Human Rights and Wrongs

“Human Rights and Wrongs is a magnificent book: lucid, insightful, nuanced, and encompassing. I know of no other work that deals with all of the major threats to human rights: slavery, terror, and genocide. Moreover, its discussion of the place of democracy in fostering and preserving human rights is original, chastening, yet encouraging. Fein’s book will be a classic in social science, standing in the company of Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy and Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work.”
—Roger W. Smith, College of William and Mary, and past president, International Association of Genocide scholars.

“Helen Fein has long been one of the world’s leading experts on genocide and state-sponsored massacres. In her superb new book she returns to that subject but also delves into other atrocities—terror, torture, and slavery—that have been perpetrated by states and by non-state actors alike. The subject is unremittingly grim, but her eloquent discussion and shrewd insights help readers to understand why these appalling forms of human cruelty have occurred so frequently and why bringing an end to them has been so difficult.”
—Mark Kramer, Director of Cold War Studies, Harvard University