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Review: The History of Human Rights

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorBrian C. Rathbun
Published date01 December 2005
Date01 December 2005
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/002070200506000425
Subject MatterReview
AUTUMN 2005.qxd | Reviews |
that might best be. To head off ethnic cleansing or genocide at one particu-
lar pass is not necessarily to have quelled the potential for it at another.
Mann has no such qualms, and at times, therefore, he is simplistic. He
devotes a mere 30 pages of 580 to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and declares that
“ethnic targeting was uncommon” (318) and that the main enemy was per-
ceived in terms of class, not ethnicity. But Weitz’s stories challenge that per-
spective, telling how, in both the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin and in
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, class morphed into ethnicity as the target
of the dominant group’s enmity, resulting in the latter case in the deaths of—
at a conservative estimate—almost eight million people. “In essence, the
Khmer Rouge layered a racial concept of being Khmer—forged…partly out of
indigenous Khmer ideas, partly out of the influence of French colonialism—
upon the models of twentieth-century communist revolutions” (188).
Mann’s brief attempt to explain the rise of political religion is similarly
glib; he tries to treat too complex a subject in too little space.
More problematic is the continuum that he creates of how modern
states deal with ethnicity—with genocide at one end and “assimilation” in
countries like the United States on the other. Underlying this continuum is
a whole series of assumptions about the multitude of ways in which identity
is constructed and difference viewed—a series of assumptions that is, it
seems, unnecessarily narrow.
Nonetheless, these are books that must be read and that must be argued
over. Without an understanding of the issues they tackle with passion and in
depth, the desire to intervene—to prevent ethnic cleansing or genocide—is
meaningless.
Rima Berns-McGown/The University of Toronto and the Canadian Institute of
International Affairs
T H E H I S T O R Y O F H U M A N R I G H T S
From Ancient Times to Globalization
Micheline R. Ishay
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. x, 450pp,...

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