New Books in Human Rights

When the possibility of wiretapping first became known to Americans they were outraged. Now, in our post-9/11 world, it's accepted that corporations are vested with human rights, and government agencies and corporations use computers to monitor our private lives. In The American Surveillance State: How the US Spies on Dissent (Pluto Press, 2022), David H. Price pulls back the curtain to reveal how the FBI and other government agencies have always functioned as the secret police of American capitalism up to today, where they luxuriate in a near-limitless NSA surveillance of all.Price looks through a roster of campaigns by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and corporations to understand how we got here. Starting with J. Edgar Hoover and the early FBI's alignment with business, his access to 15,000 pages of never-before-seen FBI files shines a light on the surveillance of Edward Said, Andre Gunder Frank and Alexander Cockburn, Native American communists, and progressive factory owners.Price uncovers patterns of FBI monitoring and harassing of activists and public figures, providing the vital means for us to understand how these new frightening surveillance operations are weaponized by powerful governmental agencies that remain largely shrouded in secrecy.David H. Price is Professor of Anthropology at Saint Martin’s University’s Department of Society and Social Justice. He is the author of a number of books on the FBI and CIA, and has written articles for The Nation, Monthly Review, CounterPunch, Guardian and Le Monde. His work has been translated into five languages.Deniz Yonucu is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on counterinsurgency, policing and security, surveillance, left-wing and anti-colonial resistance, memory, racism, and emerging digital control technologies. Her book, Police, Provocation, Politics Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022), presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by state security apparatus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business and Human Rights Law is a rapidly growing area of law, which has dramatically transformed many parts of international law. In this new volume in the Elements series, Robert McCorquodale explores how the responsibility for human rights abuses has transitioned from a purely state obligation to also being the responsibility of businesses. Business responsibility for human rights impacts have become subject both to legislation and to court decisions whenever their activities lead to human rights abuses anywhere in the world.Business and Human Rights (Oxford UP, 2024) shows the importance of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in these developments, and examines their influence on international, regional, and national law. It also analyses the changes on state obligations to protect human rights, on the corporate responsibility for human rights abuses, and on effective access to remedies for those adversely affected by business activities. Each of these shifts has consequences on core tenets of international law, such as sovereignty and jurisdiction, and has implications for crafting new international law in areas such as climate change and technology.Robert is a member of the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights, and brings his decades of experience in scholarship and legal practice in business and human rights law, as well as his extensive engagement with businesses, governments, civil society, and international organisations, to bear on his understanding and analysis of this increasingly important field.Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession 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. His University of Leeds profile page can be found here. Twitter: @batesmith. LinkedInHis recent publications include: “Cambodia and the progressivist ‘imaginary’: The limitations of international(ised) criminal tribunals as mechanisms for implementing human rights” in Louisa Ashley and Nicolette Butler (eds), The Incoherence of Human Rights in International Law: Absence, Emergence and Limitations (Routledge, 2024 ISBN13: 978-1-032638-03-4) “‘Poetic Justice Products’: International Justice, Victim Counter-Aesthetics, and the Spectre of the Show Trial” in Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Rob Knox (eds) Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice (Counterpress, 2024 ISBN 978-1-910761-17-5) "Lawyers who want to make the world a better place – Scheingold and Sarat’s Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering" in D. Newman (ed.) Leading Works on the Legal Profession (Routledge, July 2023), ISBN 978-1-032182-80-3) “International Prosecutors as Cause Lawyers" (2021) Journal of International Criminal Justice 19(4) 803-830 (ISSN 1478-1387) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maria Dimova-Cookson's new book Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty (Routledge, 2019) offers an analysis of the distinction between positive and negative freedom building on the work of Constant, Green and Berlin. The author proposes a new reading of this distinction for the twenty-first century. The author defends the idea that freedom is a dynamic interaction between two inseparable, yet sometimes fundamentally, opposed positive and negative concepts – the yin and yang of freedom. Positive freedom is achieved when one succeeds in doing what is right, while negative freedom is achieved when one is able to advance one’s wellbeing. In an environment of culture wars, resurging populism and challenge to progressive liberal values, theorizing freedom in negative and positive terms can help us better understand the political dilemmas we face and point the way forward.Maria Dimova-Cookson is Associate Professor in Politics at the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, UK.Yorgos Giannakopoulos (@giannako) is a currently a Junior Research Fellow in Durham University, UK. He is a historian of Modern Britain and Europe. His published research recovers the regional impact of British Intellectuals in Eastern Europe in the age of nationalism and internationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Grono, a nonprofit leader and CEO of the Freedom Fund, discusses the unique challenges of nonprofit management versus corporate environments. He shares insights from his book on maximizing impact through purpose and collaboration. Key topics include the importance of psychological safety in teams and the dynamics between nonprofit leaders and boards. Grono emphasizes cultivating an inclusive culture and the role of mentorship in developing leadership skills tailored to the nonprofit sector, aiming to drive meaningful change.

