This volume argues that international human rights law has made a positive contribution to the realization of human rights in much of the world. Although governments sometimes ratify human rights treaties, gambling that they will experience little pressure to comply with them, this is not typically the case. Focusing on rights stakeholders rather than the United Nations or state pressure, Beth Simmons demonstrates through a combination of statistical analyses and case studies that the ratification of treaties leads to better rights practices on average. Simmons argues that international human rights law should get more practical and rhetorical support from the international community as a supplement to broader efforts to address conflict, development, and democratization.

/pdf/mobilizing-for-human-rights-international-law-in-domestic-1kn9xhxi9f.pdf

Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics

Attitudes toward men's violence against women shape both the perpetration of violence against women and responses to this violence by the victim and others around her. For these reasons, attitudes are the target of violence-prevention campaigns. To improve understanding of the determinants of violence against women and to aid the development of violence-prevention efforts, this article reviews the factors that shape attitudes toward violence against women. It offers a framework with which to comprehend the complex array of influences on attitudes toward violent behavior perpetrated by men against women. Two clusters of factors, associated with gender and culture, have an influence at multiple levels of the social order on attitudes regarding violence. Further factors operate at individual, organizational, communal, or societal levels in particular, although their influence may overlap across multiple levels. This article concludes with recommendations regarding efforts to improve attitudes toward violence against women.

/pdf/factors-influencing-attitudes-to-violence-against-women-39dit5ttj0.pdf

Factors influencing Attitudes to violence Against Women

More than 30 years after the first scholarship of its kind was produced, feminist studies of crime are more commonplace than ever before. Two recent milestone events—the 20th anniversary of the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Women and Crime and the creation of this journal, the official publication of the division—provide the perfect opportunity to reflect on what lies ahead for feminist criminology. In this article, the author argues that the future of feminist criminology lies in our willingness to embrace a theoretical framework that recognizes multiple, intersecting inequalities. Specifically, the author maintains that to advance an understanding of gender, crime, and justice that achieves universal relevance and is free from the shortcomings of past ways of thinking, feminist criminologists must examine linkages between inequality and crime using an intersectional theoretical framework that is informed by multiracial feminism.

/pdf/intersections-of-race-class-gender-and-crime-future-3ik9z5t97x.pdf

Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Crime Future Directions for Feminist Criminology

1. Political Ethics in an Age of Terror 2. The Strength of the Weak 3. The Weakness of the Strong 4. The Ethics of Emergency 5. The Temptations of Nihilism 6. The Usefulness of Ethics.

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Book)

King Leopold's ghost: a story of greed, terror and heroism in colonial Africa

THE LEAST OF ALL POSSIBLE EVILS: HUMANITARIAN VIOLENCE FROM ARENDT TO GAZA by Eyal Weizman New York: Verso, 2011 (218 pages, index, illustrations) $26.95 (cloth)In that historical moment after the September 11 terrorist attacks, American politicians and pundits launched a debate about whether torture should be employed to combat terror. Those who endorsed the use of torture, and even some conflicted torture opponents, affirmed the consensus view that torture is unequivocally bad. But, they opined, if torture was necessary to elicit vital information to keep Americans safe, it would be a justiflable lesser evil in the service of national security. Nowadays, drone strikes have supplanted torture as the popular lesser evil.Eyal Weizman begins The Least of All Possible Evils with a history of lesser-evil thinking. "The principle of the lesser evil," he explains,is often presented as a dilemma between two or more bad choices in situations where available options are, or seem to be, limited. ... Both aspects of the principle are understood as taking place within a closed system in which those posing the dilemma, the options available for choice, the factors to be calculated and the very parameters of calculation are unchallenged. Each calculation is taken anew, as if the previous accumulation of events has not taken place, and the future implications are out of bounds. (6)Weizman's work is a profound and empirically rich engagement with developments in contemporary "humanitarianism," which, he argues, has evolved into various technocratic collusions among those who work to aid the vulnerable and those who mete out state violence in the name of security. He names this lesser-evil collusion "the humanitarian present."Weizman dates the start of the humanitarian present to the 1980s, specifically the "humanitarian crisis" in Ethiopia and the role Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) played there. The "crisis" was not the devastating famine in East Africa. It was rather the ways in which Mengistu Haile Mariam's regime co-opted MSF's relief work to seize and relocate starving people who came from rebel-controlled regions to the food distribution centers, ultimately leading to thousands of deaths.Weizman traces the contemporary history of humanitarianism to French left-radical politics in the late 1960s and the influence of Hannah Arendt's work on totalitarianism. Anti-totalitarianism supplanted revolutionary leftism, and activism shifted from proletariats and capitalists to the "passive quasi-religious dialectics of victims and perpetrators" (37). This elevation of victims as the focus of humanitarian concern and action congealed as a politics of compassion and a practice oriented to the humanitarian culture of emergency. The humanitarian ethic, in the words of Bernard-Henri Levy, was the utilitarian objective to "make the world a little more livable for the greatest number of people" (38). The nexus of compassion and practice found its infrastructure in humanitarian nongovernmental organizations, such as MSF.The logic of principled compromises can be seen in MSF's promotion of "humanitarianism in its minimalist form, ... as the practice of 'lesser evils' ... [to sustain] life without seeking to govern or manage populations, [or to make] political claims on their behalf, [or to seek] to resolve root causes of conflicts" (54). Weizman compares this willingness to compromise for the goal of keeping people alive to that of the world's most preeminent humani- tarian organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross, where access to prisoners is traded for the promise not to publicize what is learned.Such political agnosticism involved a three-part move: creating humani- tarian spaces separate from the political spheres of armies or regimes, adhering to a logic of humanitarian minimalism to sustain life, and believing that the people whose lives were saved would create their own politics, someday. …

