New Books in Human Rights

The Gender Regime of Anti-Liberal Hungary (Palgrave, 2021) explains a new type of political order that emerged in Hungary in 2010: a form of authoritarian capitalism with an anti-liberal political and social agenda. Eva Fodor analyzes an important part of this agenda that directly targets gender relations through a set of policies, political practice and discourse—what she calls “carefare.” The book reveals how this is the anti-liberal response to the crisis-of-care problem and establishes how a state carefare regime disciplines women into doing an increasing amount of paid and unpaid work without fair remuneration. Fodor analyzes elements of this regime in depth and contrasts it to other social policy ideal-types, demonstrating how carefare is not only a set of policies targeting women, but an integral element of anti-liberal rule that can be seen emerging globally.Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 1949 Geneva Conventions are the most important rules for armed conflict ever formulated. To this day they continue to shape contemporary debates about regulating warfare, but their history is often misunderstood. For most observers, the drafters behind these treaties were primarily motivated by liberal humanitarian principles and the shock of the atrocities of the Second World War. In Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. Boyd van Dijk “shows how the final text of the 1949 Conventions, far from being an unabashedly liberal blueprint, was the outcome of a series of political struggles among the drafters, many of whom were not liberal and whose ideas changed radically over time. Nor were they merely a product of idealism or even the shock felt in the wake of Hitler’s atrocities. Constructing the Conventions meant outlawing some forms of inhumanity while tolerating others. It concerned a great deal more than simply recognising the shortcomings of Internatinal law as revealed by the experience of the Second World War. In making the Conventions, drafters sought to contest European imperial rule, empower the ICRC, challenge state sovereignty, fight Cold War rivalries, ensure rights during wartime, reinvent the concept of war crimes and prepare for (civil) wars to come.”Dr. van Dijk argues that to understand the politics and ideas of the Conventions' drafters is to see them less as passive characters responding to past events than as active protagonists trying to shape the future of warfare. In many different ways, they tried to define the contours of future battlefields by deciding who deserved protection and what counted as a legitimate target. Outlawing illegal conduct in wartime did as much to outline the concept of humanized war as to establish the legality of waging war itself.Using never previously accessed archival materials, the book provides a comprehensive historical account of the Conventions' past and contributes to a deeper understanding of the most important treaty of humanitarian law. The book therefore presents an eye-opening account of the making of international law and offers both historians and legal scholars with detailed information about international law's origins.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

This book cuts new ground by applying a human rights lens of analysis to domestic mental health laws. It makes a timely contribution into the discourse regarding mental health, supported decision-making and disability rights in the post CRPD era. In A New Era for Mental Health Law and Policy: Supported Decision-Making and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Cambridge University Press, 2017) Research Fellow Dr Piers Gooding challenges law makers to bring domestic laws into compliance with the CRPD. At the same time, Gooding confronts the pragmatic concerns which continue to shape these same laws, such as the case where a person's mental impairment is perceived as a risk to self or others.  I had a great chat with Dr. Gooding in this hour; we spoke about arguments for and against coercive interventions, the right to and meaning of autonomy, tensions between rights based legalism and clinical governance, and more. We spoke about how domestic mental health laws have evolved since the 1980s, and especially since the introduction of the CRPD, and where to go from here. Some of the scholarship mentioned in our conversation included that of Tina Minkowitz, John Fanning, and the collaborative work of Piers himself with Bernadette McSherry, Cath Roper, and Flick Grey.   Dr Piers Gooding is a Research Fellow at the Melbourne Social Equity Institute and Melbourne Law School, and is currently an Open Science Fellow at the Mozilla Foundation. His work focuses on the law and politics of disability and mental health, with a special interest in issues of legal capacity, decision-making, technology, and human rights.Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Acts of repetition abound in international law. Security Council Resolutions typically start by recalling, recollecting, recognising or reaffirming previous resolutions. Expert committees present restatements of international law. Students and staff extensively rehearse fictitious cases in presentations for moot court competitions. Customary law exists by virtue of repeated behaviour and restatements about the existence of rules. When sources of international law are deployed, historically contingent events are turned into manifestations of pre-given and repeatable categories.In Repetition and International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Dr. Wouter Werner studies the workings of repetition across six discourses and practices in international law. It links acts of repetition to similar practices in religion, theatre, film and commerce. Building on the dialectics of repetition as set out by Søren Kierkegaard, the book examines how repetition in international law is used to connect concrete practices to something that is bound to remain absent, unspeakable or unimaginable.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

