New Books in Human Rights

Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy (Cambridge UP, 2020) traces the role of human rights concerns in US foreign policy during the 1980s, focusing on the struggle among the Reagan administration and members of Congress. It demonstrates how congressional pressure led the administration to reconsider its approach to human rights and craft a conservative human rights policy centered on democracy promotion and anti-communism - a decision which would have profound implications for American attention to human rights. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard combines a comprehensive overview of human rights in American foreign relations with in-depth case studies of how human rights shaped US foreign policy toward Soviet Jewry, South African apartheid, and Nicaragua. Tracing the motivations behind human rights activism, this book demonstrates how liberals, moderates, and conservatives selectively invoked human rights to further their agendas, ultimately contributing to the establishment of human rights as a core moral language in US foreign policy.Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in U.S. and international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research examines the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Follow him on Twitter @ghgolub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict Over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America (Cornell UP, 2020), Theresa Keeley analyzes the role of intra-Catholic conflict within the framework of U.S. foreign policy formulation and execution during the Reagan administration. She challenges the preponderance of scholarship on the administration that stresses the influence of evangelical Protestants on foreign policy toward Latin America. Especially in the case of U.S. engagement in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Keeley argues, the bitter debate between the U.S. and Central American Catholics over the direction of the Catholic Church shaped President Reagan’s foreign policy.The flashpoint for these intra-Catholic disputes was the December 1980 political murder of four American Catholic missionaries in El Salvador. Liberal Catholics described nuns and priests in Central America who worked to combat structural inequality as human rights advocates living out the Gospel’s spirit. Conservative Catholics saw them as agents of class conflict who furthered the so-called Gospel, according to Karl Marx. The debate was an old one among Catholics, but, as Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns contends, it intensified as conservative, anticommunist Catholics played instrumental roles in crafting U.S. policy to fund the Salvadoran government and the Nicaraguan Contras.Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns describes the religious actors as human rights advocates and, against prevailing understandings of the fundamentally secular activism related to human rights, highlights religion-inspired activism during the Cold War. In charting the rightward development of American Catholicism, Keeley provides a new chapter in the history of U.S. diplomacy. She shows how domestic issues such as contraception and abortion joined with foreign policy matters to shift Catholic laity toward Republican principles at home and abroad.Allison Isidore is a graduate of the Religion in Culture Masters program at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Alexandra Grey about Dr. Grey’s book entitled Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study (De Gruyter, 2021).China has had constitutional minority language rights for decades, but what do they mean today? Answering with nuance and empirical detail, this book examines the rights through a sociolinguistic study of Zhuang, the language of China’s largest minority group. The analysis traces language policy from the Constitution to local government practices, investigating how Zhuang language rights are experienced as opening or restricting socioeconomic opportunity. The study finds that language rights do not challenge ascendant marketised and mobility-focused language ideologies which ascribe low value to Zhuang. However, people still value a Zhuang identity validated by government policy and practice.Rooted in a Bourdieusian approach to language, power and legal discourse, this is the first major publication to integrate contemporary debates in linguistics about mobility, capitalism and globalization into a study of China’s language policy.This book came out in May 2021 after almost a decade of Alex’s doctoral and postdoctoral work. Her doctoral dissertation was recognised as the best dissertation on the sociology of language, internationally, through the 2018 Joshua A. Fishman Award.For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Faith in Rights: Christian-Inspired NGOs at Work in the United Nations (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Amélie Barras explores why and how Christian nongovernmental organizations conduct human rights work at the United Nations. The book interrogates the idea that the secular and the religious are distinct categories, and more specifically that human rights, understood as secular, can be neatly distinguished from religion. It argues that Christianity is deeply entangled in the texture of the United Nations and shapes the methods and areas of work of Christian NGOs.To capture these entanglements, Dr. Barras analyzes—through interviews, ethnography, and document and archive analysis—the everyday human rights work of Christian NGOs at the United Nations Human Rights Council. She documents how these NGOs are involved in a constant work of double translation: they translate their human rights work into a religious language to make it relevant to their on-the-ground membership, but they also reframe the concerns of their membership in human rights terms to make them audible to UN actors. Faith in Rights is a crucial new evaluation of how religion informs Christian nongovernmental organizations' understandings of human rights and their methods of work, as well as how being engaged in human rights work influences these organizations' own religious identity and practice.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

Melissa Johnston, a peace and conflict studies lecturer at the University of Queensland and author of "Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy," discusses the shortcomings of gender interventions in Timor-Leste. She highlights how these initiatives, meant to empower women, often reinforce existing class and gender hierarchies. Johnston critiques the effectiveness of gender-responsive budgeting and microfinance, revealing how they may perpetuate patriarchal structures instead of fostering true equality. Her insights challenge conventional peacebuilding strategies and advocate for a deeper understanding of local dynamics.

