Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid

Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid
Jessica Alexander (Author)

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Human Rights

Jessica Alexander arrived in Rwanda in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide as an idealistic intern, eager to contribute to the work of the international humanitarian aid community. But the world that she encountered in the field was dramatically different than anything she could have imagined. It was messy, chaotic, and difficult—but she was hooked.
    In this honest and irreverent memoir, she introduces readers to the realities of life as an aid worker. We watch as she manages a 24,000-person camp in Darfur, collects evidence for the Charles Taylor trial in Sierra Leone, and contributes to the massive aid effort to clean up a shattered Haiti. But we also see the alcohol-fueled parties and fleeting romances, the burnouts and self-doubt, and the struggle to do good in places that have long endured suffering.
    Tracing her personal journey from wide-eyed and naïve newcomer to hardened cynic—and, ultimately, to hopeful but critical realist, Alexander transports readers to some of the most troubled locations around the world and shows us not only the seemingly impossible challenges, but also the moments of resilience and recovery.

• Rank: #220584 in Books
• Published on: 2013-10-15
• Released on: 2013-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l, .81 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History

The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
Samuel Moyn (Author)
(5)

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Human Rights

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future.

For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront.

It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

• Rank: #120452 in Books
• Published on: 2012-03-05
• Released on: 2012-02-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l, .88 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare

Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare
Philip Short (Author)
(4)

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Human Rights