Human Security

In The Most Human Right, Eric Heinze explains why global human rights systems have failed. International organizations constantly report on how governments manage human goods, such as fair trials, humane conditions of detention, healthcare, or housing. But to appease autocratic regimes, experts have ignored the primacy of free speech. Heinze argues that goods become rights only when citizens can claim them publicly and fearlessly: free speech is the fundamental right, without which the very concept of a “right” makes no sense.

Asserting that you have the moral right to be in control of your life, Think Right or Wrong, Not Left or Right (2nd Expanded Edition advocates that neither today’s political left nor right have your best interests at hand. Their alluring promise of a cradle-to-grave safety net is deceptive, because in reality, it transfers control of your life from you to society, one government program, one tax, and one regulation at a time. The book shows why the traditional political left-to-right spectrum presents you with two false alternatives.

Pamela Olson, a small town girl from eastern Oklahoma, had what she always wanted: a physics degree from Stanford University. But instead of feeling excited for what came next, she felt consumed by dread and confusion. This irresistible memoir chronicles her journey from aimless ex-bartender to Ramallah-based journalist and foreign press coordinator for a Palestinian presidential candidate.

A number one New York Times best-selling author, Harvard Law School professor, and tireless defender of civil liberties unearths a little-known letter by his hero, Thomas Jefferson, and shares its secrets. The letter illuminates Jefferson’s views on freedom of speech in a way that has important implications for the country today, particularly in the struggle against terrorism. This book is about the remarkable letter Alan Dershowitz found, how he found it, and why it matters not only to him, but to us today.

More than five years in the making, Mark Gevisser’s The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers is a globetrotting exploration of how the human rights frontier around sexual orientation and gender identity has come to divide - and describe - the world in an entirely new way over the first two decades of the 21st century. No social movement has brought change so quickly and with such dramatically mixed results.

Saving Free Speech…from Itself sets the tone for the fractious discussion of how the First Amendment should be interpreted in today’s society and how the free speech aspect of it should not be weaponized by individuals and groups whose agenda includes causing harm to innocent people. In an era of political correctness, race-baiting, terrorist incitement, the "Danish" cartoons, the shouting down of speakers, and, of course, "fake news", liberals and conservatives are up in arms both about speech and its excesses, and what the First Amendment means. Speech has been weaponized.

Euphemistically labeled as the "Water Supply and Prophylaxis Administration" and "HippoEpizootic Administration" of the Imperial Japanese Army, Unit 731 and Unit 100, as well as their subsidiary branches, performed human experimentation on the innocents under the leadership of Dr. Ishii Shiro. Although the exact number of victims is unclear since the Japanese destroyed most of the evidence at the end of the war, but it ranged from 3,000-250,000 innocent men, women, and children.

The world is not as God intends it to be. God's heart is to make things right, and for the world to be just. But complex problems warrant more sustained attention than quick posts on social media. How can we actually make a difference? Activist Mae Elise Cannon takes us beyond the hashtags to serious engagement with real issues. God calls the church to respond substantively to the needs of the poor, the realities of racial inequity, and the mistreatment of women and the marginalized.

Reporter Sally Hayden was at home in London when she received a message on Facebook: “Hi sister Sally, we need your help.” The sender identified himself as an Eritrean refugee who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months, locked in one big hall with hundreds of others. From this single message begins a staggering account of the migrant crisis across North Africa. With unprecedented access, Hayden’s book is based on interviews with hundreds of refugees and migrants who tried to reach Europe and found themselves stuck in Libya.

Our modern conceptions of press and speech liberty, Dabhoiwala shows, were invented in Britain around 1700. The real history of freedom of expression is a story of countless fascinating men and women whose lives have shaped its principles and practices over the past 300 years – slaves and imperialists, poets and philosophers, plutocrats and revolutionaries. Ranging across Europe, North America and South Asia, and not neglecting other parts of the world, Dabhoiwala rejects celebratory platitudes about the past and present of free expression.

To understand the most contentious issues around religious liberty, this volume provides influential philosophical ideas from the US’ founding to the present day and key US Supreme Court judgements to ask how the two twin pillars of religious freedom - free exercise and the limit on religious establishment - unfold in daily life.

Imagine a war without battlefields. There are no uniforms. Civilians and combatants are indistinguishable. Homes, schools, hospitals, and religious buildings are used as command centers and for the warehousing of weapons. Apartment rooftops are launching pads; the civilians who live inside . . . human shields. There are over 300 miles of reinforced tunnels, all outfitted with weapons, communications, and surveillance equipment. Such passageways enable terrorists to travel freely.

Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom explores the reach, penetration, power, and impact of Big Digital or the mega-information managers, social media platforms, Artificial Intelligence developers, providers of other web applications and functionalities, and the architects and proponents of the promised Internet of Things.

The first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Shirin Ebadi has inspired millions around the globe through her work as a human rights lawyer defending women and children against a brutal regime in Iran. Now Ebadi tells her story of courage and defiance in the face of a government out to destroy her, her family, and her mission: to bring justice to the people and the country she loves.

Human Rights After Hitler reveals thousands of forgotten US and Allied war crimes prosecutions against Hitler and other Axis war criminals based on a popular movement for justice that stretched from Poland to the Pacific. These cases provide a great foundation for 21st-century human rights and accompany the achievements of the Nuremberg trials and postwar conventions.

The rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule are told with unique insight in this new history by Michael Sheridan, drawing on eyewitness reporting over three decades, interviews with key figures and documents from archives in China and the West. The story sweeps the listener from the earliest days of trade through the Opium Wars of the 19th century to the age of globalisation, the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, the battle for democracy on the city’s streets and the ultimate victory of the Chinese Communist Party.

The first definitive account of Boko Haram’s abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls, their years in captivity, and why this story still matters - by celebrated international journalist Isha Sesay.

The national security and civil liberties tensions of the World War II mass incarceration link 9/11 and the 2015 Paris-San Bernardino attacks to the Trump era in America - an era darkened by accelerating discrimination against and intimidation of those asserting rights of freedom of religion, association and speech, and an era marked by increasingly volatile protests. This book discusses the broad civil liberties challenges posed by these past-into-the-future linkages.

Few topics in human rights have inspired as much debate as the right to health. Proponents would enshrine it as a fundamental right on a par with freedom of speech and freedom from torture. Detractors suggest that the movement constitutes an impractical over-reach. Jonathan Wolff cuts through the ideological stalemate to explore both views. In an accessible, persuasive voice, he explores the philosophical underpinnings of the idea of a human right, assesses whether health meets those criteria, and identifies the political and cultural realities we face in attempts to improve the health of citizens in wildly different regions.

One of Argentina's 30,000 "disappeared", Alicia Partnoy was abducted from her home by secret police and taken to a concentration camp where she was tortured, and where most of the other prisoners were killed. Her writings were smuggled out of prison and published anonymously in human rights journals. The Little School is Alicia Partnoy's memoir of her disappearance and imprisonment in Argentina in the 1970s.