Richard Ashby Wilson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3616709 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Ashby Wilson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard Ashby |
| FAMILY NAME | Wilson |
| SIGNATURE | WILSON R A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Connecticut |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8724-6999 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 345 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Racial violence and historicity in the U.S. Criminal justice system
The (Non)Enforcement of Hate Crime Laws in the United States
In the years that followed the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the US federal government, cities, and states enacted sweeping reforms of the police and criminal justice system. To counter the narrative of racialized police violence and promote community policing, these included new hate crime statutes and dedicated bias-crime task forces. This article reviews the literature on the enforcement of hate crime, evaluates post-2020 antibias initiati…
Juries and Prosecutors in an Era of Mass Incarceration
Dangerous Speech: A Cross-Cultural Study of Dehumanization and Revenge
Dehumanization is routinely invoked in social science and law as the primary factor in explaining how propaganda encourages support for, or participation in, violence against targeted outgroups. Yet the primacy of dehumanization is increasingly challenged by the apparent influence of revenge on collective violence. This study examines critically how various propaganda influence audiences. Although previous research stresses the dangers of dehuman…
Accountability, affect, and the political unconscious: A dialogue
This dialogue between John Borneman and Richard Ashby Wilson examines several of the key questions for law and politics that have come to the fore since the end of the Cold War. Beginning with Borneman's contributions over the last three decades, in which he elaborates the concepts of accountability, care, and affect, both authors then engage with how these issues emerge in their own research in different locales. They argue for the global releva…
Irreconciliation, reciprocity, and social change (Afterword 1)
La storia nei tribunali internazionali sui crimini di guerra
Perché i tribunali penali internazionali scrivono storie delle origini e delle cause dei conflitti armati? Sulla base di ricerche empiriche originali e dello studio delle strategie perseguite da giudici, pubblici ministeri, avvocati della difesa e periti in tre tribunali penali internazionali, il saggio qui proposto si sofferma su come il diritto e la storia si combinino nelle aule di tribunale. La testimonianza storica è ora parte integrante dei…
Uma análise das histórias dos Tribunais de Crimes de Massa: Introdução a Writing History in International Criminal Trials
Por que os tribunais penais internacionais escrevem histórias sobre as origens e causas dos conflitos armados? Com base em pesquisa empírica original com juízes, promotores, advogados de defesa e testemunhas especializadas em três tribunais penais internacionais, Writing History in International Criminal Trials, livro introduzido no presente artigo, procura entender como o direito e a história são combinados no tribunal. O testemunho histórico ag…
How Propaganda Works: Nationalism, Revenge and Empathy in Serbia
What is the relationship between war propaganda and nationalism, and what are the effects of each on support for, or participation in, violent acts? This is an important question for international criminal law and ongoing speech crime trials, where prosecutors and judges continue to assert that there is a clear causal link between war propaganda, nationalism, and mass violence. Although most legal judgments hinge on the criminal intent of propaga…
The digital ethnography of law
The ethnography of social media is still a developing field, and the anthropology of online legal topics is even more incipient. This article charts a digital ethnography of the regulation of hate speech online by examining the infrastructure of social media platforms, the content of speech acts (including coded speech) and their offline effects. These three levels can be analysed using an adapted version of Erving Goffman’s heuristic model of ba…
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions
In periods of transition after political violence, a truth and reconciliation commission is one method for successor governments and international agencies to document past abuses of human rights. These temporary commissions investigate the covert activities of repressive regimes and rebel groups, document and publicize survivors' testimonies, and recommend institutional reforms and restitution for victims and their families. Most commissions pur…
Anthropological publics, public anthropology
Based on a transcript from the AAA 2016 roundtable on "anthropological publics, public anthropology," organized by Sindre Bangstad, held at the AAA Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 18, 2016, and edited, referenced, and footnoted by Sindre Bangstad, this forum explores prominent anthropologists' experiences of doing "public anthropology," asks what kind of structural impediments there are in our time to the engagement of wider…
Propaganda and History in International Criminal Trials
In the course of prosecuting crimes against humanity, international criminal tribunals from the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg to the International Criminal Court (ICC) have provided accounts of the origins and causes of mass atrocities. Their historical narratives exhibit a common feature that has not been remarked upon, and that is the central role they assign to political propaganda in explaining popular participation in ma…
How to accept German reparations
How to Accept German Reparations is a beautiful book about a traumatic subject; reparations for the unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust and colonialism. Few discussions of restitution, reparations
Expert evidence on trial: Social researchers in the international criminal courtroom
Social researchers often feature as expert witnesses in international criminal trials, and they can exert a strong influence on a court's understandings of mass atrocities. Analysis of over 400 expert appearances shows that, overall, international judges prefer experts who use scientific methods, but when social researchers are called, courts favor qualitative researchers over quantitative ones. In two international speech-crimes trials, a langua…
Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights
This remarkable book demonstrates through in-depth case studies from ten countries around the world how the forensic exhumation of mass graves is inextricably intertwined with grassroots initiatives, national political developments, international human rights advocacy, and transnational claims of transitional justice.
Combining Historical Research and Narrative Inquiry to Create Chronicles and Narratives
Stories about the Idaho State Library, chronicles and narratives, are reported in my doctoral dissertation (Wilson, 2005). The chronicles, reconstructed from documents and records, provided a presentation of the people, events, and activities to frame the stories. The narratives, excerpted from interviews, provided the rich description and unique perspectives of the two living State Librarians who directed the agency between 1962 and 2005. The fo…
Global Legal Pluralism: A Jurisprudence of Law Beyond Borders by Paul Schiff Berman
Introduction – Anthropology's Interdisciplinary Connections
The Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology
Writing History in International Criminal Trials
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 p…
Through the Lens of International Criminal Law: Comprehending the African Context of Crimes at the International Criminal Court
This article examines how the African context of alleged crimes is presented and evaluated in trials at the International Criminal Court (ICC). It does this by examining the evidence of two expert witnesses, one called by the prosecution and the other by the judges, who testified during the first trial at the ICC of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo regarding the context of crimes in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). What images …
Human Rights in the United States, or Are Americans Human
human rights forum, North America, AAA Committee for Human Rights]Gretchen E Schafft is contributing editor of "Human Rights Forum," the AAA Committee for Human Rights column in Anthropology News
In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care
Scientists, activists, state officials, NGOs, and others increasingly claim to speak and act on behalf of "humanity." The remarkable array of circumstances in which humanity is invoked testifies to the category's universal purchase. Yet what exactly does it mean to govern, fight, and care in the name of humanity? In this timely collection, leading anthropologists and cultural critics grapple with that question, examining configurations of humanit…
Trustworthiness: The Commentators
Mark Thompson deplores the decline in the public trust of government and of public service institutions such as the BBC. But there has also been a decline in another form of trust: government's trust in the ability of professionals such as doctors and teachers to deliver high quality public services. And, unlike Thompson's type of trust, this decline was inevitable, because it was based on untenable assumptions concerning professional motivation.…
Symbolic closure through memory,reparation and revenge in post-conflict societies
Countries going through democratic transition have to address how they will deal with the human rights crimes committed during the authoritarian era. In the context of amnesty for perpetrators, truth commissions have emerged as a standard institution to document the past. Increasingly,claims are made that truth commissions have beneficial psychological consequences, that is, that they facilitate 'catharsis', or 'heal the nation', or allow the nat…
"Afterword to "Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key: The Social Life of Human Rights
In this article, I argue for an ethnographic approach to human rights that recognizes the plural and fragmentary nature of the international rights regime and the ideological promiscuity of rights talk. Instead of determining in advance the social or political character of rights, anthropologists could profitably draw from the insights of early-20th-century "legal realists" and look closely at the underlying assumptions and hidden practices of po…
Anthropological Studies of National Reconciliation Processes
This article examines how social researchers have evaluated the rise of institutions to create `national reconciliation' in countries emerging from authoritarianism and state repression. Reconciliation has been counter-posed to retributive justice by new political and religious elites, who have instead sought to construct a new notion of the national self and psyche, and in so doing used organic models of state and society and metaphors of illnes…
Reconciliation and Revenge in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Rethinking Legal Pluralism and Human Rights
Human rights are a central element in the new governmental project in the new South Africa, and this article traces some of the specific forms of connection and disconnection between notions of justice found in townships of the Vaal and rights discourses as articulated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The introduction of human rights in post-apartheid South Africa has had varied social effects. Religious values and human rights discour…
The Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology
The trouble with truth: Anthropology's epistemological hypochondria
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the AAA meeting in November 2003, in a panel on 'Anthropological evidence and its uses', sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation. My thanks to Jane Cowan, Nigel Rapport and an anonymous reviewer for their comments
The Sizwe will not go away: The truth and reconciliation commission, human rights and nation-building in South Africa
