Middle East/North Africa

From the Publisher Modern human rights, born in the aftermath of the Second World War and crystallized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, reflect a broader, societal, approach to the complex problem of well-being. While health is mentioned only once in the document, human rights are about the societal preconditions for physical, mental and social well-being. Health care professionals are generally unaware of the key concepts, meaning and content of modern human rights.

In this article, we offer a critical examination of the tendency to segregate discussion of surgical alterations to the male and female genitals into separate compartments- the first known as circumcision, the second as genital mutilation. We argue that this fundamental problem of definition underlies the considerable controversy surrounding these procedures when carried out on minors, and that it hinders objective discussion of the alleged benefits, harms, and risks.

The international campaign to eliminate female genital cutting (FGC) has, since the early 1990s, actively attempted to divorce itself from a health framework, adopting instead a human rights framework to justify intervention. Several key questions emerge regarding the prominent placement of FGC in the international human rights movement: What are the ramifications of framing FGC as a human rights violation? What actions are mandated by a human rights approach? What perils and pitfalls potentially arise from the adoption of a rights-based framework, and how might they be avoided?

The mass graves from our long human history of genocide, massacres, and violent conflict form an underground map of atrocity that stretches across the planet's surface.

The growth of the human rights regime in the Palestinian occupied territories during the last two decades and the spread of visual media have had an extreme effect on the nature of Palestinian politics and society. They have transformed the way Palestinians represent themselves to each other and to the international community, whereby appeals to human rights help to constitute a human subject with certain kinds of rights that are seen to arise not from a political status but from the state of (human) nature.

In the torrent of reporting on human rights in recent years far more attention is given to human rights violations in the non-Western world than in Euro-America. How should we explain this imbalance? … [W]e should look at the variable functions of the nation state, the shifting structures of international power, and the moral languages in which injustice is identified and its elimination advocated.

Since independence in 1956, large numbers of Moroccans have been forcibly disappeared, tortured, and imprisoned. Morocco's uncovering and acknowledging of these past human rights abuses are complicated and revealing processes. A community of human rights activists, many of them survivors of human rights violations, are attempting to reconstruct the past and explain what truly happened.

An extraordinary work of both cinematic and political activism, 5 Broken Cameras is a deeply personal, first-hand account of non-violent resistance in Bil'in, a West Bank village threatened by encroaching Israeli settlements.

Shot almost entirely by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat, who bought his first camera in 2005 to record the birth of his youngest son, the footage was later turned into a galvanizing cinematic experience by co-directors Guy Davidi and Burnat.

Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women’s piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt’s political landscape. Saba Mahmood’s compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.

No contemporary figure is more demonized than the Islamist foreign fighter who wages jihad around the world. Spreading violence, disregarding national borders, and rejecting secular norms, so-called jihadists seem opposed to universalism itself. In a radical departure from conventional wisdom on the topic, The Universal Enemy argues that transnational jihadists are engaged in their own form of universalism: these fighters struggle to realize an Islamist vision directed at all of humanity, transcending racial and cultural difference.