BY JO-MARIE BURT In spring 2008, the Transitional/Transnational Justice Working Group, a group of Mason faculty and graduate students interested in issues of global justice and human rights, launched the Human Rights, Global Justice and Democracy Project. The project’s central concern is to examine how societies that experienced mass atrocity cope with the legacies of [...]
BY SUSAN BENESCH Once unimaginable, prosecutions for state-sponsored atrocities are multiplying rapidly. They continue to deliver new milestones, both by expanding transnationally and by reaching previously untouchable defendants. Some trials astonish even their own proponents, as this symposium illustrated: Peru’s conviction of its former head of state Alberto Fujimori in April left Ronald Gamarra Herrera [...]
BY TRICIA D. OLSEN, LEIGH A. PAYNE, AND ANDREW G. REITER Despite the recent proliferation of transitional justice practices and scholarship around the world, we know very little about whether and how it achieves its goals of strengthening democracy and reducing human rights violations. Findings from the Transitional Justice Data Base (TJDB) fill that gap [...]
BY HUGO VAN DER MERWE In 1995, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) introduced a mechanism that offered a morally compromised form of accountability: amnesty in exchange for public disclosure of truth. While this was a bitter pill to swallow for the South African public and an unacceptable deal for many victims, it [...]
BY RONALD GAMARRA HERRERA On April 7, 2009, the Peruvian Supreme Court’s Special Criminal Court handed down a unanimous sentence against former President Alberto Fujimori in the four cases of human rights violations for which he was on trial: collective assassinations in Barrios Altos and La Cantuta, and the abductions of journalist Gustavo Gorriti and [...]
BY PETER MANDAVILLE This is real life, engraved on my pages: families dying from starvation whilst the government’s worried about immigration. — Blind Alphabetz, ‘Concrete Landz’ Like everyone today, Young British Muslims are carrying around iPods full of the latest tunes. Despite the recent phenomenal popularity of a pop-oriented variant of nasheed devotional music—a key [...]
BY LINDA SELIGMANN In her most recent novel, Digging to America, Anne Tyler spins a tale of two Baltimore families whose paths cross at the airport where they go to greet their Korean adoptive girls. As the story unfolds, the children’s status as transnational adoptees matters less in building social ties between the families than [...]
BY LISA JORDAN Global civil society is a relatively new layer of networks and organizations that operate beyond national borders. Over 20,000 of these networks are already active on the world stage, 90 % of which have been formed within the last thirty years. Many —including Jubilee 2000, the Global Campaign to Ban Landmines, Amnesty International [...]
BY FRANCES V. HARBOUR One of the tragedies common in failed and violent authoritarian states is that the police force becomes a significant contributor to humanitarian disaster. An organization that should protect domestic order and human security instead is implicated in human rights violations. When violation is on a scale that provokes international humanitarian intervention, [...]
BY JO-MARIE BURT One of the most contentious issues facing transitional democracies is the problem of gross human rights violations committed during the previous regime. How should fragile democracies address the question of accountability, given the known deficiencies of their judicial systems; the ongoing power of the torturers themselves and/or those who benefited from their [...]