New Books in Human Rights

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy (Henry Holt, 2023) is the inside story of a worldwide investigation, sparked by the leak which revealed that cyber-intrusion and cyber-surveillance are happening with exponentially increasing frequency, across the globe. Pegasus, it turns out, is less a law enforcement tool than a weapon for hire and not only a threat to privacy but also to democracy, as the most notorious human-rights-violating governments and autocrat-wannabes are licensing and utilizing Pegasus spyware in the most vulnerable democracies in the world. Pegasus follows the personal stories of real victims--intrepid individuals who have spoken truth to some of the most corrupt, risible powers around the globe.Laurent Richard is a Paris-based award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist who was named the 2018 European Journalist of the Year at the Prix Europa in Berlin. He is the founder of Forbidden Stories, a network of investigative journalists devoted continuing the unfinished work of murdered reporters to ensure the work they died for is not buried with them.Sandrine Rigaud is a French investigative journalist. As editor of Forbidden Stories since 2019, she coordinated the award-winning Pegasus Project and the Cartel Project, an international investigation of assassinated Mexican journalists.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Comfort women" or ianfu is the euphemism used by the Japanese military for the women they compelled to do sex work in the Second World War. The role of comfort women in history remains a topic of importance — and emotion — around the world. It is well-known that an elaborate series of comfort stations, or comfort houses, were organised by the Japanese administration across Singapore during the Occupation from 1942 to 1945.So why did no local former comfort women come forward and tell their stories when others across Asia began to do publicly in the 1990s? To understand this silence, The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory (National University of Singapore Press, 2022) by Dr. Kevin Blackburn details the sex industry serving the Japanese military during the wartime occupation of Singapore: the comfort stations, managers, procuresses, girls and women who either volunteered or were forced into service and in many cases sexual slavery. Could it be that no former comfort women remained in Singapore after the war? Dr. Blackburn shows through a careful weighing of the different kinds of evidence why this was not the case. The immediate post-war years, and efforts to repatriate or ‘reform’ former comfort women fills in a key part of the history.Dr. Blackburn then turns from history to the public presence of the comfort women in Singapore's memory: newspapers, novels, plays, television, and touristic heritage sites, showing how comfort women became known in Singapore during the 1990s and 2000s.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

