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"When All Else Fails: International Adjudication of Human Rights Abuse Claims, 1976–1999."

Although interest in the consolidation and expansion of the international human rights regime has grown in recent years, little attention is accorded to the formal procedures that allow individuals aggrieved by states to appeal directly to an international audience. Using data for 82 countries between 1976 and 1999, this article examines the political and cultural factors that produce cross-national variation in the propensity of individuals to file allegations of human rights abuse with the Human Rights Committee.

"The Collective Dynamics of Racial Dehumanization and Genocidal Victimization in Darfur."

Sociologists empirically and theoretically neglect genocide. In this article, our critical collective framing perspective begins by focusing on state origins of race-based ideology in the mobilization and dehumanization leading to genocide. We elaborate this transformative dynamic by identifying racially driven macro-micro-macro-level processes that are theoretically underdeveloped and contested in many settings. We investigate generic processes by exploiting an unprecedented survey of refugees from the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

"Political crimes and serious violations of human rights."

Some images stick out in the collective memory of mankind and become icons for a whole generation. Among the most forceful images of our generation are the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, on 11 September 2001. These attacks revealed a new face of terrorism at the dawn of the 21st century, with new targets and new means, intended to produce many indiscriminate victims and without any concern for the offenders to save their own lives.

"Confessions without guilt: public confessions of state violence in Turkey."

Drawing on Austin’s speech act theory and on related theories of performativity and positioning, this article analyses the public confessions during the 1990s by three prominent state actors in Turkey about their direct involvement in state crimes against Kurds and left-wing political opponents. All three cases received significant media attention at the time. The aim of the article is not only to shed new light on those specific confessions by the perpetrators within the Turkish context, but also to develop further theoretical insights into the phenomenon of public confessions as such.

"Conditional decoupling: Assessing the impact of national human rights institutions, 1981 to 2004."

National human rights institutions, defined as domestic but globally legitimated agencies charged with promoting and protecting human rights, have emerged worldwide. This article examines the effect of these organizations on two kinds of human rights outcomes: physical integrity rights and civil and political rights. We analyze cross-national longitudinal data using regression models that account for the endogeneity of organizational formation.

"A Public Sociology for Human Rights."

A public sociology that will tackle the public issues of today requires the transformation of sociology as we know it. This is the stirring message of this volume—at the heart of sociology must lie a concern for society as such, the protection of those social relations through which we recognize each other as humans. Thus, the chapters focus on those fundamental human rights that uphold human community, first and foremost, against the colonizing projects of states and markets.

Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People

Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People is a riveting book that exposes the potential in each of us for acting unspeakably. John Conroy sits down with torturers from several nations and comes to understand their motivations. His compelling narrative has the tension of a novel. He takes us into a Chicago police station, two villages in the West Bank, and a secret British interrogation center in Northern Ireland, and in the process we are exposed to the experience of the victim, the rationalizations of the torturer, and the seeming indifference of the bystander.

"The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology"

In bracketing certain "Western" Enlightenment truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoretically a multiplicity of alternative truths encoded in our reified notion of culture, anthropologists may be "suspending the ethical" in our dealings with the "other." Cultural relativism, read as moral relativism, is no longer appropriate to the world in which we live, and anthropology, if it is to be worth anything at all, must he ethica