New Books in Human Rights

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

Abandoned airports. Shipping containers. Squatted hotels. These are just three of the many unusual places that have housed refugees in the past decade. The story of international migration is often told through personal odysseys and dangerous journeys, but when people arrive at their destinations a more mundane task begins: refugees need a place to stay. Governments and charities have adopted a range of strategies in response to this need. Some have sequestered refugees in massive camps of glinting metal. Others have hosted them in renovated office blocks and disused warehouses. They often end up in prefabricated shelters flown in from abroad.Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Tom Scott-Smith focuses on seven examples of emergency shelter, from Germany to Jordan, which emerged after the great "summer of migration" in 2015. Drawing on detailed ethnographic research into these shelters, the book reflects on their political implications and opens up much bigger questions about humanitarian action. By exploring how aid agencies and architects approached this basic human need, Dr. Scott-Smith demonstrates how shelter has many elements that are hard to reconcile or combine; shelter is always partial and incomplete, producing mere fragments of home. Ultimately, he argues that current approaches to emergency shelter have led to destructive forms of paternalism and concludes that the principle of autonomy can offer a more fruitful approach to sensitive and inclusive housing.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

Around the world, millions are forcibly displaced by conflict, climate change, and persecution. Some cross international borders, while others are displaced within their own countries. In We Wait for a Miracle: Health Care and the Forcibly Displaced (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Muhammad H. Zaman shares poignant stories across continents to highlight the health care experiences of refugees and forced migrants. For many of these people, health risks unfortunately become part of the fabric of everyday life as they navigate new countries that treat them with varying degrees of care and indifference.Across widely varied local systems, countries of origin, health concerns, and other contexts, Zaman finds that barriers to health care share these key factors: trust, social network, efficiency of the health system, and the regulatory framework of the host environment. A combination of these factors explains difficulties in accessing health care across the geographic and geopolitical spectrum and challenges the existing global public health framework, which is based entirely on local context. In moving stories that span seven countries—Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Colombia, and Venezuela—Zaman shares the everyday struggles of refugees, the internally displaced, and the stateless in accessing the health care they need.This unique look at an urgent global challenge addresses the issue of access for populations that are currently in distress due to civil war, economic collapse, or a conflict driven by external state actors. Organic social networks and trust, rather than top-down policies, are often what save the lives of migrants, refugees, and the stateless. Focusing on that trust—and its deficit—in camps, urban slums, hospitals, and clinics, Zaman combines personal and journalistic accounts of refugees with broad systemic analysis on global health care access to compare problems and solutions in different regions and provide holistic policy and practice recommendations for refugees, internally displaced persons, and stateless populations.In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Muhammad Zaman about the healthcare experiences of refugees, and the power of storytelling.Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samuel Fury Childs Daly, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago, explores post-colonial militarism in Africa. He discusses how military dictators attempted to create martial societies but often failed, leading to tyranny disguised as discipline. The conversation dives into the dualities of militarism and decolonization, the complexities of post-colonial identity, and the influence of charismatic leaders. Daly also highlights upcoming research on military desertion and Nigeria's amphetamine trade, revealing insights into this intricate legacy.

The Burning Forest: India's War Against the Maoists (Verso, 2019) by Nandini Sundar is an empathetic, moving account of what drives indigenous peasants to support armed struggle despite severe state repression, including lives lost, homes and communities destroyed.Over the past decade, the heavily forested,mineral-rich region of Bastar in central India has emerged as one of the most militarized sites in the country. The government calls the Maoist insurgency the “biggest security threat” to India. In 2005, a state-sponsored vigilante movement, the Salwa Judum, burnt hundreds of villages, driving their inhabitants into state-controlled camps, drawing on counterinsurgency techniques developed in Malaysia, Vietnam and elsewhere. Apart from rapes and killings, hundreds of ‘surrendered’ Maoist sympathisers were conscripted as auxiliaries. The conflict continues to this day, taking a toll on the lives of civilians, security forces and Maoist cadres.In 2007, Sundar and others took the Indian government to the Supreme Court over the human rights violations arising out ofthe conflict. In a landmark judgment, the Court in 2011 banned state supportfor vigilantism.The Burning Forest describes this brutal war in the heart of India, and what it tells us about the courts, media and politics of the country. The result is a granular and critical ethnography of Indian democracy over a decade.Nandini Sundar is a Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, and has been visiting Bastar for over 25 years. Her first book, Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar (1854-1996) is an authoritative account of Bastar's colonial and post-colonial past.Stuti Roy has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices