West Bank, where queer Palestinian activists welcome her into their spaces for conversations that will change the course of her life. She describes the dusty roads through the West Bank, where Palestinians are cut off from water and subjected to endless restrictions while Israeli settler neighborhoods have full freedoms and resources.

As Schulman learns more, she questions the contradiction between Israel's investment in presenting itself as gay friendly—financially sponsoring gay film festivals and parades—and its denial of the rights of Palestinians. At the same time, she talks with straight Palestinian activists about their position in relation to homosexuality and gay rights in Palestine and internationally. Back in the United States, Schulman draws on her extensive activist experience to organize a speaking tour for some of the Palestinian queer leaders whom she had met and trusted. Dubbed "Al-Tour," it takes the activists to LGBT community centers, conferences, and universities throughout the United States. Its success solidifies her commitment to working to end Israel's occupation of Palestine, and it kindles her larger hope that a new "queer international" will emerge and join other movements demanding human rights across the globe.

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It Will Yet Be Heard

A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer once described Dr. Leon Thorne’s memoir as a work of “bitter truth” that he compared favorably to the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Proust. Out of print for over forty years, this lost classic of Holocaust literature now reappears in a revised, annotated edition, including both Thorne’s original 1961 memoir Out of the Ashes: The Story of a Survivor and his previously unpublished accounts of his arduous postwar experiences in Germany and Poland.

Rabbi Thorne composed his memoir under extraordinary conditions, confined to a small underground bunker below a Polish peasant’s pigsty. But, It Will Yet Be Heard is remarkable not only for the story of its composition, but also for its moral clarity and complexity. A deeply religious man, Rabbi Thorne bore witness to forced labor camps, human degradation, and the murders of entire communities. And once he emerged from hiding, he grappled not only with survivor’s guilt, but also with the lingering antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in Poland even after the war ended. Harrowing, moving, and deeply insightful, Rabbi Thorne’s firsthand account offers a rediscovered perspective on the twentieth century’s greatest tragedy.

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