There is an urgent need to analyze and assess how we prevent torture, against the background of a rigorous analysis of the factors that condition and sustain it. Drawing on rich empirical material ...from Sri Lanka and Nepal, The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach interrogates the worlds that produce torture, in order to propose how to bring about systemic institutional and cultural change. Critics have decried human rights approaches' failure to attend to structural factors, but this book seeks to go beyond a 'stance of criticism' to take up the positive project of reimagining human rights theory and practice. It discusses key debates in human rights and political theory, as well as the challenges that advocates face in translating situational analyses into real world interventions. Danielle Celermajer develops a new, ecological framework for mapping the worlds that produce torture, and thereby develops prevention strategies.
In the last years of the twentieth century, political leaders the world over began to apologize for wrongs in their nations' pasts. Many dismissed these apologies as 'mere words', cynical attempts to ...avoid more costly forms of reparation; others rejected them as inappropriate encroachments into politics or forms of action that belonged in personal relationships or religion. To understand apology's extraordinary political emergence, we have to suspend our automatic interpretations of what it means for nations to apologize and interrogate their meaning afresh. Taking the reader on a journey through apology's religious history and contemporary apologetic dramas, this book argues that the apologetic phenomenon marks a new stage in our recognition of the importance of collective responsibility, the place of ritual in addressing national wrongs, and the contribution that practices that once belonged in the religious sphere might make to contemporary politics.
This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. ...Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.
The Subject of Human Rights is the first book to systematically address the human part of human rights. Drawing on the finest thinking in political theory, cultural studies, history, law, ...anthropology, and literary studies, this volume examines how human rights-as discourse, law, and practice-shape how we understand humanity and human beings. It asks how the humanness that the human rights idea seeks to protect and promote is experienced. The essays in this volume consider how human rights norms and practices affect the way we relate to ourselves, to other people, and to the nonhuman world. They investigate what kinds of institutions and actors are subjected to human rights and are charged with respecting their demands and realizing their aspirations. And they explore how human rights shape and even create the very subjects they seek to protect. Through critical reflection on these issues, The Subject of Human Rights suggests ways in which we might reimagine the relationship between human rights and subjectivity with a view to benefiting human rights and subjects alike.
Power, Judgment and Political Evil Celermajer, Danielle; Schaap, Andrew
2010, 20160408, 2016-04-08, 2016-04-07, 2010-04-01, 2013-03-28, 20100101
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In an interview with Günther Gaus for German television in 1964, Hannah Arendt insisted that she was not a philosopher but a political theorist. Disillusioned by the cooperation of German ...intellectuals with the Nazis, she said farewell to philosophy when she fled the country. This book examines Arendt's ideas about thinking, acting and political responsibility, investigating the relationship between the life of the mind and the life of action that preoccupied Arendt throughout her life. By joining in the conversation between Arendt and Gaus, each contributor probes her ideas about thinking and judging and their relation to responsibility, power and violence. An insightful and intelligent treatment of the work of Hannah Arendt, this volume will appeal to a wide number of fields beyond political theory and philosophy, including law, literary studies, social anthropology and cultural history.
In this article we address torture in military and police organizations as a public health and human rights challenge that needs to be addressed through multiple levels of intervention. While most ...mental health approaches focus on treating the harmful effects of such violence on individuals and communities, the goal of the project described here was to develop a primary prevention strategy at the institutional level to prevent torture from occurring in the first place. Such an approach requires understanding and altering the conditions that cause and sustain “atrocity producing situations” (Lifton
2000
,
2004
). Given the persistence of torture across the world and its profound health consequences, this is an increasingly important issue in global health and human rights.
Amongst humanities scholars seeking to transform our understanding of the relationship between humans and other animals, there is near universal agreement that the stories constitutive of the ...tradition we call 'the West' assume and inform an ontology of absolute separation and hierarchy, and a politics of domination. Whilst this way of telling stories about our stories elucidates the tremendous hold that the narrative of human/animal discontinuity has, it nevertheless deprives us of resources that might nourish a different way of ordering ourselves and our worlds. By weaving the threads of stories that lie at the heart of our cultural traditions, principally the creation story from the Old Testament, and Shakespeare's King Lear, but also Plutarch's Gryllus, this paper suggests another retelling, one in which the apparent disorder wrought through the loss of human sovereignty opens up to radically different ways of being human and living together with the morethanhuman. If the story of humans' homelessness in the world has, in our historical retellings, also been the occasion for declaring our transcendence and triumph, this paper muses upon how we might story ourselves at home in the world amongst animal others.
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