Raj Balkaran interviews Walter Dorn (Professor of Defence Studies, Royal Military College) and Andrew Bartles-Smith (Head of Global Affairs, International Committee of the Red Cross) about very timely and important research at the intersection of ancient Indian ethics and modern global discourse.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Max Krochmal and Todd Moye’s Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas (University of Texas Press, 2021) is a critical contribution that uncovers histories of activism in the lone state. From El Paso, Dallas, and to the Rio Grande Valley, social justice initiatives were critical for fighting Jim Crow and Juan Crow. The contributors make the case that various towns and cities across the state developed coalitions across Black and Brown racial lines.In this episode, Tiffany speaks with Drs. Max Krochmal, Katherine Bynum, and Todd Moye about the process for collecting histories of the long liberation struggles in Texas. Moye, Krochmal, and other Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex joined forces to create a coalition of professionals to spearhead the creation of Civil Rights in Black and Brown, a digital oral history project that holds over a hundred oral interviews. As a graduate student at Texas Christian University, Bynum worked alongside Krochmal to document and preserve the oral records of activists and traveled with other peers to learn more about the hidden history of Jim Crow discrimination in the state.Tiffany González is an Assistant Professor of History at James Madison University. She is a historian of Chicana/Latinx history, American politics and social movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From 1942 through 1972, American biomedical researchers deliberately infected people with hepatitis. Government-sponsored researchers were attempting to discover the basic features of the disease and the viruses causing it, and develop interventions that would quell recurring outbreaks. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-person interviews, Sydney Halpern traces the hepatitis program from its origins in World War II through its expansion during the initial Cold War years, to its demise in the early 1970s amid outcry over research abuse. The subjects in hepatitis studies were members of stigmatized groups--conscientious objectors, prison inmates, and developmentally disabled adults and children. Dangerous Medicine: The Story Behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis (Yale UP, 2021) reveals how researchers invoked military and scientific imperatives and the rhetoric of common good to win support for the experiments and access to potential recruits. Halpern examines consequences of participation for subjects' long-term health, and raises troubling questions about hazardous human experiments aimed at controlling today's epidemic diseases.Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Food insecurity poses one of the most pressing development and human security challenges in the world. Feeding the Hungry: Advocacy and Blame in the Global Fight Against Hunger (Oxford UP, 2020) examines the social and normative environments in which international anti-hunger organizations are working and argues that despite international law ascribing responsibility to national governments to ensure the right to food of their citizens, there is no shared social consensus on who ought to do what to solve the hunger problem. The book provides a new analytic model of transnational advocacy. In investigating advocacy around a critical economic and social right — the right to food — the book challenges existing understandings of the relationships among human rights, norms, and laws. Most important, the book provides an expanded conceptual tool kit with which we can examine and understand the social and moral forces at play in rights advocacy.Michelle Jurkovich is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She has served as a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, a Visiting Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology Fellow where she worked full-time for the Office of Food for Peace at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Her research interests include hunger and international food security, ethics, economic and social rights, and human security and her work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, and Global Governance, among other outlets.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 1895, forty-seven rebel military officers contested the terms of a law that granted them amnesty but blocked their immediate return to the armed forces. During the century that followed, numerous other Brazilians who similarly faced repercussions for political opposition or outright rebellion subsequently made claims to forms of recompense through amnesty. By 2010, tens of thousands of Brazilians had sought reparations, referred to as amnesty, for repression suffered during the Cold War-era dictatorship. Amnesty in Brazil: Recompense After Repression, 1895-2010 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) examines the evolution of amnesty in Brazil and describes when and how it functioned as an institution synonymous with restitution. Ann M. Schneider is concerned with the politics of conciliation and reflects on this history of Brazil in the context of broader debates about transitional justice. She argues that the adjudication of entitlements granted in amnesty laws marked points of intersection between prevailing and profoundly conservative politics with moments and trends that galvanized the demand for and the expansion of rights, showing that amnesty in Brazil has been both surprisingly democratizing and yet stubbornly undemocratic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Rule of Law in the United States: An Unfinished Project of Black Liberation (Hart, 2021), Dr. Paul Gowder focuses on examining the ideals of the American rule of law by asking: how do we interpret its history and the goals of its constitutional framers to see the rule of law ambitions its foundational institutions express? The book considers those constitutional institutions as inextricable from the problem of race in the United States and the tensions between the rule of law as a protector of property rights and the rule of law as a restrictor on arbitrary power and a guarantor of legal equality. In that context, it explores the distinctive role of Black liberation movements in developing the American rule of law. Finally, it considers the extent to which the American rule of law is compromised at its frontiers, and the extent that those compromises undermine legal protections Americans enjoy in the interior. It asks how America reflects the legal contradictions of capitalism and empire outside its borders, and the impact of those contradictions on its external goals.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