425 books match the query 'Human rights' and 29 start with c

cover of Callous Objects: Designs against the Homeless

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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cover of Capitalism, Colonisation and the Ecocide-Genocide Nexus

Capitalism, Colonisation and the Ecocide-Genocide Nexus

Martin Crook

University of London Press, 2024

A timely analysis of the genocidal and ecologically destructive nature of capitalism and colonialism, and its effects.

This timely publication examines the drivers of ecologically induced genocide, in particular, how environmental destruction can lead to conditions that fundamentally threaten a social group’s cultural or physical existence. Focusing on the former British colonies of Kenya and Australia, both united by a discourse of developmentalism, this book draws attention to the critical role that ecological destruction has in the genocide of Indigenous and place-based peoples. The book synthesizes radical political ecology with a political-economic approach, illuminating the chain connection between the inherent genocidal and ecocidal properties of global capitalism, and how this connection intersects with settler and post-colonial structures. In exploring the genocidal effects of climate governance, the economic market for environmental rights, and energy extraction on Indigenous peoples in Kenya and Australia, the book also draws on original interviews to prioritize the lived experiences of the groups that have suffered structural violence and social harm. Fundamentally, Crook calls forward the political economy of genocide. As such, this important book deepens and enriches our knowledge of genocide, the eco-genocidal nature of colonization, and the capitalist mode of production that underpins developmentalism.
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cover of Catastrophe: Law, Politics, and the Humanitarian Impulse

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.
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cover of Challenges to Globalization: Analyzing the Economics

Challenges to Globalization

Analyzing the Economics

Edited by Robert E. Baldwin and L. Alan Winters

University of Chicago Press, 2004

People passionately disagree about the nature of the globalization process. The failure of both the 1999 and 2003 World Trade Organization's (WTO) ministerial conferences in Seattle and Cancun, respectively, have highlighted the tensions among official, international organizations like the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, nongovernmental and private sector organizations, and some developing country governments. These tensions are commonly attributed to longstanding disagreements over such issues as labor rights, environmental standards, and tariff-cutting rules. In addition, developing countries are increasingly resentful of the burdens of adjustment placed on them that they argue are not matched by commensurate commitments from developed countries.

Challenges to Globalization evaluates the arguments of pro-globalists and anti-globalists regarding issues such as globalization's relationship to democracy, its impact on the environment and on labor markets including the brain drain, sweat shop labor, wage levels, and changes in production processes, and the associated expansion of trade and its effects on prices. Baldwin, Winters, and the contributors to this volume look at multinational firms, foreign investment, and mergers and acquisitions and present surprising findings that often run counter to the claim that multinational firms primarily seek countries with low wage labor. The book closes with papers on financial opening and on the relationship between international economic policies and national economic growth rates.
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cover of Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics: Subversive Kin

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
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cover of Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination: From Patriots to Victims

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.   
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cover of Child Survivors of the Holocaust: The Youngest Remnant and the American Experience

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. 
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cover of Chile and the Inter-American Human Rights System

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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cover of China's Quest for Liberty: A Personal History of Freedom

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.
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cover of Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold: Myanmar and the Rohingya

Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold

Myanmar and the Rohingya

Penny Green

Rutgers University Press, 2027

Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold is a powerful account of one of the most devastating human crises of the 21st century. Drawing on firsthand research conducted in Burma (Myanmar) and neighboring countries, the book uncovers how the Rohingya Muslims have been systematically isolated, impoverished, and targeted in a state-led genocidal campaign. Through more than 150 interviews with survivors, local officials, religious leaders, and international actors, the authors reveal how discrimination, mass displacement, and organized brutality have created conditions that meet the legal, criminological, and moral definition of genocide. The book also challenges the silence and complicity of the international community. Accessible and grounded in rigorous research, this book speaks to scholars, activists, policymakers, and anyone concerned with justice, human rights, and the global failure to prevent genocide.

