Beth Simmons’s Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (Cambridge, 2009) has been celebrated as the most significant work in the field in many years. And the reception of the book is generally well deserved. As most people know, Simmons brings extraordinary quantitative rigor to the topic of whether several human rights treaties make a difference.
Editorial collective member Miriam Ticktin has just published her book, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France with University of California Press. Congratulations!
Here is the book description:
Drug addiction in Russia has reached epidemic proportions, but the government is refusing to address the problem head-on, preferring instead to inveigh against external forces like the USA, NATO and the war in Afghanistan. On current problems and their implications for the future.
A couple of weeks ago when it became clear that Barack Obama has reneged on his campaign promise to close the Guantánamo Bay facility, Hendrik Hertzberg inveighed against the result in the New Yorker. Torture was a “vile offense to elementary morality” on George W. Bush’s watch, and there were sundry other “crimes against American and international law” from which Obama’s new policies do not sufficiently depart.
Nils Gilman's coedited book Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century has been published.
Here is the description:
There have been not a few commentators, from the bleeding hearts on the liberal left to the usual suspects on the neocon right, who have been celebrating the raining down of Tomahawk missiles on Libya as a wonderful return of morality to foreign policy.
A few people have asked my how my recent account of the history of human rights connects to the contemporary events in Middle Eastern politics. While I have no expertise with respect to the latter, I have a new post at Dissent magazine applying to the events a distinction between the rights of man and human rights on which my book is based.
I explore that question in a new article in the American Historical Review.
Humanity editorial board member Paul W. Kahn has recently published a new book.
Here is the description:
As Sam Moyn has pointed out in his previous post, the events in Tunisia and Egypt have triggered a revival of sorts of “democracy promotion.” Yesterday, the New York Times ran a feature about “the return of pushing democracy” that explored how current events are used by some supporters of the previous administration to suggest that George W.
