Die komplexen Wandlungen der Menschenrechte in der jüngsten Zeitgeschichte. Nach 1990 gewannen Menschenrechte national wie international ein wohl vorher nie erreichtes Gewicht. Immer mehr Akteure begriffen gesellschaftliche Probleme als Menschenrechtsfragen. Der Universalanspruch erfuhr weltweite Zustimmung und beförderte eine Vielzahl neuer interventionistischer Praktiken über nationalstaatliche Grenzen hinweg. Nicht zuletzt machten zahlreiche wissenschaftliche Disziplinen Menschenrechte, in einer vielschichtigen Wechselwirkung mit den gleichzeitigen politischen Veränderungen, zum Gegenstand der Forschung. Die Phase zukunftsgewisser Aufbrüche endete jedoch bereits vor der Jahrhundertwende. Zugleich sah sich die Idee universal gültiger Rechte heftigen Anfechtungen und Gegenentwürfen ausgesetzt. Dieser Band will eine neue empirische Grundlage für das Nachdenken über die jüngste Menschenrechtsgeschichte legen, indem zentrale Entwicklungen der letzten dreißig Jahre beleuchtet werden. Dabei bewegen sich die Beiträge über dichotomische Deutungsangebote von einerseits Triumph und Erfolg, andererseits Scheitern und Niedergang hinaus und schärfen den Blick für komplexe Wandlungsprozesse und gegenläufige Entwicklungen. Der Band erscheint vollständig in englischer Sprache. _____ The complex trajectory of human rights in the history of the past three decades. The 1990s saw an extraordinary surge in the significance that various actors attributed to the concept of human rights. A growing number of activists and politicians began framing their concerns as human rights issues. The universal claim of human rights received unprecedented support and spurred new interventionist practices across national borders. Numerous academic disciplines made human rights a subject of research, both reflecting on and influencing the emerging human rights policies. Yet the moment of enthusiastic new departures waned even before the advent of the new century. At the same time – and often as a direct consequence of its new prominence – critics opposed the idea of universal rights with an unprecedented fierceness. This volume breaks new ground in examining important developments that have unfolded in human rights history over the past thirty years. In situating these events, the volume looks beyond dichotomous interpretations of either triumph and success or failure and decline, sharpening our view of complexities and contradictions. The volume is published entirely in English.

Winner of the 2021 annual book award of the Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS). “David Leupold’s exceptional book explores the complex and contested Turkish, Kurdish, and Armenian visions of homeland in the greater Van region of contemporary Turkey. Through a layered analysis of collective violence, constructed national histories, and imagined homelands, Embattled Dreamlands demonstrates how violence and population displacement in the early 1900s produced homeland imaginaries and mutually exclusive interpretations of the past. Based on five years of ethnographic and historical research, Leupold’s rich tapestry of Ottoman and Soviet history, imagined geographies, and national narratives makes unique theoretical contributions to studies of collective memory and provides an insightful and impartial assessment of sectarian and national identities. The book invites us to evaluate critically and carefully our past and its impact on our contemporary imagined worlds.” Embattled Dreamlands explores the complex relationship between competing national myths, imagined boundaries and local memories in the threefold-contested geography referred to as Eastern Turkey, Western Armenia or Northern Kurdistan. Spatially rooted in the shatter zone of the post-Ottoman and post-Soviet space, it sheds light on the multi-layered memory landscape of the Lake Van region in Southeastern Turkey, where collective violence stretches back from the Armenian Genocide to the Kurdish conflict of today. Based on his fieldwork in Turkey and Armenia, the author examines how states work to construct and monopolize collective memory by narrating, silencing, mapping and performing the past, and how these narratives might help to contribute and resolve present-day conflicts. By looking at how national discourses are constructed and asking hard questions about why nations are imagined as exclusive and hostile to others, Embattled Dreamlands provides a unique insight into the development of national identity which will provide a great resource to students and researchers in sociology and history alike.

A novel centered on the journey of the Turner family and its thirteen siblings, particularly the eldest and youngest, as they face the ghosts of their pasts--both an actual haint and the specter of addiction--the imminent loss of their mother, and the necessary abandonment of their family home in struggling Detroit.

Kimberly M. Blaeser begins with an examination of Vizenor's concept of Native American oral culture and his unique incorporation of oral tradition in the written word. She details Vizenor's efforts to produce a form of writing that resists static meaning, involves the writer in the creation of the literary moment, and invites political action and explores the place of Vizenor's work within the larger context of contemporary tribal literature, Native American scholarship, and critical theory.

The Civil War was just days old when the first enslaved men, women, and children began fleeing their plantations to seek refuge inside the lines of the Union army as it moved deep into the heart of the Confederacy. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands more followed in a mass exodus from slavery that would destroy the system once and for all. Drawing on an extraordinary survey of slave refugee camps throughout the country, Embattled Freedom reveals as never before the everyday experiences of these refugees from slavery as they made their way through the vast landscape of army-supervised camps that emerged during the war. Amy Murrell Taylor vividly reconstructs the human world of wartime emancipation, taking readers inside military-issued tents and makeshift towns, through commissary warehouses and active combat, and into the realities of individuals and families struggling to survive physically as well as spiritually. Narrating their journeys in and out of the confines of the camps, Taylor shows in often gripping detail how the most basic necessities of life were elemental to a former slave's quest for freedom and full citizenship. The stories of individuals--storekeepers, a laundress, and a minister among them--anchor this ambitious and wide-ranging history and demonstrate with new clarity how contingent the slaves' pursuit of freedom was on the rhythms and culture of military life. Taylor brings new insight into the enormous risks taken by formerly enslaved people to find freedom in the midst of the nation's most destructive war.

In Material Dreams, Starr turns to one of the most vibrant decades in the Golden State's history, the 1920s, when some two million Americans migrated to California, the vast majority settling in or around Los Angeles. Although he treats readers to intriguing side trips to Santa Barbara and Pasadena, Starr focuses here mainly on Los Angeles, revealing how this major city arose almost defiantly on a site lacking many of the advantages required for urban development, creating itself out of sheer will, the Great Gatsby of American cities. He describes how William Ellsworth Smyth, the Peter the Hermit of the Irrigation Crusade, propounded the importance of water in Southern California's future, and how such figures as the self-educated, Irish engineer William Mulholland (who built the main aquaducts to Los Angeles) and George Chaffey (who diverted the Colorado River, transforming desert into the lush Imperial Valley) brought life-supporting water to the arid South. He examines the discovery of oil ("Yes it's oil, oil, oil / that makes LA boil," went the official drinking song of the Uplifters Club), the boosters and land developers, the evangelists (such as Bob Shuler, the Methodist Savanarola of Los Angeles, and Aimee Semple McPherson), and countless other colorful figures of the period. There are also fascinating sections on the city's architecture (such as the remarkably innovative Bradbury Building and its eccentric, neophyte designer, George Wyman), the impact of the automobile on city planning, the great antiquarian book collections, the Hollywood film community, and much more. By the end of the decade, Los Angeles had tripled in population and become the fifth largest city in the nation. In Material Dreams, Kevin Starr captures this explosive growth in a narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose.