Böcker i Critical Human Rights-serien

A gripping account of daily life as a political prisoner by a former Chilean cabinet minister, offering personal insight into the political climate and historical events of 1970s Chile under military dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Transnational solidarity movements often play an important role in reshaping structures of global power. However, there remains a significant gap in the historical literature on collaboration between parties located in the Global South. Facing increasing repression, the Latin American left in the 1960s and 1970s found connection in transnational exchange, organizing with distant activists in Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. By exploring the particularities of South-South solidarity, this volume begins new conversations about what makes these movements unique, how they shaped political identities, and their lasting influence. Jessica Stites Mor looks at four in-depth case studies: the use of legal reform to accomplish the goals of solidarity embedded in Mexico's revolutionary constitution, visual and print media circulated by Cuba and its influence on the agenda of the Afro-Asian block at the United Nations, organizing on behalf of Palestinian nationalism in reshaping Argentina's socialist left, and the role of Latin American Catholic activists in challenging the South African apartheid state. These examples serve as a much-needed road map to navigate our current political climate and show us how solidarity movements might approach future struggles.

Argues that working toward greater socioeconomic equality - access to food, housing, land, jobs - is crucial to achieving a successful and sustainable democracy. Drawing on interviews with local residents and activists in South Africa's impoverished townships during more than a decade of dramatic political change, this tracks the development of community organising and reveals the shifting challenges faced by poor citizens.

Facing repression, the Latin American left in the '60s and '70s found connection in transnational exchange, organising with activists in Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. By exploring South-South solidarity, this volume begins conversations about what makes these movements unique, how they shaped political identities, and their influence.

Reveals and analyzes how Peru's military elite have engaged in a cultural campaign--via memoirs, novels, films, museums--to shift public memory and debate about the nation's recent violent conflict and their part in it.

This collection of case studies by scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds turns a critical and reflective eye toward qualitative fieldwork on perpetrators of genocide. This volume provides an essential starting point for future research while advancing genocide studies, transitional justice, and related fields.

Donny Meertens contends that women's advocacy organisations in Colombia must have a prominent role in overseeing transitional policies in order to create a more just society. By bringing together the topic of property repayment and the pursuit of gender justice in peacebuilding, his findings have broad significance elsewhere in the world.

Reads between the lines of Argentine cultural texts (fiction, drama, testimonial narrative, telenovela, documentary film) to explore the fundamental role of silence - the unsaid - in the expression of trauma. Nancy J. Gates-Madsen's careful examination of the interplay between textual and contextual silences illuminates public debate about the meaning of memory in Argentina.

The first book to trace Brazil's reckoning with dictatorship through the collision of politics and cultural production.

By identifying and embracing the paradox that human rights are at once a transcendent value belonging to all and a reality forged by particular people rooted in specific places, The Human Rights Paradox advances a new way to understand the history, contemporary politics, advocacy, and future prospects of human rights.

A series of photographic mug shots taken by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia are agents in an ongoing drama of unimaginable human suffering.

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.

Highlights the global movement for historical justice-acknowledging and redressing historic wrongs-as one of the most significant moral and social developments of our times. Such historic wrongs include acts of genocide, slavery, systems of apartheid, the persecution of presumed enemies of the state, colonialism, and the oppression of or discrimination against ethnic or religious minorities.

Human rights activism is often associated with international organisations that try to effect change in regional conflicts around the globe. In Barrancabermeja, Colombia, argues Luis van Isschot, the struggle for rights has emerged more organically and locally, out of a long history of civil and social organising. He offers insight into the lives of home-grown activists in a conflict zone, against the backdrop of major historical changes.

Argues that today's Chile is a product of both complicity and complacency. Combining historical analysis with deft literary, political, and cultural critique, Michael J. Lazzara scrutinizes the post-Pinochet rationalizations made by politicians, artists, intellectuals, bystanders, former revolutionaries-turned-neoliberals, and common citizens.

In recent decades, a more formalized and forceful shift has emerged in the legislative realm when it comes to gender and sexual justice in Africa. This rigorous, timely volume brings together leading and rising scholars across disciplines to evaluate these ideological struggles and reconsider the modern history of human rights on the continent.

During the 1990s and early 2000s in Europe, more than fifty historical commissions were created to confront, discuss, and document the genocide of the Holocaust and to address some of its unresolved injustices. Amending the Past offers the first in-depth account of these commissions, examining the complexities of reckoning with past atrocities and large-scale human rights violations.

After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, 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, and how they affected Rwandan society.

In Santiago's urban shantytowns, a searing history of poverty and Chilean state violence have prompted grassroots resistance movements among the poor and working class from the 1940s to the present. Underscoring this complex continuity, Alison J. Bruey offers a compelling history of the struggle for social justice and democracy during the Pinochet dictatorship and its aftermath.

A definitive account and analysis of the evolving genocidal violence in Rwanda in 1994, and of the judicial, political, and diplomatic responses to it.

From 1973 to 1990 in Chile, approximately 370,000 young men were conscripted to serve in Augusto Pinochet's regime. Some were brutal enforcers, but many themselves endured physical and psychological abuse. Relying on unpublished material, interviews, and field notes, Passmore locates these individuals' narratives at the intersection of long-term histories of patriotism, masculinity, and poverty.

After the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, the UN resolved to prevent and punish the crime of genocide. The resulting UN Genocide Convention treaty, however, was weakened in the midst of Cold War tensions. Anton Weiss-Wendt reveals in detail how the political aims of the superpowers rendered the convention a weak instrument for addressing abuses against human rights.