New Books in Human Rights

Why laws focused on data cannot effectively protect people—and how an approach centered on human rights offers the best hope for preserving human dignity and autonomy in a cyberphysical world.Ever-pervasive technology poses a clear and present danger to human dignity and autonomy, as many have pointed out. And yet, for the past fifty years, we have been so busy protecting data that we have failed to protect people. In Beyond Data: Reclaiming Human Rights at the Dawn of the Metaverse (MIT Press, 2023), Elizabeth Renieris argues that laws focused on data protection, data privacy, data security and data ownership have unintentionally failed to protect core human values, including privacy. And, as our collective obsession with data has grown, we have, to our peril, lost sight of what’s truly at stake in relation to technological development—our dignity and autonomy as people.Far from being inevitable, our fixation on data has been codified through decades of flawed policy. Renieris provides a comprehensive history of how both laws and corporate policies enacted in the name of data privacy have been fundamentally incapable of protecting humans. Her research identifies the inherent deficiency of making data a rallying point in itself—data is not an objective truth, and what’s more, its “entirely contextual and dynamic” status makes it an unstable foundation for organizing. In proposing a human rights–based framework that would center human dignity and autonomy rather than technological abstractions, Renieris delivers a clear-eyed and radically imaginative vision of the future.At once a thorough application of legal theory to technology and a rousing call to action, Beyond Data boldly reaffirms the value of human dignity and autonomy amid widespread disregard by private enterprise at the dawn of the metaverse.Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This book announces the new, interdisciplinary field of critical disaster studies. Unlike most existing approaches to disaster, critical disaster studies begins with the idea that disasters are not objective facts, but rather are interpretive fictions--and they shape the way people see the world. By questioning the concept of disaster itself, critical disaster studies reveals the stakes of defining people or places as vulnerable, resilient, or at risk.As social constructs, disaster, vulnerability, resilience, and risk shape and are shaped by contests over power. Managers and technocrats often herald the goals of disaster response and recovery as objective, quantifiable, or self-evident. In reality, the goals are subjective, and usually contested. Critical disaster studies attends to the ways powerful people often use claims of technocratic expertise to maintain power. Moreover, rather than existing as isolated events, disasters take place over time. People commonly imagine disasters to be unexpected and sudden, making structural conditions appear contingent, widespread conditions appear local, and chronic conditions appear acute. By placing disasters in broader contexts, critical disaster studies peels away that veneer.With chapters by scholars of five continents and seven disciplines, Critical Disaster Studies (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) asks how disasters come to be known as disasters, how disasters are used as tools of governance and politics, and how people imagine and anticipate disasters. The volume will be of interest to scholars of disaster in any discipline and especially to those teaching the growing number of courses on disaster studies.Anna Levy researches and teaches on emergency, crisis, and development practice & politics at Fordham & New York Universities. She is the founder and principal of Jafsadi.works, a research collective focused on advancing structural and participatory accountability in non-profit, movement, multilateral, city, and policy strategies. You can follow her @politicoyuntura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Perpetrators of mass violence are commonly regarded as evil. Their violent nature is believed to make them commit heinous crimes as members of state agencies, insurgencies, terrorist organizations, or racist and supremacist groups. Upon close examination, however, perpetrators are contradictory human beings who often lead unsettlingly ordinary and uneventful lives. Drawing on decades of on-the-ground research with perpetrators of genocide, mass violence, and enforced disappearances in Cambodia and Argentina, Antonius Robben and Alex Hinton explore how researchers go about not just interviewing and writing about perpetrators, but also processing their own emotions and considering how the personal and interpersonal impact of this sort of research informs the texts that emerge from them. Through interlinked ethnographic essays, methodological and theoretical reflections, and dialogues between the two authors, Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity's Dark Side (Stanford UP, 2023) conveys practical wisdom for the benefit of other researchers who face ruthless perpetrators and experience turbulent emotions when listening to perpetrators and their victims. Perpetrators rarely regard themselves as such, and fieldwork with perpetrators makes for situations freighted with emotion. Research with perpetrators is a difficult but important part of understanding the causes of and creating solutions to mass violence, and Robben and Hinton use their expertise to provide insightful lessons on the epistemological, ethical, and emotional challenges of ethnographic fieldwork in the wake of atrocity.Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gendering Peace in Violent Peripheries: Marginality, Masculinity, and Feminist Agency (Routledge, 2022) forward Assam (and Northeast India) as a specific location for studying operations of gendered power in multi-ethnic, conflict-habituated geopolitical peripheries globally.In the shifting and relational margins of such peripheral societies, power and agency are constantly negotiated and in flux. Notions of masculinity are redefined in an interlaced environment of militarization, hyper-masculinization, and gendered violence. These interconnections inform victimhood and agency among the most vulnerable marginalised constituencies – namely, women and migrants. By centering the marginalised in its inquiry, the book analyses obstacles to achieving positive, organic peace based on cooperation and mutual healing. The tools used to perpetuate an endless cycle of violence that makes conflict a habit – a way of life – are identified in order to enable resistance against them from within the margins. Such resistance must be based on reflexivity and strategic, cautious radicalism. This involves critically interrogating the inherent connections between engendered pasts and feminist futures, local changes and global contexts, as well as between small, incremental changes and big shifts impacting entire societies, nations, and global orders.This book will be of much interest to students of ethnic conflict, conflict resolution, feminist peace, and Asian/South Asian politics.Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anjan Sundaram is an award-winning journalist who has written three books on African people and places: Democratic Republic of Congo in Stringer, Rwanda in Bad News and now Central African Republic in Breakup. Each of Anjan’s books are glorious for their storytelling, told in great detail through years professional engagement with violence, war and genocide from the perspective of those living through it.I’m delighted to have Anjan with me today to talk about his forthcoming book: Break Up: A Marriage in Wartime (Catapult 2023). I read the book in a single sitting, for the prose is unflinching in its human rights reporting of the ongoing civil war in the Central African Republic. It is also about the demise of a marriage, meaning Break Up documents the ways in which war and marriage tear people apart.At the end of our interview, Anjan recommends A House Without Windows, a graphic novel by Didier Kassaï (Simon & Schuster 2021).Susan Thomson is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of producing academic knowledge about African places and people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Women’s rights activists around the world have commonly understood gendered violence as the product of so-called traditional family structures, from which women must be liberated. Counseling Women: Kinship Against Violence in India (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) contends that this perspective overlooks the social and cultural contexts in which women understand and navigate their relationships with kin.This book follows frontline workers in India, called family counselors, as they support women who have experienced violence at home in the context of complex shifting legal and familial systems. Drawing on ethnographic research at counseling centers in Jaipur, Rajasthan, Julia Kowalski shows how an individualistic notion of women’s rights places already vulnerable women into even more precarious positions by ignoring the reality of the social relations that shape lives within and beyond the family. Thus, rather than focusing on attaining independence from kin, family counselors in India instead strive to help women cultivate relationships of interdependence in order to reimagine family life in the wake of violence. Counselors mobilize the beliefs, concepts, and frameworks of kinship to offer women interactive strategies to gain agency within the family, including multigenerational kin networks encompassing parents, in-laws, and other extended family. Through this work, kinship becomes a resource through which people imagine and act on new familial futures.In viewing this reliance on kinship as part of, rather than a deviation from, global women’s rights projects, Counseling Women reassesses Western liberal feminism’s notions of what it means to have agency and what constitutes violence, and retheorizes the role of interdependence in gendered violence and inequality as not only a site of vulnerability but a potential source of strength.Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Melanie 0'Brien's book From Discrimination to Death: Genocide Process Through a Human Rights Lens (Routledge, 2022) studies the process of genocide through the human rights violations that occur during genocide. Using individual testimonies and in-depth field research from the Armenian Genocide, Holocaust and Cambodian Genocide, this book demonstrates that a pattern of specific escalating human rights abuses takes place in genocide. Offering an analysis of all these particular human rights as they are violated in genocide, the author intricately brings together genocide studies and human rights, demonstrating how the ‘crime of crimes’ and the human rights law regime correlate. The book applies the pattern of rights violations to the Rohingya Genocide, revealing that this pattern could have been used to prevent the violence against the Rohingya, before advocating for a greater role for human rights oversight bodies in genocide prevention.The pattern ascertained through the research in this book offers a resource for governments and human rights practitioners as a mid-stream indicator for genocide prevention. It can also be used by lawyers and judges in genocide trials to help determine whether genocide took place. Undergraduate and postgraduate students, particularly of genocide studies, will also greatly benefit from this book.Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Taking Sides: A Memoir about Love, War, and Changing the World (Scribe, 2023) is a personal memoir by Sherine Tadros, the United Nations Representative and Deputy Director of Advocacy for Amnesty International. An award-winning broadcast journalist and war correspondent for Sky News and Al Jazeera English, where she reported on the Gaza War, the Arab Spring, and rise of the Islamic State, Tadros decided in 2016 to leave journalism for human rights activism after concluding that her reporting work “ended up at the wrong point”. In this wide-ranging interview she talks about overcoming discrimination as an Egyptian-British “halfie”, a woman, and an immigrant, the importance and limits of being an acclaimed war correspondent, the duty she feels to fight for the rights of others and why individual action makes a difference.Nicholas Bequelin is a human rights professional with a PhD in history and a scholarly bent. He has worked about 20 years for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, most recently as Regional director for Asia. He’s currently a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at Yale Law School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Miriam Bak McKenna is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University (Denmark). Her first monograph, Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law (Brill, 2023), adopts a new approach to self-determination’s international legal history, tracing the ways in which various actors have sought to reinvent self-determination in different juridical, political, and economic iterations to create the conditions for global transformation. The value of the book’s approach lies not only in a more nuanced understanding of self-determination’s legal history, but also in excavating the multiple ways in which actors, particularly those from the Global South, have challenged the existing normative and legal structures which rendered them unequal under the European system of international law. Rethinking this process touches on issues that are relevant not only to debates about the enduring legacy of imperialism in our present, but also to contemporary discussions of the position self-determination has come to occupy in international law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on International Horizons, Ellen Chesler interviews Rebecca Adami and Fatima Sator, editor and co-author of Women and the UN: A New History of Women's International Human Rights (Routledge, 2022) that debunks the myth that the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were Western male-dominated inventions. Moreover, the authors discuss how women did not act as a unified bloc in the first chapters of global governance, and that it has been women from the Global South such as Marie Sivomey from Togo, Jaiyeola Aduke Moore from Nigeria, Jeanne Martin Cissé from Guinea, Aziza Hussein from Egypt, Artati Marzuki from Indonesia, and Carmela Aguilar from Peru, Bertha Lutz from Brazil and Minerva Bernardino from Dominican Republic who were the main drivers of feminism in the early stages of the UN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices