New Books in Human Rights

Animals, Justice, and the Politics of Violence: Shared Struggles in Turkey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) by Dr. Sezai Ozan Zeybek explores the intricate relationship between humans and animals in the context of modern Turkish history. From drafted animals in war, to urban stray dogs and the role of cattle in the Kurdish conflict, the cases developed in this book show how animal lives are deeply entangled with human affairs, including complex social organisations such as families, states and nations. In doing so, the book exposes power dynamics, exploitative practices, and the discursive regimes that underpin development, nationalism, and urban growth.

This book offers a timely exploration of human-animal relations, critically revising a number of concepts such as human rights, productivity, health and efficiency from a multispecies perspective.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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The Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki invoked in graphic terms the specter of total human destruction. In response, a new international order of reparations and human rights arose from the ashes of World War II. This legal regime sought to subrogate the sovereignty of the nation-state in order to defend the sovereignty of the human being. While the Holocaust’s history is settled—Nazis were perpetrators and Jews were victims—there remains little historical consensus as to the victims and perpetrators of the atomic bombings. In Reparations and the Human (Duke UP, 2025), David L. Eng investigates a history of reparations across the Transpacific. He analyzes how concepts of reparation established during colonial settlement and the European Enlightenment shape contemporary configurations of the human and human rights, determining who can be recognized as victims, who must be seen as perpetrators, and who deserves repair. As demands for reparations now occupy center stage in debates concerning unresolved legacies of dispossession and Transatlantic slavery, Eng considers how the Cold War Transpacific provides a limit case for the politics of repair and definitions of the human. This book is a sweeping genealogical investigation that moves from seventeenth-century land dispossession in the Americas to the irradiated histories of the Cold War Transpacific, asking a fundamental question: who is considered deserving of repair?

Deep Acharya is a PhD student and a George L. Mosse fellow of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on the history of fatherhood in 20th century Germany.
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A Light in the Tower argues that excellent education and radical support for mental health struggles can coexist, and provides detailed advice for how to do so. Dr. Katie Rose Guest Pryal debunks claims that supporting student mental health harms educational rigor (coining the term “rigor angst” to discuss the fear that rigor is declining). She outlines actionable steps professors and administrators can take, including abandoning ableist and exclusionary campus culture; replacing “bad-hard” work that creates unnecessary logistical difficulties for students in favor of “good-hard” work that challenges them intellectually; providing an easy path to disability accommodations; and teaching accessibly for neurodivergent students.

Dr. Pryal examines the anxiety that plagues campuses as a result of exploited and overworked contingent faculty and students, the systemic and institutional burnout that affects higher education at every level, and the market-driven culture of toxic overwork. Addressing the stigma that haunts mental disability on campus, the ableism that hounds our teaching, and the cascade of mental health struggles that far too many faculty and students face, Dr. Pryal provides straightforward solutions to complex challenges.

Our guest is: Dr. Katie Rose Guest Pryal, who is an author, neurodiversity expert, and adjunct professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of A Light in the Tower, and other works including the award-winning Even If You’re Broken: Bodies, Boundaries, and Mental Health.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and creator of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist:

Sitting Pretty

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The Power of Play in Higher Education

Disabled Ecologies

Teaching While Nerdy

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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The Ecosystem of Exile Politics: Why Proximity and Precarity Matter for Bhutan's Homeland Activists (Cornell UP, 2024), relays the events in Bhutan that led to the exodus of one-sixth of the population, and then recounts the activism by Bhutan's refugee diaspora that followed in response. Susan Banki asserts that activism functions like a physical ecosystem, in which hubs of activism in different locations interact to pressure the home country.

For Bhutan’s refugee mobilizers, physical proximity offers advantages in Nepal and India, where organizing protests, lobbying, and collecting information about government abuse in Bhutan is aided by being close to the homeland. But in an ecosystem of exile politics, proximity is both a boon and a bane. Sites proximate to Bhutan can be spaces of risk and disempowerment, and refugee activists rarely secure legal, political, and social protection. While distant diasporas in the Global North may not be in precarious situations, they cannot tap into the advantages of proximity. In examining these phenomena, The Ecosystem of Exile Politics adds to theoretical understandings of exile politics and to empirical research on Bhutan and its refugee population.

Susan Banki is an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney. She studies the political, institutional, and social contexts that explain the roots of and solutions to human rights violations and social justice abuses, with a specific focus on the Asia-Pacific region.
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In Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law (Bloomsbury 2025), Lys Kulamadayil offers a crucial examination of how international law shapes the exploitation of natural resources in post-colonial States. Kulamadayil reveals how international legal rules can be constitutive, punitive, remedial in creating the paradox of plenty in resource-rich States.

The book revisits the making of foundational principles like sovereignty over natural resources and economic self-determination as applied during decolonisation; explores how humanitarian frameworks have justified extraction of public natural resources; and traces the proliferation of international treaties that protect foreign property rights. The book also zooms in on legal paradigms ranging from contract law to anti-corruption, human rights, and criminal law, arguing that these frameworks often work together to create the pathology of plenty.

Through this interrogation, the book points to proposals to escape siloed ways of thinking about natural resources and embrace an intersectoral and anti-carceral thinking instead.

Lys Kulamadayil is a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and the Principal Investigator of the project Law by Colour Code: Locating Race and Racism in International Law.

Raghavi Viswanath is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London. Her research, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, examines how pastoralists claim grazing rights under India’s Forest Rights Act 2006 and how the everyday processes of staking such claims has been impacted by the authoritarian turn in India. LinkedIn. Email:[email protected]
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