New Books in Human Rights

Mikaela Rabinowitz’s Incarceration without Conviction: Pretrial Detention and the Erosion of Innocence in American Criminal Justice (Routledge, 2021) addresses an understudied fairness flaw in the US criminal justice system: namely, the significant impact of pretrial detention on the millions of Americans held in local jails. On any given day, approximately 500,000 Americans are held in pretrial detention in US jails—not because they are a flight risk, but because they cannot pay for bail or a bail bond. Impacting disproportionally Black and poor individuals, Rabinowitz highlights how pretrial detention is at odds with juridical notions of fairness, effectively punishing Americans before guilt or innocence is ever explored in court. Using a mixed-methods approach, Rabinowitz argues that pretrial detention undermines both the presumption and the meaning of innocence in the American criminal justice system.Incarceration without Conviction is available through Routledge. Mikaela Rabinowitz is Director of Data, Research, and Analytics at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office.Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at McGill University, where they research the how UK asylum tribunals consider claims on the basis of belief. Their public writing focuses on issues of migration governance, as well as how inaccessibility and transphobia can shape the practice of anthropological research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Disability is often described as a tragedy, a crisis, or an aberration, though 1 in 5 people worldwide have a disability. Why is this common human experience rendered exceptional? In All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship (Beacon Press, 2022), disability studies scholar Jennifer Natalya Fink argues that this originates in our families. When we cut a disabled member out of the family story, disability remains a trauma as opposed to a shared and ordinary experience. This makes disability and its diagnosis traumatic and exceptional.Weaving together stories of members of her own family with sociohistorical research, Fink illustrates how the eradication of disabled people from family narratives is rooted in racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic sorting systems inherited from Nazis. By examining the rhetoric of genetic testing, she shows that a fear of disability begins before a child is even born and that a fear of disability is, fundamentally, a fear of care. Fink analyzes our racist and sexist care systems, exposing their inequities as a source of stigmatizing ableism.Inspired by queer and critical race theory, Fink calls for a lineage of disability a reclamation of disability as a history, a culture, and an identity. Such a lineage offers a means of seeing disability in the context of a collective sense of belonging, as cause for celebration, and is a call for a radical reimagining of carework and kinship. All Our Families challenges us to re-lineate disability within the family as a means of repair toward a more inclusive and flexible structure of care and community.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peer Schouten, of the Danish Institute for International Studies, has written a breathtaking book. Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa (Cambridge, 2022). Schouten mapped more than 1000 roadblocks in both the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In so doing, he illuminates the relationship between road blocks and what he calls “frictions of terrain” (p 262). These frictions demonstrate how rebels, locals and state security forces interact in the making, or unmaking, of state authority and legitimacy. Looking at roadblocks as a kind of infrastructural empire that existed before the Europeans first arrived in Africa, Schouten develops a new framework to understand the ways in which supply chain capitalism thrives in places of non-conventional logistical capacity, to reframe how state theory fails to capture the nature of statehood and local authority in Central Africa. Schouten calls out governments, the UN and other international actors, to highlight how control of roadblocks translates into control over mineral, territory or people. No analysis of the drivers of conflict anywhere in the world is complete without consideration of Peer Schouten’s groundbreaking book, Roadblock Politics.At the end of the interview, Schouten recommends two books: Mintz’s (1986) Sweetness of Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and Labatut’s (2021) When We Cease to Understand the World. Thomson recommends the CBC podcast Nothing is Foreign.Susan Thomson is an Associate 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

The life and legacy of a young Argentinian woman whose disappearance in 1976 haunts those she left behind It started with a coincidence--when Marc Raboy happened to discover that he shared a surname with a young leftwing Argentinian journalist who in June 1976 was ambushed by a rightwing death squad while driving with her family in the city of Mendoza. Alicia's partner, the celebrated poet and fellow Montonero Francisco "Paco" Urondo, was killed on the spot. Their baby daughter was taken and placed in an orphanage. Her daughter ultimately rescued but Alicia was never heard from again. In Looking for Alicia: The Unfinished Life of an Argentinian Rebel (Oxford University Press, 2022), Raboy pursues her story not simply to learn what happened when the post-Perón government in Argentina turned to state terror, but to understand what drove Alicia and others to risk their lives to oppose it. Author and subject share not only a surname--a distant ancestral connection--but youthful rebellion, journalistic ambition, and the radical politics that were a hallmark of the 1960s. Their destinies diverged through a combination of choice and circumstance. Using family archives, interviews with those who knew her, and transcripts from the 2011 trial of former Argentine security forces personnel involved in her disappearance, Raboy reassembles Alicia's story. He supplements his narrative with documents from Argentina's attempts to deal with the legacy of the military dictatorship, such as the 1984 report of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, Nunca Más ("Never Again"); as well as secret diplomatic correspondence recently made public through the U.S. State Department's Argentina Declassification Project. Looking for Alicia immerses readers in the years of the so-called "Dirty War," which, decades later, cast their shadow still. It also gives an unforgettably human face to the many thousands who disappeared during that dark era, those they left behind, and the power of the memories that bind them.Candela Marini is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Spanish at MSOE University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, I talk to two of the editors of Reorienting Hong Kong’s Resistance: Leftism, Decoloniality, and Internationalism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), Ellie Tse and JN Chien about this timely and important volume.The book brings together writing from activists and scholars that examine leftist and decolonial forms of resistance that have emerged from Hong Kong’s contemporary era of protests. Practices such as labor unionism, police abolition, land justice struggles, and other radical expressions of self-governance may not explicitly operate under the banners of leftism and decoloniality. Nevertheless, examining them within these frameworks uncovers historical, transnational, and prefigurative sightlines that can help to contextualize and interpret their impact for Hong Kong’s political future. This collection offers insights not only into Hong Kong's local struggles, but their interconnectedness with global movements as the city remains on the frontlines of international politics.Wen Liu is assistant research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, in Taiwan. She received her Ph.D. from Critical Social Psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Broadly interested in issues of race, sexuality, and affect, she has published in journals such as American Quarterly, Feminism & Psychology, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Subjectivity.JN Chien is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California researching US-Hong Kong integration in the Cold War transpacific through economic history, labor, migration, and detention in the shadow of multiple imperialisms. His writing has been published in Hong Kong Studies, The Nation, Jacobin, and Lausan.Christina Chung is a Ph.D. candidate researching the intersections of decolonial feminism and Hong Kong contemporary art at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her writing has been published by Asia Art Archive, College Arts Association Reviews, and in the anthology: Creating Across Cultures: Women in the Arts from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan (East Slope Publishing, 2017).Ellie Tse is a Ph.D. student in Cultural and Comparative Studies at the Department of Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research addresses the aftermath of inter-imperial encounters via visual, spatial and architectural practices across the Sinophone Pacific with a focus on Hong Kong.Clara Iwasaki is an assistant professor of modern Chinese literature at the University of Alberta. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. looked over into the promised land and tried to discern how we would get there, he called the poor to lead the way. The Poor People’s Campaign was part of a political strategy for building a movement expansive enough to tackle the enmeshed evils of racism, poverty, and war. In Freedom Church of the Poor: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign (Fortress Academic, 2021), Colleen Wessel-McCoy roots King’s political vision solidly in his theological ethics and traces the spirit of the campaign in the community and religious leaders who are responding to the devastating crises of inequality today.Colleen Wessel-McCoy is an Assistant Professor of Peace & Justice Studies and the Director of the Master of Arts in Peace and Social Transformation program at the Earlham School of Religion.Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar at the University of Florida. Email: Brady.McCartney@UFL.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Leon Hanna's book 25 Million Sparks: The Untold Story of Refugee Entrepreneurs (Cambridge UP, 2022) takes readers inside the Za'atari refugee camp to follow the stories of three courageous Syrian women entrepreneurs: Yasmina, a wedding shop and salon owner creating moments of celebration; Malak, a young artist infusing color and beauty throughout the camp; and Asma, a social entrepreneur leading a storytelling initiative to enrich children's lives. Anchored by these three inspiring stories, as well as accompanying artwork and poetry by Malak and Asma, the narrative expands beyond Za'atari to explore the broader refugee entrepreneurship phenomenon in more than twenty camps and cities across the globe. What emerges is a tale of power, determination, and dignity - of igniting the brightest sparks of joy, even when the rest of the world sees only the darkness. A significant portion of the author's proceeds from this book is being contributed to support refugee entrepreneurs in Za'atari and around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

International treaties are the primary means for codifying global human rights standards. However, nation-states are able to make their own choices in how to legally commit to human rights treaties. A state commits to a treaty through four commitment acts: signature, ratification, accession, and succession. These acts signify diverging legal paths with distinct contexts and mechanisms for rights change reflecting legalization, negotiation, sovereignty, and domestic constraints. How a state moves through these actions determines how, when, and to what extent it will comply with the human rights treaties it commits to. Using legal, archival, and quantitative analysis Committed to Rights: UN Human Rights Treaties and Legal Paths for Commitment and Compliance (Cambridge UP, 2021) shows that disentangling legal paths to commitment reveals distinct and significant compliance outcomes. Legal context matters for human rights and has important implications for the conceptualization of treaty commitment, the consideration of non-binding commitment, and an optimistic outlook for the impact of human rights treaties.Audrey L. Comstock is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University and Interim Director of the ASU Global Human Rights Hub. She received a PhD in Government from Cornell University. Her research focuses on the United Nations, international human rights law, negotiations, women's rights, and sexual exploitation and abuse.Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Michael Berry, Director of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies on American scapegoating, Chinese censorship and the sad story of Fang Fang's brave and influential COVID-19 memoir, Wuhan Diary.Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's vision of world order is founded upon the concept of strong, well-functioning states, in contrast to the destabilizing potential of failed or fragile states. This worldview has dominated international interventions over the past 30 years as enormous resources have been devoted to developing and extending the governance capacity of weak or failing states, hoping to transform them into reliable nodes in the global order. But with very few exceptions, this project has not delivered on its promise: countries like Somalia, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) remain mired in conflict despite decades of international interventions.In States of Disorder, Ecosystems of Governance: Complexity Theory Applied to UN Statebuilding in the DRC and South Sudan (Oxford University Press, 2022) Dr. Adam Day addresses the question, 'Why has UN state-building so consistently failed to meet its objectives?'. He proposes an explanation based on the application of complexity theory to UN interventions in South Sudan and DRC, where the UN has been tasked to implement massive stabilization and state-building missions. Far from being ''ungoverned spaces," these settings present complex, dynamical systems of governance with emergent properties that allow them to adapt and resist attempts to change them. UN interventions, based upon assumptions that gradual increases in institutional capacity will lead to improved governance, fail to reflect how change occurs in these systems and may in fact contribute to underlying patterns of exclusion and violence.Based on more than a decade of the author's work in peacekeeping, this book offers a systemic mapping of how governance systems work, and indeed work against, UN interventions. Pursuing a complexity-driven approach instead helps to avoid unintentional consequences, identifies meaningful points of leverage, and opens the possibility of transforming societies from within.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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