Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture
![handle is hein.journals/hurq39 and id is 786 raw text is:
HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
cultural backgrounds underscores the
short-sightedness of an essentialized
use of woman, and claims to a shared
sisterhood. DEMUS came to understand
how much culture mattered only when
the team members began to reflect on
their own individual backgrounds as well
as their institutional culture. In short, one
cannot add culture and stir without
first examining the cultural assumptions
of the methods, instruments, and ques-
tions one uses.
It is fitting the book concludes with
some suggestions for changing these
dynamics. As the author argues, gender
analysis must begin at the conception of
the transitional justice process, with gen-
der shaping the assumptions, methods,
questions, and instruments to be used.
Similarly, transitional justice practitioners
would do well to realize that it is not only
the designated Other who is culturally
placed! Liberal legalism and transitional
justice are permeated with a particular
rationality and epistemology, and sim-
ply adding brown faces to brochures or
translating questionnaires from Spanish
to Quechua does not allow one to first
ask if the materials themselves render
other's worlds and ways of knowing
inconceivable. These efforts might lead
to challenging the monopoly of liberal
legalism and its conceits, which in turn
could take up this book's challenge
to trace the ragged edge where good
intentions collapse under the weight of
historical exclusionary practices.'
Kimberly Theidon*
Henry J. Leir Professor of International
Humanitarian Studies
Fletcher School, Tufts University
* Kimberly Theidon is a medical anthro-
pologist focusing on Latin America. Her
research interests include political violence,
transitional justice, reconciliation, and the
politics of post-war reparations. She is the
author of many articles, and Entre Pr6jimos:
El conflicto armado interno y la politica de la
reconciliaci6n en el Per (Instituto de Estudios
Peruanos, 1st edition 2004; 2nd edition 2009)
and Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconcili-
ation in Peru (University of Pennsylvania Press,
2012). Intimate Enemies was awarded the
2013 Honorable Mention from the Washington
Office on Latin America-Duke University Li-
braries Book Award for Human Rights in Latin
America, and the 2013 Honorable Mention for
the Eileen Basker Prize from the Society for
Medical Anthropology for research on gender
and health. She is the Henry]. Leir Professor
of International Humanitarian Studies at the
Fletcher School, Tufts University.
Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Vul-
nerability and Security in Human
Rights Literature and Visual Culture
(New York: Routledge, 2016), ISBN:
9781138860278, 262 pages.
Because an investment in human rights
always returns us to lived experience,
it invariably raises questions of how
to document actual events. Out of this
foundational gesture of documentation
comes the intense focus in human rights
scholarship on methods of narration and
representation. The law, human rights
reports, witness of humanitarian workers,
government and corporate reporting, and
work of journalists all exhibit some de-
gree of their own narrative unconscious:
ways in which they presume to capture
truth (if not the real), glossing over the
mediations which render convincing
representation. Much of the interven-
3. Id. at 164.
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Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture
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