Perpetrators of mass atrocities have used displacement to transport victims to killing sites or extermination camps to transfer victims to sites of forced labor and attrition, to ethnically homogenize regions by moving victims out of their homes and lands, and to destroy populations by depriving them of vital daily needs. Displacement has been treated as a corollary practice to crimes committed, not a central aspect of their perpetration. Destroy Them Gradually: Displacement as Atrocity (Rutgers UP, 2024) examines four cases that illuminate why perpetrators have destroyed populations using displacement policies: Germany’s genocide of the Herero (1904–1908); Ottoman genocides of Christian minorities (1914–1925); expulsions of Germans from East/Central Europe (1943–1952); and climate violence (twenty-first century). Because displacement has been typically framed as a secondary aspect of mass atrocities, existing scholarship overlooks how perpetrators use it as a means of executing destruction rather than a vehicle for moving people to a specific location to commit atrocities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bringing together philosophy, jurisprudence, and a deep concern for the environment, Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change offers an inspiring and generative way of thinking about the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. In particular, Thomas Kearns and Kathleen Dean Moore provide readers with insight into the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal as well as the wide-ranging and deeply-felt impacts of fracking, interspersing legal analysis, excerpts of Tribunal testimony, and reflections by climate writers like Winona LaDuke, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Sandra Steingraber. The book's structure even creatively mirrors that of the Tribunal, offering a collage of insight to any reader interested in human rights and environmental issues—it is a work of deep dedication to thinking critically and deeply about how to face not only the environmental degradation caused by fracking, but also other kinds of harms caused by resource extraction and corporate interests. Rather than slip into climate nihilism, Bearing Witness seeks to name, investigate, and claim rights around environmental harms felt by humans and non-humans alike.In the face of the increasing, globally-felt impacts of climate change, Kearns and Dean Moore provide us with a human-rights centered framework for engaging with and addressing some of the most pressing questions of our time.Thomas A. Kearns is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at North Seattle College, and is Director of Environment and Human Rights Advisory. In 2015, he helped draft the international Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change, and in 2018, co-organized the International Tribunal on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change, which forms much of the basis for this book. His work is currently centred around facilitating youth climate courts.Kathleen Dean Moore is a Distinguished Philosophy Professor Emerita at Oregon State University, and longstanding public advocate for climate justice and ecological thriving. Her concern for climate catastrophe led her to leave her academic position to speak and write on environmental crises. Her numerous books and essays—many award-winning—focus on environmental ethics and climate crises, and she has published widely in academic and non-academic fora alike.Rine Vieth is an incoming FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. Interested in how people experience state legal regimes, their research centres around questions of law, migration, gender, and religion.Further reading and works discussed in this episode: The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Human Rights, Fracking, and Climate Change Film by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University, Bedrock Rights: A New Foundation for Global Action Against Fracking and Climate Change Kathleen Dean Moore and Bob Haverluck, Take Heart (OSU Press) Youth Climate Courts website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By examining the intersection of Islamic law, state law, religion, and culture in the Egyptian nation-building process, Recasting Islamic Law: Religion and the Nation State in Egyptian Constitution Making (Cornell University Press, 2021) highlights how the sharia, when attached to constitutional commitments, is reshaped into modern Islamic state law.Dr. Rachel M. Scott analyses the complex effects of constitutional commitments to the sharia in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. She argues that the sharia is not dismantled by the modern state when it is applied as modern Islamic state law, but rather recast in its service. In showing the particular forms that the sharia takes when it is applied as modern Islamic state law, Scott pushes back against assumptions that introductions of the sharia into modern state law result in either the revival of mediaeval Islam or in its complete transformation. Scott engages with premodern law and with the Ottoman legal legacy on topics concerning Egypt's Coptic community, women's rights, personal status law, and the relationship between religious scholars and the Supreme Constitutional Court. Recasting Islamic Law considers modern Islamic state law's discontinuities and its continuities with premodern sharia.Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.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

This episode is the first of two episodes this season on Muslims in China. Here Claudia Radiven and Chella Ward talk to Darren Blyer about his book Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke UP, 2022). Darren is a sociocultural anthropologist at Simon Fraser University, whose book explores how islamophobia and capitalism contribute to the violence against Uyghur Muslims in East Turkestan. Our conversation spans the history of China, the question of global Islamophobia and the importance of friendship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jessica Henry's Smoke But No Fire: Convicting the Innocent of Crimes that Never Happened (U California Press, 2021) explores a shocking but all-too-common kind of wrongful conviction: wrongful convictions for crimes that never actually happened. Henry's meticulously-researched book sheds light on how the US criminal justice system makes it possible to convict people of nonexistent crimes. By tracing this issue from first interactions with the police, to encounters with legal professionals, to judges' verdicts, and beyond, Henry's analysis explains in heartbreaking detail the impacts of convictions without a crime on those convicted and their families—as well as what this means for US criminal law. Drawing from Henry's own experience working for many years as a public defender, Smoke But No Fire will be of great interest to legal professionals, students, organizers, and anyone interested in criminal law.Jessica Henry is a Professor in the Department of Justice Studies at Montclair State University. Previously, she worked as a public defender in New York City for nearly ten years. Her research focuses on the US criminal justice system, particularly wrongful convictions, severe sentences, and hate crimes.Rine Vieth is an incoming FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. Interested in how people experience state legal regimes, their research centres around questions of law, migration, gender, and religion.Further reading: National Registry of Exonerations Jessica Henry, "Smoke but No Fire: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted of Crimes That Never Happened" in the American Criminal Law Review (via SSRN) Michelle Alexander, “Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System” in the New York Times Opinion section  2024 New Jersey Clemency Initiative Announcement Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR--and still provides a model of opposition in Putin's Russia.Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world's imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile--and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton UP, 2024) is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century.Benjamin Nathans's vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents--from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was "simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people."An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR's totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin's Russia--and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices