In recent years, influential studies have shown that the activities of human rights organizations are central in convincing violating governments to improve their practices. Yet some governments continue to get away with human rights violations despite mobilizations against them. In Human Rights and State Security: Indonesia and the Philippines, Anja Jetschke considers the impact of transnational human rights advocacy on the process of human rights reform and democratization in two countries that have been successful in resisting international human rights pressure. Jetschke details the effects of campaigns waged by international and domestic NGOs, foreign governments, local opposition leaders, and international organizations. She argues that the literature on transnational advocacy overlooks the ability of governments to justify and excuse human rights violations in their public dialogue with human rights organizations. Describing efforts of international and domestic human rights advocates to protect the rights of various groups, the case studies in this book suggest that governments successfully block or evade pressures if they invoke threats to state security. Jetschke finds that state security puts into play a set of powerful international norms related to sovereignty—a state's right to territorial integrity, the secular organization of the state, or a government's lack of control over the means of organized violence. If governments frame persuasive arguments around these norms, they can effectively mobilize competing domestic and international groups and trump human rights advocacy. Human Rights and State Security shows that the content and arguments on behalf of human rights matter and provide opportunities for both governments and civil society organizations to advance their agendas.

Through a comparative analysis of Iran under the Shah, Nicaragua under the Somozas and the Philippines under Marcos, Steinmetz evaluates the effectiveness of American priorities in authoritarian states that were perceived to protect U.S. interests.

Although a wave of democratization appears to be sweeping the globe, torture persists in more than seventy-five nations. Despite widespread condemnation of torture and the efforts of international and nongovernmental organizations to end it, the "politics of pain" continues in a broad range of social and political systems. This book is one of the first to systematically examine the psychological, cultural, and social origins of torture. It provides profiles of torturers and of those who direct them in their brutal activities. The contributors provide case studies from the past and present, including Somoza's National Guard in Nicaragua and regimes in the Southern Cone of Latin America and in Greece.

"Wurfel presents a full examination of the island republic from independence to the present, placed in the context of the Philippines' long and rich history. . . . [He] has taken advantage of new research and publications, and has devoted more than a third of the study to the Marcos and Aquino administrations. . . . This is an important book--a study no student of Philippine politics and society can ignore."--Choice

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.

As a classic text of the New Haven School of International Law, this book explores human rights and international law in the broadest sense, taking into account social sciences research while embracing all values secured, or consequently fulfilled, or needed to thus be achieved. The re-issuance of this venerable title, unveils this work to a new generation of scholars, students, and practitioners of international law and human rights.