The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation: From Terror to Trauma

by Michael Humphrey

Overview

The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation examines contemporary political violence and atrocity in the context of the crisis of the nation-state. It explores the way violence is used to unmake the social world and how its product: suffering, is used to try to remake the social world. Humphrey considers both the unmaking of the world through torture, war, urbicide and ethnic cleansing and the resultant remaking of the world through testimony and witnessing in the forums of truth commissions and trials. The discussion thus moves from terror to trauma.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415274135
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/21/2002
Series:	Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought , #34
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Michael Humphrey is Associate Professor and Head of School at the School of Sociology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He has published widely on the themes of dispute resolution, ethnicity, Lebanese diaspora communities, Islamic movements, Middle East migration, globalisation, violence and national reconstruction. He is also the author of Islam, Multiculturalism & Transnationalism: From the Lebanese Diaspora.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Politics of atrocity; Chapter 2 Horror, abjection and terror; Chapter 3 The atrocity of torture; Chapter 4 War, horrors, beliefs; Chapter 5 Urbicide; Chapter 6 Ethnic cleansing; Chapter 7 Witnessing atrocity; Chapter 8 Trauma, truth and reconciliation; Chapter 9 Atrocity, trials and justice; Chapter 10 Conclusion;

Editorial Reviews

' ... its great achievement is that it confronts the enormous difficulties of rendering moral arguments in this changed scenario of politics and warfare or rather politics as warfare.' - The Australian Journal of Anthropology

From the Publisher