New Books in Human Rights

Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability (2020, University of Minnesota Press) provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system.Liat Ben-Moshe (https://www.liatbenmoshe.com/) provides groundbreaking case studies that show how abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration—antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Ben-Moshe discusses a range of topics, including why deinstitutionalization is often wrongly blamed for the rise in incarceration; who resists decarceration and deinstitutionalization, and the coalitions opposing such resistance; and how understanding deinstitutionalization as a form of residential integration makes visible intersections with racial desegregation. By connecting deinstitutionalization with prison abolition, Decarcerating Disability also illuminates some of the limitations of disability rights and inclusion discourses, as well as tactics such as litigation, in securing freedom.Decarcerating Disability’s rich analysis of lived experience, history, and culture helps to chart a way out of a failing system of incarceration. C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does individual religious liberty apply to religiously affiliated groups? Edward A. David investigates the polarized ways legal theorists seek to understand group ontology in A Christian Approach to Corporate Religious Liberty (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). David surveys the merits and pitfalls of prevailing approaches from within and without the Christian tradition. Many legal theorists are deeply skeptical of corporate group ontology, especially as religious groups have sometimes tended to conflate churches proper with religiously affiliated organizations in ways that can set uncomfortable precedents. This book offers a novel way forward that suggests a retrieval of Saint Thomas Aquinas's theory of coordinated group activity to provide a more salient moral framework to evaluate the liberties and limits of religious groups. You can follow Edward David's work on his website or on Twitter (@edwardinoxford)Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton, which ruled that the Title VII prohibition on sex discrimination in employment extends to discrimination based on sexual orientation and transgender status, may imperil the fundamental right of parents to educate their children in line with their values.This right is examined brilliantly in the 2016 book, To Whom Do Children Belong? Parental Rights, Civic Education, and Children's Autonomy by scholar Melissa Moschella. Given the rise of the transgender movement and other aspects of wokeism, this book has only increased in importance. It is a rare combination of a serious scholarly work and a book that general audiences, particularly and crucially, the parents of school-age children should read.Moschella addresses timely questions such as, “Can we defend parental rights against those who believe we need more extensive state educational control to protect children's autonomy or prepare them for citizenship in a diverse society?” and draws upon psychological and social scientific research to make a compelling philosophical argument for the right of parents to determine fundamental questions of morals when it comes to their children.And this is not only a matter for philosophers. Moschella makes clear that under the cover of such seemingly innocuous verbiage as “diversity education” and “education for citizenship,” public schools are engaging in outright indoctrination of children in left-wing social justice and libertarian moral views. Moreover, progressives are increasingly targeting even private schools and some are even calling for an outright ban on homeschooling.Moschella’s book is eerily prescient in the way she was able to predict that parents who seek to pass on a traditional understanding of sexuality find their efforts directly undermined in ever more public schools. Many parents cannot afford private schools or are unable to home school—and, as noted, even those refuges are under threat. Moschella foretold in her book that if the views of the progressive scholars whose arguments she delineates with scrupulous fairness prevail, parents will have no choice but to send their children into an educational environment that may sow damaging confusion about the basic truths of human identity.Readers of this book need not even be religious but simply parents and other readers who worry that children will be stigmatized and parents’ rights erased if children are forced by schools to deny that maleness and femaleness are grounded on objective biological reality rather than subjective self-image, or that the purpose of human sexuality is not merely pleasure or self-expression, but to unite a man and woman in marriage and enable them to form a family. This is not solely a question of religious liberty but of conscience rights more broadly, which she discusses both authoritatively and movingly.Moschella examines the arguments for expanding school choice, vouchers and granting exemptions when educational programs or regulations threaten parents' ability to raise their children in line with their values and moral codes.The questions raised in this important book have become even more salient in the era of the Biden administration.Give a listen.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s often said that the time in our lives can often pass without us noticing. Old age can come before we realize it, and it brings with it new elements to our own daily lives that we couldn’t have anticipated before. Observed from a distance and growing old can seem like a universal experience, but observed up close, it becomes clear that the different ways people age are as varied and unique as the people themselves, and these differences can come from within and without. Whether you get to live out your twilight years in a comfortable retirement home in the country, or an understaffed inner-city hospital, these experiences will be profoundly different, and likely had different paths that led to them. Viewed in this way, aging is seen not as some eternal experience that is the same for all people, but as a fundamental part of our politics and economic dynamics, for better and for worse. The COVID-crisis of the last year has brought to light how vulnerable our elderly are, how understaffed our care-facilities are, and how much needs to change to provide lives of safety, comfort and dignity to our elders, but in many ways all this crisis has done is exacerbated certain tensions and antagonisms that were already there, barely concealed by the relentless optimism of neoliberal technocrats. Changing these systems will mean rethinking the aging process, and connecting it with broader questions traditionally raised by the fields of critical theory and radical critiques of political economy.Diving right into this project are my guests today, Carroll Estes and Nicholas DiCarlo, here to discuss their recent publication Aging A-Z: Concepts Toward Emancipatory Gerontology (Routledge 2019). Styled as a sort of dictionary, the book has entries for a number of terms you would expect a book like this to have: Ableism, Home Care and Retirement all make appearances. Readers will be surprised, however, by the number of entries that also make appearances: Climate Change, Colonialism, Epistemology, Leninist Strategy and Praxis all make appearances as well. This book then is incredibly broad in scope, and attempts to force readers to realize the ways in which aging is affected that go beyond one’s immediate concern, bringing a new layer of understanding to the phrase: ‘The personal is political.’ Speaking as someone who has spent the entirety of the COVID-crisis working in elderly care, this book was a joyful revelation to flip through, and should be considered critical reading by anyone impacted by aging.Carroll Estes has a long and distinguished career in both academia and activism. She is professor emerita of Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. It was there that she founded the Institute for Health and Aging. She has written numerous books and articles on the politics of aging, including the co-authored The Long Term Care Crisis, which was a 1994 Most Important Book (Choice Magazine). She is also the recipient of numerous academic honors, and is the former president of The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), the American Society on Aging (ASA) and the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE).Nicholas DiCarlo writes about aging and social policy at the Institute for Health and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco. They have a Masters of Social Work, and a private psychotherapy practice in Oakland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mona Lena Krook examines the unique phenomena of violence against women in politics, which is distinct from the broader concern and issue of violence against women in general. Krook pulls together global experiences in regard to this issue, noting that violence against women in politics is not confined to any particular region or part of the world. The research also indicates that this is not just physical violence or force, but also includes psychological violence, economic violence, sexual violence, threats, and harassment, and semiotic violence, a newer category to be included with the other classifications of violence against women in politics. Violence Against Women in Politics (Oxford UP, 2020) also explores the violence that is directed towards women who are not in elected office but are working in areas or fields that are directly connected to electoral or appointed political offices, namely women who are working in human rights areas or with human rights organizations, and women who are members of the press or media. Krook explains that her research in the book centers around this issue of violence against women in politics because that violence, in whatever form it takes, is designed to keep women from fully participating in politics and in the public sphere. Krook has also developed a number of websites with information and further connections to work towards the end of violence against women in politics, including the companion website for the book itself: https://www.vawpolitics.org/, and the collaborative #NotTheCost website hosted by the National Democratic Institute.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as a Way of Life (Stanford UP, 2018) offers an intimate ethnographic account of a group of LGBT activists before, during, and after Myanmar's post-2011 political transition. Lynette J. Chua explores how these activists devoted themselves to, and fell in love with, the practice of human rights and how they were able to empower queer Burmese to accept themselves, gain social belonging, and reform discriminatory legislation and law enforcement. Informed by interviews with activists from all walks of life—city dwellers, villagers, political dissidents, children of military families, wage laborers, shopkeepers, beauticians, spirit mediums, lawyers, students—Chua details the vivid particulars of the LGBT activist experience founding a movement first among exiles and migrants and then in Myanmar's cities, towns, and countryside. A distinct political and emotional culture of activism took shape, fusing shared emotions and cultural bearings with legal and political ideas about human rights. For this network of activists, human rights moved hearts and minds and crafted a transformative web of friendship, fellowship, and affection among queer Burmese. Chua's investigation provides crucial insights into the intersection of emotions and interpersonal relationships with law, rights, and social movements.Lynette J. Chua is Associate Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore. Her first book, Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights & Resistance in an Authoritarian State (2014), received the Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociology Association's Sociology of Law Section.Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature (Princeton UP, 2021), Emmanuel Kreike offers a global history of environmental warfare and makes the case for why it should be a crime. The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people’s livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment—"environcide"—constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature. In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war in Europe transformed Holland into a desolate swamp where hunger and the black death ruled. He describes how Spanish conquistadores exploited the irrigation works and expansive agricultural terraces of the Aztecs and Incas, triggering a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions. Kreike demonstrates how environmental warfare has continued unabated into the modern era. His panoramic narrative takes readers from the Thirty Years' War to the wars of France's Sun King, and from the Dutch colonial wars in North America and Indonesia to the early twentieth-century colonial conquest of southwestern Africa. Shedding light on the premodern origins and the lasting consequences of total war, Scorched Earth explains why ecocide and genocide are not separate phenomena, and why international law must recognize environmental warfare as a violation of human rights.Dr. Emmanuel Kreike is a professor of history at Princeton University. He holds a Ph.D. in African history from Yale University (1996) and a Dr. of Science (PhD) in Tropical Forestry from the School of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University (2006), the Netherlands. His research and teaching interests focus on the intersection of war/violence, population displacement, environment, and society. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The tradition of political liberalism has a long and complicated history, filled with twists, turns, critiques and responses that have filled books, essays and lectures for several centuries now. Questions of the importance and limitations of individual rights and how to balance different interests have produced no shortage of theoretical conflict as different figures have attempted to make sense of the importance and limits of individuals and their rights. Diving right into this debate is Matt McManus, returning again to the New Books Network to discuss his recent book A Critical Legal Examination of Liberalism and Liberal Rights (Palgrave, 2020). Going back as far as Burke, Hobbes, Kant and Locke, and then through critiques of liberalism from both radically progressive and reactionary orientations, the book traces the various ideas of liberalism up to the present in figures such as Habermas, Rawls and MacIntyre. It also posits it’s own understanding of liberalism, which emphasizes every individual's right to self-authorship as a central pillar for developing the liberal project. Crossing the fields of history, philosophy, political theory and law, the book offers a number of interventions across an array of fields, and will be of immense use to those seeking to understand some of the most pressing concerns of our time.Matt McManus is a professor of politics at Whitman College. He is the author of a number of books, including The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism, and is also one of the coauthors of Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson, both of which we discussed in previous episodes of this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christoph Menke, who is professor of philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt Germany and considered the most important representative of the third generation of the "Frankfurt School of Critical Theory", presents in Critique of Rights (Polity Press 2020) a critical reflection on modern normativity in the so-called "Western world". More specifically: He analyzes “subjective rights”. To have a right means to have a justified and binding claim. Now Menke exposes in his book – which is both a genealogy and an ontology of law – that these “subjective rights”, which mark the birth of bourgeois society, have ambivalent properties. They are not only expressions of individuality and freedom everybody of us enjoys today as the most important achievement that Enlightenment has transferred to us. They also create what Karl Marx called "the entitlement of the egoistic human being, set apart from his fellow human being and from the community”. Private interests become the new natural basis for politics. Contrary to what one might think “subjective rights” do not empower the citizens of a political community but disempower them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can we ever overcome the epistemological barrier to conceptualizing Asian women not as particular cases but as theories, and can women of color academics be heard in this process? This is one of the central questions Laura Hyun Yi Kang grapples with in her groundbreaking book, Traffic in Asian Women (Duke University Press, 2020). Kang, in conversation with works such as Kuan-Hsing Chen’s Asia as Method: Towards Deimperialization, contests the uses of Asian women as a bounded unit of knowledge and proposes “start[ing] off from ‘Asian women’ as an imperial effect and multivalent discourse of intra-Asian contestation and transpacific nonknowing” (35). Contesting the limitation of rendering a generalized group as a bounded unit legible for academics’ expertise and dissection, Kang proceeds to examine “unexpected transfigurations” and “investments in sympathies” of Asian women in three categories that became important for knowledge dissemination within and by the universities, NGOs and UN agencies: “Traffic in women,” “sexual slavery,” and “violence against women.” Further, Kang critically analyzes how the contours of human rights and women’s rights discourses as well as political economy shaped compensation, truth disclosure, and memorialization of “comfort women” transnationally. Through the figure of Asian women, Kang critiques the ways in which capitalist and imperialist global governance has shaped international justice and discourses of redress, drawing a boundary in the knowledge production of Asian women in their complexity, nuance, and unknowability. Kang's work is critical for any scholars who are interested in the questions of interdisciplinarity, critical area and empire studies, justice, transnational feminism, critical university studies, cultural production and social movement. Laura Hyun Yi Kang is a Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of California, Irvine. Her previous book, which contends with the problem of disciplinarity, is Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (Duke University Press, 2002) and lays out some of the grounds of the discussions that continues in her new book, Traffic in Asian Women. Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices