New Books in Human Rights

• Maja Davidović, "Governing the Past: 'Never Again' and the Transitional Justice Project" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

  The way we govern the past to ensure peaceful futures keeps conflict anxieties alive. In pursuit of its own survival, permanence and legitimacy, the project of transitional justice, designed to put the 'Never Again' promise into practice, makes communities that ought to benefit from it anxious about potential repetition of conflict. Governing the Past: 'Never Again' and the Transitional Justice Project (Cambridge UP, 2025)challenges the benevolence of this human rights-led global project. It invites readers to reflect on the incompatibility between transitional justice and the grand goal of ensuring peace, and to imagine alternative and ungovernable futures. Rich in stories from the field, the author draws on personal experiences of conflict and transition in the former Yugoslavia to explore how different elements of transitional justice have changed the structure of this Bosnia and Herzegovina and neighbouring societies over the years. This powerful study is essential reading for students, scholars and practitioners interested in human rights and durable international peace. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• Alexander Cooley and Alexander Dukalskis, "Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics" (Oxford UP, 2025)

  Following the end of the Cold War, the world experienced a remarkable wave of democratization. Over the next two decades, numerous authoritarian regimes transitioned to democracies, and it seemed that authoritarianism as a political model was fading. But as recent events have shown, things have clearly changed.In Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics (Oxford UP, 2025), authors Dr. Alexander Cooley and Dr. Alexander Dukalskis reveal how today's authoritarian states are actively countering liberal ideas and advocacy surrounding human rights and democracy across various global governance domains. The transformed global context has unlocked for authoritarian states the possibility to contend with Western liberal soft power in new, traditionally "non-political" ways, including by plugging or even reversing the very channels of influence that originally spread liberalism. Dr. Cooley and Dr. Dukalskis ultimately advance a theory of authoritarian snapback, the process in which non-democratic states limit the transnational resonance of liberal ideas at home and advance anti-liberal norms and ideas into the global public sphere.Drawing from a range of evidence, including field work interviews and comparative case studies that demonstrate the changing nature of consumer boycotts, a database of authoritarian government administrative actions against foreign journalists, a database of global content-sharing agreement involving Chinese and Russian state media, and a database of transnational higher education partnerships involving authoritarian and democratic countries, this book doesn't just reveal the limits of the liberal influence taken for granted across the world. It offers a novel theory of how authoritarian governments figured out how to exploit and repurpose the same actors, tools, and norms that once exclusively promoted and sustained US-backed liberalism. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• Adam Jones, "Sites of Genocide" (Routledge, 2022)

  Adam Jones will be familiar to anyone interested in the field of genocide studies. He's published one of the leading textbooks in the field. He's been influential in drawing attention to the intersection of gender and mass violence. And he's particpated in the emergence of attention to genocides of indigenous peoples over the past decade. Sites of Genocide (Routledge, 2022) is a compilation of Jones' work over the past ten years. The book is comprised of essays, interviews and reflections. Each individual piece stands alone. But together the pieces reflect a decade-long discussion of mass violence. A careful reading of the section on gender reveals, among other things, the gradual emergence of male victims of gender-based violence as an area of interest for Jones. Also prominent is a wrestling with an ever-deeper understanding of mass violence in Central Africa and how to write about this truthfully in a politically fraught environment. These are only two of several throughlines of the essays. The book is valuable for anyone interested in the subject. But graduate students in particular will benefit from witnessing an expert wrestle with ideas over time.   Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• Mark L. Clifford, "The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong's Greatest Dissident, and China's Most Feared Critic" (Free Press, 2024)

