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In Sacred Violence, the distinguished political and legal theorist Paul W. Kahn investigates the reasons for the resort to violence characteristic of premodern states. In a startling argument, he contends that law will never offer an adequate account of political violence. Instead, we must turn to political theology, which reveals that torture and terror are, essentially, forms of sacrifice. Kahn forces us to acknowledge what we don't want to see: that we remain deeply committed to a violent politics beyond law.

Paul W. Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities at Yale Law School and Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights.

Cover Illustration: "Abu Ghraib 67, 2005" by Fernando Botero. Courtesy of the artist and the American University Museum.

Following World War II, the communist government of Poland forcibly relocated the country's Ukrainian minority by means of a Soviet-Polish population exchange and then a secretly planned action code-named Operation Vistula. In Scattered, Diana Howansky Reilly recounts these events through the experiences of three siblings caught up in the conflict, during a turbulent period when compulsory resettlement was a common political tactic used against national minorities to create homogenous states.
    Born in the Lemko region of southeastern Poland, Petro, Melania, and Hania Pyrtej survived World War II only to be separated by political decisions over which they had no control. Petro relocated with his wife to Soviet Ukraine during the population exchange of 1944–46, while his sisters Melania and Hania were resettled to western Poland through Operation Vistula in 1947. As the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought resettlement, the Polish government meanwhile imprisoned suspected sympathizers within the Jaworzno concentration camp. Melania, Reilly's maternal grandmother, eventually found her way to the United States during Poland's period of liberalization in the 1960s.
    Drawing on oral interviews and archival research, Reilly tells a fascinating, true story that provides a bottom-up perspective and illustrates the impact of extraordinary historical events on the lives of ordinary people. Tracing the story to the present, she describes survivors' efforts to receive compensation for the destruction of their homes and communities.

Silver Medal for World History, Independent Publisher Book Awards

Finalist, Housatonic Book Awards

Finalist in History, Foreword Books of the Year

Silence on the Mountain is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala’s thirty-six-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of some 200,000 people, the vast majority of whom died (or were “disappeared”) at the hands of the U.S.-backed military government. Written by Daniel Wilkinson, a young human rights worker, the story begins in 1993, when the author decides to investigate the arson of a coffee plantation’s manor house by a band of guerrillas. The questions surrounding this incident soon broaden into a complex mystery whose solution requires Wilkinson to dig up the largely unwritten history of the country’s recent civil war, following its roots back to a land reform movement that was derailed by a U.S.-sponsored military coup in 1954 and to the origins of a plantation system that put Guatemala’s Mayan Indians to work picking coffee beans for the American and European markets.

Decades of terror-inspired fear have led the Guatemalans to adopt a survival strategy of silence so complete that it verges on collective amnesia. The author’s great triumph is that he finds a way for people to tell their stories, and it is through these stories—dramatic, intimate, heartbreaking—that we are shown the anatomy of a thwarted revolution that has relevance not only to Guatemala but also to countless places around the world where terror has been used as a political tool.

Silencing the Guns in Haiti traces Haiti's halting and uncertain quest for democracy from the perspective of someone who played a leading part in every stage of that process.

"A provocative study of the prospects for the rule of law in Haiti."—Marilyn Bowden, Miami Today

"[Stotzky] deepens insights into the contradictory obstacles to democratic governance in Haiti."—Library Journal

"Controversial and stimulating."—Choice

"Lucid and informative. . . . Stotzky gives readers a good foundation for understanding the pressures facing the impoverished but determined Caribbean island."—Islands

HE MADE  HISTORY. HE TELLS THE TRUTHS HE  KNOWS.
 LEAD TITLE/Our  National Conversation Series

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, passed in 1865, has long been viewed as a definitive break with the nation’s past by abolishing slavery and ushering in an inexorable march toward black freedom. Slaves of the State presents a stunning counterhistory to this linear narrative of racial, social, and legal progress in America.

Dennis Childs argues that the incarceration of black people and other historically repressed groups in chain gangs, peon camps, prison plantations, and penitentiaries represents a ghostly perpetuation of chattel slavery. He exposes how the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause—allowing for enslavement as “punishment for a crime”—has inaugurated forms of racial capitalist misogynist incarceration that serve as haunting returns of conditions Africans endured in the barracoons and slave ship holds of the Middle Passage, on plantations, and in chattel slavery.

Childs seeks out the historically muted voices of those entombed within terrorizing spaces such as the chain gang rolling cage and the modern solitary confinement cell, engaging the writings of Toni Morrison and Chester Himes as well as a broad range of archival materials, including landmark court cases, prison songs, and testimonies, reaching back to the birth of modern slave plantations such as Louisiana’s “Angola” penitentiary.

