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The Mixed Economic Progress of Immigrants
Robert F. Schoeni Manufacturer: RAND Corporation ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 083302390X |
Book Description
A revealing and surprising new study on immigration and the economy.
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Engines that Move Markets: Technology Investing from Railroads to the Internet and Beyond
Alasdair Nairn Manufacturer: Wiley ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 0471205958 |
Book Description
A comprehensive history of market-shaping industries and their impact on how we invest todayCustomer Reviews:
Be a player in the world to come.......2005-06-01
Required reading for serious investors.......2002-03-19
Insightful history of investment and industrial development.......2002-01-26
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Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice, Revised and Updated Edition
Geoffrey Robertson Manufacturer: New Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 1595580719 |
Book Description
The story of the rise of the human rights movement by the renowned international attorney, in a newly revised and expanded edition.Customer Reviews:
A Fantastic Read!!.......2007-08-24
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Understanding Evil: Lessons from Bosnia
Keith Doubt Manufacturer: Fordham University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0823227006 Release Date: 2006-11-15 |
Book Description
In Understanding Evil, Keith Doubt uses the horrors of the recent war in Bosnia to develop meaningfully adequate accounts of evil within the context of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Since the foundations of the social are found in human action, evil's assault on these foundations results in the demise of the social. In Bosnia, not only were individuals, families, homes, and buildings destroyed, but entire towns and cities were obliterated. Not only were individual human beings murdered, but so was the history and memory of vibrant communities. Crimes against humanity in Bosnia, Doubt argues, were "sociocidal"; they were systematic attacks on social life itself. The book develops the significance of "sociocide" as what evil is in order to understand the suffering and tragedy of the people and communities in Bosnia.
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Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice
Geoffrey Robertson Manufacturer: New Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 1565846680 |
Book Description
How human rights have come to dominate world politics, from Kosovo to East Timor. Hailed by the Observer as "a book to stop another Holocaust," Crimes Against Humanity is the first work to weave together history, philosophy, international law, and politics into a comprehensive and engrossing account of the increasingly significant movement for world human rights. Robertson, one of the world's leading human rights lawyers, reveals how human rights, a concept virtually unknown before the second world war, has over the last fifty years penetrated the legal armor of the sovereign state, providing a justification for the international communitywith or without the United Nationsto bring down tyrants and torturers. Called "absorbing and important" by the Guardian [London], Crimes Against Humanity defines a whole new field of inquiry.Customer Reviews:
Refreshing revival of a dead letter.......2002-11-27
The justification of common law is its origin in a time out of mind for "time out of mind" releases jurists from the Godlike role by means of precedent. International law's foundations are shakier, for *jus sovereignis* is the will of dead white males.
International law predated the idea that rights flow not from the sovereign but from people and therefore is an intellectual and moral anomaly. Anomalies like American slavery tend to produce disasters, and the anomaly of *jus sovereignis* produced the Balkan disaster, as old-school diplomats seemed compelled to stand idly by.
Diplomacy and international law seem to the layperson to be a pleasant affair involving bun-fights, at the better sort of spa. The problem is the Monty-Pythonesque intrusion of reality, as seen by British and Argentine diplomats in 1982, by international economists in Seattle, and in the Balkan mess. No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition, Srebenica, or the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacreýexcept the truly first-rate, like Richard Holbrooke here in the USA or Geoffrey Robertson in Britain.
The dyslexic may object that I have been hornswoggled by Holbrooke's and Robertson's purple prose. The problem is that both write well, in this book and in Richard Holbrooke's recount of the long road to the Dayton peace conference of 1995. The problem is that writing well is constituted in a conformance to both moral vision and facts on the ground.
The modern international law movement reacts to the recurrence of absolute evil in Europe and Africa in the 1990s, this time unjustified by Communist or free market ideology, and unexplained by Fascist pseudo-ideology.
Absolute evil is to the moral imagination the converse of the needs of one's own children to Bertrand Russell. Despite his skeptical precommittments, Lord Russell said that the needs of kids are something that "skepticism does not easily question". Skepticism did not easily process the return, in August 1992, of concentration camps in the former Yugoslavia, and Robertson's response is the deconstruction of absolute national sovereignity. Skepticism dare not question the redress of crime.
One objection, mentioned by Robertson, is that international law, other than a purely naturalistic law based on jus sovereignis, is cultural imperialism.
Cultural imperialism has indeed misapplied norms. But you cannot apply cultural relativism in an absolute way: this is mere self-contradiction.
There is also the objection against a natural law as inconsistent with an open society.
The problem is that unthinking adherence to a natural law in an open society results in a confused expansion of natural law when we tolerantly seek to reconcile views, as to what the practical implications of natural law might actually be.
This resulted in America's "Black Hawk Down" disaster in Mogadishu in which idealism combined with our Pentagon's vainglorious refusal to serve in a unified command to send underpowered Rangers into Mogadishu, and the Rangers were rescued by Pakistanis with the sense to serve as part of the rest of the UN.
The natural law was you don't let people starve, even when they are far away, and, if bullies are taking the aid you have sent, you send soldiers. Clinton failed to enforce this because the Pentagon vaingloriously refuses to serve under UN command.
