Author Archives: Claire Moon

About Claire Moon

Claire Moon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, a member of LSE Human Rights, and an associate of the Latin America and Caribbean Centre, LSE. She has degrees in Literature, International Relations, and Politics. Her research spans the sociologies of politics, crime, law, violence, knowledge, science and death, and is best characterised as theoretically-driven empirical research. Drawing on atrocities and their redress as an empirical backdrop, her research has engaged with broad topics such as the nation, justice, and human rights. Specific topics she has written on include transitional justice, post-conflict reconciliation, reparations, war trauma, human rights, humanitarianism and science (forensics). She is the author of Narrating Political Reconciliation: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and is currently working on a book manuscript on the history, politics and ethics of forensic exhumations of mass graves.

Politics, Deathwork, and the Rights of the Dead

This post is part of a series on politics in the face of death. For an introduction and links to the other posts, please see here. I want to address, here, the dead body itself. Not just any dead body, but the mass dead victims of politically animated atrocity, some of which, sometimes, become the subject of large-scale justice processes, such as those in Argentina, Rwanda and Bosnia. These dead are not only the objects of humanitarian concern and legal action, but also the site Continue reading →