Suchergebnisse

MORAL DEVELOPMENT IS STUDIED AND A MODEL PRESENTED THAT INTEGRATES EXISTING APPROACHES WITHIN A MORE THEORETICAL STRUCTURE. AN INTERRELATIONSHIP IS SUGGESTED BETWEEN THE NATURE OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SITUATIONS AND HOW MORAL DEVELOPMENT AS AN ASPECT OF POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION CAN AID IN UNDERSTANDING POLITICAL BEHAVIOR.

"Why do international criminal tribunals write histories of the origins and causes of armed conflicts? Richard Ashby Wilson conducted empirical research with judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and expert witnesses in three international criminal tribunals to understand how law and history are combined in the courtroom. Historical testimony is now an integral part of international trials, with prosecutors and defense teams using background testimony to pursue decidedly legal objectives. Both use historical narratives to frame the alleged crimes and to articulate their side's theory of the case. In the Slobodan Milošević trial, the prosecution sought to demonstrate special intent to commit genocide by reference to a long-standing animus, nurtured within a nationalist mind-set. For their part, the defense calls historical witnesses to undermine charges of superior responsibility, and to mitigate the sentence by representing crimes as reprisals. Although legal ways of knowing are distinctive from those of history, the two are effectively combined in international trials in a way that challenges us to rethink the relationship between law and history"--

This book asks whether human rights, since the 9/11 attacks and the 'war on terror,' are a luxury we can no longer afford, or rights that must always remain a fundamental part of democratic politics, in order to determine the boundary between individual freedom and government tyranny. This volume brings together leading international lawyers, policy-makers, scholars and activists in the field of human rights to evaluate the impact of the 'war on terror' on human rights, as well as to develop a counter-terror strategy which takes human rights seriously. While some contributors argue that war is necessary in defense of liberal democracy, others assert that it is time to move away from the war model towards a new paradigm based upon respect for human rights, an internationally-coordinated anti-terror justice strategy, and a long-term political vision that can reduce the global tensions that generate a political constituency for terrorists

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up to deal with the human rights violations of apartheid during the years 1960–1994. However, as Wilson shows, the TRC's restorative justice approach to healing the nation did not always serve the needs of communities at a local level. Based on extended anthropological fieldwork, this book illustrates the impact of the TRC in urban African communities in Johannesburg. While a religious constituency largely embraced the commission's religious-redemptive language of reconciliation, Wilson argues that the TRC had little effect on popular ideas of justice as retribution. This provocative study deepens our understanding of post-apartheid South Africa and the use of human rights discourse. It ends on a call for more cautious and realistic expectations about what human rights institutions can achieve in democratizing countries

Stories about the Idaho State Library, chronicles and narratives, are reported in my doctoral dissertation (Wilson, 2005). The chronicles, reconstructed from documents and records, provided a presentation of the people, events, and activities to frame the stories. The narratives, excerpted from interviews, provided the rich description and unique perspectives of the two living State Librarians who directed the agency between 1962 and 2005. The focus of this paper is a presentation and discussion of the use of historical research and narrative inquiry to create chronicles and narratives.

This article reflects on my experiences observing and participating in the development of risk analysis for environmental and health hazards since the 1970s with emphasis on its critical role in informing decisions with potentially high consequences, even for very low probability events once ignored or simply viewed as "acts of God." I discuss how modern society wants to protect itself from hazards with limited or no immediate historical precedent such that prediction and protective actions must depend on models that offer varying degrees of reliability. I believe that we must invest in understanding risks and risk models to ensure health in the future and protect ourselves from large challenges, including climate change, whether anthropogenic or otherwise, terrorism, and perhaps even cosmic change.

Scholars and legal officials have argued that courts should not attempt to write definitive historical accounts of mass human rights violations. Even if a court seeks to reconstruct a comprehensive history of a conflict, law and history use such different modes of thinking and inquiry that legal accounts are likely to be partial, deeply flawed, or just plain boring. These criticisms have appeared prominently in discussions of Holocaust trials in the domestic courts of Israel and France. Yet the Tadić and Krstić judgments written by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) are characterized by detailed contextualization of criminal acts and extensive historical interpretation. This Article asserts that the Tribunal's historical record represents a departure from previous courtroom accounts of mass atrocities for two reasons. First, because it is an international tribunal it has been less influenced by distorted narratives on national identity. Second, the ICTY has applied legal categories such as genocide which emphasize the collective nature of crimes against humanity, and this compels the court to situate individual acts within long-term, systematic policies.