I Book Review: States of Denial. Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/016934410502300412 |
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Part D: DocumentationI Book Review |
Moreover, so far the litigation has been limited to the United States with its unique
laws and a few hesitant developments in other countries and most cases will take
years to come to a conclusion. Even though this litigation is promising and
interesting from a legal perspective, it can hardly be considered an adequate answer
to human rights abuses committed by corporations all over the world. An
international mechanism is therefore necessary. Chapter eight ends with the
following hopeful sentence: ‘perhaps the proliferation of transnational human
rights cases against TNCs is the catalyst needed to generate the political and
commercial will to create new international human rights laws to govern commercial
actors’ (p. 154).
Given the ongoing developments in the field Joseph has chosen to describe it no
doubt will be necessary to follow up on this study in a couple of years time. I look
forward to the next book of Joseph on the subject.
Stanley Cohen,
States of Denial. Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering,
Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001, 344 p., ISBN: 0-7456-2392-1 (pbk)*
In the last half century since the end of the Second World War, some 25 million
people have been killed, mostly civilians and often by their own governments, in
internal conflicts and ethnic, nationalist or religious violence. About 50 million
people were forced to leave their homes. In 1998, every month more than 2,000
people were killed or maimed by land-mine explosions. More than 17 million
people a year die from infectious and parasitic diseases; 600 million people are
undernourished and some parts of the world are ravaged and depopulated because
of the AIDS virus.
In contrast to facing up to the knowledge and painfully confronting the reality,
many people and also many governments are inclined to live ‘in denial’. Turning a
blind eye, blocking out knowledge, shutting off, not wanting to know, wearing
blinkers, only seeing what we want to see, it’s none of my business... they are all
expressions of denial. As a matter of fact, according to Stanley Cohen, denial is the
normal state of affairs in politics and daily life. Can one speak of a ‘culture of
denial’?
Cohen has a long-standing fascination with denial. Stanley Cohen grew up in
South Africa and is of Jewish origin. In the Introduction he mentions that, as a
young boy, he felt injustice about the unequal treatment of black servants.
According to his mother he was ‘over-sensitive’. He came to London in 1963, worked
as a social worker, completed his Ph.D. and became a Professor of Sociology at the
University of Essex. In 1980, he moved with his family to Israel. Staying in Israel, he
wrote about torture of Arabs and he was also closely involved in the Peace
Movement. In the end he became disillusioned with the lack of progress. Cohen
became more or less a persona non grata and returned to the UK in 1994. States of
Denial, his latest book, is an impressive and comprehensive study of the ways in which
uncomfortable realities are avoided and evaded. We live in an increasingly global
world, with an extraordinary level of media exposure, in which it might seem
difficult to live ‘in denial’. Still, there are many statements made by perpetrators,
I Book Reviews
Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, Vol. 23/4 (2005) 693
* Hans Werdmo
¨lder is a social anthropologist and criminologist. He is the Coordinator of the School
of Human Rights Research and Senior Researcher at the Faculty of Law at Utrecht University, the
Netherlands.
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