Lea David, "The Past Can't Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

New Books in Sociology · Oct 2, 2020 · 1h 7m

In The Past Can't Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights (Cambridge UP, 2020), Lea David critically investigates the relationship between human rights and memory, suggesting that, instead of understanding human rights in a normative fashion, human rights should be treated as an ideology. Conceptualizing human rights as an ideology gives us useful theoretical and methodological tools to recognize the real impact human rights has on the ground. David traces the rise of the global phenomenon that is the human rights memorialization agenda, termed 'Moral…