Bøker av Richard Ashby Wilson

This book provides law scholars and students with a critical review of international speech crimes and will also appeal to social scientists studying hate speech and incitement. The book integrates social science and legal perspectives, advocating a preventative approach and proposing a new risk assessment model for inciting speech acts.

The TRC was set up to deal with the human rights violations of apartheid. However, its restorative justice approach did not always serve the needs of communities at a local level. Based on detailed fieldwork, this book illustrates the impact of the TRC in urban African communities in Johannesburg.

Why do international criminal tribunals write histories of the origins and causes of armed conflicts? Richard Ashby Wilson conducted research with judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and expert witnesses in three international criminal tribunals to understand how law and history are combined in the courtroom. Historical testimony is now an integral part of international trials, with prosecutors and defense teams using background testimony to pursue decidedly legal objectives. In the Slobodan Milosevic trial, the prosecution sought to demonstrate special intent to commit genocide by reference to a long-standing animus, nurtured within a nationalist mindset. For their part, the defense called historical witnesses to undermine charges of superior responsibility, and to mitigate the sentence by representing crimes as reprisals. Although legal ways of knowing are distinct from those of history, the two are effectively combined in international trials in a way that challenges us to rethink the relationship between law and history.