Remaking Rwanda Front Cover
Feature Publications
Remaking Rwanda - State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence
Edited by Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf
The first comprehensive critique of state reconstruction, peace-building, and human rights in post-genocide Rwanda
In the mid-1990s, civil war and genocide ravaged Rwanda. Since then, the country’s new leadership has undertaken a highly ambitious effort to refashion Rwanda’s politics, economy, and society, and the country’s accomplishments have garnered widespread praise. Remaking Rwanda is the first book to examine Rwanda’s remarkable post-genocide recovery in a comprehensive and critical fashion. By paying close attention to memory politics, human rights, justice, foreign relations, land use, education, and other key social institutions and practices, this volume raises serious concerns about the depth and durability of the country’s reconstruction.
Edited by Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf, Remaking Rwanda brings together experienced scholars and human rights professionals to offer a nuanced, historically informed picture of post-genocide Rwanda—one that reveals powerful continuities with the nation’s past and raises profound questions about its future.
"This rich array of careful scholarship provides a valuable, multifaceted view of a country still struggling with the aftereffects of genocide and civil war. It offers an important corrective to the naively rosy picture of Rwanda that too often prevails in the American media.”—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost
"An important contribution to scholarship both on Rwanda and on human rights. Many of the chapters, by leading and emergent Rwanda scholars, directly challenge received wisdom about governance in post-conflict-states, and raise serious questions about the impact of a range of transitional justice measures on longer-term peacebuilding."
Chandra Lekha Sriram, author of Peace as Governance: Power-Sharing, Armed Groups and Contemporary Peace Negotiations
"Remaking Rwanda is an ambitious book, a rich and varied compilation that demonstrates the full complement of approaches, methods, and concerns informing the study of post-genocide Rwanda.”—Lee Ann Fujii, author of Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda
Scott Straus is associate professor of political science and international studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Lars Waldorf, senior lecturer in international human rights law at the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York, is coeditor of Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities after Mass Violence and Disarming the Past: Transitional Justice and Ex-Combatants.
The Era of Transitional Justice The Aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and Beyond
Paul Gready University of York, UK
The Era of Transitional Justice: The Aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and Beyond explores the broader issues raised by political transition and transitional justice through the prism of the TRC and transition in South Africa.
South Africa constitutes a powerful case study of the enduring structural legacies of a troubled past, and of both the potential and limitations of transitional justice and human rights as agents of transformation in the contemporary era. South Africa’s story has wider relevance because it helped to launch constitutional human rights and transitional justice as global discourses; as such, its own legacy is to some extent writ large in post-authoritarian and post-conflict contexts across the world. Based on a decade of research, and in an analysis that is both comparative and interdisciplinary, Paul Gready maintains that transitional justice needs to do more to address structural violence - and in particular poverty, inequality and social and criminal violence - as these have emerged as stubborn legacies from an oppressive or war-torn past in many parts of the world. Organised around four central themes - new keyword conceptualisation (truth, justice, reconciliation); re-imagining human rights; engaging with the past and present; remaking the public sphere - it is an argument that will be of considerable relevance to those interested in the law and politics of transitional societies.
Reviews
"Paul Gready has written a well-researched, thoughtful and unique volume. His assertion that those working on transitional justice and human rights must do more to address the structural poverty and violence which are the enduring legacies of the past - including through greater attention to realizing economic, social and cultural rights for all - is an important message for the 21st century. This book offers a wealth of insights for those working in a range of fields including, but going well beyond, transitional justice." - Mary Robinson, President of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative; former President of Ireland
"This superb book provides an insightful, provocative and timely critique of the strengths and weaknesses of transitional justice mechanisms, through the prism of truth commissions. In recent years transitional justice mechanisms have spread somewhat promiscuously and have been asked to take on a rapidly expanding array of tasks. But too little attention has been paid to coherence, manageability, or the deeper assumptions underpinning the process. This book analyses those shortcomings critically but constructively and provides important guidelines for the future." - Philip Alston, John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
"The Era of Transitional Justice is a brilliant inquiry into the sensitive domain of transitional justice given concreteness by a focus on post-apartheid South Africa's struggle for truth and reconciliation, but it is more than this. What really makes this book indispensable is its exceptionally clarifying conceptual framework for thought and action across the whole spectrum of human rights/justice concerns." - Richard Falk, Research Professor, Global Studies, UCSB
Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities after Mass Violence
Edited by Rosalind Shaw and Lars Waldorf, with Pierre Hazan
Through war crimes prosecutions, truth commissions, purges of perpetrators, reparations, and memorials, transitional justice practices work under the assumptions that truth telling leads to reconciliation, prosecutions bring closure, and justice prevents the recurrence of violence. But when local responses to transitional justice destabilize these assumptions, the result can be a troubling disconnection between international norms and survivors' priorities.
