Human rights seemingly offer universal protection. However, irregular migrants have, at best, only problematic access to human rights. Whether understood as an ethical injunction or legally codified norm, the promised protection of human rights seems to break down when it comes to the lived experience of irregular migrants. This book therefore asks three key questions of great practical and theoretical importance. First, what do we mean when we speak of human rights? Second, is the problematic access of irregular migrants to human rights protection an issue of implementation, or is it due to the inherent characteristics of the concept of human rights? Third, should we look beyond human rights for an effective source of protection? Written is an accessible style, with a range of socio-legal and doctrinal approaches, the chapters focus on the situation of the irregular migrant in Europe and the United States. Throughout the book, nuanced theoretical debates are put in the context of concrete case studies. The critical reflections it offers on the limitations and possibilities of human rights protections for irregular migrants will be invaluable for students, scholars and practitioners.

As the Oslo Peace Process has given way to the violence of the second intifada, this book explores the continuing legacy of Oslo in the everyday life of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Taking a perspective that sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a conflict over the distribution of legal rights, it focuses on the daily concerns of West Bank Palestinians, and explores the meanings, limitations and potential of legal claims in the context of the region's structures of governance. Kelly argues that fundamental contradictions in the process through which the West Bank has been ruled and misruled have resulted in an unstable mixture of legality, fear and uncertainty. Based on long term ethnographic fieldwork, this book provides an insight into how the wider Middle East conflict manifests itself through the daily encounters of ordinary Israelis and Palestinians, offering an evocative and theoretically informed account of the relationship between law, peace-building and violence.

As the Oslo Peace Process has given way to the violence of the second intifada, this book explores the continuing legacy of Oslo in the everyday life of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Taking a perspective that sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a conflict over the distribution of legal rights, it focuses on the daily concerns of West Bank Palestinians, and explores the meanings, limitations and potential of legal claims in the context of the region's structures of governance. Kelly argues that fundamental contradictions in the process through which the West Bank has been ruled and misruled have resulted in an unstable mixture of legality, fear and uncertainty. Based on long term ethnographic fieldwork, this book provides an insight into how the wider Middle East conflict manifests itself through the daily encounters of ordinary Israelis and Palestinians, offering an evocative and theoretically informed account of the relationship between law, peace-building and violence.

This volume focuses on the everyday social relationships through which international justice is produced. Using case studies from the International Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Women's Convention Committee and elsewhere, it explores international justice as a process that takes place at the intersection of the often contradictory practices of applicants, lawyers, bureaucrats, victims, accused and others. With a sensitivity to broader institutional and political inequalities, the contributors ask how and why international justice is mobilised, understood and abandoned by concrete social actors, and to what effect. An attention to the different voices that feed into international justice is essential if we are to understand its potentials and limitations in the midst of social conflict or full blown political violence.

This volume focuses on the everyday social relationships through which international justice is produced. Using case studies from the International Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Women's Convention Committee and elsewhere, it explores international justice as a process that takes place at the intersection of the often contradictory practices of applicants, lawyers, bureaucrats, victims, accused and others. With a sensitivity to broader institutional and political inequalities, the contributors ask how and why international justice is mobilised, understood and abandoned by concrete social actors, and to what effect. An attention to the different voices that feed into international justice is essential if we are to understand its potentials and limitations in the midst of social conflict or full blown political violence.

Law and medicine can be caught in a tight embrace. They both play a central role in the politics of harm, making decisions regarding what counts as injury and what might be the most suitable forms of redress or remedy. But where do law and medicine converge and diverge in their responses to and understandings of harm and suffering? Using empirical case studies from Europe, the Americas and Africa, The Clinic and the Court brings together leading medical and legal anthropologists to explore this question.

A ground-breaking new study brings us a very different picture of the Second World War, asking fundamental questions about ethical commitments Accounts of the Second World War usually involve tales of bravery in battle, or stoicism on the home front, as the British public stood together against Fascism. However, the war looks very different when seen through the eyes of the 60,000 conscientious objectors who refused to take up arms and whose stories, unlike those of the First World War, have been almost entirely forgotten. Tobias Kelly invites us to spend the war five of these individuals: Roy Ridgway, a factory clerk from Liverpool; Tom Burns, a teacher from east London; Stella St John, who trained as a vet and ended up in jail; Ronald Duncan, who set up a collective farm; and Fred Urquhart, a working-class Scottish socialist and writer. We meet many more objectors along the way -- people both determined and torn -- and travel from Finland to Syria, India to rural England, Edinburgh to Trinidad. Although conscientious objectors were often criticised and scorned, figures such as Winston Churchill and the Archbishop of Canterbury supported their right to object, at least in principle, suggesting that liberty of conscience was one of the freedoms the nation was fighting for. And their rich cultural and moral legacy -- of humanitarianism and human rights, from Amnesty International and Oxfam to the US civil rights movement -- can still be felt all around us. The personal and political struggles carefully and vividly collected in this book tell us a great deal about personal and collective freedom, conviction and faith, war and peace, and pose questions just as relevant today: Does conscience make us free? Where does it take us? And what are the costs of going there? '[An] excellent book' - DAILY TELEGRAPH 'A moving tribute' - SPECTATOR

We are accustomed to thinking of torture as the purposeful infliction of cruelty by public officials, and we assume that lawyers and clinicians are best placed to speak about its causes and effects. However, it has not always been so. The category of torture is a very specific way of thinking about violence, and our current understandings of the term are rooted in recent twentieth-century history. In This Side of Silence, social anthropologist Tobias Kelly argues that the tensions between post-Cold War armed conflict, human rights activism, medical notions of suffering, and concerns over immigration have produced a distinctively new way of thinking about torture, which is saturated with notions of law and trauma. This Side of Silence asks what forms of suffering and cruelty can be acknowledged when looking at the world through the narrow legal category of torture. The book focuses on the recent history of Britain but draws wider comparative conclusions, tracing attempts to recognize survivors and perpetrators across the fields of asylum, criminal law, international human rights, and military justice. In this thorough and eloquent ethnography, Kelly avoids treating the legal prohibition of torture as the inevitable product of progress and yet does not seek to dismiss the real differences it has made in concrete political struggles. Based on extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, the book argues that the problem of recognition rests not in the inability of the survivor to communicate but in our inability to listen and take responsibility for the injustice before us.

Human rights seemingly offer universal protection. However, irregular migrants have, at best, only problematic access to human rights. Whether understood as an ethical injunction or legally codified norm, the promised protection of human rights seems to break down when it comes to the lived experience of irregular migrants. This book therefore asks three key questions of great practical and theoretical importance. First, what do we mean when we speak of human rights? Second, is the problematic access of irregular migrants to human rights protection an issue of implementation, or is it due to the inherent characteristics of the concept of human rights? Third, should we look beyond human rights for an effective source of protection? Written is an accessible style, with a range of socio-legal and doctrinal approaches, the chapters focus on the situation of the irregular migrant in Europe and the United States. Throughout the book, nuanced theoretical debates are put in the context of concrete case studies. The critical reflections it offers on the limitations and possibilities of human rights protections for irregular migrants will be invaluable for students, scholars and practitioners.