Virtual Library

Creating the Witness examines the role of film and the Internet in creating virtual witnesses to genocide over the past one hundred years. Leshu Torchin’s broad survey of media and the social practices around it investigates the development of popular understandings of genocide to achieve recognition and response, ultimately calling on viewers to act on behalf of human rights.

When it was first published in 1999, Crimes Against Humanity called for a radical shift from diplomacy to justice in international affairs. In vivid, non-legalese prose, leading human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson made a riveting case for holding political and military leaders accountable in international courts for genocide, torture, and mass murder.

Since then, fearsome figures such as Charles Taylor, Laurent Gbagbo, and Ratko Mladic have been tried in international criminal court, and a global movement has rallied around the human rights framework of justice. Any such legal framework requires constant evolution in order to stay relevant, and this newly revised and expanded volume brings the conversation up to date. In substantial new chapters, Robertson covers the protection of war correspondents, the problem of piracy, crimes against humanity in Syria, nuclear armament in Iran, and other challenges we are grappling with today. He criticizes the Obama administration's policies around "targeted killing" and the trials of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other "high value" detainees. By rendering a complex debate accessible, Robertson once again provides an essential guide for anyone looking to understand human rights and how to work toward a more complete blueprint for justice.

On the heels of Woodstock, a group of teen campers are inspired to join the fight for disability civil rights. A spirited look at grassroots activism.

What if development agencies and researchers are not driven by policy? Suppose that the things that make for 'good policy' - policy that legitimizes and mobilizes political support - in reality make it impossible to implement?

By focusing in detail on the unfolding activities of a development project in western India over more than ten years, as it falls under different policy regimes, this book takes a close look at the relationship between policy and practice in development. David Mosse shows how the actions of development workers are shaped by the exigencies of organizations and the need to maintain relationships rather than by policy; but also that development actors work hardest of all to maintain coherent representations of their actions as instances of authorized policy. Raising unfamiliar questions, Mosse provides a rare self-critical reflection on practice, while refusing to endorse current post-modern dismissal of development.

In Curated Stories, Sujatha Fernandes considers the rise of storytelling alongside the broader shift to neoliberal, free-market economies. She argues that stories have been reconfigured to promote entrepreneurial self-making and restructured as easily digestible soundbites mobilized toward utilitarian ends. Fernandes roams the globe and returns with stories from the Afghan Women's Writing Project, the domestic workers movement and the undocumented student Dreamer movement in the United States, and the Misión Cultura project in Venezuela. She shows how the conditions under which certain stories are told, the tropes through which they are narrated, and the ways in which they are responded to may actually disguise the deeper contexts of global inequality. Curated stories shift the focus away from structural problems and defuse the confrontational politics of social movements.

In this exploration of the way racism is translated from the print-only era to the cyber era the author takes the reader through a devastatingly informative tour of white supremacy online. The book examines how white supremacist organizations have translated their printed publications onto the Internet. Included are examples of open as well as 'cloaked' sites which disguise white supremacy sources as legitimate civil rights websites. Interviews with a small sample of teenagers as they surf the web show how they encounter cloaked sites and attempt to make sense of them, mostly unsuccessfully. The result is a first-rate analysis of cyber racism within the global information age. The author debunks the common assumptions that the Internet is either an inherently democratizing technology or an effective 'recruiting' tool for white supremacists. The book concludes with a nuanced, challenging analysis that urges readers to rethink conventional ways of knowing about racial equality, civil rights, and the Internet. 

In Dark Matters, Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brooks, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and The Book of Negroes, to contemporary art, literature, biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm. 

Alger, 1956. Jeune ouvrier communiste anticolonialiste rallié au FLN, Fernand Iveton a déposé dans son usine une bombe qui n'a jamais explosé. Pour cet acte symbolique sans victime, il est exécuté le 11 février 1957, et restera dans l'Histoire comme le seul Européen guillotiné de la guerre d'Algérie. Ce roman brûlant d'admiration, tendu par la nécessité de la justice et cinglant comme une sentence, lui rend hommage.

Lyrical and radical, a debut novel that created a sensation in France. Winner of the Prix Goncourt for first novel, one of the most prestigious literary awards in France. A young revolutionary plants a bomb in a factory on the outskirts of Algiers during the Algerian War. The bomb is timed to explode after work hours, so no one will be hurt. But the authorities have been watching. He is caught, the bomb is defused, and he is tortured, tried in a day, condemned to death, and thrown into a cell to await the guillotine. A routine event, perhaps, in a brutal conflict that ended the lives of more than a million Muslim Algerians. But what if the militant is a "pied-noir"? What if his lover was a member of the French Resistance? What happens to a "European" who chooses the side of anti-colonialism?By turns lyrical, meditative, and heart-stoppingly suspenseful, this novel by Joseph Andras, based on a true story, was a literary and political sensation in France, winning the Prix Goncourt for First Novel and being acclaimed by Le Monde as "vibrantly lyrical and somber" and by the journal La Croix as a "masterpiece".

Ariel Dorfman's 1991 award-winning drama is set in a country that ‘is probably Chile’ but ‘could be any country that has just departed from a dictatorship.’ Taking place in a remote beach house primarily on a single night and day, the play follows the actions of Paulina, who has been tortured by the previous regime and whose husband Gerardo, a human rights lawyer, has just been appointed to head a truth commission established by the new transitional government. When Gerardo’s car breaks down one night, he is picked up by the doctor Roberto Miranda. But in the voice of this good Samaritan, Gerardo's wife, Paulina Salas, thinks she recognizes another man—the one who raped and tortured her as she lay blindfolded in a military detention center years before.

Tracing the concept of human rights in Chinese political discourse since the late Qing dynasty, this comprehensive history convincingly demonstrates that-contrary to conventional wisdom-there has been a vibrant debate on human rights throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on little-known sources, Marina Svensson argues that the concept of human rights was invoked by the Chinese people well before the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and that it has continued to have strong appeal after 1949, both in Taiwan and on the mainland. These largely forgotten debates provide important perspectives on and contrasts to the official PRC line. The author gives particular attention to the issues of power and agency in describing the widely divergent views of official spokespersons, establishment intellectuals, and dissidents. Until quite recently the PRC dismissed human rights as a bourgeois slogan. Yet the globalization of human rights and the growing importance of the issue in bilateral and multilateral relations have forced the regime to embrace, or rather appropriate, the language of human rights, an appropriation that continues to be vigorously challenged by dissidents at home and abroad. By exploring the relationship between domestic and international human rights discourses, this study offers new insights not only into the Chinese but also into the Western human rights debate. Students and scholars of China and of human rights will find this work an important tool for understanding one of the great issues of our time.