New Books in Human Rights

What happens when a religion is demonized to such an extent that it is no longer deemed a religion – but an ideology? What effect does such a political refashioning of a religion have on the rights to free expression of its adherents? What are the implications of politicizing and secularizing a religion as it concerns religious liberty and diversity? How does this treatment of one religion set a precedent for treatment of them all?In When Islam Is Not a Religion: Inside America’s Fight for Religious Freedom (Pegasus Books, 2019), Asma T. Uddin grapples precisely with these questions. Through weaving personal narrative, legal training, and historical grounding into her book, Asma breaks down prevailing stereotypes about Muslims and Islam, details the various mechanisms and consequences of religious bigotry and animus, and underscores the importance of religious liberty for all communities in a highly accessible and graceful language.Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dag Hammarskjold was such a dynamic secretary-general that for years, the motto about him was simply “Leave it to Dag.” Only the second person to hold that post when he was elected, Hammarskjold did a great deal to shape perceptions of the UN. Consequently, evaluations of his legacy have tended to run the gamut, from extremely positive to bitingly critical. Hammarskjold’s defenders see him as a paragon of virtue, one who did his utmost to defuse international conflict at a time when the Cold War and decolonization threatened to ignite wars at any given moment. Hammarskjold’s critics accused of him meddling in international politics, or worse, being a tool of western imperialists as they tried to maintain control over the decolonizing world.Henning Melber’s Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations, and the Decolonisation of Africa (Hurst, 2019( looks at Hammarskjold’s legacy. Melber offers no apology when he states that he deeply admires Hammarskjold, though he does also clarify that Hammarskjold was imperfect. Moreover, while Hammarskjold was a person of deep integrity, his life nevertheless reveals many of the shortcomings of the UN and the difficulty of forcing the great powers to accept justice for the Global South. This books offers a succinct and informative overview of the influences that shaped Hammarskjold, his work in relation to Africa, and the legacies he bequeathed to the UN. Long after his untimely death, Hammarskjold continues to illuminate much of the UN’s history, and its complicated relationship with Africa.Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who has the right to have rights? Motivated by Hannah Arendt’s famous reflections on the question of statelessness the book tells a non-linear global story of the emergence and transformations of human rights in the age of nation-states. In his new book A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States (Princeton UP, 2019), Eric D. Weitz argues somewhat provocatively that “the history of Nation-States is the history of Human rights” and he goes on to show how human rights claims take shape in a nexus between popular struggles, state interests and the workings of the international community. The book focuses on a range of case studies, from the struggle of Greek rebels in post-Napoleonic Europe, to American settlers and Brazilian abolitionists and from anti-colonial Africans and Soviet dissidents to Zionists. These stories unveil what the author calls the “multi-storeyed glass house of human rights”: a fragile, and multidimensional structure riddled by paradoxes and insoluble contradictions. The book steers a middle course between arguments that regard the language of human rights as a post-war invention and long durée teleological narratives about the emergence and advance of human rights. It is a compelling defence for the need to fight for the protection and expansion of basic human rights in today’s fractured world.Eric D. Weitz is Distinguished Professor of History at City College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His books include Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy and A Century of Genocide (both Princeton UP).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

The military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power as Pakistan's tenth president resulted in the abolition of a century-old sharecropping system that was rife with corruption. In its place the military regime implemented a market reform policy of cash contract farming. Ostensibly meant to improve living conditions for tenant farmers, the new system, instead, mobilized one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia—still active today.In The Ethics of Staying: Social Movements and Land Rights Politics in Pakistan (Stanford University Press, 2019), Mubbashir A. Rizvi presents an original framework for understanding this major social movement, called the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP). This group of Christian and Muslim tenant sharecroppers, against all odds, successfully resisted Pakistan military's bid to monetize state-owned land, making a powerful moral case for land rights by invoking local claims to land and a broader vision for subsistence rights. The case of AMP provides a unique lens through which to examine state and society relations in Pakistan, one that bridges literatures from subaltern studies, military and colonial power, and the language of claim-making. Rizvi also offers a glimpse of Pakistan that challenges its standard framing as a hub of radical militancy, by opening a window into to the everyday struggles that are often obscured in the West's terror discourse.Madhuri Karak holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his book, De-Moralizing Gay Rights: Some Queer Remarks on LGBT+ Rights Politics in the US(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Cyril Ghosh interrogates three arenas of debate over LGBT+ rights in the contemporary American landscape—debates over and critiques of pinkwashing, the recent US Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), and Kenji Yoshino’s concept of gay covering. Ghosh is associate professor of political science at Wagner College and was the original host of the New Books in Political Science podcast.In each case, Ghosh identifies a tension in the promotion of LGBT+ rights, from both liberal and radical perspectives, demonstrating that these discourses often (re/)produce their own assimilationist logics. Drawing on queer theoretical frameworks, Ghosh ultimately argues for an approach to theorizing rights that takes seriously the project of resisting and dismantling assimilationist demands.The podcast is co-hosted by Heath Brown and Emily Crandall.Heath Brown is associate professor of public policy at the City University of New York, John Jay College and The Graduate Center. