Undoing Impunity

Undoing Impunity PDF

Author: V. Geetha

Publisher: Zubaan

Published: 2016-11-28

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9385932152

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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

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789384757779

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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.

In Plain Sight

In Plain Sight PDF

Author: Tyrell Haberkorn

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2018-01-09

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0299314405

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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.

The Truth Machines

The Truth Machines PDF

Author: Jinee Lokaneeta

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2020-02-26

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0472126474

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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.

The Verso Book of Feminism

The Verso Book of Feminism PDF

Author: Jessie Kindig

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-10-20

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 1788739809

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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.

Thai Legal History

Thai Legal History PDF

Author: Andrew Harding

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-06-17

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1108830870

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The first book to provide a broad coverage of Thai legal history in the English language.

New Perspectives on India and Turkey

New Perspectives on India and Turkey PDF

Author: Smita Tewari Jassal

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-09

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1134977018

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India and Turkey, Asia Minor and the Subcontinent of Hindustan, and the Ottomans and Mughals have had shared histories of contact, engagement, and dialogue over the centuries. Much of northern India was under the control of rulers from Central Asia since at least the thirteenth century. Startling glimpses of the presence of Turkic-speaking peoples from Central Asia are still visible, for example, in north Indian material cultures - languages, cuisine, religion, architecture, and medicine. This book places the Indian subcontinent side by side with the Turkic-speaking world, both past and present, in order to understand one geographical context in relation to the other. The juxtaposition of the two countries throws up some startling commonalities as well as considerable differences, and it is the variations as well as the similarities that allow for comparability. By exploring historical connections and providing a comparative perspective in terms of spirituality and religion, social movements, political economy, and foreign policy, the book initiates productive cross-cultural conversations, allowing concerns from one location to illuminate the other. The book is split into five parts: History and Memory, Nationhood and Leadership, Secularism, Debating Development, and claiming the City. The first comparison of the Subcontinent and present-day Turkey, the book emphasizes the importance of cross-regional comparative analysis in order to overcome some of the pitfalls of area-focused analysis. Filling a gap in the existing literature, it will be of interest to scholars in various disciplines, including politics, religion, history, urbanization, and development in the Middle East and Asia.

Women Speak Nation

Women Speak Nation PDF

Author: Panchali Ray

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2019-07-24

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1000507270

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Women Speak Nation underlines the centrality of gender within the ideological construction of nationalism. The volume locates itself in a rich scholarship of feminist critique of the relationship between political, economic, cultural, and social formations and normative gendered relations to try and understand the cross-currents in contemporary feminist theorizing and politics. The chapters question the gendered depictions of the nation as Hindu, upper caste, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied Indian mother. The volume also brings together interviews and short essays from practitioners and activists who voice an alternative reimagining of the nation. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender, politics, modern South Asian history, and cultural studies.

Oxford Handbook of Caste

Oxford Handbook of Caste PDF

Author: Surinder S. Jodhka

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-10-16

Total Pages: 689

ISBN-13: 0198896719

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The Oxford Handbook of Caste brings together a wide range of essays encompassing various academic disciplines to lay the foundations for a new understanding of caste, capturing emerging research trends, imaginations, and the lived realities of caste.

Cultures of Ageing and Ageism in India

Cultures of Ageing and Ageism in India PDF

Author: Kaustav Bakshi

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-01-30

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1003852238

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This book examines the discourses on ageing and ageism in Indian culture, politics, art and society. It explores its representations and the anxieties, fears and vulnerabilities associated with ageing. The volume looks at ageing within the contexts of the larger discourses of gender, sexuality, nation, health and the performance and politics of ageing. The chapters grapple with diverse issues around ageing and elder care in contemporary India, shifts in socio-economic conditions and the breakdown of the heteropatriarchal family. The book includes personal accounts and narratives that detail the daily experiences of ageing and living with disease, anxiety, loneliness and loss for both elders and their friends and families. The book also explores the models of alternative networks of kinship and care that queer elders in India create in India as well as examining narratives—in society, art, sports and popular culture that both critique and challenge stereotypical ideas about the desires, aspirations, and mental and physical capabilities of elders. Topical and comprehensive, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of gerontology, literature, cultural studies, popular culture, sociology, social psychology, queer studies, gender studies, social anthropology, and South Asian studies.