The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza

This article focuses on the issue of domestic violence in Muslim societies in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The analytical framework is comparative, emphasizing four factors and the interplay among them: shari'a (Islamic law), state power, intrafamily violence, and struggles over women's rights. The comparative approach historicizes the problem of domestic violence and impunity to consider the impact of transnational legal discourses (Islamism and human rights) on “local” struggles over rights and law. The use of shari'a creates some commonalities in gender and family relations in Muslim societies, notably the sanctioning and maintenance of male authority over female relatives. However, the most important issue for understanding domestic violence and impunity is the relationship between religion and state power. This relationship takes three forms: communalization, in which religious law is separate from the national legal regime; nationalization, in which the state incorporates religious law into the national legal regime; and theocratization, in which the national legal regime is based on religious law.

Religion, State Power, and Domestic Violence in Muslim Societies: A Framework for Comparative Analysis

Israel's military court system, a centerpiece of Israel's apparatus of control in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, has prosecuted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. This authoritative book provides a rare look at an institution that lies both figuratively and literally at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lisa Hajjar has conducted in-depth interviews with dozens of Israelis and Palestinians - including judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, defendants, and translators - about their experiences and practices to explain how this system functions, and how its functioning has affected the conflict. Her lucid, richly detailed, and theoretically sophisticated study highlights the array of problems and debates that characterize Israel's military courts as it asks how the law is deployed to protect and further the interests of the Israeli state and how it has been used to articulate and defend the rights of Palestinians living under occupation.

Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza

This article traces the development and transformation of the human rights movement in Israel/Palestine, focusing mainly on the situation in the West Bank and Gaza. The conflict is, at its core, a struggle
 over rights, pitting the prerogatives of the Israeli state against the national and human rights of the Palestinian population (i.e., to self-determination, legal protections, civil liberties). Since the
 creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, however, rights-violating practices have continued.

Human Rights in Israel/Palestine: The History and Politics of a Movement

There is an interest among scholars working on cause lawyering to "globalize" the subject by studying professional and political networks that span national boundaries. The globalizing scope of human rights provides a particularly relevant perspective, complementing the more narrowly attenuated focus on the roles and activities of cause lawyers. The subjects of this article are Israeli and Palestinian cause lawyers who have worked in the Israeli military court system in the Occupied Territories. This study adopts a transnational perspective both because the context itself (Israel/Palestine) is composed of relations that span national boundaries (statal and ethnonational) and because it befits a consideration of the international networks of human rights. Following an introductory discussion of transnationalism and a brief background on Israel/ Palestine and the military courts, I turn to three aspects of cause lawyering: the political motivations inspiring lawyers to engage in such work; a comparative assessment of the legal and extralegal strategies pursued by lawyers; and the influence of human rights on the politics of lawyering in this context. I. Thinking Transnationally Around the world, lawyers often play important roles in formulating and advancing social or political causes. "Cause lawyering" refers to the legal and extralegal engagements of politically motivated lawyers, whether the cause is comprehensive transformation, such as independence or democratization, or a more limited aspect of public policy, such as expanded rights or guaranteed protections of some kind. In contrast to "conventional" or "client lawyering," which is tailored to accommodate prevailing arrangements of power, cause lawyering involves the application of professional skills and services to transform some aspect of the status quo.1 The very notion of "cause" implies agency, motivation, social identifications, political relations, and goals. The other side of the coin is the ways in which sociopolitical dynamics affect cause lawyering as opportunities for intervention expand or contract, political alliances shift, and causes become redefined by circumstance or deliberation. The study of cause lawyering, then, involves analysis of the contours of resistance through the medium of law within a given field of hegemonic relations. Much of the work done on cause lawyering thus far has focused on national contexts wherein lawyers' causes relate to the politics or policies of their own state or to issues affecting their own society. Even when the subjects are lawyers working in support of causes which have an internationalist agenda, cause lawyering often is organized and operationalized within national boundaries.2 However, there is an interest among scholars working on cause lawyering to incorporate a more "global" perspective. The objective is to study professional and political networks that span national boundaries in order to gain an understanding of the factors and forces that drive and/or inhibit cause lawyering in "local" contexts. Although cause lawyering manifests itself in widely varied ways around the world in terms of the causes and practices of lawyers, the quest for change provides a kind of organizing principle at the heart of the concept. Globalizing the study of cause lawyering would not (necessarily) alter the subject (lawyers and their activities); rather, it would involve an opening up of the boundaries-often national-that frame the analysis. Human rights, as both a normative discourse and a form of international politics, provides a global perspective particularly relevant to the study of cause lawyering. It offers a way of imagining the world or, more specifically, a way of imagining a world changed for the better. Many examples of cause lawyering are tantamount to human rights work of some kind, and human rights "works" in large part through the efforts and activities of lawyers. …

Lisa Hajjar

Papers

The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza

Religion, State Power, and Domestic Violence in Muslim Societies: A Framework for Comparative Analysis

Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza

Human Rights in Israel/Palestine: The History and Politics of a Movement

Cause Lawyering in Transnational Perspective: National Conflict and Human Rights in Israel/Palestine