
Edited by Diego Sanchez-Ancochea and Iwan Morgan
University of London Press, 2009
Benjamin Meiches
University of Minnesota Press, 2019
How did a powerful concept in international justice evolve into an inequitable response to mass suffering?
For a term coined just seventy-five years ago, genocide has become a remarkably potent idea. But has it transformed from a truly novel vision for international justice into a conservative, even inaccessible term? The Politics of Annihilation traces how the concept of genocide came to acquire such significance on the global political stage. In doing so, it reveals how the concept has been politically contested and refashioned over time. It explores how these shifts implicitly impact what forms of mass violence are considered genocide and what forms are not.
Benjamin Meiches argues that the limited conception of genocide, often rigidly understood as mass killing rooted in ethno-religious identity, has created legal and political institutions that do not adequately respond to the diversity of mass violence. In his insistence on the concept’s complexity, he does not undermine the need for clear condemnations of such violence. But neither does he allow genocide to become a static or timeless notion. Meiches argues that the discourse on genocide has implicitly excluded many forms of violence from popular attention including cases ranging from contemporary Botswana and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to the legacies of colonial politics in Haiti, Canada, and elsewhere, to the effects of climate change on small island nations.
By mapping the multiplicity of forces that entangle the concept in larger assemblages of power, The Politics of Annihilation gives us a new understanding of how the language of genocide impacts contemporary political life, especially as a means of protesting the social conditions that produce mass violence.
By Martha Menchaca
University of Texas Press, 2016
The United States and Mexico trade many commodities, the most important of which are indispensable sources of energy—crude oil and agricultural labor. Mexican oil and workers provide cheap and reliable energy for the United States, while US petro dollars and agricultural jobs supply much-needed income for the Mexican economy. Mexico’s economic dependence on the United States is well-known, but The Politics of Dependency makes a compelling case that the United States is also economically dependent on Mexico.
Expanding dependency theory beyond the traditional premise that weak countries are dominated by powerful ones, Martha Menchaca investigates how the United States and Mexico have developed an asymmetrical codependency that disproportionally benefits the United States. In particular, she analyzes how US foreign policy was designed to enable the US government to help shape the development of Mexico’s oil industry, as well as how migration from Mexico to the United States has been regulated by the US Congress to ensure that American farmers have sufficient labor. This unprecedented dual study of energy sectors that are usually examined in isolation reveals the extent to which the United States has become economically dependent on Mexico, even as it remains the dominant partner in the relationship. It also exposes the long-term effects of the agricultural policies of NAFTA, which led to the unemployment of millions of agricultural workers in Mexico, a large percentage of whom relocated to the United States.
Sylvia Ostry
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Bo Rothstein
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Edited by Jeffrey A. Frankel
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Tugba Bayar
Central European University Press, 2026
Thomas Cottier and Petros C. Mavroidis, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Kenneth W. Dam
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Sally Engle Merry
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Ching Kwan Lee
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Edited by Sonja Puntscher Riekmann, Monika Mokre, and Michael Latzer
Campus Verlag, 2004
Alan V. Deardorff and Robert M. Stern, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1994
Edited by Robert E. Baldwin and Anne O. Krueger
University of Chicago Press, 1985
Edited by Edward P. Lazear and Kathryn L. Shaw
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Jody Benjamin
Ohio University Press, 2024
Eugene Davidson
University of Missouri Press, 1997
The "definitive one-volume study of Nuremberg," The Trial of the Germans is now available in paperback. An astute observer of the Nuremberg trial, Eugene Davidson has struggled with the issues it raised: Was it a necessary response to the heinous crimes of the Third Reich? How were Germany and the Germans capable of such extraordinary evil? Was the trial just, given the claims that the defendants were simply serving their country, doing as they had been told to do? And if not just, was it nonetheless necessary as a warning to prevent future crimes against humanity? Davidson's approach to these and other large questions of justice is made through examination of each of the defendants in the trial. His reluctant, but firm, conclusion is: "In a world of mixed human affairs where a rough justice is done that is better than lynching or being shot out of hand, Nuremberg may be defended as a political event if not as a court." Some sentences may have seemed too severe, but none was harsher than the punishments meted out to innocent people by the regime these men served. "In a certain sense," says Davidson, "the trial succeeded in doing what judicial proceedings are supposed to do: it convinced even the guilty that the verdict against them was just."
Faulty as the trial was from the legal point of view, a catharsis of the pent-up emotions of millions of people had to be provided and a record of what had taken place duly preserved for whatever use later generations would make of it.
Terris, Daniel
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Jinee Lokaneeta
University of Michigan Press, 2020
The Truth Machines examines the emergence and use of these three scientific techniques to analyze two primary themes. First, the book questions whether existing theoretical frameworks for understanding state power and legal violence are adequate to explain constant innovations of the state. Second, it explores the workings of law, science, and policing in the everyday context to generate a theory of state power and legal violence, challenging the monolithic frameworks about this relationship, based on a study of both state and non-state actors.
Jinee Lokaneeta argues that the attempt to replace physical torture with truth machines in India fails because it relies on a confessional paradigm that is contiguous with torture. Her work also provides insights into a police institution that is founded and refounded in its everyday interactions between state and non-state actors. Theorizing a concept of Contingent State, this book demonstrates the disaggregated, and decentered nature of state power and legal violence, creating possible sites of critique and intervention.
Lucrecia García Iommi and Richard W. Maass
University of Michigan Press, 2022
The United States spearheaded the creation of many international organizations and treaties after World War II and maintains a strong record of compliance across several issue areas, yet it also refuses to ratify major international conventions like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Why does the United States often seem to support international law in one way while neglecting or even violating it in another?
The United States and International Law: Paradoxes of Support across Contemporary Issues analyzes the seemingly inconsistent U.S. relationship with international law by identifying five types of state support for international law: leadership, consent, internalization, compliance, and enforcement. Each follows different logics and entails unique costs and incentives. Accordingly, the fact that a state engages in one form of support does not presuppose that it will do so across the board. The contributors to this volume examine how and why the United States has engaged in each form of support across twelve issue areas that are central to twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. foreign policy: conquest, world courts, war, nuclear proliferation, trade, human rights, war crimes, torture, targeted killing, maritime law, the environment, and cybersecurity. In addition to offering rich substantive discussions of U.S. foreign policy in each of these areas, their findings reveal patterns across the U.S. relationship with international law that shed light on behavior that often seems paradoxical at best, hypocritical at worst. The results help us understand why the United States engages with international law as it does, the legacies of the Trump administration, and what we should expect from the United States under the Biden administration and beyond.
Lawrence J. LeBlanc
Duke University Press, 1991
Edited by Martin Feldstein
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Edited by Anne O. Krueger
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Edited by Kojo Koram
Pluto Press, 2019
Gordon Mathews, Linessa Dan Lin, and Yang Yang
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Edited by Gunther Hellmann
Campus Verlag, 2018
Tony Allen, with Michael E. Veal
Duke University Press, 2013
Allen embraced the drum set, rather than African handheld drums, early in his career, when drum kits were relatively rare in Africa. His story conveys a love of his craft along with the specifics of his practice. It also provides invaluable firsthand accounts of the explosive creativity in postcolonial African music, and the personal and artistic dynamics in Fela's Koola Lobitos and Africa 70, two of the greatest bands to ever play African music.
Edited by Magnus Blomström and Linda S. Goldberg
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Dorothy V. Jones
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Edited by Robert C. Feenstra
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Edited by Robert E. Baldwin
University of Chicago Press, 1988

Robert E. Baldwin
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Ka Zeng
University of Michigan Press, 2004

Edited by Robert M. Stern
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Joyce Elizabeth Harman, With a New Introduction by Carl E. Swanson
University of Alabama Press, 2004
A groundbreaking study of commerce, conflict, and survival in colonial Spanish Florida.
Trade and Privateering examines the illegal yet highly profitable and mutually beneficial trade between Spanish Florida and the English colonies on the eastern seaboard in the mid-18th century. In St. Augustine, the arrival of subsidies from Spain was erratic, causing shortages of food and supplies, so authorities ignored the restrictions on trade with foreign colonies and welcomed British goods. Likewise, the British colonists sought Spanish products from Florida, especially oranges.
But when England and Spain became declared enemies in the War of Jenkins’ Ear and the French and Indian Wars, this tacit trade arrangement was threatened, and the result was a rise of privateering in the region. Rather than do without Spanish goods, the English began to attack and capture Spanish vessels with their cargoes at sea. Likewise, the Spaniards resorted to privateering as a means of steadily supplying the Florida colony. Harman concludes that, both willingly and unwillingly, the English colonies helped their Spanish neighbor to sustain its position in the Southeast.
Edited by Takatoshi Ito and Anne O. Krueger
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Edited by Colin I. Bradford Jr. and William H. Branson
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Edited by Takatoshi Ito and Anne O. Krueger
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Edited by Paul Krugman
University of Chicago Press, 1991

Ernest H. Preeg
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Kerry A. Chase
University of Michigan Press, 2005
David P. Rapkin and William R. Thompson
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Emily Apter, ed.
Duke University Press, 0
Contributors. Dina Al-Kassim, Emily Apter, Timothy Brennan, Elena Climent, Maryse Condé, Michael Eng, Renée Green, Rainer Ganahl, Sarah M. Hudgins, Michael North, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Judith Armatta
Duke University Press, 2010