The failures of international law in the early 1990s produced, not abstract theories, but hard work like that of QC Robertson, the benefit of which skepticism does not easily question.
This included the arrest of General Pinochet.
The flaccid skepticism of America's media about Pinochet's guilt does not easily question Robertson's factual recitation of what happened, in the 1970s, to people in Chile.
In recent years USA circles have been oppressed with a skeptical cynicism which proclaims the impossibility of securing the good because, don't you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
This makes it possible for pro-Pinochet American conservatives to easily question the veracity of torture reports, or, failing this, the innocence of the disappeared, or, failing this, the "realism" of letting philosophy majors scuttle around Santiago, or, failing this, the free-market ideological bona fides of the messenger. This epistemological curse, of a doubt which is really a bias and a form of intellectual schlamperei, going along to get along with the free market god, is pervasive in American culture.
In Rome we reasoned against the fact that people die when modern states collapse that some future Rusty Calley jest might get nailed. We like to talk about "do-gooders" and their ineffectuality when our own ineffectuality was on display in Vietnam and Mogadishu.
What we fail to see is the Kantianism that abstract ideals DO NOT EXIST without acts: but pure acts show a bad will because they are uninformed by a consistent ideal, but were, in Mogadishu, the product of a monstrous "will" that made the Pentagon an equal partner with the Chief Executive.
Note the laziness, note the sloppiness, note the flaccidity.
For we apply Constitutional "separation of powers" to the Pentagon which as part of the executive doesn't get power independent of the commander in chief.
QC Robertson's vigorous prose is clearly evidence of a first-class mind sorely absent in American councils of state. If this is at all indicative of the abilities of people at The Hague, I for one am an American who would welcome those fabled black helicopters.
He puts me in mind of the astonishing statement at the beginning of Kant's Metaphysic of Morals, for Kant says the only thing we can know to be good is a good will.
On the face of it, this seems to be one of those marvelous-but-false-at-the-critical-point German ideas, like zoos, Zeppelins or the Schlieffen plan: for as we know the road to hell or Srebenica is paved with good intentions. But upon closer examination, will wills itself into pragmatic daily action, and the road to hell is seen to be paved with action and inaction and not good will.
Allow yourself to be challenged, at least.......2002-09-12
David Takes on a Goliath Task.......2002-04-19
5 stars to the book, zero star to "davidpet"'s review.......2001-01-28
MIGHT MAKES RIGHT.......2000-11-10
But for Robertson, who is a leading advocate of the right of states to participate in "humanitarian interventions" (i.e., an interstate system in which the greater the power, the greater the right--or "Might makes right"), concerns of this kind are dismissed as the "myth of state equality" (p. 446), a very insidious myth that in his opinion the more enlightened members of the "international community, a.k.a. "coalitions of the willing," need to put behind them. All very sickening. And dangerous.
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Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon With Former Regimes : General Considerations (Transitional Justice)
Manufacturer: United States Institute of Peace Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 1878379437 |
Customer Reviews:
Superb reference.......2000-11-20
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From Sovereign Impunity To International Accountability: The Search For Justice In A World Of States
Manufacturer: United Nations University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 9280811002 |
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Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law in New Democracies (Title from the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies)
Manufacturer: University of Notre Dame Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0268042039 |
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Bringing the Khmer Rouge to Justice: Prosecuting Mass Violence Before the Cambodian Courts (Criminology Studies)
Manufacturer: Edwin Mellen Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0773459944 |
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Accountability for Atrocities: National and International Responses (International and Comparative Criminal Law Series)
Manufacturer: Transnational Publishers ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 1571052798 |
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Atrocities and International Accountability: Beyond Transnational Justice
Manufacturer: United Nations University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 928081141X |
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Confronting Past Human Rights Violations: Justice vs. Peace in Times of Transition (The Cass Series on Peacekeeping)
Chandra Sriram Manufacturer: Frank Cass ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0714655996 |
Book Description
This book examines what makes accountability for previous abuses more or less possible for transitional regimes to achieve. It closely examines the other vital goals of such regimes against which accountability is often balanced. The options available are not simply prosecution or pardon, as the most heated polemics of the debate over transitional justice suggest, but a range of options from complete amnesty through truth commissions and lustration or purification to prosecutions. The question, then, is not whether or not accountability can be achieved, but what degree of accountability can be achieved by a given country.
The book examines five countries' experiences in detail - El Salvador, Honduras, Argentina, South Africa and Sri Lanka - and offers a comparative survey of nearly 30 countries' experiences. It discusses three factors that affect the accountability achieved: international or external influences, the balance of forces between civilians and the military and or government and opposition forces, and the extent and nature of previous rights abuses. The book also examines strategies of transition, trade-offs and compromises that regimes (and international actors assisting them) may make in an attempt to achieve greater accountability or greater stability. The focus of the book is on the politics of transition: what makes accountability more or less feasible and what strategies are deployed by regimes to achieve greater accountability (or alternatively, greater reform). The result is a more nuanced understanding of the different conditions and possibilities that countries face, and the lesson that there is no one-size-fits-all prescription that can be handed to transitional regimes.
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Rootstocks for Fruit Crops
Roy C. Rom Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0471805513 |
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