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International justice has become a crucial part of the ongoing political debates about the future of shattered societies like Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Chile. Why do our governments sometimes display such striking idealism in the face of war crimes and atrocities abroad, and at other times cynically abandon the pursuit of international justice altogether? Why today does justice seem so slow to come for war crimes victims in the Balkans? In this book, Gary Bass offers an unprecedented look at the politics behind international war crimes tribunals, combining analysis with investigative reporting and a broad historical perspective. The Nuremberg trials powerfully demonstrated how effective war crimes tribunals can be. But there have been many other important tribunals that have not been as successful, and which have been largely left out of today's debates about international justice. This timely book brings them in, using primary documents to examine the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, the Armenian genocide, World War II, and the recent wars in the former Yugoslavia. Bass explains that bringing war criminals to justice can be a military ordeal, a source of endless legal frustration, as well as a diplomatic nightmare. The book takes readers behind the scenes to see vividly how leaders like David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton have wrestled with these agonizing moral dilemmas. The book asks how law and international politics interact, and how power can be made to serve the cause of justice. Bass brings new archival research to bear on such events as the prosecution of the Armenian genocide, presenting surprising episodes that add to the historical record. His sections on the former Yugoslavia tell--with important new discoveries--the secret story of the politicking behind the prosecution of war crimes in Bosnia, drawing on interviews with senior White House officials, key diplomats, and chief prosecutors at the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Bass concludes that despite the obstacles, legalistic justice for war criminals is nonetheless worth pursuing. His arguments will interest anyone concerned about human rights and the pursuit of idealism in international politics.

A small group founded Amnesty International in 1961 to translate human rights principles into action.Diplomacy of Conscienceprovides a rich account of how the organization pioneered a combination of popular pressure and expert knowledge to advance global human rights. To an extent unmatched by predecessors and copied by successors, Amnesty International has employed worldwide publicity campaigns based on fact-finding and moral pressure to urge governments to improve human rights practices. Less well known is Amnesty International's significant impact on international law. It has helped forge the international community's repertoire of official responses to the most severe human rights violations, supplementing moral concern with expertise and conceptual vision. Diplomacy of Consciencetraces Amnesty International's efforts to strengthen both popular human rights awareness and international law against torture, disappearances, and political killings. Drawing on primary interviews and archival research, Ann Marie Clark posits that Amnesty International's strenuously cultivated objectivity gave the group political independence and allowed it to be critical of all governments violating human rights. Its capacity to investigate abuses and interpret them according to international standards helped it foster consistency and coherence in new human rights law. Generalizing from this study, Clark builds a theory of the autonomous role of nongovernmental actors in the emergence of international norms pitting moral imperatives against state sovereignty. Her work is of substantial historical and theoretical relevance to those interested in how norms take shape in international society, as well as anyone studying the increasing visibility of nongovernmental organizations on the international scene.

Advocacy groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have made a historic contribution to the cause of international human rights by publicizing the need to prevent mass atrocities such as war crimes, genocide, and widespread political killings and torture. However, a strategy that many such groups favor for achieving this goal risks causing more atrocities than it would prevent, because it pays insufficient attention to political realities.

Gaza is among the most densely populated places in the world. Two-thirds of its inhabitants are refugees, and more than half the population is under eighteen years of age. Since Israel occupied Gaza in 1967, it has systematically de-developed the economy. After Hamas won democratic elections in 2006, Israel intensified its blockade of Gaza, and after Hamas consolidated its control of the territory in 2007, Israel tightened its illegal siege another notch. In the meantime, Israel has launched no less than eight military operations against Gaza--culminating in Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9 and Operation Protective Edge in 2014--that left behind over three million tons of rubble. Recent UN reports predict that Gaza will be unlivable by 2020. Norman G. Finkelstein presents a meticulously researched and devastating inquest into Israel's actions of the last decade. He argues that although Israel justified its blockade and violent assaults in the name of self-defense, in fact these actions were cynical exercises of brutal power against an essentially defenseless civilian population. Based on hundreds of human rights reports, the book scrutinizes multifarious violations of international law Israel committed both during its operations and in the course of its decade-long siege of Gaza. It is a monument to Gaza's martyrs and a scorching accusation against their tormenters

In 1993 Human Rights Watch, one of the two most influential human rights organizations in the world, launched a major campaign to derail Beijing’s bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. This article situates this highly publicized campaign in the context of Sino–US relations, the end of the Cold War, and the ‘victory’ of human rights as a global moral lingua franca. It argues that Human Rights Watch’s decision to oppose Beijing’s bid stemmed from its new post-Cold War focus on China combined with the organization’s search for new ways to secure media attention and the funding that flowed from publicity. The campaign most likely swayed the International Olympic Committee’s close vote in favor of Sydney. It also brought Human Rights Watch a windfall of favorable publicity among new audiences. The article argues that the campaign irrevocably inserted broad-based human rights considerations into the Olympic Games, decisively moving moral claims-making around the Olympics beyond the playing field. It also linked Human Rights Watch’s moral legitimacy to US power in problematic ways and triggered a powerful anti-US backlash in China.

International organizations like Human Rights Watch are legitimately urged to pay more attention to economic, social and cultural rights. But practical prescriptions are often simplistic--typically involving only the rhetorical invocation of these rights. The strength of organizations like Human Rights Watch is not their rhetorical voice but their shaming methodology--their ability to investigate misconduct and expose it to public opprobrium. That methodology is most effective when there is relative clarity about violation, violator, and remedy. That clarity is best achieved when misconduct can be portrayed as arbitrary or discriminatory rather than a matter of purely distributive justice.

Naming and shaming is a widely-used strategy to promote human rights globally. Organizations' denouncements of abuses have exerted pressure on states to react, particularly in cases of repression and physical violations. However, evidence of the technique's effectiveness at reducing abuses, varying in type and socio-cultural context, and over time, is lacking. In this article, I explore the technique's limits through an ethnographic case analysis of a naming and shaming campaign in Senegal that succeeded in eliciting a state reaction. Due to incongruence with local human rights efforts, however, it failed to achieve its goal of curbing forced child begging.

Reports from Mogadishu, Somalia, examine the pros and cons of humanitarian military interventions here and their impact on human rights; we also see interviews in Somalia and the Sudan, along with footage from Liberia, Rwanda and Zaire.

Despite its media reforms designed to democratize the country’s media landscape, the Ecuadorian government has been subject to constant condemnation from major U.S.-based human rights organizations on freedom-of-expression grounds. A close examination of these critiques and the Ecuadorian media reforms to which they correspond and a comparison of the Ecuadorian government’s and critical human rights organizations’ positions with liberal scholarship on the right to freedom of expression leads to the conclusion that Ecuadorian media reform is consistent with liberal social-democratic principles and, by contrast, human rights organizations uphold an early-modern interpretation of liberalism that is marginal within scholarship on freedom of expression. A pesar de su programa de reformas para democratizar el campo de los medios de difusión, el gobierno ecuatoriano ha sido objeto de una condena permanente por parte de las principales organizaciones de los derechos humanos de los Estados Unidos por motivos de la libertad de expresión. Un examen minucioso de estas críticas y de las reformas del gobierno ecuatoriano, así como una comparación de las posiciones del gobierno ecuatoriano y las de las organizaciones de derechos humanos con los estudios liberales sobre el derecho a la libertad de expression, revelan que estas reformas son consistentes con los principios liberales y socialdemócratas y que, en cambio, las organizaciones de derechos humanos defienden una interpretación del liberalismo correspondiente al principio de la era moderna temprana que queda marginal dentro de los estudios sobre la libertad de expresión.