Human Rights and the Politics of Victimhood

Ethics and International Affairs

Volumn 16, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 91-108

  Meister, Robert ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84937382047     PISSN: 08926794     EISSN: 17477093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7093.2002.tb00400.x     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. See, e.g., Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights: The Mid-Life Crisis,” New York Review of Books, May 20, 1999, and the works reviewed therein.
2. See, e.g., David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995)
3. Philip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
4. See, e.g., William Shawcross, Deliver Us from Evil: Warlords and Peacekeepers and a World of Endless Conflict (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
5. Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 22.
6. Cf. Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Henry Holt, 2000).
7. For the connection between bombing and Western imperialism see Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg (New York: The New Press, 2001)
8. Exterminate All the Brutes: One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, trans. Joan Tate (New York: The New Press, 1996).
9. For a useful background discussion of this process see Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch. 1.
10. Counterrevolutionary thought continues (with a twist) the old Socratic idea that the physical and material suffering of victims of injustice is nothing as compared to the moral harm that makes them capable of committing injustice in their turn. For a perceptive discussion of whether the true victims of injustice are the unjust or their prey, see Judith N. Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 28–40.
11. See, e.g., Alex Boraine, A Country Unmasked: Inside South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. ch. 11
12. Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity (New York: Routledge, 2001)
13. Carlos Nino, Radical Evil on Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)
14. generally, Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).
15. Robert Meister, “Ways of Winning: The Costs of Moral Victory in Transitional Regimes” (prepared for the conference, “Forgiveness: Traditions and Implications,” Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah, April 13–15, 2000).
16. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, vol. 5 (Cape Town: Juta, 1998), ch. 5.
17. See, e.g., Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)
18. George Kateb, “On Political Evil,” in The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 199–221
19. Judith N. Shklar,“ The Liberalism of Fear,” in Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 21–38.
20. For a valuable discussion of this point see also Shklar, The Faces of Injustice, pp. 40–50.
21. See, e.g., Nino, Radical Evil on Trial
22. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths.
23. For a useful discussion of this and related questions see Herbert Morris, “Shared Guilt,” in On Guilt and Innocence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 111–138.
24. Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 132–143.
25. Anne Sa'adeh, Germany's Second Chance: Trust, Justice, and Democratization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 1.
26. Germany's Second Chance: Trust, Justice, and Democratization, ch.1.
27. See Nino, Radical Evil on Trial.
28. See also Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1997).
29. Meister, “Forgiving and Forgetting”, in Carla Hesse and Robert Post, eds., Human Rights in Political Transitions: Gettysburg to Bosnia (New York: Zone Books, 1999), pp. 135–176
30. “Sojourners and Survivors: Two Logics of Non-Discrimination,” University of Chicago Law School Roundtable 3, no. 1 (1996), pp. 121–184.
31. This point is discussed extensively in Rian Malan, My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country His Tribe, and His Conscience (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990). See, e.g., pp. 189ff.
32. Edmund S. Morgan,“The Big American Crime,” New York Review of Books, December 3, 1998, p. 16.
33. For a useful discussion of this point see Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear” and The Faces of Injustice.
34. See, e.g., Neil J. Kritz, ed., Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon With Former Regimes, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995)
35. Teitel, Transitional Justice
36. Aryeh Neier, War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror, and the Struggle for Justice (New York: Times Books, 1998).
37. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 263.
38. Illuminations, p. 255.
39. Illuminations, p. 261.
40. Illuminations, p. 263.
41. Illuminations, p. 255.
42. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 51.
43. The Concept of the Political, p. 54.
44. The Concept of the Political, p.57.
45. The Concept of the Political, pp. 78–79.
46. The Concept of the Political, p. 79.
47. The Concept of the Political, p. 54.
48. See, e.g., Shklar, ine races ot Injustice, pp. 1–14.
49. See Meister, Forgiving and Forgetting, p. 140.
50. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 256.
51. For Benjamin's debt to Schmitt, see Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 389.
52. For a recent development of a similar line of argument, see Michel Feher, Powerless by Design: The Age of the International Community (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
53. C. Fred Alford, Melanie Klein and Critical Social Ihe-ory: An Account of Politics, Art, and Reason Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), ch. 2
54. Melanie Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” in Love, Guilt, and Reparation, and Other Works, 1921–1945 (London: Virago, 1988)
55. “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” in Juliet Mitchell, ed., The Selected Melanie Klein (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 176–200.
56. Philip Joseph Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
57. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
58. See, e.g., Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Plume, 2000).
59. Frank Stern, The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge: Antisemitism and Philosemitism in Postwar Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
60. “German-Jewish Relations in the Postwar Period: The Ambiguities of Antisemitic and Philosemitic Discourse,” in Y Michal Bodemann, ed.,Jews, Germans, Memory: Reconstructions of Jewish Life in Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996)
61. Jane Kramer, The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (New York: Random House, 1996).
62. See,esp., Malan, My Traitor's Heart
63. Breyten Breytenbach, True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (New York: Harcourt, 1994).
64. See also Andre Brink, Imaginings of Sand (New York: Harcourt, 1999).
65. Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 95–96.
66. Malan, My Traitor's Heart, p. 227.
67. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear”.
68. See, most recently, John Rawls, The Law of peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). C. Fred Alford argues, in contrast, that the Rawlsian “original position,” requiring us to imagine our own worst feelings as the feelings of others toward us, institutionalizes Klein's “paranoid-schizoid” position.
69. See his “Rawls: Justice as Fearfulness,” in Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory, pp. 179–183.
70. See, e.g., Mahmood Mamdani, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim-A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002).
71. For a catalogue of twentieth-century human rights atrocities committeed by great powers (rather than against them), see R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1994)
72. Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century.