Böcker i Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights-serien

The Human Right to Citizenship provides an accessible overview of citizenship around the globe, focusing on empirical cases of denied or weakened legal rights. This wide-ranging volume provides a theoretical framework to understand the particular ambiguities, paradoxes, and evolutions of citizenship regimes in the twenty-first century.

Medical Humanitarianism provides comparative ethnographies of the moral, practical, and policy implications of modern medical humanitarian practice. It offers twelve vivid case studies that challenge readers to reach a more critical and compassionate understanding of humanitarian assistance.

Responding to Human Trafficking explores how cultural and symbolic frameworks of sex, gender, and prostitution dominate the interpretation and implementation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and provides a detailed ethnography of its ramifications for the persons it is designed to protect.

In Communists and Their Victims, Roman David identifies and examines four classes of justice measures—retributive, reparatory, revelatory, and reconciliatory—to discover which, if any, rectified the legacy of human rights abuses committed during the communist era in the Czech Republic. Conducting interviews, focus groups, and nationwide surveys between 1999 and 2015, David looks at the impact of financial compensation and truth-sharing on victims'' healing and examines the role of retribution in the behavior and attitudes of communists and their families. Emphasizing the narratives of former political prisoners, secret collaborators, and former Communist Party members, David tests the potential of justice measures to contribute to a shared sense of justice and their ability to overcome the class structure and ideological divides of a formerly communist regime.Complementing his original research with analysis of legal judgments, governmental reports, and historical records, David finds that some justice measures were effective in overcoming material and ideological divides while others obstructed victims'' healing and inhibited the transformation of communists. Identifying "justice without reconciliation" as the primary factor hampering the process of overcoming the past in the Czech Republic, Communists and Their Victims promotes a transformative theory of justice that demonstrates that justice measures, in order to be successful, require a degree of reconciliation.

When the Thai state violently suppressed a massive prodemocracy protest in "Black May," 1992, it initiated an unprecedented period in Thailand. The military, shamed and chagrined, withdrew from political life, and the democracy movement had more latitude than ever before in Thailand''s history, gaining an institutional presence previously unseen. This extraordinary moment created a unique opportunity for the human rights movement to emerge, for the first time, on a national scale in Thailand.Don F. Selby examines this era of Thai political history to determine how and why the time was ripe for such developments. By placing greater emphasis on human rights as an anthropological concern, he focuses on the understandings that social actors draw from human rights struggles. He concludes that what gave emergent human rights in Thailand their shape, force, and trajectories are the ways that advocates engaged, contested, or reworked debates around Buddhism in its relationship to rule and social structure; political struggle in relation to a narrative of Thai democracy that disavowed egalitarian movements; and traditional standards of social stratification and face-saving practices. In this way, human rights ideals in Thailand emerge less from global-local translation and more as a matter of negotiation within everyday forms of sociality, morality, and politics.

Human rights are increasingly described as being in crisis, but the ideals inherent in them remain appealing. Human Rights Transformation in Practice demonstrates how these ideals are embedded in everyday social practice and activism, and how they can be reinterpreted and redefined in a variety of contexts and for a range of problems.

Abena Ampofoa Asare identifies the documents, testimonies, and petitions gathered by Ghana's National Reconciliation Commission as a portal to an unprecedented public archive of Ghanaian political history as told by the self-described survivors of human rights abuse.

Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India argues that, although the right to religious freedom is enshrined in India's constitution, mass conversions to minority religions have complicated the practice of this right, which is increasingly invoked to restrict, rather than defend, the freedoms of minorities and women.

Beyond Virtue and Vice examines human rights practices that bring criminal law to bear on sexuality, gender, and reproduction and seek to articulate if, when, and under what conditions, recourse to criminal law is compatible with human rights in matters of gender expression and equality, sexuality, and reproductive health and justice.

William H. Meyer defines global governance as the management of global issues within a political space that has no single centralized authority. Employing a combination of historical, quantitative, normative, and policy analyses, he presents a series of case studies at the intersection of power politics and international justice.

Sarita Cargas contends that the field of human rights should be treated as an academic discipline in higher education contexts, possessing as it does a canon of literature, a community of scholars, and a methodology. Her book offers practical recommendations for creating human-rights programs at the university level in the United States.

Religious Freedom Under Scrutiny argues that without freedom of religion or belief, human rights cannot fully address the needs, yearnings, and vulnerabilities of human beings and that marginalizing freedom of religion or belief would weaken the plausibility and legitimacy of the entire system of human rights.

Through participant observation and in-depth interviews, Sustaining Life explores how the South African AIDS movement transformed public health institutions, changed policy norms, and enabled near-universal access to treatment to sustain the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS.

Joyful Human Rights espouses a joy-centered approach that provides new insights into foundational human rights issues. William Paul Simmons offers a framework-surveying a more comprehensive understanding of human experiences-for theorizing and practicing a more affirmative and robust notion of human rights.

Founded in 1969, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is an intergovernmental organization whose purpose is the strengthening of solidarity among Muslims. With expectations as to the OIC's role in global human rights that are, to date, unfulfilled, this volume demonstrates the potential, obstacles, and shortcomings of the OIC.

Indigeneity contains a paradox: indigenous communities are incorporated into and separated from the legal system of the postcolonial nation state. The Indigenous Paradox explores indigenous rights cases from north and south America in order to shed light on issues of shared sovereignty, multiculturalism, and legal pluralism.

