Undoing Impunity

Undoing Impunity PDF Author: V. Geetha
Publisher: Zubaan
ISBN: 9385932152
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia research project (coordinated by Zubaan and supported by the International Development Research Centre) brings together, for the first time in the region, a vast body of knowledge on this important - yet silenced - subject. Six country volumes (one each on Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and two on India, as well as two standalone volumes) comprising over fifty research papers and two book-length studies, detail the histories of sexual violence and look at the systemic, institutional, societal, individual and community structures that work together to perpetuate impunity for perpetrators. In this remarkable and wide-ranging study, activist and historian V. Geetha unpacks the meanings of impunity in relation to sexual violence in the context of South Asia. The State's misuse of its own laws against its citizens is only one aspect of the edifice of impunity; its less-understood resilience comes from its consistent denial of the recognition of suffering on the part of victims, and its refusal to allow them the dignity of pain, grief and loss. Time and again, in South Asia, the State has worked to mediate public memory, to manipulate forgetting, particularly in relation to its own acts of commission. It has done this by refusing to take responsibility, not only for its acts but also for the pain such acts have caused. It has denied suffering the eloquence, the words, the expression that it deserves and papered over the hurt of its people with routine government procedures. The author argues that the State and its citizens must work together to accord social recognition to the suffering of victims and survivors of sexual violence, and thereby join in what she calls 'a shared humanity'. While this may or may not produce legal victories, the acknowledgment that the suffering of our fellow citizens is our collective responsibility is an essential first step towards securing justice. It is this that in a fundamental sense challenges and illuminates the contours and details of State impunity, and positions impunity as not merely a legal or political conundrum, but as resolute refusal on the part of State personnel to be part of a shared humanity.

Undoing Impunity

Undoing Impunity PDF Author: V. Geetha
Publisher: Zubaan
ISBN: 9385932152
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia research project (coordinated by Zubaan and supported by the International Development Research Centre) brings together, for the first time in the region, a vast body of knowledge on this important - yet silenced - subject. Six country volumes (one each on Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and two on India, as well as two standalone volumes) comprising over fifty research papers and two book-length studies, detail the histories of sexual violence and look at the systemic, institutional, societal, individual and community structures that work together to perpetuate impunity for perpetrators. In this remarkable and wide-ranging study, activist and historian V. Geetha unpacks the meanings of impunity in relation to sexual violence in the context of South Asia. The State's misuse of its own laws against its citizens is only one aspect of the edifice of impunity; its less-understood resilience comes from its consistent denial of the recognition of suffering on the part of victims, and its refusal to allow them the dignity of pain, grief and loss. Time and again, in South Asia, the State has worked to mediate public memory, to manipulate forgetting, particularly in relation to its own acts of commission. It has done this by refusing to take responsibility, not only for its acts but also for the pain such acts have caused. It has denied suffering the eloquence, the words, the expression that it deserves and papered over the hurt of its people with routine government procedures. The author argues that the State and its citizens must work together to accord social recognition to the suffering of victims and survivors of sexual violence, and thereby join in what she calls 'a shared humanity'. While this may or may not produce legal victories, the acknowledgment that the suffering of our fellow citizens is our collective responsibility is an essential first step towards securing justice. It is this that in a fundamental sense challenges and illuminates the contours and details of State impunity, and positions impunity as not merely a legal or political conundrum, but as resolute refusal on the part of State personnel to be part of a shared humanity.

Undoing Impunity

Undoing Impunity PDF Author: Va Kītā
Publisher: Zubaan Sexual Violence and Imp
ISBN: 9789384757779
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Acts of sexual violence are also acts committed with impunity. Those who commit them do not consider their actions consequential, and this is as true of perpetrators in the social realm, as it is of state actors. Such impunity is sustained by what it refuses: shared humanity and the recognition of suffering. Yet throughout history impunity to do with sexual violence has been challenged by fearless, just and compassionate speech, in courts of justice and outside of it. Those who did do, and continue to do so, not only advance a politics of accountability but also an ethics of recognition, of suffering and hurt. This book explores the contours of such politics and ethics in the modern South Asian context. It takes a historical lens to our collective struggles with sexual violence and the question of impunity, and builds an archive of speech, partial silence and of the unspeakable, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It examines closely explicitly feminist responses from the region: drawing from the latter, it suggests that sexual violence and the impunity it claims for itself are best understood in the manner they relate to the sexual everyday in our cultures.

Undoing Coups

Undoing Coups PDF Author: Antonia Witt
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1786996855
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since the beginnings of independence, a number of African nations have been plagued by repeated coup d'états. Within the African Union (AU), there has been a concerted effort to break this cycle through the official adoption of an ‘anti-coup norm’, by which the AU is mandated to suspend a member state and restore constitutional order following a coup. Supporters of this stance see it as strengthening democracy in Africa, while critics argue that it has served to prop up existing regimes. But there has been little analysis of what the AU’s attempts to ‘restore constitutional order’ have meant for individual African states. In this book, Antonia Witt looks at the legacy of the AU’s intervention in Madagascar following the 2009 ‘Malagasy crisis’, one of the increasingly relevant yet under-researched cases of non-Western intervention in Africa. The book looks at the ways in which international intervention reconfigured the political order in Madagascar, how it facilitated the power struggle within the Madagascan elite and prevented more profound political change. It also considers what the example set by the Madagascan intervention means for the wider international order in Africa and the powers attributed to African international actors such as the AU.

Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?

Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? PDF Author: Essar Batool
Publisher: Zubaan
ISBN: 9384757845
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
On a cold February night in 1991, a group of soldiers and officers of the Indian Army pushed their way into two villages in Kashmir, seeking out militants assumed to be hiding there. They pulled the men out of their homes and subjected many to torture, and the women to rape. According to village accounts, as many as 31 women were raped. Twenty-one years later, in 2012, the rape and murder of a young medical student in Delhi galvanized a protest movement so widespread and deep that it reached all corners of the world. In Kashmir, a group of young women, all in their twenties, were inspired to re-open the Kunan-Poshpora case, to revisit their history and to look at what had happened to the survivors of the 1991 mass rape. Through personal accounts of their journey, this book examines questions of justice, of stigma, of the responsibility of the state, and of the long-term impact of trauma.

The Verso Book of Feminism

The Verso Book of Feminism PDF Author: Jessie Kindig
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788739809
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Get Book Here

Book Description
An unprecedented collection of feminist voices from four millennia of global history Throughout written history and across the world, women have protested the restrictions of gender and the limitations placed on women's bodies and women's lives. People–of any and no gender–have protested and theorized, penned manifestos and written poetry and songs, testified and lobbied, gone on strike and fomented revolution, quietly demanded that there is an "I" and loudly proclaimed that there is a "we." The Book of Feminism chronicles this history of defiance and tracks it around the world as it develops into a multivocal and unabashed force. Global in scope, The Book of Feminism shows the breadth of feminist protest and of feminist thinking, moving through the female poets of China's Tang Dynasty and accounts of indigenous women in the Caribbean resisting Columbus's expedition, British suffragists militating for the vote and the revolutionary petroleuses of the 1848 Paris Commune, the first century Trung sisters who fought for the independence of Nam Viet to women in 1980s Botswana fighting for equal protection under the law, from the erotica of the 6th century and the 19th century to radical queer politics in the 20th and 21st. The Book of Feminism is a weapon, a force, a lyrical cry, and an ongoing threat to misogyny everywhere.

In Plain Sight

In Plain Sight PDF Author: Tyrell Haberkorn
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299314405
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373

Get Book Here

Book Description
Following a 1932 coup d’état in Thailand that ended absolute monarchy and established a constitution, the Thai state that emerged has suppressed political dissent through detention, torture, forced reeducation, disappearances, assassinations, and massacres. In Plain Sight shows how these abuses, both hidden and occurring in public view, have become institutionalized through a chronic failure to hold perpetrators accountable. Tyrell Haberkorn’s deeply researched revisionist history of modern Thailand highlights the legal, political, and social mechanisms that have produced such impunity and documents continual and courageous challenges to state domination.

Undoing Conquest

Undoing Conquest PDF Author: Common, Kate
Publisher: Orbis Books
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 153

Get Book Here

Book Description


A Difficult Transition

A Difficult Transition PDF Author: Mandira Sharma
Publisher: Zubaan
ISBN: 9385932128
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia research project (coordinated by Zubaan and supported by the International Development Research Centre) brings together, for the first time in the region, a vast body of research on this important – yet silenced – subject. Six country volumes (one each on Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and two on India, as well as two standalone volumes) comprising over fifty research papers and two book-length studies, detail the histories of sexual violence and look at the systemic, institutional, societal, individual and community structures that work together to perpetuate impunity for perpetrators. The essays in this volume focus on Nepal, which though not directly colonized, has not remained immune from the influence of colonialism in its neighbourhood. In addition to home-grown feudal patriarchal structures, the writers in this volume clearly demonstrate that it is the larger colonial and post-colonial context of the subcontinent that has enabled the structuring of inequalities and power relations in ways that today allow for widespread sexual violence and impunity in the country – through legal systems, medical regimes and social institutions. The period after the 1990 democratic movement, the subsequent political transformation in the aftermath of the Maoist insurgency and the writing of the new constitution, has seen an increase in public discussion about sexual violence. The State has brought in a slew of legislation and action plans to address this problem. And yet, impunity for perpetrators remains intact and justice elusive. What are the structures that enable such impunity? What can be done to radically transform these? How must States understand the search for justice for victims and survivors of sexual violence? This volume addresses these and related issues. Published by Zubaan.

The Truth Machines

The Truth Machines PDF Author: Jinee Lokaneeta
Publisher:
ISBN: 0472054392
Category : Forensic sciences
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Using case studies and the results of extensive fieldwork, this book considers the nature of state power and legal violence in liberal democracies by focusing on the interaction between law, science, and policing in India. The postcolonial Indian police have often been accused of using torture in both routine and exceptional criminal cases, but they, and forensic psychologists, have claimed that lie detectors, brain scans, and narcoanalysis (the use of "truth serum," Sodium Pentothal) represent a paradigm shift away from physical torture; most state high courts in India have upheld this rationale. The Truth Machines examines the emergence and use of these three scientific techniques to analyze two primary themes. First, the book questions whether existing theoretical frameworks for understanding state power and legal violence are adequate to explain constant innovations of the state. Second, it explores the workings of law, science, and policing in the everyday context to generate a theory of state power and legal violence, challenging the monolithic frameworks about this relationship, based on a study of both state and non-state actors. Jinee Lokaneeta argues that the attempt to replace physical torture with truth machines in India fails because it relies on a confessional paradigm that is contiguous with torture. Her work also provides insights into a police institution that is founded and refounded in its everyday interactions between state and non-state actors. Theorizing a concept of Contingent State, this book demonstrates the disaggregated, and decentered nature of state power and legal violence, creating possible sites of critique and intervention"--

Resisting Dispossession

Resisting Dispossession PDF Author: Ranjana Padhi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811507171
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book Here

Book Description
The book brings to the reader a set of political and social narratives woven around people’s resistance against big dams, mining and industrial projects, in short, displacement and dispossession in Odisha, India. This saga of dispossession abounds with stories and narratives of ordinary peasants, forest dwellers, fisher folk and landless wage laborers, which make the canvas of resistance history more complete. The book foregrounds these protagonists and the events that marked their lives; they live in the coastal plains as well as the hilly and forested areas of south and south-west Odisha. The authors have chronicled the development trajectory from the construction of the Hirakud Dam in the 1950s to the entry of corporations like POSCO and Vedanta in contemporary times. It thus covers extensive ground in interrogating the nature of industrialization being ushered into the state from post-independent India till today. The book depicts how and why people resist the development juggernaut in a state marked with endemic poverty. In unraveling this complex reality, the book conveys the world view of a vast section of people whose lives and livelihoods are tied up to land, forests, mountains, seas, rivers, lakes, ponds, trees, vines and bushes. These narratives fill a yawning gap in resistance literature in the context of Odisha. In doing so, they resonate with the current predicament of people in other mineral-rich states in Eastern India. The book is an endeavour to bring Odisha on the map of resistance politics and social movements in India and across the world.