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Genocide And The Eroticization Of Death: Law, Violence, And Moral Purity, Tawia Baidoe Ansah
Genocide And The Eroticization Of Death: Law, Violence, And Moral Purity, Tawia Baidoe Ansah
Faculty Publications
In this article, I ask: What is the relationship between law and morality in response to mass violence and suffering abroad? How does law shape and determine our moral response to mass death and suffering? We repose in the law itself a desire to define the moral and the ethical parameters of legal-political action. Thus, when faced with mass violence and suffering abroad, law functions as a proxy for morality. The legal prohibition under the Genocide Convention defines morality, or cabins the variety of moral responses into a single and universally applicable ethical-legal norm of response to genocide. The moral …
Surprised By Sin: Human Rights And Universality, Tawia Baidoe Ansah
Surprised By Sin: Human Rights And Universality, Tawia Baidoe Ansah
Faculty Publications
International human rights law's claim to universality, at the level of normative formation, has been shaped by conceptions of the self over time. The metaphysical reconfigurations of the self, from the Enlightenment to the present, have marked the human rights narrative in particular ways. This essay will suggest that since World War II, a conception of the self within a narrative of rights has been replaced, or at least countermanded, by a conception of sacral evil, with profound implications for the normative claim to universality of the human rights discourse. The essay begins with a synoptic analysis of the rise …
War: Rhetoric And Norm-Creation In Response To Terror, Tawia Baidoe Ansah
War: Rhetoric And Norm-Creation In Response To Terror, Tawia Baidoe Ansah
Faculty Publications
Everything is very simple in war," said Carl von Clausewitz, "but the simplest thing is difficult." This essay will suggest that the resort to the language of war, as "natural" and "starkly simple" as it is, nevertheless has a profound impact on how the law's intervention is shaped, or how the laws governing the transnational use of force are interpreted to accommodate a "war" on terrorism. I argue that although "war" is absent from the principal international legal instruments by which states are guided (and obligated) in their relations with other states, the concepts suppressed by this elision have an …