Virtual Library

The universal promise of contemporary international law has long inspired countries of the Global South to use it as an important field of contestation over global inequality. Taking three central examples, Sundhya Pahuja argues that this promise has been subsumed within a universal claim for a particular way of life by the idea of ‘development.’ As the horizon of the promised transformation and concomitant equality has receded ever further, international law has legitimized an ever-increasing sphere of intervention in the Third World. The post-war wave of decolonization ended in the creation of the developmental nation-state, the claim to permanent sovereignty over natural resources in the 1950s and 1960s was transformed into the protection of foreign investors, and the promotion of the rule of international law in the early 1990s has brought about the rise of the rule of law as a development strategy in the present day.

Statesmen and scholars were inspired by a period after World War I (when the victors devised Minority Treaties for the new and expanded states of Eastern Europe) at the time that the Cold War ended between 1989-1991. This book is the first study of that period--between 1878 and 1938--when the Great Powers established a system of external supervision to reduce the threats in Europe's most volatile regions of Irredentism, persecution, and uncontrolled waves of westward migration. It is a study of the strengths and weaknesses of an early state of international human rights diplomacy as practiced by rival and often-uninformed Western political leaders, ardent but divided Jewish advocates, and aggressive state minority champions, in the tumultuous age of nationalism and imperialism, Bolshevism and fascism between Bismarck and Hitler.

The Green Movement protests that erupted in Iran in 2009 amid allegations of election fraud shook the Islamic Republic to its core. For the first time in decades, the adoption of serious liberal reforms seemed possible. But the opportunity proved short-lived, leaving Iranian activists and intellectuals to debate whether any path to democracy remained open.

Offering a new framework for understanding democratization in developing countries governed by authoritarian regimes, Democracy in Iran is a penetrating, historically informed analysis of Iran’s current and future prospects for reform. Beginning with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Misagh Parsa traces the evolution of Iran’s theocratic regime, examining the challenges the Islamic Republic has overcome as well as those that remain: inequalities in wealth and income, corruption and cronyism, and a “brain drain” of highly educated professionals eager to escape Iran’s repressive confines. The political fortunes of Iranian reformers seeking to address these problems have been uneven over a period that has seen hopes raised during a reformist administration, setbacks under Ahmadinejad, and the birth of the Green Movement. Although pro-democracy activists have made progress by fits and starts, they have few tangible reforms to show for their efforts.

In Parsa’s view, the outlook for Iranian democracy is stark. Gradual institutional reforms will not be sufficient for real change, nor can the government be reformed without fundamentally rethinking its commitment to the role of religion in politics and civic life. For Iran to democratize, the options are narrowing to a single path: another revolution.

Each popular uprising of the "Arab Spring" was unique in some ways, and digital media was relevant in different ways in each case. Communities used social media to understand their shared grievances and learn about each other’s strategies. Inspiring stories of risk and success cascaded digitally between cities, and across borders. Digital networks activated for protest with immense impact. Comparing systems of political communication across the region, we find that the use of digital media by domestic and transnational political actors helps explain why some regimes were durable, and others fragile. Moreover, patterns in technology use also help explain why some political uprisings were successful, and others not. The long-term outcomes of this latest wave of anti-authoritarian sentiment are difficult to predict. But it is no longer possible to understand political communication or social movements in the region without investigating the impact of digital media on cultural, economic and political institutions.

In a long overdue contribution to geography and social theory, Katherine McKittrick offers a new and powerful interpretation of black women's geographic thought. In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material geographies, McKittrick reveals how human geographies are a result of racialized connections, and how spaces that are fraught with limitation are under acknowledged but meaningful sites of political opposition.

Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, the author addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs's attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter's philosophies.

Central to McKittrick's argument are the ways in which black women are not passive recipients of their surroundings and how a sense of place relates to the struggle against domination. Ultimately, McKittrick argues, these complex black geographies are alterable and may provide the opportunity for social and cultural change.