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrownEmily K. Crandall holds a PhD in Political Science from the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tiffany Jasmin González speaks with Dr. Gabriela González about her award-winning book, Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability and Rights (Oxford University Press, 2018) to talk about the strategies transborder activists used to redeem la raza from body politic exclusion happening in the U.S. She finds that middle-class Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans modernized la raza by encouraging Mexican-origin people to take ethnic pride and unity seriously, and to find strategies to create community during a time when Mexico and U.S. pushed for modernization. Dr. González’s rich analysis of the Idar family, the Munguía family, Leonor Villegas de Magnón and the Mexican Revolution, Emma Tenayuca, and LULAC illustrates another story of activism in the early twentieth century. Turn your volume up and tune in to this episode to learn more.Tiffany Jasmin González is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at Texas A&M University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the preface to In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) Tyrell Haberkorn asks, echoing Pakavadi Veerapaspong, if and when it might one day be possible to write a book on “memories of dictatorship” in Thailand. Concluding that today a clear end to dictatorship is not in sight, she invokes Howard Zinn to insist that nevertheless, “We must not accept the memory of states as our own… it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus has suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners”. It is in this spirit that she takes up the task of writing a history of impunity: one that “aims to explicitly challenge the repressive organs of the state and their ongoing evasion of accountability”.How she pursues that aim and what she uncovers is the topic of this New Books in Southeast Asian Studies interview, in which Tyrell talks about Thailand’s exemplary injustice cascade, distinguishes a history of impunity from a history of human rights abuse, and reflects on her experiences of reading for state violence in state archives. Listeners of this episode might also be interested in Tyrell talking on her first book, Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law and Violence in Northern Thailand; and, Sam Moyn on The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and currently a visiting research scholar at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel with Patrick Jory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Katherine M. Marino is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) follows the many Latin American and Caribbean women in the first half of the century who not only championed feminism for the continent but also contributed to defining the meaning of international human rights. They drove a transnational movement for women’s suffrage that included equal work and maternity rights and the self-determination of their nations rejecting U.S. imperialism. Marino draws attention to the enduring contributions of women such as the Brazilian Bertha Lutz, Cuban Clara Gonzales and Chilean Marta Vergara who have yet to receive a significant place in human rights history. The work of Latin American and Caribbean feminist was impeded by internal race and class conflict, insufficient funding, lack of government support and by imperial assumptions of U.S. feminists. Their tenacious efforts through multiple organizations, gatherings, and personal networks led to the inclusion of women’s rights in the global human rights framework and assured that economic and social rights would not be sidelined. The book also illuminates the ideological differences that have plagued the global feminist movement and adds a significant piece to the history of human rights.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current research project is on the intellectual history of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Outsiders: Why Difference is the Future of Civil Rights(Oxford University Press, 2019) by Zachary Kramer (Oxford University Press, 2019) sets forth an imaginative critique of the way that civil rights law currently fulfills its mission. Using stories that lucidly illustrate the gap between the aspiration of civil rights law and the lived reality, Professor Kramer proposes a new approach. Drawing on existing protections for disability and for religious practice, Professor Kramer outlines the way that a right to personality, combined with an accommodation-focused inquiry, could update and refresh our approach to civil rights.Zachary Kramer is Associate Dean of Faculty, Professor of Law, and Willard H. Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.Künga Tenje is an independent librarian in Virginia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With a focus on mainline Protestants and gay rights activists in the twentieth century, Heather R. White challenges the usual picture of perennial adversaries with a new narrative about America's religious and sexual past. In her new book Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), White argues that today's antigay Christian traditions originated in the 1920s when a group of liberal Protestants began to incorporate psychiatry and psychotherapy into Christian teaching. A new therapeutic orthodoxy, influenced by modern medicine, celebrated heterosexuality as God-given and advocated a compassionate "cure" for homosexuality.White traces the unanticipated consequences as the therapeutic model, gaining popularity after World War II, spurred mainline church leaders to take a critical stance toward rampant antihomosexual discrimination. By the 1960s, a vanguard of clergy began to advocate for homosexual rights. White highlights the continued importance of this religious support to the consolidating gay and lesbian movement. However, the ultimate irony of the therapeutic orthodoxy's legacy was its adoption, beginning in the 1970s, by the Christian Right, which embraced it as an age-old tradition to which Americans should return. On a broader level, White challenges the assumed secularization narrative in LGBT progress by recovering the forgotten history of liberal Protestants' role on both sides of the debates over orthodoxy and sexual identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices