Search results for ""author julie a. mertus""
Taylor & Francis Ltd Bait and Switch: Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy
It has become routine for the US government to invoke human rights to justify its foreign policy decisions and military ventures. But this human rights talk has not been supported by a human rights walk. Policy makers consistently apply a double standard for human rights norms: one the rest of the world must observe, but which the US can safely ignore.Based on extensive interviews with leading foreign policy makers, military officials, and human rights advocates, Mertus tells the story of how America's attempts to promote human rights abroad have, paradoxically, undermined those rights in other countries. The second edition brings the story up-to-date, including new sections on the second half of the Bush administration and the Iraq War, and updates on Afghanistan.The first edition of Bait and Switch won the American Political Science Association's 2005 Best Book on Human Rights.
£175.00
Stanford University Press Human Rights Matters: Local Politics and National Human Rights Institutions
Among human rights advocates, dominant wisdom holds that the promotion and protection of human rights relies not on international efforts, but on domestic action. International institutions may capture news headlines, but it is national groups that effectively shape local expectations and ultimately make human rights matter. Through a series of case studies and an extensive range of interviews with the administrators and constituencies of national human rights institutions, Julie Mertus offers a close look at the day-to-day workings of these groups. She presents an unusual and lively set of European cases—examining Bosnia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, and Northern Ireland—to illustrate how local culture matters in promoting human rights. But even with the obvious successes of these institutions, Mertus offers a cautionary tale. National institutions are incredibly difficult to design and operate, and they are only as good as the domestic political and economic factors will allow. It is too frequently seen that the countries most supportive of human rights on the world stage may prove to be highly disappointing back home.
£23.99
University of California Press The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia
The whirlwind of Europe's longest war in half a century has produced this powerful collection of personal narratives - essays, letters, and poems - from refugees fleeing Bosnia and Croatia. Taking us behind the barrage of media coverage, these stories tell of perseverance, brutality, forced departure, exile, and courage. With startling immediacy and in moving detail, speakers tell of stuffing a few belongings - a handful of photographs, a rock from the garden, a change of clothes--into a suitcase and fleeing their homeland. Contributors from all ethnic groups and every region of Bosnia and Croatia describe their sense of lost community, memories of those left behind, recollections of town squares that no longer exist, and homes now occupied by neighbors. The editors of "The Suitcase", themselves representing the diverse people of the region, traveled to camps and temporary homes across the globe to collect these stories. An antidote to apathy, this work moves beyond and outside the vicissitudes of daily politics to portray the human tragedy at the center of present-day Bosnia and Croatia. Probing the intimate losses of countless individuals, it delivers a powerful indictment of injustice, militarism, prejudice, and warfare.
£24.30
