Full Description
In the twenty-first century, fighting impunity has become both the rallying cry and a metric of progress for human rights. The new emphasis on criminal prosecution represents a fundamental change in the positions and priorities of students and practitioners of human rights and transitional justice: it has become almost unquestionable common sense that criminal punishment is a legal, political, and pragmatic imperative for addressing human rights violations. This book challenges that common sense. It does so by documenting and critically analyzing the trend toward an anti-impunity norm in a variety of institutional and geographical contexts, with an eye toward the interaction between practices at the global and local levels. Together, the chapters demonstrate how this laser focus on anti-impunity has created blind spots in practice and in scholarship that result in a constricted response to human rights violations, a narrowed conception of justice, and an impoverished approach to peace.
Contents
Introduction; Part I. What Does Anti-Impunity Mean?: 1. A genealogy of the criminal turn in human rights Karen Engle; 2. Anti-impunity as deflection of argument Samuel Moyn; 3. Doing history with impunity Vasuki Nesiah; Part II. How and Where Does Anti-Impunity Operate?: 4. The South African Truth Commission and the AZAPO case: a reflection almost two decades later D. M. Davis; 5. Anti-impunity politics in post-genocide Rwanda Zinaida Miller; 6. Whose exceptionalism? Debating the inter-American view on amnesty and the Brazilian case Fabia Fernandes Carvalho Veçoso; 7. The distributive politics of impunity and anti-impunity: lessons from four decades of Colombian peace negotiations Helena Alviar García and Karen Engle; 8. From political repression to torturer impunity: the narrowing of Filártiga v. Peña-Irala Natalie R. Davidson; Part III. Are There Alternatives to Anti-Impunity?: 9. Impunity in a different register: people's tribunals and questions of judgment, law and responsibility Dianne Otto; 10. Beyond Nuremberg: the historical significance of the post-Apartheid transition in South Africa Mahmood Mamdani.
