The Wages of Impunity consists of essays on human rights and civil liberties in India. Reiterating the indispensability of fundamental rights, the essays focus on aspects such as secularism, socialism, and the right to life, liberty, free speech and association. Using the Constitution as the point of departure, the author opens up the complexity of rights through incisive analyses of case law on each of these aspects.

Cases argued and determined in the Supreme Court of North Carolina.

"Transnational Torture by Jinee Lokaneeta reviewed with Prachi Patankar" on the blog Kafila. Evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and harsh interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay beg the question: has the "war on terror" forced liberal democracies to rethink their policies and laws against torture? Transnational Torture focuses on the legal and political discourses on torture in India and the United States--two common-law based constitutional democracies--to theorize the relationship between law, violence, and state power in liberal democracies. Analyzing about one hundred landmark Supreme Court cases on torture in India and the United States, memos and popular imagery of torture, Jinee Lokaneeta compellingly demonstrates that even before recent debates on the use of torture in the war on terror, the laws of interrogation were much more ambivalent about the infliction of excess pain and suffering than most political and legal theorists have acknowledged. Rather than viewing the recent policies on interrogation as anomalous or exceptional, Lokaneeta effectively argues that efforts to accommodate excess violence--a constantly negotiated process--are long standing features of routine interrogations in both the United States and India, concluding that the infliction of excess violence is more central to democratic governance than is acknowledged in western jurisprudence.

How does the globalization of law, the emergence of multiple and shifting venues of legal accountability, enhance or evade the fulfillment of international human rights? Alison Brysk’s edited volume aims to assess the institutional and political factors that determine the influence of the globalization of law on the realization of human rights. The globalization of law has the potential to move the international human rights regime from the generation of norms to the fulfillment of rights, through direct enforcement, reshaping state policy, granting access to civil society, and global governance of transnational forces. In this volume, an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars explores the development of new norms, mechanisms, and practices of international legal accountability for human rights abuse, and tests their power in a series of "hard cases." The studies find that new norms and mechanisms have been surprisingly effective globally, in terms of treaty adherence, international courts, regime change, and even the diffusion of citizenship rights, but this effect is conditioned by regional and domestic structures of influence and access. However, law has a more mixed impact on abuses in Mexico, Israel-Palestine and India. Brysk concludes that the globalization of law is transforming sovereignty and fostering the shift from norms to fulfillment, but that peripheral states and domains often remain beyond the reach of this transformation. Theoretically framed, but comprised of empirical case material, this edited volume will be useful for both graduate students and academics in law, political science, human rights, international relations, global and international studies, and law and society.

An intervention in the field of dissenting writings by women political detainees in India in the 1970s, and it straddles three interlinked areas: politics, prison and writing. It focuses on writings arising out of Bengal's Naxalite movement (1967-1975) and from the pan-Indian period of Emergency (1975-1977).

Corruption is endemic in Cameroon. Twice, Transparency International have accorded the country the infamous first place in corruption. As one of many concerned Cameroonians, Sammy Oke Akombi was moved and they realized that something was in fact wrong somewhere and something had to be done somehow. This collection of short stories is his contribution to the collective resolve by concerned Cameroonians to wage a war against this most unusual friend of fairness. The stories seek to elicit awareness about a social ill that is ironically championed by the very politicians, functionaries, educator, leaders and power elite whose duty it is to keep society healthy and on the rails. The stories are on corruption in different segments of society and about the people who perpetrate it. Almost everyone is immersed in it and so must make every effort to resurface from it. It takes only the will to stay alive because the wages of corruption like any other sin can only be death.

Using case studies and the results of extensive fieldwork, this book considers the nature of state power and legal violence in liberal democracies by focusing on the interaction between law, science, and policing in India. The postcolonial Indian police have often been accused of using torture in both routine and exceptional criminal cases, but they, and forensic psychologists, have claimed that lie detectors, brain scans, and narcoanalysis (the use of “truth serum,” Sodium Pentothal) represent a paradigm shift away from physical torture; most state high courts in India have upheld this rationale. The Truth Machines examines the emergence and use of these three scientific techniques to analyze two primary themes. First, the book questions whether existing theoretical frameworks for understanding state power and legal violence are adequate to explain constant innovations of the state. Second, it explores the workings of law, science, and policing in the everyday context to generate a theory of state power and legal violence, challenging the monolithic frameworks about this relationship, based on a study of both state and non-state actors. Jinee Lokaneeta argues that the attempt to replace physical torture with truth machines in India fails because it relies on a confessional paradigm that is contiguous with torture. Her work also provides insights into a police institution that is founded and refounded in its everyday interactions between state and non-state actors. Theorizing a concept of Contingent State, this book demonstrates the disaggregated, and decentered nature of state power and legal violence, creating possible sites of critique and intervention.

On the seventieth anniversary of Indian independence, Partition, and the creation of Pakistan, this ground breaking collection brings together fourteen cutting-edge scholarly essays on multiple aspects of both the region and the issue of Kashmir. While keeping the political dimensions of the dispute over the territory in focus, these innovative essays branch out from the high politics of the conflict to consider less well-known aspects and areas of Kashmir. They examine the continuities and ruptures between Kashmir's past and its present situation; reevaluate the contemporary political scenario from the perspective of gender, economic and political marginality, everyday experiences, and governance; and analyze the ways in which the region of Kashmir and its people are represented and (re)present themselves in films and literature through their regional and religious identities, and commodities. This volume aims to understand the limitations of postcolonial nationalism and citizenship as exemplified by the situation in contemporary Kashmir.