  The extraordinary life story of the billionaire businessman Jimmy Lai, a leading Hong Kong democracy activist fighting for freedom of speech who became China’s most famous political prisoner. Jimmy Lai escaped mainland China when he was twelve years old, at the height of a famine that killed tens of millions. In Hong Kong, he hustled and often slept overnight on a table in a clothing factory where he did odd jobs. At twenty-one, he was running a factory. By his mid-twenties, he owned one and was supplying sweaters and shirts to some of the biggest brands in the United States, from Polo to The Limited. His ideas about retail led him to create Giordano in 1981, and with it “fast fashion.” But then came the 1989 democracy spring protests and the June 4th Tiananmen massacre. His reaction to the violence was to enter the media industry to push China toward more freedoms. He started a magazine, Next, to advocate for democracy in Hong Kong. Then, just two years before the city was to return to Chinese control, he founded the Apple Daily newspaper. Its mix of bold graphics, gossip, local news, and opposition to the Chinese Communist Party was an immediate hit. For more than two decades, Lai used Appleand Next as part of a personal push for democracy. A draconian new security law came into effect in Hong Kong in mid-2020, effectively making human rights advocacy and free speech a crime and censorship a fact. Lai was arrested and held without bail before being convicted on trumped-up charges. At the end of 2023, a lengthy national security trial, that could see him jailed for life, alleged “collusion with foreign forces” and printing seditious materials. China’s most famous political prisoner has been held in solitary confinement since December 2020, while his supporters and family continue the fight to have him freed. Mark L. Clifford, former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and the Standard and President of The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, draws on his three-decade friendship with Lai to tell the inside story of Lai's activism and his bravery in standing up to China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 159 Glenn Patterson: You Can Choose Who You Are (JP, DC)

  In Belfast, good fences can make for bad neighbors. David Cunningham ( Wash U. sociologist, author of There’s Something Happening Here and Klansville, U.S.A and frequent RTB visitor) joins John to speak about the Troubles and their aftermath with the brilliant Northern Irish novelist/essayist/memoirist Glenn Patterson. His fiction includes The International (1999) and Where Are We Now? but the conversation’s main focus is his two collections of short non-fiction, Lapsed Protestant (2006) and Here’s Me Here (2016). Glenn has lifetime of insights about the boundary markers and easy to miss shibboleths that define life in divided places--and in divided times. In Belfast, everyone learns to use words without being marked out: how do you avoid uttering "the one word that gets you killed"? But Troubles that go cold also have a way of heating up again, if we forget, as Glenn puts it, that you can choose who you are. China Mieville's brilliant novel The City and the City is, says Glenn, an allegory for places like Belfast itself, where you have to learn to “unsee” residents of "the other city" even in shared areas. That kind of unseeing, in fiction and in real life, leads to distorted mental maps. Glenn sees the so-called “softening” of the peace walls as among the most pernicious occurrences of the last 40 years, since softening coupled with notion that you simply belong to one of two "communities" is what makes real traffic, real conversation, harder to achieve. He and David agree that all over the world, in ways the echo Belfast although it is rarely spelled out, all sorts of invisible architectural extensions of the security and segregation apparatus hover unobtrusively. Glenn also riffs on the names people dream up for what might lie beyond a Belfast wall's other side, spinning off writer Colin Carberry's proposal: Narnia. Mentioned in the Episode “Love poetry: the RUC and Me” was Glenn's first nonfiction piece back inthe late 1980s. Robert McLiam Wilson: Glenn's friend and fellow Troubles novelist, whose work includes Ripley Bogle (1989). Eoin Macnamie's work includes Resurrection Man (1994). “The C-word” (2014) Glenn's wonderful essay on the trouble that starts when the word "community" gets subdivided into "communities." Padraic Fiacc, sometimes called ”the Poet oft he Troubles” finally has a blue historical marker. That makes Glenn ask why are there are so many "blue plaques" for combatants, so few for non-combatants? The interface zones and the strategic cul de sacs that continue to divide Belfast neighborhoods have been brilliantly detailed and studied by various historians; eg this tour by Neil Jarman, Glenn compares Civil Rights in Northern Ireland in the 1960s with the US Civil Rights movement and with Paris 1968; the 70’s bombing campaigns lines up with the actions of the Red Army Faction in Germany. Recallable Books Glennn says his inspiration to write on partition comes from reading Salman Rushdie’s Shame and Midnight’s Children. He also praises John Dos Passos USA trilogy. David interested in the long tail of a conflict and aingles out Glenn Patterson’s own novel, The Northern Bank Job as well as Eoin McNamee The Bureau. Inspired by Glenn's account of how resident learn to see and unsee portions of Belfast, John praises Kevin Lynch's 1960 The Image of the City. Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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