In Search of A Better World

A Human Rights Odyssey

Payam Akhavan

• Editorial: House of Anansi Press
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781487002015
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Human Rights

A work of memoir, history, and a call to action, the CBC Massey Lectures by internationally renowned UN prosecutor and scholar Payam Akhavan is a powerful and essential work on the major human rights struggles of our times.

Renowned UN prosecutor and human rights scholar Payam Akhavan has encountered the grim realities of contemporary genocide throughout his life and career. He argues that deceptive utopias, political cynicism, and public apathy have given rise to major human rights abuses: from the religious persecution of Iranian Bahá'ís that shaped his personal life, to the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, the genocide in Rwanda, and the rise of contemporary phenomena such as the Islamic State. But he also reflects on the inspiring resilience of the human spirit and the reality of our inextricable interdependence to liberate us, whether from hateful ideologies that deny the humanity of others or an empty consumerist culture that worships greed and self-indulgence.

A timely, essential, and passionate work of memoir and history, In Search of a Better World is a tour de force by an internationally renowned human rights lawyer.

INDEX

PAGE NUMBERS REFER TO PRINT EDITION

Acholiland. See Uganda

Adelabad prison, Iran, 63–64

Afghanistan: extremism as reversible, 233–234; growth of jihadists, 220–224, 234; Soviet atrocities, 226–228; world’s abandonment of, 210–214, 217. See also Taliban

Afghanistan Human Rights Commission, 225, 229–231

African Holocaust, 301

Ahmići village, Bosnia, 107–110

Akhavan, Payam: Ahmići village, Bosnia, 107–110; Arctic trips, 324–325, 331, 334–335; birth of son, 268–269; British sexual abuse inquiry, 306–307; childhood in Tehran, 6–9, 28, 54; citizenship, 42, 52; corporate lawyer, 208–210; education, 65–67, 74, 218; experience of 9/11, 205–209, 214–215, 267–268; experience of exile, 64–65, 69–70, 126; experience of immigration, 1–3, 23–28, 40–42; experience of justice work, 126–127, 147–148; experience of siege of Sarajevo, 95–104, 106; Father of, 10, 15; grandmoth...