New Books in Human Rights

A deeply considered examination of the “common good” reconciling Catholic Social Thought with secular politics and philosophy.The Second Vatican Council invites dialogue about the common good as the set of economic, political, legal, and cultural conditions for human flourishing, whether as individuals or as communities. However, some contemporary Catholic authors jeopardize this dialogue by polarizing liberalism and the common good, interpreting the commitment to individual liberty as incompatible with commitment to the common good.Human Dignity and Liberal Politics: Catholic Possibilities for the Common Good (Georgetown UP, 2023) clarifies the meaning of the common good through the three lenses of Aristotelian practical philosophy, twentieth-century Catholic Social Thought, and political liberalism. It makes the case that embracing the common good does not entail a rejection of liberalism, but that a commitment to liberal politics is compatible with faithful adherence to the Catholic tradition. The book argues that liberal political philosophy is not only compatible with Catholic Social Teaching but may also be the most appropriate framework for communicating the richness of the Church’s tradition today. Furthermore, accepting political liberalism can facilitate collaboration in political life between those who hold different worldviews and foster an enriched discussion of democracy, human rights, and religious liberty.Students and scholars of Christian ethics and political philosophy will benefit from this response to the challenges of dialogue about the “common good” in the context of the resurgence of this topic.Sam Young is a recent PhD graduate from Cardiff University, specialising in the theological history of European social Catholic movements active during the crisis years of the 1920s and 1930s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For three decades, Kenneth Roth led Human Rights Watch, transforming it from a small advocacy group into one of the most influential human rights organizations in the world. In Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments (Knopf, 2025), he offers a gripping inside account of the relentless fight against some of the world’s most abusive governments—from war crimes in Syria and Russia’s authoritarianism to China’s crackdown on dissent and the global erosion of democratic norms.Part memoir, part strategic guide, and part call to action, Righting Wrongs reveals the behind-the-scenes battles to hold governments accountable, the difficult choices human rights activists must make, and the lessons learned from engaging with autocrats, diplomats, and international institutions. With keen insight, Roth shows how pressure and advocacy can curb abuses and spark change—even against the most powerful forces.A must-read for anyone passionate about justice, democracy, and global affairs, Righting Wrongs is both an inspiring chronicle of courage and a crucial roadmap for the challenges ahead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Incarcerations: Bk-16 and the Search for Democracy in India (OR Books, 2024) pulls back the curtain on Indian democracy to tell the remarkable and chilling story of the Bhima Koregaon case, in which 16 human rights defenders (the BK-16) – professors, lawyers, journalists, poets – have been imprisoned, without credible evidence and without trial, as Maoist terrorists.Alpa Shah unravels how these alleged terrorists were charged with inciting violence at a year’s day commemoration in 2018, accused of waging a war against the Indian state, and plotting to kill the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Expertly leading us through the case, Shah exposes some of the world’s most shocking revelations of cyber warfare research, which show not only hacking of emails and mobile phones of the BK-16, but also implantation of the electronic evidence that was used to incarcerate them. Through the life histories of the BK-16, Shah dives deep into the issues they fought for and tells the story of India’s three main minorities – Adivasi, Dalits and Muslims – and what the search for democracy entails for them.Essential and urgent, The Incarcerations reveals how this case is a bellwether for the collapse of democracy in India, as for the first time in the nation’s history there is a multi-pronged, coordinated attack on key defenders of various pillars of democracy. In so doing, Shah shows that democracy today must be not only about protecting freedom of expression and democratic institutions, but also about supporting and safeguarding the social movements that question our global inequalities.About the Author: Alpa Shah is the Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford, with a Fellowship at All Souls College. She has written and presented for BBC Radio 4 Crossing Continents and From Our Own Correspondent. She is a twice-finalist for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing for her 2018 book Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas and her 2024 book The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India.About the Host: Stuti Roy has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria. These “displaced persons,” or DPs—Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and people from West Ukraine and the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939—refused to repatriate to the Soviet Union despite its demands. Thus began one of the first big conflicts of the Cold War. In Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War (2024), Sheila Fitzpatrick draws on new archival research, including Soviet interviews with hundreds of DPs, to offer a vivid account of this crisis, from the competitive maneuverings of politicians and diplomats to the everyday lives of DPs. American enthusiasm for funding the refugee organizations taking care of DPs quickly waned after the war. It was only after DPs were redefined—from “victims of war and Nazism” to “victims of Communism”—in 1947 that a solution was found: the United States would pay for the mass resettlement of DPs in America, Australia, and other countries outside Europe. The Soviet Union protested this “theft” of its citizens. But it was a coup for the United States. The choice of DPs to live a free life in the West, and the West’s welcome of them, became an important theme in America’s Cold War propaganda battle with the Soviet Union. A compelling story of the early Cold War, Lost Souls is also a rare chronicle of a refugee crisis that was solved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You Must Take Part In Revolution is a mind-bending graphic novel by award-winning journalist Melissa Chan and acclaimed dissident artist Badiucao. A near-future dystopia in the vein of George Orwell's Animal's Farm, the book explores technology, authoritarian government, and the lengths to which one will go in the fight for freedom. Three idealistic young people, forever changed by the real-life protests in Hong Kong in 2019, develop different beliefs about how best to fight against a techno-authoritarian China. The three characters take different paths toward transformative change, each struggling with how far they will go to fight for freedom and who they will become in the process. A powerful and important book about global totalitarian futures and the costs of resistance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With over 300 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and with emergencies and climate disasters becoming more common, AI and big data are being championed as forces for good and as solutions to the complex challenges of the aid sector.Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful (Polity, 2024) argues, however, that digital innovation engenders new forms of violence and entrenches power asymmetries between the global South and North. Dr. Madianou develops a new concept, technocolonialism, to capture how the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures, state power and market forces reinvigorates and reshapes colonial legacies. The concept of technocolonialism shifts the attention to the constitutive role that digital infrastructures, data and AI play in accentuating inequities between aid providers and people in need.Drawing on ten years of research on the uses of digital technologies in humanitarian operations, Dr. Mirca Madianou examines a range of practices: from the normalization of biometric technologies and the datafication of humanitarian operations to experimentation in refugee camps, which are treated as laboratories for technological pilots. In so doing, the book opens new ground in the fields of humanitarianism and critical AI studies, and in the debates in postcolonial studies, by highlighting the fundamental role of digital technologies in reworking colonial genealogies.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can we better protect survivors? How can we learn from their stories without causing further harm?With a pen in one hand and watercolours in the other, graphic journalist Dan Archer embarks on an investigation into human trafficking and how comics can be used to empower survivors and raise awareness of human rights issues. Based on years of research and reporting, Voices from Nepal: Uncovering Human Trafficking through Comics Journalism (University of Toronto Press, 2024) holds a mirror up to the ways that international and local NGOs study and combat trafficking, reflecting on both the positive and negative impacts they can have.Featuring interviews with trafficking survivors across Nepal, as well as former traffickers themselves, Archer dispels common misconceptions around labour trafficking, sex trafficking, organ trafficking, and more. Through a combination of live sketches, illustrated reportage, and visual testimonies, he champions the use of graphic journalism in human rights reporting and emphasizes the need for a survivor-centric approach to this work.Carefully compiled and expressively illustrated, Voices from Nepal sheds light on an important issue while fostering a discussion about how we can improve the tools and methods we use to make change.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Environments associated with migration are often seen as provisional, lacking both history and architecture. As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi demonstrates in Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke UP, 2023), a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. She moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material and visual archive of Dadaab, finding long migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives created through histories of partition, sedentarization, domesticity, and migration.This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, whose research focuses on human mobilities. She is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, introduces a book she co-edited with Dr Polina Ivanova (University of Bremen) titled Refugees and Asylum Seekers in East Asia: Perspective from Japan and Taiwan (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024), and she interviews one of the authors of the book, Dr Shu-fen Lin, at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University. In this chat, Shu-fen Lin explores the life story of a Vietnamese refugee, Father Nguyễn Văn Hùng, who escaped Vietnam via boat in the late 1970s and arrived in Japan, and then went to Australia and, eventually, Taiwan. The story of Father Nguyễn Văn Hùng intersects with the immigration and refugee policies of Japan, Australia and Taiwan, his fight for justice in Taiwan as well as Vietnam, and his future ambitions and goals.For those who are interested to know more about this conversation, here you can find the link of the book and here the link of the specific chapter. The book is available open access, so feel free to share it with your network! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

International Development Law: Rule of Law, Human Rights & Global Finance (Springer, 2020) describes how international development works, its shortcomings, its theoretical and practical foundations, along with prescriptions for the future. It provides the reader with new perspectives on the origins of global poverty, identifies legal impediments to sustainable economic growth, and provides a better understanding of the challenges faced by the international community in resolving global poverty issues. The text is structured into two basic parts: the first part deals with the theoretical and philosophic foundations of the subject, and the second part sets forth issues relating to the international financial architecture, namely, international borrowing practices, privatization, and emerging economies. In particular, the book provides new, innovative analysis on corruption as an impediment to sustainable development. The three interlocking facets of corruption are examined: transnational organized crime, Islamic-based international terrorism, and corruption within emerging economies and the international banking system. Thus fresh new analysis adds depth and clarity to a field that heretofore has been scattered and superficial. Finally, the “right to development” within the international human rights discourse is critically reviewed, particularly in light of new jurisprudence emerging from the African context.This book offers a fresh, new and balanced legal perspective on the development process. The text has been rigorously researched and has many practical facets based on the author’s professional experience within the international development field. It is an invaluable research and teaching tool since it takes a multidisciplinary approach to putting complex issues, legal trends and political questions into a clear, new perspective that is highly analytical as well as accessible to the reader. The author's elegant legal prose is both powerful and persuasive.Rumu Sarkar is Adjunct Law Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices