Volume 3 Number 1 March 2004

RHODA E. HOWARD-HASSMANN discusses the case of Bariya Magazu who, in early 2001 was flogged for having had sexual relations outside marriage. Bariya lived in the Nigerian state of Zamfara, which had just instituted Shari'a law. Her sentence drew the attention of many Canadians. Her essay investigates the various issues raised by this Canadian interest. These include the social meaning of punishment, the local understanding of adulthood, and reactions to Western sexual liberalism. Other ramifications of Bariya's sentence include the separation of federal and state powers in Nigeria, both Christian and Muslim proselytization in the North, and reactions to secular political thought. Finally, the paper discusses various actors who protested Bariya's sentence, including Nigerian feminists, the Canadian government, and international feminism.

JULIE MERTUS illustrates some of the ways in which civil society organizations can and do make substantial differences in shaping human rights discourse, in particular, by initiating and monitoring treaties and in working to raise the domestic human rights conscience. It provides a survey of general trends and presents six case studies of organizations that have made discernable impact on the application or formation of US foreign policy related to human rights. The essay breaks new ground in its selection of a broad and ideologically diverse group of non-governmental actors concerned with human rights.

SERENA PAREKH provides an in-depth examination of Hannah Arendt's treatment of human rights in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She begins by examining the pre-conditions of totalitarianism - the creation of stateless people and the tension between the nation-state and individual rights. She then explains Arendt's conception of human rights as 'the right to have rights'. In order to understand this, the concepts of speech, action and opinion are developed. How can Arendt's framework help us to increase the possibility of human rights? She argues that by 'taking the ground out from under human rights', as it were, Arendt is able to give us a more solid conception of them.

KEVIN BALES argues that most people, when they confront the shocking realities of modern slavery, seek to understand slavery by defining the actions of slaveholders as evil. In this article he explores ideas about evil and how they fit with our understanding of slavery. To do so, he traces the transformation of public perceptions of slavery as they moved from seeing it primarily as an economic issue, to seeing it as a moral issue. Once slavery was generally perceived as a violation of morality, pressure built for its abolition. The redefinition of slavery is shown to be a leading and defining moment in the development of human rights, with important implications for the extension and understanding of human rights today.

MARK LEVENE explores the question: how are we to understand state policy and action in an era of weapons of mass destruction? Where these are translated into the potentiality or actuality of state-organized mass murder are the driving forces rational and pragmatic consideration? Or are neurosis, anxiety and projection as much the critical factors in explaining the behavior of state elites in extremis? His article considers three great 20th century states, the United States, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, on the cusp of the nuclear age and offers an ambivalent verdict on the question asked.

RUSSELL FORD investigates ethical aspects of the practice of writing that make it a form of resistance to terror. The essay links the idea of terror to a philosophical conception of desire that finds its most explicit expression in Kojève's reading of Hegel's dialectic. Drawing primarily on the work of Camus and Deleuze, it argues that certain forms of writing resist this desire. It concludes by arguing that philosophy is challenged by terror to create through writing the forms of thought, the concepts, questions and problems that express new and emergent configurations of the world.

SEAN GURD examines the narrative underpinnings of terror. He argues that the experience of terror has less to do with the exercise of violence than with the implementation of a certain narrative structure which he refers to as the 'narrative of insecurity.' This narrative is traced in the work of Greek tragedy and the writing of Emma Goldman.

JULIJA SUKYS examines the writing of Assia Djebar, one of Algeria's most prolific writers, n the history of war and violence in Algeria, not only during the Algerian war, but in the recent civil war in that country. The violence of the 1990s was characterized by an all-out war by Islamist groups against Francophone intellectuals. The article explores Djebar's work as a complex fusion of literature, remembrance and mourning, and raises more general questions about the relationship between writing and atrocity, testimony and silence.