Human Rights Politics

Every generation inherits the problems created by the ones before them, but no generation will inherit as many problems—as many crises—as the current generation of young people. From the devastations of climate change to the horrors of gun violence, from rampant transphobia to the widening wealth gap, from the lack of health care to the lack of housing, the challenges facing the next generation can feel insurmountable. But change, even revolution, is possible; you just have to know where to start.

In late 2019, Dennis Oya's persistent cough was just the beginning of a harrowing tale of neglect and systemic failure in a Washington prison. Diagnosed eighteen months later with tuberculosis (TB), Oya's case sparked one of the largest prison TB outbreaks in decades, affecting over 3,000 contacts. This outbreak, and others like it, exposes the glaring weaknesses in prison healthcare systems. In Outbreak Behind Bars, Homer Venters reveals the grim realities of how communicable diseases thrive in the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions of correctional facilities.

In Xinjiang, the large northwest region of China, the government has imprisoned more than a million Uyghurs in reeducation camps. One of the incarcerated-whose sentence, unlike most others, has no end date-is Ilham Tohti, an intellectual and economist, a prolific writer, and formerly the host of a website, Uyghur Online. Here are Tohti's own words, a collection of his plain-spoken calls for justice, scholarly explanations of the history of Xinjiang, and poignant personal reflections.

One of the earliest works of feminist philosophy, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman advocates for the education of women in a time where the opposite belief was predominately held. Written during the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft's work had a significant impact on those advocating for women's rights during the nineteenth century.

On the eve of International Women's Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists, and online warriors prompting an unprecedented awakening among China's educated, urban women.

In A Moonless, Starless Sky Okeowo weaves together four narratives that form a powerful tapestry of modern Africa: a young couple, kidnap victims of Joseph Kony's LRA; a Mauritanian waging a lonely campaign against modern-day slavery; a women's basketball team flourishing amid war-torn Somalia; and a vigilante who takes up arms against the extremist group Boko Haram.

Refuge seeks to restore moral purpose and clarity to refugee policy. Rather than assuming indefinite dependency, Collier - author of The Bottom Billion - and his Oxford colleague Betts propose a humanitarian approach integrated with a new economic agenda that begins with jobs, restores autonomy, and rebuilds people's ability to help themselves and their societies.

The enormous sense of optimism unleashed by the Arab Spring in 2011 soon gave way to widespread suffering and despair. Of the many popular uprisings against autocratic regimes, Tunisia's now stands alone as a beacon of hope for sustainable human rights progress. Challenging the widely shared pessimism among regional experts, Micheline Ishay charts bold and realistic pathways for human rights in a region beset by political repression, economic distress, sectarian conflict, a refugee crisis, and violence against women.

A history of the landmark case of Clarence Earl Gideon's fight for the right to legal counsel.

An urgent, essential, and practical call to action from the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. The climate crisis threatens global social collapse. Within a generation. What to do? Common Sense for the 21st Century outlines how movements around the world now need to come together to start doing "what works". This means engaging in mass civil disobedience to make real change happen. This booklet is not just theory, it is the call to action. The political class is not going to save us from extinction.

Joel Simon, who in nearly two decades at the Committee to Protect Journalists has worked on dozens of hostages cases, delves into the heated hostage policy debate. We Want to Negotiate is an exploration of the ethical, legal, and strategic considerations of a bedeviling question: Should governments pay ransom to terrorists?

Recalling the great muckrakers of the past, an outraged team of America's best-selling writers unite to confront the disasters of wrongful convictions. Wrongful convictions, long regarded as statistical anomalies in an otherwise sound justice system, now appear with frightening regularity. But few people understand just how or why they happen and, more important, the immeasurable consequences that often haunt the lucky few who are acquitted years after they are proven innocent.

Jimmy Carter has lived the most admired and productive post-presidency in the nation's history. Through The Carter Center, which he and Rosalynn Carter founded in 1982, President Carter has fought neglected diseases, waged peace in war zones, and built hope among some of the most forgotten and needy people in the world.

Student resistance in the first decade of the 21st century was the single most powerful liberating force around the globe during those years. Challenging governments-in a few cases, overturning governments - at a time when representational democracies appeared weak and authoritarian regimes were on the rise. In Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos, Book 1, Mark Boren goes continent by continent, country by country, to show us the contours of the new frontlines of resistance, the sacrifices that were made, the seismic changes caused by the internet, and more.

What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? draws on the voices of individual working people to tell the stories left out of standard histories of that era, and helps us imagine how to address our own failed economy, and how to imagine and build movements challenging it that do not themselves replicate racism and patriarchy.

The years of the COVID-19 pandemic have brought to light the exploitation of workers. Unbroken Chains demands that listeners examine the hidden sector of American trafficked labor and understand its prevalence across our economy. Drawing from nearly two decades of research on US and international human trafficking, Melissa Hope Ditmore sets forth the harrowing stories of human trafficking survivors and grounds their accounts in the long history of US indentured servitude, looking to its iterations in chattel slavery, Chinese contract labor, and prison labor.

Pamela Olson, a small town girl from eastern Oklahoma, had what she always wanted: a physics degree from Stanford University. But instead of feeling excited for what came next, she felt consumed by dread and confusion. This irresistible memoir chronicles her journey from aimless ex-bartender to Ramallah-based journalist and foreign press coordinator for a Palestinian presidential candidate.

The American Caste Story is an "underground railroad" map of America's apartheid system. Lawrence's debut work doubles as a "concept mixtape," and an autobiographical statement about social systems' impact on humans around the world. The author explores systemic issues that relate to social, economic, and political conditions, using elements of poetry to depict the current state of affairs for members of the African diaspora and the world at large.

America in 1982. Japanese car companies are on the rise and believed to be putting American autoworkers out of their jobs. Anti-Asian-American sentiments simmer, especially in Detroit. A bar fight turns fatal, leaving Vincent Chin - a Chinese-American man - beaten to death at the hands of two white men, autoworker Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz. From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry is a searing examination of the killing and the trial and verdicts that followed.

Since the revolution-turned-civil war in Syria began in 2011, over 500,000 civilians have been killed and more than 12 million Syrians have been displaced. Rania Abouzeid, one of the foremost journalists on the topic, follows two pairs of sisters from opposite sides of the conflict to give listeners a firsthand glimpse of the turmoil and devastation this strife has wrought.