Virtual Library

This paper offers a critical analytic reconstruction of some of the main symbolic properties of annual UN Holocaust and Rwandan genocide commemorations since 2005. Applying a discourse‐historical approach (Wodak and Meyer 2010), it retraces how themes of guilt, responsibility, evil and redemption are woven together across annual commemorative performances in the hope of stabilizing shared patterns of cultural translation of the significance of these atrocities to globally dispersed communities. UN commemorative discourse characteristically links memories of Holocaust and Rwandan trauma in a ‘chain of communication’ with those of other episodes of brutality (e.g., Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur) chiefly to convey the continuity of human barbarity across time and endorse certain presuppositions regarding the fate of a fallen humanity in this more ‘post‐secular’ age. As scenes of mourning, UN commemorations unite participating international delegations in their expressions of grief for the victims of ‘preventable tragedies’ in the past but also, it must be said, their uncertainty regarding new horrors likely to occur in the future. The duty to remember is reiterated continuously as both a mark of respect to those who have already perished and as a warning of atrocities yet to unfold. This paper explores how the historical constancy of violence is interpreted by the UN through a detailed critical analysis of its recently inaugurated ‘remembrance through education’ programme aimed at a transnational collective learning from atrocity.

In this essay, Mohanty argues that Western feminist scholarship has reduced all women of the third world into a single, collective other. She critiques the approach to feminism and third-world women, arguing for more nuanced scholarship from Western scholars.

The UNESCO Associated Schools Project emphasizes world community, human rights, and international understanding. This article investigates the emergence and global diffusion of the project from 1953 to 2001, estimating the influence of national, regional, and world characteristics on the likelihood of a country adopting a UNESCO school. It also addresses the effects of national linkages to the international human rights regime. The results reveal that adoption rates are positively influenced by stronger national links to the human rights regime throughout the period and that various measures of the density of global society influence adoption, particularly after the institutionalization of human rights. Finally, the results demonstrate that democratic countries and nations with more expanded educational systems tend to adopt a UNESCO school before the period of human rights institutionalization. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the literature on the global environment and the diffusion of innovations in education.

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 torture occurs in democracies that ostensibly value justice, due process, and human rights, and yet the perpetrators and their superiors escape without punishment, revealing much about the dynamics of torture.

How does violence shape citizens’ preferences for conflict termination? The existing literature has argued that violence either begets sympathy for more violence or drives support for making peace. Focusing on the 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement, this article finds that victimhood dissociation strongly shapes these preferences. With victimhood dissociation, a discrepancy exists between objective and subjective victimization, and the effect of violence on peace attitudes depends on citizens’ subjective interpretations of their personal experiences of violence. Citizens who do not experience violence often see themselves as victims of the conflict and vice versa. Victimhood dissociation is linked to cultural stereotypes of victimhood as portrayed in elite narratives concerning the conflict. In Colombia, political leaders framed victimhood around rurality, business entrepreneurship, kidnapping, extortion, and disappearance. In 2016, this widespread narrative was instrumental for politicians opposing the peace agreement. Citizens who disassociated their personal experiences of violence from their self-understanding as victims were instrumental to the failure of the peace plebiscite.

In this monumental volume, Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer draw upon nearly one thousand interviews with civil rights activists, politicians, reporters, Justice Department officials, and hundreds of ordinary people who took part in the struggle, weaving a fascinating narrative of the civil rights movement told by the people who lived it.

Literature on global care work deals with biopolitical tensions between care markets and exclusionary migration regimes leading to the formation of transnational families. Nevertheless, it disregards how these tensions produce “illegal” families within countries of destination, catalyzing the mobilization of moral claims over their recognition in the local civil society. To fill this lacuna, this article looks at the interface between migration policies controlling the reproductive lives of migrant care workers and the mobilization of ethical claims and moral constructions of care from below (ie, movements and organizations advocating for care workers). Based on fieldwork in Israeli advocacy NGOs and the 2009 anti-deportation campaign, we suggest that the sociolegal position of migrant care workers’ families in destination countries is shaped not only by state policies and market dynamics but also by the types of social mobilizations, ethical evaluations, and pragmatic strategizing they spur in civil society. Findings show that while anti-deportation networks and NGO’s advocacy succeeded in achieving public recognition of the reproductive needs and lives of care workers, their forms of moral reasoning and strategizing reinforced definitions of care workers as primarily workers and of their children as humanitarian exceptions to the non-immigration regime. We conclude by arguing that the transformative power of the politics of ethical claims from below in stringent ethnonational regimes like the Israeli may be contingent on its not disrupting the tensions between wanted workers and unwanted families but rendering them manageable. As such, civil society’s social and moral agency broadens the range of actors and dynamics shaping the globalization of care as well as its contradictions.

This paper addresses how New York City's workfare program has structured opportunities for collective action by welfare recipients. As workfare blurs the distinction between wage workers and welfare recipients, it calls into question accepted understandings of the rights and obligations of welfare recipients and fosters new claims on the state. The concept of “cultural opportunity structures” can help to explain the political mobilization of workfare participants if it is linked to a Durkheimian tradition of cultural analysis attentive to symbolic classification. The dramaturgic approach to culture exemplified in the work of Erving Goffman can usefully complement this structural approach if a narrow focus on frames and framing processes is broadened to include interaction rituals and ceremonial profanation.

In the torrent of reporting on human rights in recent years far more attention is given to human rights violations in the non-Western world than in Euro-America. How should we explain this imbalance? … [W]e should look at the variable functions of the nation state, the shifting structures of international power, and the moral languages in which injustice is identified and its elimination advocated.