Localizing Transitional Justice traces how ordinary people respond to—and sometimes transform—transitional justice mechanisms, laying a foundation for more locally responsive approaches to social reconstruction after mass violence and egregious human rights violations. Recasting understandings of culture and locality prevalent in international justice, this vital book explores the complex, unpredictable, and unequal encounter among international legal norms, transitional justice mechanisms, national agendas, and local priorities and practices.
Reviews
"Localizing Transitional Justice addresses extremely current debates on transitional justice and post-conflict justice interventions, bringing together a range of excellent cases. The contributors are doing some of the most exciting, cutting-edge work in this area. Together, they have written a sterling book which maps out a new field with remarkable breadth and clarity. It will definitely be a key reference in the field."—Rachel Sieder, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), Mexico
"Full of innovative ideas and trenchant critiques, Localizing Transitional Justice offers smart recommendations for how we should approach and conceive of transitional justice today. Among its strengths are its distinction between post-repression and post-war transitional justice, its critique of equating the local with the traditional, and its incisive assessment of the 'toolkit' approach to transitional justice. This is a powerful new contribution to the study of human rights."—Mike McGovern, Yale University
Disarming the Past: Transitional Justice and Ex-Combatants
Edited by Ana Cutter Patel, Pablo de Greiff and Lars Waldorf
Over the past twenty years, international donors have invested in large-scale disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs. In the same period, there has been a proliferation of transitional justice measures to help render truth, justice, and reparations in the aftermath of state violence and civil war. Yet DDR programs are seldom analyzed to consider justice-related aims; and transitional justice mechanisms rarely articulate strategies for coordinating with DDR. Disarming the Past: Transitional Justice and Ex-combatants examines how these two types of initiatives have connected — or failed to connect — in peacebuilding contexts, and begins to articulate how future DDR programs ought to link with transitional justice aims. The book is the result of a research project of the International Center for Transitional Justice.
This book can be downloaded at http://www.ssrc.org/publications/view/465EDE38-0C0D-DF11-9D32-001CC477EC70/
The No-Nonsense Guide to Human Rights
by Olivia Ball, Adjunct Lecturer at Curtin University's Centre for Human Rights Education and Prof Paul Gready, Centre Director, Centre for Applied Human Rights, University of York
With a forword by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Desmond Tutu.
‘I commend to you The No-Nonsense Guide to Human Rights as a call to question, to think, to act, and to contribute.’ The Most Reverend Desmond M. Tutu, Anglican Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, 1984 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
'Accessible without becoming superficial, Ball and Gready have an engaging style and impressive command of this important subject. More than simply a practitioner's handbook, The No Nonsense Guide to Human Rights makes an intellectual contribution of its own to the field. This pocket-sized book is important reading for the novice and equally useful for the seasoned human rights practitioner.' Mary Robinson, President, Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalisation Initiative, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997-2002), President of Ireland (1990-1997)
'An indispensible exploration of human rights in our time, not only for beginners but also I suspect for many activists who will be challenged by the complexity with which this guide addresses our current dilemmas.' Ariel Dorfman, Chilean writer and human rights activist
'I am full of admiration for the richness and variety packed in to a relatively short text. I only wish that I'd had something like this to read when I was starting out! I'm recommending it to all my students.' Dr Brian Phillips, Senior Lecturer in Human Rights Practice, Oxford Brookes University