Undeniable Atrocities

Undeniable Atrocities
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2016
Genre: Disappeared persons
ISBN: 9781940983622

"Since the Mexican government escalated its war on organized crime at the end of 2006, over 150,000 Mexicans have been intentionally murdered. Countless thousands of others have been tortured; no one knows how many have disappeared. Caught between government forces and organized crime cartels, the Mexican people have suffered as atrocities and impunity reign. Based on three years of research, over 100 interviews, and previously unreleased government documents, this report finds a reasonable basis to believe that government forces and members of criminal cartels have perpetrated crimes against humanity in Mexico. The report comprehensively examines why there has been so little justice for atrocity crimes, and finds the main answers in political obstruction. Given the lack of political will to end impunity, new approaches must be taken. The report argues for a series of institutional changes, most importantly the creation of an internationalized investigative body, based inside Mexico, with powers to independently investigate and prosecute atrocity crimes."--Page 4 of cover.

Fear and Crime in Latin America

Fear and Crime in Latin America
Author: Lucía Dammert
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2012-10-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1136298274

The feeling of insecurity is a little known phenomenon that has been only partially explored by social sciences. However, it has a deep social, cultural and economic impact and may even contribute to define the very structures of the state. In Latin America, fear of crime has become an important stumbling block in the region’s process of democratization. After long spells of dictatorships and civil wars, violence in the region was supposed to be under control yet crime rates have continued to skyrocket and citizens remain fearful. This analytical puzzle has troubled researchers and to date there is no publication which explores this problem. Based on a wealth of cutting edge qualitative and quantitative research, Lucía Dammert proposes a unique theoretical perspective which includes a sociological, criminological and political analysis to understand fear of crime. She describes its linkages to issues such as urban segregation, social attitudes, institutional trust, public policies and authoritarian discourses in Chile’s recent past. Looking beyond Chile, Dammert also includes a regional comparative perspective allowing readers to understand the complex elements underpinning this situation. Fear and Crime in Latin America challenges many assumptions and opens an opportunity to discuss an issue that affects everyone with key societal and personal costs. As crime rates increase and states become even more fragile, fear of crime as a social problem will continue to have an important impact in Latin America.

What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment

What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment
Author: Professor Albena Yaneva
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2015-12-28
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1472452275

The scale of ecological crises made us realize that every kind of politics has always been cosmopolitics, politics of a cosmos. Cosmos embraces everything, including the multifarious natural and material entities that make humans act. The book examines cosmopolitics in its relation to design practice. Abandoning the modernist idea of nature as being external to the human experience - a nature that can be mastered by engineers and scientists from outside, the cosmpolitical thinking offers designers to embark in an active process of manipulating and reworking nature ‘from within.’ To engage in cosmopolitics, this book argues, means to redesign, create, instigate, and compose every single feature of our common experience. In the light of this new understanding of nature, we set the questions: What is the role of design if nature is no longer salient enough to provide a background for human activities? How can we foster designers’ own force and make present what causes designers to think, feel, and act? How do designers make explicit the connection of humans to a variety of entities with different ontology: rivers, species, particles, materials and forces? How do they redefine political order by bringing together stars, prions and people? In effect, how should we understand design practice in its relation to the material and the living world? In this volume, anthropologists, science studies scholars, political scientists and sociologists rethink together the meaning of cosmopolitics for design. At the same time designers, architects and artists engage with the cosmopolitical question in trying to imagine the future of architectural and urban design. The book contains original empirical chapters and a number of revealing interviews with artists and designers whose practices set examples of ‘cosmopolitically correct design’.