Slaves of the State paves the way for a new understanding of chattel slavery as a continuing social reality of U.S. empire—one resting at the very foundation of today’s prison industrial complex that now holds more than 2.3 million people within the country’s jails, prisons, and immigrant detention centers.

How and why has solidarity changed over time? Why have particular strategies, tactics, and strands of internationalism emerged or re-emerged at particular moments? And how has solidarity shaped the history of the US left in particular?

In Solidarity, Steve Striffler addresses these key questions, offering the first history of US-Latin American solidarity from the Haitian Revolution to the present day. Striffler traces the history of internationalism through the Cold War, exploring the rise of human rights as the dominant current of international solidarity. He also considers the limitations of a solidarity movement today that inherited its organisational infrastructure from the human rights movements.

Moving beyond conventionally ahistorical analyses of solidarity, here Striffler provides a distinctive intervention in the history of progressive politics in both the US and Latin America, the past and present of US imperialism and anti-imperialism, and the history of human rights and labour internationalism.

The human rights movement in South Africa’s transition to a postapartheid democracy has been widely celebrated as a triumph for global human rights. It was a key aspect of the political transition, often referred to as a miracle, which brought majority rule and democracy to South Africa. The country’s new constitution, its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the moral authority of Nelson Mandela stand as exemplary proof of this achievement. Yet, less than a generation after the achievement of freedom, the status of human rights and constitutionalism in South Africa is uncertain. In government the ANC has displayed an inconsistent attitude to the protection, and advancement, of hard-won freedoms and rights, and it is not at all clear that a broader civic and political consciousness of the importance of rights is rooting itself more widely in popular culture.

Spectacular Rhetorics is a rigorous analysis of the rhetorical frameworks and narratives that underlie human rights law, shape the process of cultural and legal recognition, and delimit public responses to violence and injustice. Integrating visual and textual criticism, Wendy S. Hesford scrutinizes “spectacular rhetoric,” the use of visual images and rhetoric to construct certain bodies, populations, and nations as victims and incorporate them into human rights discourses geared toward Westerners, chiefly Americans. Hesford presents a series of case studies critiquing the visual representations of human suffering in documentary films, photography, and theater. In each study, she analyzes works addressing a prominent contemporary human rights cause, such as torture and unlawful detention, ethnic genocide and rape as a means of warfare, migration and the trafficking of women and children, the global sex trade, and child labor. Through these studies, she demonstrates how spectacular rhetoric activates certain cultural and national narratives and social and political relations, consolidates identities through the politics of recognition, and configures material relations of power and difference to produce and, ultimately, to govern human rights subjects.

Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states.

The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt.

In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.

Staying Power is a panoramic history of black Britons. First published in 1984 amid race riots and police brutality, Fryer’s history performed a deeply political act, revealing how Africans, Asians, and their descendants had been erased from British history.
            Stretching back to the Roman conquest, encompassing the court of Henry VIII, and following a host of characters from the pioneering nurse and war hero Mary Seacole to the abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, Peter Fryer paints a picture of two thousand years of black presence in Britain. By rewriting black Britons into British history, showing where they influenced political traditions, social institutions, and cultural life, Staying Power presented a radical challenge to racist and nationalist agendas. This edition includes a new foreword by Gary Younge examining the book’s continued significance in shaping black British identity today, alongside the now-classic introduction by Paul Gilroy.
 

From the 1960s to the 1990s, seven members of the Quimpo family dedicated themselves to the anti-Marcos resistance in the Philippines, sometimes at profound personal cost. In this unprecedented memoir, eight siblings (plus one by marriage) tell their remarkable stories in individually authored chapters that comprise a family saga of revolution, persistence, and, ultimately, vindication, even as easy resolution eluded their struggles.

Subversive Lives tells of attempts to smuggle weapons for the New People’s Army (the armed branch of the Communist Party of the Philippines); of heady times organizing uprisings and strikes; of the cruel discovery of one brother’s death and the inexplicable disappearance of another (now believed to be dead); and of imprisonment and torture by the military. These stories show the sacrifices and daily heroism of those in the movement. But they also reveal its messy legacies: sons alienated from their father; daughters abused by the military; friends betrayed; and revolutionary affection soured by intractable ideological differences.

The rich and distinctive contributions span the martial law years of Ferdinand Marcos’s rule. Subversive Lives is a riveting and accessible primer for those unfamiliar with the era, and a resonant history for those with a personal connection to what it meant to be Filipino at that time, or for anyone who has fought political repression.