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Seventy years have passed since the end of the Asia-Pacific War, yet Japan remains embroiled in controversy with its neighbors over the war’s commemoration. Among the many points of contention between Japan, China, and South Korea are interpretations of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, apologies and compensation for foreign victims of Japanese aggression, prime ministerial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, and the war’s portrayal in textbooks. Collectively, these controversies have come to be called...

Governments increasingly offer or demand apologies for past human rights abuses, and it is widely believed that such expressions of contrition are necessary to promote reconciliation between former adversaries. The post-World War II experiences of Japan and Germany suggest that international apologies have powerful healing effects when they are offered, and poisonous effects when withheld. West Germany made extensive efforts to atone for wartime crimes-formal apologies, monuments to victims...

The Rape of Nanjing was one of the worst atrocities committed during World War II. On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army captured the city of Nanjing, then the capital of wartime China. According to the International Military Tribunal, during the ensuing massacre 20,000 Chinese men of military age were killed and approximately 20,000 cases of rape occurred; in all, the total number of people killed in and around the city of Nanjing was about 200,000. This carefully researched, intelligent...

Contested Memories in Chinese and Japanese Foreign Policy explores the issue of memory and lack of reconciliation in East Asia. As main East Asian nations have never achieved a common memory of their pasts, in particular, the events of the Second World War and Sino-Japanese War, this book locates the issue of memory within International Relations theory, exploring the theoretical and practical link between the construction of a country’s identity and the formation and contestation of its...

What role does the political survival of prime ministers play in Japan’s relations with China over the Yasukuni issue? Three Japanese prime ministers, including Nakasone Yasuhiro, Hashimoto Ryutaro and Abe Shinzo, complied with China’s demands and stopped visiting the controversial Shrine in 1986, 1997 and 2007, respectively. By contrast, the Yasukuni controversy intensified between 2001 and 2006 when a popular Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro was determined to pay regular homage to the...

The rise of China presents a long-term challenge to the world not only economically, but politically and culturally. Callahan meets this challenge in China: The Pessoptimist Nation by using new Chinese sources and innovative analysis to see how Chinese people understand their new place in the world.To chart the trajectory of its rise, the book shifts from examining China's national interests to exploring its national aesthetic. Rather than answering the standard social science question "what...

This is a timely empirical study and review of the Gacaca Courts which were established in 2001 in Rwanda as an attempt to prosecute suspects involved in the 1994 genocide. Based on the author's original field work which began in 2003 in Rwanda and which has been updated to the end of 2009, it includes responses from within the Rwandan population. Dr. Clark argues that, despite widespread international scepticism, the Gacaca process has achieved remarkable results in terms of justice and...

The Rainbow People Of God traces South Africa's glorious victory over apartheid in the writings and speeches of one its central figures, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. From the graveside of Steven Biko to the triumphant inauguration of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa, Tutu's words and presence helped shape events and led South Africa toward justice and freedom. This astonishing tapestry of narrative is not only a valuable historical document of those significant events, but it also...

The international community can creatively and aggressively address deadly conflict through mediation, arbitration, and the development of international institutions to promote reconciliation. The editors of this book designed a systematic framework with which contributors compare third party intervention in twelve conflicts of the postDCold War period. They examine the role of international organizations_the United Nations, international development banks, and international law...

Includes over 100 laws, regulations and decrees, constitutional provisions, judicial decisions, reports of official, commissions of inquiry, and treaty excerpts from 28 countries and from international organizations.

Leading scholars, activists, and political leaders on being victim's of the world's worst atrocities"How much compensation ought to be paid to a woman who was raped 7,500 times? What would the members of the Commission want for their daughters if their daughters had been raped even once?"?Karen Parker, speaking before the U.N. Commission on Human RightsSeemingly every week, a new question arises relative to the current worldwide ferment over human injustices. Why does the U.S. offer $20,000...

From Polders to Postmodernism is a broad ranging history of the conception and development of the theories that have guided archivists in their work from the late 19th through the early 21st centuries. Narrated through the controversial thread of archival appraisal theory, the book examines how archivists have engaged with theory through the tension between keeping records that reflect objective history "as it happened" and subjective decision making in the archive. Through an interpretive...

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year“Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.” —The Wall Street Journal“Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history.” —The Boston GlobeAlmost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed...

Between 1974 and 1990 more than thirty countries in southern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe shifted from authoritarian to democratic systems of government. This global democratic revolution is probably the most important political trend in the late twentieth century. In The Third Wave, Samuel P. Huntington analyzes the causes and nature of these democratic transitions, evaluates the prospects for stability of the new democracies, and explores the possibility of more...

Dividing the century into the Age of Catastrophe, 1914–1950, the Golden Age, 1950–1973, and the Landslide, 1973–1991, Hobsbawm marshals a vast array of data into a volume of unparalleled inclusiveness, vibrancy, and insight, a work that ranks with his classics The Age of Empire and The Age of Revolution.    In the short century between 1914 and 1991, the world has been convulsed by two global wars that swept away millions of lives and entire systems of government. Communism became a...