Thousands of naturalized French men and women had their citizenship revoked by the Vichy government during the Second World War. Once denaturalized, these men and women, mostly Jews who were later sent to concentration camps, ceased being French on official records and walked off the pages of history. As a result, we have for decades severely underestimated the number of French Jews murdered by Nazis during the Holocaust. In Denaturalized, Claire Zalc unearths this tragic record and rewrites World War II history.

At its core, this is a detective story. How do we trace a citizen made alien by the law? How do we solve a murder when the body has vanished? Faced with the absence of straightforward evidence, Zalc turned to the original naturalization papers in order to uncover how denaturalization later occurred. She discovered that, in many cases, the very officials who granted citizenship to foreigners before 1940 were the ones who retracted it under Vichy rule.

The idea of citizenship has always existed alongside the threat of its revocation, and this is especially true for those who are naturalized citizens of a modern state. At a time when the status of millions of naturalized citizens in the United States and around the world is under greater scrutiny, Denaturalized turns our attention to the precariousness of the naturalized experience―the darkness that can befall those who suddenly find themselves legally cast out.

Ils ont été appelés en Algérie au moment des « événements », en 1960. Deux ans plus tard, Bernard, Rabut, Février et d’autres sont rentrés en France. Ils se sont tus, ils ont vécu leurs vies. Mais parfois, il suffit de presque rien, d’une journée d’anniversaire en hiver, d’un cadeau qui tient dans la poche, pour que, quarante ans après, le passé fasse irruption dans la vie de ceux qui ont cru pouvoir le nier.

"Where is your wound?" asks Jean Genet in the lines Laurent Mauvignier uses as an epigraph to The Wound. By the time we have finished this four-part novel, we realize that for many the wound lies four decades back in "the Events" that people have tried to not talk about ever since: the Algerian War.
Chronicling the lives of two cousins--Bernard and Rabut--both in the present and at the time of the Algerian War of Independence in the 1960s, we get a full picture of the lasting effects this event had on the men who were involved. Through the fragments of their stories we see the whole history of the war: its atrocities, its horrors, and its hatreds. Mauvignier shows readers how the Algerian War, always present yet always repressed, has sickened the emotional and moral life of everyone it touched--and France itself, perhaps. The epigraph, like the novel, suggests that wounded men may even become the wound itself.

What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world.

This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival.

The mass graves from our long human history of genocide, massacres, and violent conflict form an underground map of atrocity that stretches across the planet's surface. In the past few decades, due to rapidly developing technologies and a powerful global human rights movement, the scientific study of those graves has become a standard facet of post-conflict international assistance. Digging for the Disappeared provides readers with a window into this growing but little-understood form of human rights work, including the dangers and sometimes unexpected complications that arise as evidence is gathered and the dead are named.

Adam Rosenblatt examines the ethical, political, and historical foundations of the rapidly growing field of forensic investigation, from the graves of the "disappeared" in Latin America to genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia to post–Saddam Hussein Iraq. In the process, he illustrates how forensic teams strive to balance the needs of war crimes tribunals, transitional governments, and the families of the missing in post-conflict nations. Digging for the Disappeared draws on interviews with key players in the field to present a new way to analyze and value the work forensic experts do at mass graves, shifting the discussion from an exclusive focus on the rights of the living to a rigorous analysis of the care of the dead. Rosenblatt tackles these heady, hard topics in order to extend human rights scholarship into the realm of the dead and the limited but powerful forms of repair available for victims of atrocity.

Digitization has transformed the way we interact with our social, political and economic environments. While it has enhanced the potential for citizen agency, it has also enabled the collection and analysis of unprecedented amounts of personal data. This requires us to fundamentally rethink our understanding of digital citizenship, based on an awareness of the ways in which citizens are increasingly monitored, categorized, sorted and profiled.

Drawing on extensive empirical research, Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society offers a new understanding of citizenship in an age defined by data collection and processing. The book traces the social forces that shape digital citizenship by investigating regulatory frameworks, mediated public debate, citizens' knowledge and understanding, and possibilities for dissent and resistance.