A new road connects the towns of Siem Reap to Along Veng, in northern Cambodia; it now takes less then two hours from the temples of Angkor to reach the last bastion of the Khmer Rouge, in what used to be a dense jungle. It is enough time for my driver, thirty-one-year-old Vann, to tell me the story of his family.
Photo Essay: Ghosts of the Khmer Rouge
Visual documentation of the legacy of the Khmer Rouge.
Introduction to “The Concept of Piracy”
There will be talk of pirates as long as something called “humanity” goes to war.
International Aid and Development NGOs in Britain and Human Rights since 1945
UK international aid and development organisations such as Oxfam, Save the Children and Christian Aid have become some of the most prominent NGOs in the world. Born out of the humanitarian response to crisis, they have subsequently become significant players in the global debate about long-term development. From advocating an alternative path to development in the 1960s and 1970s they have come to articulate a rights-based approach in the 1990s. For NGOs, this was a logical consequence of “scaling up” their activities. However, as Hilton demonstrates, it was the result of more complex processes which have gradually brought these ever larger organisations into the development mainstream.
The Concept of Piracy
Due to copyright restrictions, this excerpt is available only in print or on Project Muse.
Somali Piracy: The Local Contexts of an International Obsession
On the moral and political economy of Somali piracy, as well as what its visibility and the effort to combat it reveal about world players.
Afterword: Social Rights and Human Rights in the Time of Decolonization
Concluding this collection, Cooper places the question of social and human rights in the context of the acute uncertainty about world politics in the years after World War II. Not least of the questions was the unit in which rights could be claimed: nation-state, empire, humanity as a whole. That issue was particularly open in the years after 1945 because of struggles over colonialism. Could the expanding notion of social rights in postwar England and France be confined to the metropole, especially as colonial powers needed to redefine their basis of legitimacy and as social and political movements in Africa were asserting political voice? Political movements in the colonies were not necessarily focused on independence, but on the right to claim rights—social as well as political—in an imperial polity. The locus of rights, as well as their contents, have remained in question ever since.
Pirate Trials, the International Criminal Court, and Mob Justice: Reflections on Postcolonial Sovereignty in Kenya
Even as Kenya imports the original ‘‘enemy of all’’—the pirate—it prepares to export to The Hague the new ‘‘enemy of all’’—the perpetrator of crimes against humanity.
Of Pirates, Empire, and Terror: An Interview with Lauren Benton and Dan Edelstein
Two important new books, histories of the early modern period, are starkly different in their topics, approaches, and conclusions. Yet they both intersect the topic of piracy in its heyday.
Child Trafficking or Labor Migration? A Historical Perspective from Mali’s Dogon Country
For demographic and historical reasons, there is no way to separate a discussion of the worst forms of child labor from the history of rural migration patterns.