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cover of Citizens against Crime and Violence: Societal Responses in Mexico

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.
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cover of Citizens of Memory: Affect, Representation, and Human Rights in Postdictatorship Argentina

Citizens of Memory

Affect, Representation, and Human Rights in Postdictatorship Argentina

Silvia R. Tandeciarz

Bucknell University Press, 2026

Citizens of Memory explores efforts at recollection in post-dictatorship Argentina and the hoped-for futures they set in motion. The sites, images, narratives, and practices it analyzes address the dark years of state repression (1976-1983) while engaging ongoing debates about how this traumatic past should be transmitted to future generations. This insightful study approaches cultural recall via two theoretical principles—the first understands memory as a social construct that is as much about the past as it is of the present, and the second observes that what distinguishes memory from history is affect. Understanding recollection and storytelling as practices that can help constitute communities of belonging, Tandeciarz suggests that by inciting deep reflection and an active engagement with the legacies of state violence, interventions like those studied here may advance transitional justice and contribute to the construction of less violent futures.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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cover of Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness

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
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cover of Civil Obedience: Complicity and Complacency in Chile since Pinochet

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.
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cover of Colonialism Is Crime

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.
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cover of Conflicted Memory: Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Peru

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.
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cover of Conflicted Memory: Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Peru

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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cover of Confronting Colonial Legacies: A History of Chicana/o Indigeneities and Transnational Activism

Confronting Colonial Legacies

A History of Chicana/o Indigeneities and Transnational Activism

José Luis Serrano Nájera

University of Arizona Press, 2026

This work offers a groundbreaking account of how Chicana/o activists have engaged in sustained efforts to reclaim Indigenous identity through political struggle, cultural expression, and transnational solidarity.

Author José Luis Serrano Nájera takes an in-depth look at the history of Chicana/o indigeneity, starting with the Chicana/o Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and through twenty-first century transnational activism and solidarity movements. Serrano Nájera reveals how claims to indigeneity were rooted in reciprocal relationships with Indigenous communities and driven by a shared commitment to decolonization. Through chapters on visual and performing arts, ceremony, education, and grassroots organizing, this book challenges reductive narratives of cultural appropriation and instead foregrounds the complex and historically grounded nature of Chicana/o indigeneity.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Serrano Nájera demonstrates how Chicana/o indigeneity has contributed to broader Indigenous rights movements, including efforts that culminated in the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This work highlights the intercontinental dimensions of Chicana/o activism and offers a vital source for scholars and students in Chicana/o studies, Indigenous studies, ethnic studies, history, and political science. Confronting Colonial Legacies is a compelling call to rethink the politics of identity, sovereignty, and solidarity across the Americas.

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cover of Constitutions and the Dialectics of Human Rights in Malawi and Kenya

Constitutions and the Dialectics of Human Rights in Malawi and Kenya

Eunice N. Sahle

University of Wisconsin Press, 2026

As in many other countries, the protection of human rights and other practices of constitutionalism remains uneven in Malawi and Kenya. In this book, Eunice N. Sahle argues that the adoption in 1994 and 2010 in Malawi and Kenya, respectively, of new constitutional frameworks, which have the markings of “critical constitutional events,” provided significant openings for the promotion of human rights. Nonetheless, the emergence of such opportunities does not mean that the protection of human rights is automatic. Sahle zeroes in on the tension between the possibilities of human rights promotion on one hand, and the historical and contemporary factors influencing that process on the other. In that regard, her analysis shows the importance and limits of transformative constitutional frameworks as tools for social change. Further, by focusing on the promotion of human rights by a diverse range of social actors—individuals, civil society, organizations, and public institutions—she demonstrates the need to broaden who “counts” as an agent of human rights and to go beyond a strictly state-centric approach.

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cover of Constructing the Maya: Ethnicity, State Formation, and Material Culture in Yucatán, Chiapas, and Guatemala, Volume 55

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, 0

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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cover of Corporate Complicity in Israel's Occupation: Evidence from the London Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine

Corporate Complicity in Israel's Occupation

Evidence from the London Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine

Edited by Asa Winstanley and Frank Barat

Pluto Press, 2011

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine is a people’s tribunal in the spirit of the Tribunal on Vietnam that was set up by Bertrand Russell in the 1960s. This book contains a selection of the most vital evidence and testimonies presented at the London session. It includes the papers submitted to the tribunal, written by expert witnesses, based on their detailed research into the companies that prop-up Israeli occupation.

Examining the involvement of corporations in the illegal occupation of Palestinian land by Israel, the tribunal of 2010 generated widespread media coverage. The book identifies companies and corporations participating in such illegality and possibilities for legal action against them are discussed.

Released to coincide with the South Africa session at the end of 2011, Corporate Complicity in Israel's Occupation is a vital resource to lawyers, journalists and activists hoping to take informed action against Israeli war crimes and occupation.

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cover of Corporate Social Responsibility?: Human Rights in the New Global Economy

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. 
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cover of Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez: Challenges to Militarization

Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez

Challenges to Militarization

By Kathleen Staudt and Zulma Y. Méndez

University of Texas Press, 2015

Ciudad Juárez has recently become infamous for its murder rate, which topped 3,000 in 2010 as competing drug cartels grew increasingly violent and the military responded with violence as well. Despite the atmosphere of intimidation by troops, police, and organized criminals, women have led the way in civil society activism, spurring the Juárez Resistance and forging powerful alliances with anti-militarization activists.

An in-depth examination of la Resistencia Juarense, Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez draws on ethnographic research to analyze the resistance’s focus on violence against women, as well as its clash with the war against drugs championed by Mexican President Felipe Calderón with the support of the United States. Through grounded insights, the authors trace the transformation of hidden discourses into public discourses that openly challenge the militarized border regimes. The authors also explore the advocacy carried on by social media, faith-based organizations, and peace-and-justice activist Javier Sicilia while Calderón faced U.S. political schisms over the role of border trade in this global manufacturing site.

Bringing to light on-the-ground strategies as well as current theories from the fields of sociology, political anthropology, and human rights, this illuminating study is particularly significant because of its emphasis on the role of women in local and transnational attempts to extinguish a hot zone. As they overcome intimidation to become game-changing activists, the figures featured in Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez offer the possibility of peace and justice in the wake of seemingly irreconcilable conflict.

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cover of Court of Remorse: Inside the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

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
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cover of Cracks in the Wall: Beyond Apartheid in Palestine/Israel

Cracks in the Wall

Beyond Apartheid in Palestine/Israel

Ben White

Pluto Press, 2018

After decades of occupation and creeping annexation, the situation on the ground in Palestine/Israel can only be described as a system of apartheid. Peace efforts have failed because of one, inconvenient truth: the Israeli maximum on offer does not meet the Palestinian minimum, or the standards of international law.

But while the situation on the ground is bleak, Ben White argues that there are widening cracks in Israel's traditional pillars of support. Opposition to Israeli policies and even critiques of Zionism are growing in Jewish communities, as well as amongst Western progressives. The election of Donald Trump has served as a catalyst for these processes, including the transformation of Israel from a partisan issue into one that divides the US establishment. Meanwhile, the Palestinian-led boycott campaign is gathering momentum, prompting a desperate backlash by Israel and its allies.

With sharp analysis, Ben White says now is the time to plot a course that avoids the mistakes of the past - a way forward beyond apartheid in Palestine. The solution is not partition and ethnic separation, but equality and self-determination - for all.
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cover of Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet

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.




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cover of Cultural Genocide

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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cover of Cultural Heritage Under Siege: Laying the Foundation for a Legal and Political Framework to Protect Cultural Heritage at Risk in Zones of Armed Conflict

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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cover of Cultures of Resistance: Collective Action and Rationality in the Anti-Terror Age

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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