What is Justice? Is it always just 'to come'? Can real experience be translated into law? Examining Cambodia's troubled reconciliation, Alexander Hinton suggests an approach to justice founded on global ideals of the rule of law, democratization, and a progressive trajectory towards liberty and freedom, and which seeks to align the country with so called universal modes of thought, is condemned to failure. Instead, Hinton advocates focusing on the individual lived experience, and the discourses, interstices, and the combustive encounters connected with it, as a radical alternative. A phenomenology inspired approach towards healing national trauma, Hinton's ground-breaking text will make anybody with an interest in transitional justice, development, humanitarian intervention, human rights, or peacebuilding, question the value of an established truth.
Anthropological Witness tells the story of Alexander Laban Hinton's encounter with an accused architect of genocide and, more broadly, Hinton's attempt to navigate the promises and perils of expert testimony. In March 2016, Hinton served as an expert witness at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, an international tribunal established to try senior Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes committed during the 1975–79 Cambodian genocide. His testimony culminated in a direct exchange with Pol Pot's notorious right-hand man, Nuon Chea, who was engaged in genocide denial. Anthropological Witness looks at big questions about the ethical imperatives and epistemological assumptions involved in explanation and the role of the public scholar in addressing issues relating to truth, justice, social repair, and genocide. Hinton asks: Can scholars who serve as expert witnesses effectively contribute to international atrocity crimes tribunals where the focus is on legal guilt as opposed to academic explanation? What does the answer to this question say more generally about academia and the public sphere? At a time when the world faces a multitude of challenges, the answers Hinton provides to such questions about public scholarship are urgent.
If many people were shocked by Trump's 2016 election, many more were stunned when, months later, white power extremists took to the streets of Charlottesville chanting "Blood and Soil" and "Jews will not replace us!" Like Trump, the Charlottesville marchers were dismissed as aberrations -- the momentary appearance of "racists" and "haters" who didn't represent the real U.S. Rather than being exceptional, It Can Happen Here argues these events are symptoms of the country's long history of systemic white supremacy, genocide, and atrocity crimes. And there is a high likelihood that such violence will occur here again. This reality, "It Can Happen Here" demonstrates, is a key post-mortem lesson we have learned from the 2016-2020 Trump presidency. "It Can Happen Here" breaks new ground by raising the alarm about the on-going threat of genocide and mass violence in the U.S. as well as considering path forward for repair. Written from a public anthropology perspective, it is also the field's first book to explore contemporary white power extremism in the U.S"--
During the Khmer Rouge's brutal reign in Cambodia during the mid-to-late 1970s, a former math teacher named Duch served as the commandant of the S-21 security center, where as many as 20,000 victims were interrogated, tortured, and executed. In 2009 Duch stood trial for these crimes against humanity. While the prosecution painted Duch as evil, his defense lawyers claimed he simply followed orders. In Man or Monster? Alexander Hinton uses creative ethnographic writing, extensive fieldwork, hundreds of interviews, and his experience attending Duch's trial to create a nuanced analysis of Duch, the tribunal, the Khmer Rouge, and the after-effects of Cambodia's genocide. Interested in how a person becomes a torturer and executioner as well as the law's ability to grapple with crimes against humanity, Hinton adapts Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil" to consider how the potential for violence is embedded in the everyday ways people articulate meaning and comprehend the world. Man or Monster? provides novel ways to consider justice, terror, genocide, memory, truth, and humanity.
Perpetrators of mass violence are commonly regarded as evil. Their violent nature is believed to make them commit heinous crimes as members of state agencies, insurgencies, terrorist organizations, or racist and supremacist groups. Upon close examination, however, perpetrators are contradictory human beings who often lead unsettlingly ordinary and uneventful lives. Drawing on decades of on-the-ground research with perpetrators of genocide, mass violence, and enforced disappearances in Cambodia and Argentina, Antonius Robben and Alex Hinton explore how researchers go about not just interviewing and writing about perpetrators, but also processing their own emotions and considering how the personal and interpersonal impact of this sort of research informs the texts that emerge from them. Through interlinked ethnographic essays, methodological and theoretical reflections, and dialogues between the two authors, this thought-provoking book conveys practical wisdom for the benefit of other researchers who face ruthless perpetrators and experience turbulent emotions when listening to perpetrators and their victims. Perpetrators rarely regard themselves as such, and fieldwork with perpetrators makes for situations freighted with emotion. Research with perpetrators is a difficult but important part of understanding the causes of and creating solutions to mass violence, and Robben and Hinton use their expertise to provide insightful lessons on the epistemological, ethical, and emotional challenges of ethnographic fieldwork in the wake of atrocity.
For survivors of the brutal Khmer Rouge Regime, western instruments of justice are small plasters on deep wounds. In Hinton's account of the subsequent international tribunal, only traditional ceremony, ritual, and unmediated dialogue can provide true healing.
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