This book grapples with the challenges inherent in an uncertain period for global human rights and explores the future of international human rights law and practice. Many Western scholars are increasingly pessimistic about the future of international human rights law. However, the contributions to this volume demonstrate that far from collapsing in the face of duress, the concept of human rights has endured despite contractions and the spectre of co-option and manipulation by the powerful. In addition, law is a malleable tool that is deployed in novel ways to promote human rights. The book illustrates that the power of human rights lies not in their essentialized transcendence of time, culture, and context but in their enduring promise that a more just world can emerge from sustained and creative struggle through, against, and at the margins of states, law, and institutions. The key questions to emerge are not whether human rights law and practice will survive, but rather what are the forces that sustain, revitalize, and transform them? And what are human rights in the process of becoming? This book will be of immense interest to those studying and researching across Politics, Human Rights, Gender and Law. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Human Rights.

"This volume offers significant and new information on and insights into current developments in many different areas and - thanks to a comprehensive bibliography on Eritrea and theoretical foundations of the concept of biopolitics as an appendix - inspirations for further general readings and reflections in the field of political.science." . Peripherie

Bringing together original, contemporary ethnographic research on the Northeast African state of Eritrea, this book shows how biopolitics - the state-led deployment of disciplinary technologies on individuals and population groups - is assuming particular forms in the twenty-first century. Once hailed as the "African country that works," Eritrea's apparently successful post-independence development has since lapsed into economic crisis and severe human rights violations. This is due not only to the border war with Ethiopia that began in 1998, but is also the result of discernible tendencies in the "high modernist" style of social mobilization for development first adopted by the Eritrean government during the liberation struggle (1961-1991) and later carried into the post-independence era. The contributions to this volume reveal and interpret the links between development and developmentalist ideologies, intensifying militarism, and the controlling and disciplining of human lives and bodies by state institutions, policies, and discourses. Also assessed are the multiple consequences of these policies for the Eritrean people and the ways in which such policies are resisted or subverted. This insightful, comparative volume places the Eritrean case in a broader global and transnational context."

Driven by genocide, civil war, political instabilities, ethnic and pastoral hostilities, the African Great Lakes Region, primarily Uganda, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Burundi, has been overwhelmingly defined by conflict. Kenneth Omeje, Tricia Redeker Hepner, and an international group of scholars, many from the Great Lakes region, focus on the interlocking conflicts and efforts toward peace in this multidisciplinary volume. These essays present a range of debates and perspectives on the history and politics of conflict, highlighting the complex internal and external sources of both persistent tension and creative peacebuilding. Taken together, the essays illustrate that no single perspective or approach can adequately capture the dynamics of conflict or offer successful strategies for sustainable peace in the region.

Bringing together original, contemporary ethnographic research on the Northeast African state of Eritrea, this book shows how biopolitics - the state-led deployment of disciplinary technologies on individuals and population groups - is assuming particular forms in the twenty-first century. Once hailed as the "African country that works," Eritrea's apparently successful post-independence development has since lapsed into economic crisis and severe human rights violations. This is due not only to the border war with Ethiopia that began in 1998, but is also the result of discernible tendencies in the "high modernist" style of social mobilization for development first adopted by the Eritrean government during the liberation struggle (1961-1991) and later carried into the post-independence era. The contributions to this volume reveal and interpret the links between development and developmentalist ideologies, intensifying militarism, and the controlling and disciplining of human lives and bodies by state institutions, policies, and discourses. Also assessed are the multiple consequences of these policies for the Eritrean people and the ways in which such policies are resisted or subverted. This insightful, comparative volume places the Eritrean case in a broader global and transnational context.

Driven by genocide, civil war, political instabilities, ethnic and pastoral hostilities, the African Great Lakes Region, primarily Uganda, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Burundi, has been overwhelmingly defined by conflict. Kenneth Omeje, Tricia Redeker Hepner, and an international group of scholars, many from the Great Lakes region, focus on the interlocking conflicts and efforts toward peace in this multidisciplinary volume. These essays present a range of debates and perspectives on the history and politics of conflict, highlighting the complex internal and external sources of both persistent tension and creative peacebuilding. Taken together, the essays illustrate that no single perspective or approach can adequately capture the dynamics of conflict or offer successful strategies for sustainable peace in the region.

African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights examines the emerging trend of requests for expert opinions in asylum hearings or refugee status determinations. This is the first book to explore the role of court-based expertise in relation to African asylum cases and the first to establish a rigorous analytical framework for interpreting the effects of this new reliance on expert testimony. Over the past two decades, courts in Western countries and beyond have begun demanding expert reports tailored to the experience of the individual claimant. As courts increasingly draw upon such testimony in their deliberations, expertise in matters of asylum and refugee status is emerging as an academic area with its own standards, protocols, and guidelines. This deeply thoughtful book explores these developments and their effects on both asylum seekers and the experts whose influence may determine their fate. Contributors: Iris Berger, Carol Bohmer, John Campbell, Katherine Luongo, E. Ann McDougall, Karen Musalo, Tricia Redeker Hepner, Amy Shuman, Joanna T. Tague, Meredith Terretta, and Charlotte Walker-Said.

"Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors, and Exiles" is an exploration of the Eritrean struggle for independence from Ethiopia, waged from 1961 to 1991, and the postindependence nation-building project. The book focuses on the way the Eritrean revolution drew refugees and exiles in the urban United States and nationalist guerrilla fighters in the Horn of Africa together in a common, yet contested, political agenda.Through a combination of ethnography and creative exposition, anthropologist Tricia Redeker Hepner recounts the experiences of Eritreans in their homeland and in the United States, illuminating the lives of men and women who participated in the independence movement. Highlighting both the personal and institutional dimensions of political transformation and struggle, the book provides insight into how the transnational nature of the Eritrean revolution shaped diaspora communities and the nation-state, enhancing authoritarian rule while also inspiring resistance movements for democratization and human rights."Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors and Exiles" provides a moving and trenchant critique of political intolerance and violence, as well as an inspiring portrait of the strength and resilience of a people whose lives have been profoundly shaped by war, forced migration, and the promises and failures of nationalism in the global era.