Overview

This is an innovative and timely sociological contribution to current concerns regarding critical cosmopolitanism, human rights and crimes against humanity. The book brings a sociologist's insight to legal institutions and narratives, while analyzing the development of the law of crimes against humanity since the Nuremburg trials and the issues of individual and collective responsibility. Discussion of the theoretical and political debates surrounding humanitarian law is anchored in the author's empirical analysis of four contemporary trials, two at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, the London trial of Andrei Sawoniuk in 1999 for crimes during the Holocaust, and the David Irving libel case. Drawing on a wide repertoire of arguments from classic and current sociology as well as theorists of international law, the author makes a case for seeing these trials as part of an emergent 'cosmopolitan' criminal law that puts the protection of people above the rights of states or governments. He takes on critics of cosmopolitan law who see it as either utopian or imperialistic.; The book is also important in addressing law's role in defining collective memory, marking off what evidence is admissible and credible, and filtering the oral and written traces of the past. The book will appeal to students and scholars in social and political theory; the politics and sociology of globalization, social identities, racism and genocide; social memory and Holocaust studies; law and social theory/socio-legal studies and criminology; international law, international relations

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9781280167065

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