Victim participation at the International Criminal Court (ICC) has routinely been viewed as an empty promise of justice or mere spectacle for audiences in the Global North, providing little benefit for victims. Why, then, do people in Kenya and Uganda engage in justice processes that offer so little, so late? How and why do they become the court’s victims and intermediaries, and what impact do these labels have on them? Victims and the Labour of Justice at the International Criminal Court: The Blame Cascade (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a response to these poignant questions, demonstrating that the notion of ‘justice for victims’ is not merely symbolic, expressive, or instrumental. On the contrary — as Leila Ullrich argues — the ICC’s methods of victim engagement are productive, reproducing the Court as a relevant institution and transforming victims in the Global South into highly gendered and racialized labouring subjects. Challenging the Court’s interplay with global capitalist relationships, the book makes visible the hidden labour of justice, and how it lures, disciplines, and blames both victims and victims’ advocates. Drawing on critical theory, criminological analysis, and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in The Hague, Kenya, and Uganda, Victims and the Labour of Justice at the International Criminal Court illuminates how the drive to include victims as participants in international criminal justice proceedings also creates and disciplines them as blameworthy capitalist subjects. Yet, as victim workers learn to ‘stop crying’, ‘be peaceful’, ‘get married’, ‘work hard’, and ‘repay debt’, they also begin to challenge the terms of global justice.Dr. Leila Ullrich is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford's Faculty of Law. Her research lies at the intersection of international criminal justice, transitional justice, victimology, and border criminology. Her work focuses on how global justice institutions construct gendered and racialized subjects and how these groups engage with or resist these processes. Outside academia, Leila worked as social stability analyst on the Syrian refugee crisis at the United Nations Development Programme in Lebanon and she has also worked as an intern for the ICC. She has also worked for the German Bundestag and the BBC World Service.Alex Batesmith is an Associate Professor in Legal Professions in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India (Stanford University Press, 2024). Against the backdrop of the global Black Lives Matter movement, debates around the social impact of hate crime legislation have come to the political fore. In 2019, the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice urgently asked how legal systems can counter bias and discrimination. In India, a nation with vast socio-cultural diversity, and a complex colonial past, questions about the relationship between law and histories of oppression have become particularly pressing. Recently, India has seen a rise in violence against Dalits (ex-untouchables) and other minorities. Consequently, an emerging "Dalit Lives Matter" movement has campaigned for the effective implementation of India's only hate crime law: the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA).Drawing on long-term fieldwork with Dalit survivors of caste atrocities, human rights NGOs, police, and judiciary, Sandhya Fuchs unveils how Dalit communities in the state of Rajasthan interpret and mobilize the PoA. Fuchs shows that the PoA has emerged as a project of legal meliorism: the idea that persistent and creative legal labor can gradually improve the oppressive conditions that characterize Dalit lives. Moving beyond statistics and judicial arguments, Fuchs uses the intimate lens of personal narratives to lay bare how legal processes converge and conflict with political and gendered concerns about justice for caste atrocities, creating new controversies, inequalities, and hopes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For more than 70 years, South Korea has woven the threat of North Korea into daily life. But now that threat has become mundane, and South Korean national security addresses family, public health, and national unity. Banal Security: Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses (Helsinki University Press, 2023) illustrates how as a result, queer Koreans are seen to represent a viral threat to national security. Taking readers from police stations and the Constitutional Court to queer activist offices and pride festivals, Timothy Gitzen shows how security weaves through daily life and diffuses the queer threat, in a context where queer Koreans are treated as viral carriers, disruptions to public order, and threats to family and culture.Timothy Gitzen is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wake Forest University.Qing Shen recently obtained his PhD in anthropology from Uppsala University, Sweden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

War forced millions of Syrians from their homes. It also forced them to rethink the meaning of home itself.In 2011, Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom. Brutal government repression transformed peaceful protests into one of the most devastating conflicts of our times, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora (Liveright, 2024) takes Syria’s refugee outflow as its point of departure. Based on hundreds of interviews conducted across more than a decade, it probes a question as intimate as it is universal: What is home? With gripping immediacy, Syrians now on five continents share stories of leaving, losing, searching, and finding (or not finding) home. Across this tapestry of voices, a new understanding emerges: home, for those without the privilege of taking it for granted, is both struggle and achievement. Recasting “refugee crises” as acts of diaspora-making, The Home I Worked to Make challenges readers to grapple with the hard-won wisdom of those who survive war and to see, with fresh eyes, what home means in their own lives.Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The redistribution of political and economic rights is inherently unequal in autocratic societies. Autocrats routinely divide their populations into included and excluded groups, creating particularistic citizenship through granting some groups access to rights and redistribution while restricting or denying access to others. This book asks: why would a government with powerful tools of exclusion expand access to socioeconomic citizenship rights? And when autocratic systems expand redistribution, whom do they choose to include?In Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship: Security, Development, and Local Membership in China (Stanford UP, 2024), Samantha A. Vortherms examines the crucial case of China—where internal citizenship regimes control who can and cannot become a local citizen through the household registration system (hukou)—and uncovers how autocrats use such institutions to create particularistic membership in citizenship. Vortherms shows how local governments explicitly manipulate local citizenship membership not only to ensure political security and stability, but also, crucially, to advance economic development. Vortherms demonstrates how autocrats use differentiated citizenship to control degrees of access to rights and thus fulfill the authoritarian bargain and balance security and economic incentives. This book expands our understanding of individual-state relations in both autocratic contexts and across a variety of regime types.Samantha Vortherms is an assistant professor at University of California, Irvine's Department of Political Science. She is a faculty affiliate at UCI’s Long U.S.-China Institute; its Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics program; and is a Non-resident Scholar at UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center. The primary focus of her research is on how processes of economic development affect institutional change and the relationship between the individual and the state. Her research has been published in journals such as The China Quarterly, World Development, Review of International Political Economy, Business and Politics, and Urban Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, her M.A. in International Relations at the University of Chicago, her A.M. in Public Policy from University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, and her B.A. from the University of Richmond.Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco, a nonresident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center, an alumnus of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. His research focuses on the economics of information, incentives, and institutions, primarily as applied to the development and governance of China. He created the unique Master’s of Science in Applied Economics at the University of San Francisco, which teaches the conceptual frameworks and practical data analytics skills needed to succeed in the digital economy.Lorentzen’s other NBN interviews relating to China’s economy and social control include Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts, on governance and quantification, Outsourcing Repression, on the use of nonstate actors for coercion, How China Escaped Shock Therapy, on China’s marketization procession, Invisible China, on the urban-rural divide, and Welfare for Autocrats, on the strategic targeting of poverty assistance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices