Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights

After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights

Meister, Robert

Paperback

PhilosophyGeneral Political ScienceSocial Movements

ISBN10: 0231150377
ISBN13: 9780231150378
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: Nov 6 2012
Pages: 544
Weight: 1.55
Height: 1.30 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

The way in which mainstream human rights discourse speaks of such evils as the Holocaust, slavery, or apartheid puts them solidly in the past. Its elaborate techniques of transitional justice encourage future generations to move forward by creating a false assumption of closure, enabling those who are guilty to elude responsibility. This approach to history, common to late-twentieth-century humanitarianism, doesn't presuppose that evil ends when justice begins. Rather, it assumes that a time before justice is the moment to put evil in the past.

Merging examples from literature and history, Robert Meister confronts the problem of closure and the resolution of historical injustice. He boldly challenges the empty moral logic of never again or the theoretical reduction of evil to a cycle of violence and counterviolence, broken only once evil is remembered for what it was. Meister criticizes such methods for their deferral of justice and susceptibility to exploitation and elaborates the flawed moral logic of never again in relation to Auschwitz and its evolution into a twenty-first-century doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect.

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