Jens Meierhenrich

The Structure of Online Activism

Despite the tremendous amount of attention that has been paid to the internet as a tool for civic engagement, we still have little idea how “active” is the average online activist or how social networks matter in facilitating electronic protest. In this paper, we use complete records on the donation and recruitment activity of 1.2 million members of the Save Darfur “Cause” on Facebook to provide a detailed first look at a massive online social movement. While both donation and recruitment behavior are socially patterned, the vast majority of Cause members recruited no one else into the Cause and contributed no money to it-suggesting that in the case of the Save Darfur campaign, Facebook conjured an illusion of activism rather than facilitating the real thing.

The legacies of law: long-run consequences of legal development in South Africa, 1652-2000

Focusing on South Africa during the period 1650–2000, this book examines the role of law in making democracy work in changing societies. The Legacies of Law sheds light on the neglected relationship between path dependence and the law. Meierhenrich argues that legal norms and institutions, even illiberal ones, have an important - and hitherto undertheorized - structuring effect on democratic outcomes. Under certain conditions, law appears to reduce uncertainty in democratization by invoking common cultural backgrounds and experiences. In instances where interacting adversaries share qua law reasonably convergent mental models, transitions from authoritarian rule are shown to be less intractable. Meierhenrichs historical analysis of the evolution of law - and its effects - in South Africa during the period 1650–2000, compared with a short study of Chile from 1830–1990, shows how, and when, legal norms and institutions serve as historical causes to both liberal and illiberal rule.

The trauma of genocide

Ever since the British physician John Erichsen first identified symptoms of trauma in victims suffering from a fear of railway accidents in the 1860s, the concept of trauma has inspired research projects in the medical sciences and social sciences. Some 13,000 scholarly articles on the subject were published between 1987 and 2001. The concept of trauma has been used widely to make sense of the psychological consequences of disturbing phenomena ranging from natural phenomena (e.g. earthquakes, tornados, tsunamis) to human phenomena (e.g. rape, terrorism, war). In recent years, the trauma of genocide has received particular attention in the fields of psychopathology and psychotraumatology. In December 2004, while the first genocidal campaign of the twenty-first century was unfolding in Darfur, Sudan, the International Congress of Ministers of Health for Mental Health and Post-Conflict Recovery released its long-awaited “Mental Health Action Plan” in Rome, Italy. Dubbed “Project 1 Billion,” the historic initiative is the culmination of international cooperation to respond to the trauma of mass violence in the international system. International cooperation toward this objective began in earnest in September 2002, when the Ministers of Health from seven countries—Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Peru, Rwanda, and Uganda—met with the representatives of over 20 countries and leading United Nations (UN) agencies in Sarajevo. Cognizant of the fact that more than one billion persons in over 47 countries today are said to have been affected by genocide and mass violence, the Sarajevo meeting resolved to respond to the mental health consequences of human aggression, leading to the formulation of the “Mental Health Action Plan” during the 2004 Rome meeting. This article places the “Mental Health Action Plan” in theoretical and comparative perspective, and considers its implications for genocidal societies. The principal argument put forth is that we ought to revise the study of genocidal trauma. In pursuit of this argument, the article revisits the concept of trauma— one of the most frequently invoked notions in psychology—and reflects on the challenges facing the medical community and the international community in humanitarian crises, notably genocide. The analysis, which brings together findings from specialist studies, provides tentative conclusions concerning the trauma of genocide. More specifically, it relates the concept of the medical to the concept of the social in an attempt to advance the interdisciplinary study of genocide. Journal of Genocide Research (2007), 9(4), December, 549–573

Perpetual war: a pragmatic sketch

This article analyzes the promise—and limits—of pro-democratic intervention in international law. It revisits Immanuel Kants influential prescription for peace, developed in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795), which has served as the foundation for democratic peace theory. This article emphasizes the unintended consequences of pro-democratic intervention in the international system. It finds arguments for the promotion of democratic entitlements deserving, but evidence for the existence of a right to democratic governance in international law wanting. The analysis, which incorporates evidence from cases, and synthesizes insights from scholarship in international law and international relations, casts doubt on the morality of democracy in the pursuit of international peace and security. It demonstrates that international lawyers have insufficiently appreciated the fact that democracy, if not handled with care, can underwrite democratic war—rather than democratic peace. This article argues that if the international community, however defined, truly aspires to realize the Kantian imperative of perpetual peace, it must enshrine democratic rights in unfamiliar cultures with more circumspection. Otherwise democratic rights become democratic wrongs, and policies of perpetual peace become prescriptions for perpetual war.

Political trials in theory and history

From the trial of Socrates to the post-9/11 military commissions, trials have always been useful instruments of politics. Yet there is still much that we do not understand about them. Why do governments use trials to pursue political objectives, and when? What differentiates political trials from ordinary ones? Contrary to conventional wisdom, not all political trials are show trials or contrive to set up scapegoats. This volume offers a novel account of political trials that is empirically rigorous and theoretically sophisticated, linking state-of-the-art research on telling cases to a broad argument about political trials as a socio-legal phenomenon. All the contributors analyse the logic of the political in the courtroom. From archival research to participant observation, and from linguistic anthropology to game theory, the volume offers a genuinely interdisciplinary set of approaches that substantially advance existing knowledge about what political trials are, how they work, and why they matter.