Human Rights and Memory

"This excellent book shows that the human rights regime gives rise to a geography of human rights that founds a new geography of power both within and between states. Within states it empowers powerless groups, and between states it empowers powerful states to intervene. This is part of a cosmopolitan realism that Levy and Sznaider are promoting and practicing very convincingly-a must-read."-Ulrich Beck, Munic University and the London School of Economics

Memories of historical events like the Holocaust have played a key role in the internationalization of human rights. Their importance lies in their ability to bridge the universal and the particular-the universality of human values and the particularity of memories rooted in local human experiences. In Human Rights and memory, Levy and Sznaider trace the growth of human rights discourse since World War II and interpret its deployment of memories as a new form of cosmopolitanism, exemplifying a dynamic through which global concerns become part of local experiences, and vice versa.

Danie Levy is Associate Professor of Sociology at Stoney Brook University.
Natan Sznaider is Professor of Sociology in the School of Behavioral Sciences at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo, Israel.