Human Rights and Memory

Acknowledgments

aCknowledgments This book owes much to conversations with friends and colleagues. More than anything else it is the product of an ongoing exchange and research agenda that we started with Ulrich Beck in the late 1990s. Thus, the book is a constant intellectual engagement with his ideas and concepts. We have been drawing a great deal of inspiration from our conversations with him over the years. We thank Tom Cushman for initiating this project and for his enthusiastic and sustained support throughout, which did not diminish his critical and incisive comments. Thanks also to Sandy Thatcher and his staff at Penn State University Press. In addition, we thank Esther Singer for her editorial help. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewer for a close reading of an earlier draft and a very supportive endorsement. Last but not least, we would like to thank our respective academic institutions, Stony Brook University in New York and the Academic College of Tel Aviv–Yaffo in Israel for granting us research leaves. This book also presents results of our joint research project (funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). It is a continuation of our earlier work, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Temple University Press, 2005), in which we developed the concept of “cosmopolitan memory.” In the current book we expand upon a variety of themes x acknowledgments that address the historical, political, and cultural connections between memory and human rights. We advanced some aspects of this link in an article entitled “Sovereignty Transformed: A Sociology of Human Rights,” British Journal of Sociology 57, no. 4 (2006): 657–76. Our focus on Europe builds on our earlier essay “Memories of Europe: Cosmopolitanism and Its Others,” which appeared in Cosmopolitanism and Europe, ed. Chris Rumford (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007). The politics of forgiveness is an elaboration on ideas we first articulated in “Forgive and Not Forget: Reconciliation Between Forgiveness and Resentment,” in Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation, ed. Elazar Barkan and Alexander Karn (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). ...