Human Rights or Global Capitalism examines the application of neoliberal policies from a human rights perspective and asks whether states, by outsourcing to the private sector many services with a direct impact on human rights, abdicate their responsibilities to uphold human rights and violate international law.

Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa provides a comprehensive evaluation of the TRC process and its impact on South African society. Based on a six-year study, the volume draws on an analysis of the victim hearings, amnesty hearings, institutional hearings, public opinion survey data, and extensive interviews.

Landsman discusses the difficulties inherent in prosecuting crimes against humanity, from the Eichmann trial to Milosevic.

Providing a novel conceptual framework and rich case studies of the Roma in France and the Czech Republic, Zoltan I. Buzas sheds light on the ways in which states are able to resist unwanted human rights obligations by circumventing international human rights norms without violating the laws designed to protect them.

Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique provides a bracing and controversial analysis of the scope of human rights and lays the groundwork for a multicultural and more universal understanding of these rights.

"This book ... offers comprehensive conceptual and practical observations and recommendations that will serve the international human rights community for many years to come."-Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights

Clan Cleansing in Somalia deals with the transformative violence that helped cause the collapse of the Somali state in 1991. Kapteijns argues that public acknowledgment of the clan cleansing of this period is indispensable to social and moral repair and to the critical memory work required from Somalis on all sides of this conflict.

Drawing on domestic and international law, as well as on judgments given by courts and human rights treaty bodies, Gender Stereotyping offers perspectives on how wrongful gender stereotypes can be effectively eliminated through the transnational legal process in order to ensure women's equality and exercise of their human rights.

Glenda Sluga traces internationalism through its rise before World War I, its mid-century apogee, and its decline after 9/11. Drawing on archival material and contemporary accounts, this innovative history restores internationalism as essential to understanding nationalism in the twentieth century.

Unmaking the Global Sweatshop gathers the work of leading anthropologists and ethnographers studying the global garment industry's impact on workers' well-being and examines the relationship between the politics of labor and initiatives to protect workers' health and safety.

This remarkable book demonstrates through in-depth case studies from ten countries around the world how the forensic exhumation of mass graves is inextricably intertwined with grassroots initiatives, national political developments, international human rights advocacy, and transnational claims of transitional justice.

The ruthless military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 betrayed the country''s people, presiding over massive disappearances of its citizenry and, in the process, destroying the state''s trustworthiness as the guardian of safety and well-being. Desperate relatives risked their lives to find the disappeared, and one group of mothers defied the repressive regime with weekly protests at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. How do societies cope with human losses and sociocultural traumas in the aftermath of such instances of political violence and state terror?In Argentina Betrayed, Antonius C. G. M. Robben demonstrates that the dynamics of trust and betrayal that convulsed Argentina during the dictatorship did not end when democracy returned but rather persisted in confrontations over issues such as the truth about the disappearances, the commemoration of the past, and the guilt and accountability of perpetrators. Successive governments failed to resolve these debates because of erratic policies made under pressure from both military and human rights groups. Mutual mistrust between the state, retired officers, former insurgents, and bereaved relatives has been fueled by recurrent revelations and controversies that prevent Argentine society from conclusively coming to terms with its traumatic past.With thirty years of scholarly engagement with Argentina—and drawing on his extensive, fair-minded interviews with principals at all points along the political spectrum—Robben explores how these ongoing dynamics have influenced the complicated mourning over violent deaths and disappearances. His analysis deploys key concepts from the contemporary literature of human rights, transitional justice, peace and reconciliation, and memory studies, including notions of trauma, denial, accountability, and mourning. The resulting volume is an indispensable contribution to a better understanding of the terrible crimes committed by the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s and their aftermath.

In Strategies of Compliance with the European Court of Human Rights, Andreas von Staden looks at the nature of human rights challenges in two enduring liberal democracies—Germany and the United Kingdom. Employing an ambitious data set that covers the compliance status of all European Court of Human Rights judgments rendered until 2015, von Staden presents a cross-national overview of compliance that illustrates a strong correlation between the quality of a country''s democracy and the rate at which judgments have met compliance. Tracing the impact of violations in Germany and the United Kingdom specifically, he details how governments, legislators, and domestic judges responded to the court''s demands for either financial compensation or changes to laws, policies, and practices.Framing his analysis in the context of the long-standing international relations debate between rationalists who argue that actions are dictated by an actor''s preferences and cost-benefit calculations, and constructivists, who emphasize the influence of norms on behavior, von Staden argues that the question of whether to comply with a judgment needs to be analyzed separately from the question of how to comply. According to von Staden, constructivist reasoning best explains why Germany and the United Kingdom are motivated to comply with the European Court of Human Rights judgments, while rationalist reasoning in most cases accounts for how these countries bring their laws, policies, and practices into sufficient compliance for their cases to be closed. When complying with adverse decisions while also exploiting all available options to minimize their domestic impact, liberal democracies are thus both norm-abiding and rational-instrumentalist at the same time—in other words, they choose their compliance strategies rationally within the normative constraint of having to comply with the Court''s judgments.

Mexico's Human Rights Crisis offers a broad survey of the human rights issues that plague Mexico. Impunity, contributors argue, is the root cause of a climate of generalized violence that is carried out, condoned, or ignored by the state and precludes any hope for justice.