How can the news better reflect important global issues? In Humanitarian Journalists Covering Crises from a Boundary Zone (Routledge, 2022), Drs Martin Scott, an Associate Professor in Media & Development at the University of East Anglia and Kate Wright, Senior Lecturer and Chancellor's Fellow in Media and Communication at the University of Edinburgh, and Prof Mel Bunce, a Professor of International Journalism at City University of London, explore the context that shapes the lives and practices of humanitarian journalists. The book uses rich case study materials, detailed interview data, and a framework drawing on field theory to analyses how humanitarian journalists exist between the journalistic and humanitarian fields. This comes at a cost to them, as well as offering significant positives for both their activities and for news itself. Accessible, and available open access here, the book is essential reading across media studies, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for anyone concerned about the need for a better system for reporting the news.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Climate change and war have flung millions of people on the move, who often seek safe harbor in the very countries responsible for their displacement. But despite the lofty ideals and supposed simplicity of international refugee law, it turns out borders are not really the fixed lines on a map we imagine them to be.Guests:  Deborah Anker is Clinical Professor of Law and Founder of the Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRC). Celeste Cantor-Stephens is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, writer, teacher and activist. Chowra Makaremi is an anthropologist and tenured research scholar at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. Adrian Rennix is a writer and an immigration attorney practicing near the southern border. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Monumental Names: Archival Aesthetics and the Conjuration of History in Moscow (Routledge, 2022) asks us to consider: what stands behind the propensity to remember victims of mass atrocities by their personal names? Grounded in ethnographic and archival research with Last Address and Memorial, one of the oldest independent archives of Soviet political repressions in Moscow and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic examines a version of archival activism that is centred on various practices of documentation and commemoration of many dead victims of historical violence in Russia to understand what kind of historicity is produced when a single name is added to an endless list.What do acts of accumulation of names of the dead affirm when they are concretised in monuments and performance events? The key premise is that multimodal inscriptions of names of the dead entail a political, aesthetic and conceptual movement between singularity and multitude that honours each dead name yet conveys the scale of a mass atrocity without reducing it to a number.Drawing on anthropology, history, philosophy, and aesthetic theory, the book yields a new perspective on the politics of archival and historical justice while it critically engages with the debates on relations and distinctions between names and numbers of the dead, monumental art and its political effects, law and history, image and text, the specific one and the infinite many.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party's Tyranny (Optimum Publishing, 2022) brings together Benedict Rogers' 30 years of advocacy, research and work in and around China. Opening with his rollicking adventures as an 18 year old teaching English in Qingdao in 1992, the human element of this monograph, the real people and their lives are foregrounded. Rogers takes the reader through a nexus of the CCP's tyranny; from China's crackdown on its own citizens; through the repression and violence perpetuated in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong, to the way that the CCP props up and is complicit in crimes against humanity in Myanmar and North Korea. This book is essential to understanding both the domestic and global ramifications of the threat that the CCP poses to the free world. Rogers has been at the heart of advocacy for human rights in and around China during this period. His on-ground insights, countless meetings, interviews and direct encounters with those who live through the harrowing realities manifested by current CCP ideology, should operate as a wake-up to those who value democracy everywhere. Benedict Rogers is a human rights activist and writer specialising in Asia. He is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hong Kong Watch, Senior Analyst for East Asia at CSW, an advisor to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, the Stop Uyghur Genocide Campaign and several other charities, and Deputy Chair of the UK Conservative Party Human Rights Commission.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the midst of the Second World War, Central and East European governments-in-exile struggled to make their voices heard as they reported back to the Allies and sought to reach mass Allied publics with eyewitness testimony of German atrocities committed in their respective homelands. The most striking case is that of Poland, whose wartime exile government served as the principal conduit for first-hand testimony (much of which was initially ignored, questioned, or suppressed by the major Allies) of both the Holocaust and the German occupiers’ mass repression and killing of non-Jewish Poles. Historian Michael Fleming offers a rich and unprecedented take on the story of Poles’ contributions to the emergence of a global legal regime for prosecuting war crimes, by reconstructing the central contribution of the Polish War Crimes Office in London to the emergence, successful work, and postwar legacy of the UN War Crimes Commission. In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Poland, the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and the Search for Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2022) is a ground-breaking intervention in global legal history, in Polish history, and in the history of the transition from World War II to the Cold War.Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is commonly thought that, thanks to globalization, nation-state borders are becoming increasingly porous. In Sorting Machines: The Reinvention of the Border in the 21st Century (Polity, 2022) Steffen Mau shows that this view is misleading: borders are not getting more permeable in the era of globalization, but rather are being turned into powerful sorting machines. Today they fulfill their separation function better and more effectively than ever. While the cross-border movement of people has steadily increased in recent decades, a counter-development has taken place at the same time: in many places, new deterrent walls and militarized border crossings are being created. Borders have also become increasingly selective. Supported by digitalization, they have been upgraded to smart borders, and border control has expanded spatially on a massive scale, even becoming a global enterprise that is detached from territory. Steffen Mau shows how the new sorting machines create mobility and immobility at the same time: for some travellers, borders open like department-store doors, but for others they remain closed more firmly than ever. While a small circle of privileged people are allowed to travel almost everywhere today, the vast majority of the world’s population continues to be systematically excluded. Nowhere is the Janus face of globalization more evident than at the borders of the 21st century.Originally published in German in 2021, this new English edition was translated by Nicola Barfoot.Steffen Mau is Professor of Macrosociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His recent works include The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social (2019) and Inequality, Marketization and the Majority Class: Why Did the European Middle Classes Accept Neo-Liberalism? (2015).Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email, Mastodon or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Content note: This episode contains discussions of suicide, as well as allusions to graphic anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Black violenceAdvances in LGBTQ rights in the recent past—marriage equality, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the expansion of hate crimes legislation—have been accompanied by a rise in attacks against trans, queer and/or gender-nonconforming people of color. In Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Duke UP, 2021), theorist and organizer Eric A. Stanley shows how this seeming contradiction reveals the central role of racialized and gendered violence in the United States. Rather than suggesting that such violence is evidence of individual phobias, Stanley shows how it is a structuring antagonism in our social world. Drawing on an archive of suicide notes, AIDS activist histories, surveillance tapes, and prison interviews, they offer a theory of anti-trans/queer violence in which inclusion and recognition are forms of harm rather than remedies to it. In calling for trans/queer organizing and worldmaking beyond these forms, Stanley points to abolitionist ways of life that might offer livable futures.Dr. Eric A. Stanley is an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.Rine Vieth is a researcher studying how the UK Immigration and Asylum tribunals consider claims of belief, how claims of religious belief are evidenced, and the role of faith communities in asylum-seeker support.Links referenced in the episode:  LGBT Books to Prisoners project Ashley Diamond fundraiser Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

International criminal justice is, at its core, an anti-atrocity project. Yet just what an 'atrocity' is remains undefined and undertheorized. Randle C. DeFalco's book Invisible Atrocities: The Aesthetic Biases of International Criminal Justice (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines how associations between atrocity commission and the production of horrific spectacles shape the processes through which international crimes are identified and conceptualized, leading to the foregrounding of certain forms of mass violence and the backgrounding or complete invisibilization of others. In doing so, it identifies various, seemingly banal ways through which international crimes may be committed and demonstrates how the criminality of such forms of violence and abuse tends to be obfuscated. DeFalco suggests that the failure to address these 'invisible atrocities' represents a major flaw in the current international criminal justice system, one that produces a host of problematic repercussions and undermines the legal legitimacy of international criminal law itself.Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices