* Reframes major events like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Holocaust, and the war in Bosnia to take into account the "complex victim" * Calls for a more effective and encompassing support of all types of victims, especially those not typically recognized as such Images of the political victim are powerful, gripping, and integral in helping us makes sense of conflict, particularly in making moral calculations, determining who is "good" and who is "evil". These images, and the discourse of victimization that surrounds them, inform the international community when deciding to recognize certain individuals as victims and play a role in shaping response policies. These policies in turn create the potential for long term, stable peace after episodes of political victimization. Bouris finds weighty problems with this dichotomous conception of actors in a conflict, which pervades much of contemporary peacebuilding scholarship. She instead argues that victims, much like the conflicts themselves, are complex. Rather than use this complexity as a way to dismiss victims or call for limits on the response from the international community, the book advocates for greater and more effective responses to conflict.

In this groundbreaking book, a leading clinical psychiatrist redefines how we think about and treat victims of trauma. A "stunning achievement" that remains a "classic for our generation." (Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., author of The Body Keeps the Score). Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war. Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud," Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand how we heal and are healed.

This work explores the links between political, economic and social violence and illustrates how local community organizations run and managed by women play a key role throughout conflict situations, not only for meeting basic needs, but also as advocates, fostering trust and collaboration.

This book seeks to refine our understanding of transitional justice and peacebuilding, and long-term security and reintegration challenges after violent conflicts. As recent events following political change during the so-called 'Arab Spring' demonstrate, demands for accountability often follow or attend conflict and political transition. While traditionally much literature and many practitioners highlighted tensions between peacebuilding and justice, recent research and practice demonstrates a turn away from the supposed 'peace vs justice' dilemma. This volume examines the complex relationship between peacebuilding and transitional justice through the lenses of the increased emphasis on victim-centred approaches to justice and the widespread practices of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of excombatants. While recent volumes have sought to address either DDR or victim-centred approaches to justice, none has sought to make connections between the two, much less to place them in the larger context of the increasing linkages between transitional justice and peacebuilding. This book will be of great interest to students of transitional justice, peacebuilding, human rights, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR.

This book provides a holistic analysis of the gendered nature of armed conflict and political violence, and in a broader understanding of the complex, changing roles and power relations between women and men during such circumstances, predominantly viewed as 'male domains', perpetrated by men acting as soldiers, guerillas, paramilitaries or peacemakers. The involvement of women has received far less attention, with a tendency to portray a simplistic division of roles between men as aggressors and women as victims, particularly of sexual abuse. Consequently the gendered causes, costs and consequences of violent conflicts have been, at best, under-represented and, most often, misrepresented.

“A pathbreaking meditation . . . shifts the discussion . . . from . . . notions of guilt and innocence to the complexities of responsibility and accountability.” —Amir Eshel, Stanford University When it comes to historical violence and contemporary inequality, none of us are completely innocent. We may not be direct agents of harm, but we may still contribute to, inhabit, or benefit from regimes of domination that we neither set up nor control. Arguing that the familiar categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander do not adequately account for our connection to injustices past and present, Michael Rothberg offers a new theory of political responsibility through the figure of the implicated subject. The Implicated Subject builds on the comparative, transnational framework of Rothberg's influential work on memory to engage in reflection and analysis of cultural texts, archives, and activist movements from such contested zones as transitional South Africa, contemporary Israel/Palestine, post-Holocaust Europe, and a transatlantic realm marked by the afterlives of slavery. An array of globally prominent artists, writers, and thinkers—from William Kentridge, Hito Steyerl, and Jamaica Kincaid, to Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Judith Butler, and the Combahee River Collective—speak show how confronting our own implication in difficult histories can lead to new forms of internationalism and long-distance solidarity. “A significant work by a major scholar . . . .While drawing on a global range of histories and texts, the book never loses focus on the contemporary moment.” —Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London “Offer[s] a fresh vocabulary to confront our personal and collective responsibility in the face of massive political violence, past and present.” —Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University

The conflict in Nepal (1996 – 2006) resulted in an estimated 15,000 deaths, 1,300 disappearances, along with other serious human rights and humanitarian law violations. Demands for peace, democracy, accountability and development, have abounded in the post-conflict context. Although the conflict catalysed major changes in the social and political landscape in Nepal, the transitional justice (TJ) process has remained deeply contentious and fragmented. This book provides an in-depth analysis of transitional justice process in Nepal. Drawing on interviews with a diverse range of stakeholders, including victims, ex-combatants, community members, human rights advocates, journalists and representatives from diplomatic missions, international organisations and the donor community, it reveals the differing viewpoints, knowledge, attitudes and preferences about TJ and other post-conflict issues in Nepal. The author develops an actor typology and an action spectrum, which can be used in Nepal and other post-conflict contexts. The actor typology identifies four main groups of TJ actors—experts, brokers, implementers and victims—and highlights who is making claims and on behalf of whom. The action spectrum, based on contentious politics literature and resistance literature, demonstrates the strategies actors use to shape the TJ process. This book argues that the potential of TJ lies in these dynamics of contention. It is by letting these dynamics play out that different conceptualisations of TJ can arise. While doing so may lead to practical challenges and produce situations that are normatively undesirable for some actors, particularly when certain political parties and national actors seem to ‘hijack’ TJ, remaining steadfast to the dominant TJ paradigm is also undesirable. As the first book to provide a single case study on TJ in Nepal, it makes theoretical and empirical contributions to: TJ research in Nepal and the Asia-Pacific more broadly, the politics versus justice binary and the concept of victimhood, among others. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars in the study of transitional justice, peace and conflict studies, human rights, sociology, political science, criminology, law, anthropology and South Asian Studies, as well as policy-makers and NGOs.

An incisive look at the causes and consequences of the Rwandan genocide "When we captured Kigali, we thought we would face criminals in the state; instead, we faced a criminal population." So a political commissar in the Rwanda Patriotic Front reflected after the 1994 massacre of as many as one million Tutsis in Rwanda. Underlying his statement was the realization that, though ordered by a minority of state functionaries, the slaughter was performed by hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, including judges, doctors, priests, and friends. Rejecting easy explanations of the Rwandan genocide as a mysterious evil force that was bizarrely unleashed, When Victims Become Killers situates the tragedy in its proper context. Mahmood Mamdani coaxes to the surface the historical, geographical, and political forces that made it possible for so many Hutus to turn so brutally on their neighbors. In so doing, Mamdani usefully broadens understandings of citizenship and political identity in postcolonial Africa and provides a direction for preventing similar future tragedies.

The far right is back with a vengeance. After several decades at the political margins, far-right politics has again taken center stage. Three of the world’s largest democracies – Brazil, India, and the United States – now have a radical right leader, while far-right parties continue to increase their profile and support within Europe. In this timely book, leading global expert on political extremism Cas Mudde provides a concise overview of the fourth wave of postwar far-right politics, exploring its history, ideology, organization, causes, and consequences, as well as the responses available to civil society, party, and state actors to challenge its ideas and influence. What defines this current far-right renaissance, Mudde argues, is its mainstreaming and normalization within the contemporary political landscape. Challenging orthodox thinking on the relationship between conventional and far-right politics, Mudde offers a complex and insightful picture of one of the key political challenges of our time.

Britain is complicit in the deaths of ten million people. These are Unpeople - those whose lives are seen as expendable in the pursuit of Britain's economic and political goals. In Unpeople, Mark Curtis shows that the Blair government is deepening its support for many states promoting terrorism and, using evidence unearthed from formerly secret documents, reveals for the first time the hidden history of unethical British policies, including: support for the massacres in Iraq in 1963; the extraordinary private backing of the US in its aggression against Vietnam; support for the rise of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin; the running of a covert 'dirty war' in Yemen in the 1960s; secret campaigns with the US to overthrow the governments of Indonesia and British Guiana; the welcoming of General Pinochet's brutal coup in Chile in 1973; and much more. This explosive new book, from the author of Web of Deceit, exposes the reality of the Blair government's foreign policies since the invasion of Iraq. It discloses government documents showing that Britain's military is poised for a new phase of global intervention with the US, and reveals the extraordinary propaganda campaigns being mounted to obscure the reality of policies from the public.