Hiding in Plain Sight
The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremberg to the War on Terror
By Eric Stover, Victor Peskin, and Alexa Koenig
University of California Press, 2016
Hiding in Plain Sight tells the story of the global effort to capture the world’s most wanted fugitives—mass murderers like Adolf Eichmann, Ratko Mladic, Osama bin Laden, and the elusive Joseph Kony. It is a tale of judicial obstruction, backroom deal making, daring escapades, and broken laws. Authors Eric Stover (HRC Faculty Director), Victor Peskin (HRC Research Fellow and Associate Professor at Arizona State University), and Alexa Koenig (HRC Executive Director) draw on years of research and hundreds of in-depth interviews with prosecutors, investigators, and diplomats to shed light on political and legal efforts to catch fugitives over seven decades.
The book opens with the flight of tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals after World War II. The action then shifts to the International Criminal Court and other modern-day tribunals and their pursuit of high-level suspects. The book closes by examining the post-9/11 landscape and the United States’ increasing reliance on military force to capture—or more often to simply kill—suspected terrorists, with little or no judicial scrutiny. Hiding in Plain Sight is a companion book to the public television documentary Dead Reckoning: Postwar Justice from World War II to the War on Terror.
Extreme Punishment
Comparative Studies in Detention, Incarceration and Solitary Confinement
Edited by Keramet Reiter and Alexa Koenig
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 (Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology)
Extreme Punishment—a new book from Palgrave edited by HRC Executive Director Alexa Koenig and UC Irvine Professor Keramet Reiter—investigates the physical architecture, legal administration, and the lived experience of 21st-century prisoners, including the mentally ill, non-citizen immigrants, and enemy combatants in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom. Contributors address the question: How do punishers exert power, and how do the punished experience that power?
“Groundbreaking in its research and documentation, this bracing collection forces us to think again–and in unexpected ways– about how law abets and sustains a global network of military, immigration, and penal polices, unprecedented in their severity and reach,” says Vanderbilt University Professor Colin Dayan about Extreme Punishment.
The Guantánamo Effect
Exposing the Consequences of U.S. Detention and Interrogation Practices
By Laurel E. Fletcher and Eric Stover
with Stephen Paul Smith, Alexa Koenig, Zulaikha Aziz, Alexis Kelly, Sarah Staveteig, and Nobuko Mizoguchi
University of California Press, 2009
This book, based on a two-year study of former prisoners of the U.S. government’s detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, reveals in graphic detail the cumulative effect of the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” Scrupulously researched and devoid of rhetoric, the book deepens the story of post-9/11 America and the nation’s descent into the netherworld of prisoner abuse. Researchers interviewed more than sixty former Guantánamo detainees in nine countries, as well as key government officials, military experts, former guards, interrogators, lawyers for detainees, and other camp personnel. We hear directly from former detainees as they describe the events surrounding their capture, their years of incarceration, and the myriad difficulties preventing many from resuming a normal life upon returning home.
The Witnesses
War Crimes and the Promise of Justice in The Hague
By Eric Stover
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005 (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights)
The Witnesses presents findings from the first study of victim-witnesses who have testified before an international war crimes tribunal. Witnesses who have appeared before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia describe their family tragedies, their moral duty to testify on behalf of the dead, their courtroom encounters with the accused, their aspirations for justice, and their disappointments.
My Neighbor, My Enemy
Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity
Edited by Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein
Cambridge University Press, 2004
My Neighbor, My Enemy tackles a crucial and highly topical issue – how do countries rebuild after ethnic cleansing and genocide? And what role do trials and tribunals play in social reconstruction and reconciliation? By talking with people in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and carrying out extensive surveys, the authors explore what people think about their past and the future. Their conclusions controversially suggest that international or local trials may have little relevance to reconciliation in post-war countries. Communities understand justice far more broadly than it is defined by the international community and the relationship of trauma to a desire for trials is not clear-cut. The authors offer an ecological model of social reconstruction and conclude that coordinated multi-systemic strategies must be implemented if social repair is to occur. Finally, the authors suggest that while trials are essential to combat impunity and punish the guilty, their strengths and limitations must be acknowledged.
A Village Destroyed, May 14, 1999
War Crimes in Kosovo
By Fred Abrahams, Gilles Peress, and Eric Stover
University of California Press, 2002 (with Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights Center)
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