This article evaluates constitutionalist claims that constructing a ‘state of right’ can displace nationalism and depoliticise ethnicity. Constitutionalism extracts law from its normative context, against which this paper asserts a view of law as an open ideological system which draws from surrounding discourses on power and identity. The paper examines the slippage between nationalist discourse and rights talk in two specific instances. In the C…
Expert evidence on trial: Social researchers in the international criminal courtroom
Social researchers often feature as expert witnesses in international criminal trials, and they can exert a strong influence on a court's understandings of mass atrocities. Analysis of over 400 expert appearances shows that, overall, international judges prefer experts who use scientific methods, but when social researchers are called, courts favor qualitative researchers over quantitative ones. In two international speech-crimes trials, a langua…
Propaganda and History in International Criminal Trials
In the course of prosecuting crimes against humanity, international criminal tribunals from the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg to the International Criminal Court (ICC) have provided accounts of the origins and causes of mass atrocities. Their historical narratives exhibit a common feature that has not been remarked upon, and that is the central role they assign to political propaganda in explaining popular participation in ma…
How Propaganda Works: Nationalism, Revenge and Empathy in Serbia
What is the relationship between war propaganda and nationalism, and what are the effects of each on support for, or participation in, violent acts? This is an important question for international criminal law and ongoing speech crime trials, where prosecutors and judges continue to assert that there is a clear causal link between war propaganda, nationalism, and mass violence. Although most legal judgments hinge on the criminal intent of propaga…
Justice and Retribution in Postconflict Settings
Research Article| January 01 2003 Justice and Retribution in Postconflict Settings Richard Ashby Wilson Richard Ashby Wilson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2003) 15 (1): 187–190. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-187 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cit…
Portrait of a Profession Revisited
Anthropological publics, public anthropology
Based on a transcript from the AAA 2016 roundtable on "anthropological publics, public anthropology," organized by Sindre Bangstad, held at the AAA Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 18, 2016, and edited, referenced, and footnoted by Sindre Bangstad, this forum explores prominent anthropologists' experiences of doing "public anthropology," asks what kind of structural impediments there are in our time to the engagement of wider…
Afterword to: Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key': The Social Life of Rights
Constitutional Change: A Note by the Bedside
The British constitution is undergoing major change although it tends to be carried out piecemeal and is often ignored. There are contradictory trends in what is happening. Some changes are deliberate major reforms which tend to disperse power and strengthen the rights of the individual against the State. Other changes are incidental by-products of other government policies, and tend in the other direction, towards the greater concentration of po…
Preface to Special Issue on Political Violence and Language
Combining Historical Research and Narrative Inquiry to Create Chronicles and Narratives
Stories about the Idaho State Library, chronicles and narratives, are reported in my doctoral dissertation (Wilson, 2005). The chronicles, reconstructed from documents and records, provided a presentation of the people, events, and activities to frame the stories. The narratives, excerpted from interviews, provided the rich description and unique perspectives of the two living State Librarians who directed the agency between 1962 and 2005. The fo…
Shifting Frontiers: Historical transformati ns of identities in Latin America
The Moral Imperialism Critique Is Not Valid
Words, Things and the Hippopotamus in the Room: A Response to Knut Myhre in This Issue
Dangerous Speech: A Cross-Cultural Study of Dehumanization and Revenge
Dehumanization is routinely invoked in social science and law as the primary factor in explaining how propaganda encourages support for, or participation in, violence against targeted outgroups. Yet the primacy of dehumanization is increasingly challenged by the apparent influence of revenge on collective violence. This study examines critically how various propaganda influence audiences. Although previous research stresses the dangers of dehuman…
The digital ethnography of law
The ethnography of social media is still a developing field, and the anthropology of online legal topics is even more incipient. This article charts a digital ethnography of the regulation of hate speech online by examining the infrastructure of social media platforms, the content of speech acts (including coded speech) and their offline effects. These three levels can be analysed using an adapted version of Erving Goffman’s heuristic model of ba…
Global Legal Pluralism: A Jurisprudence of Law Beyond Borders by Paul Schiff Berman
Through the Lens of International Criminal Law: Comprehending the African Context of Crimes at the International Criminal Court
This article examines how the African context of alleged crimes is presented and evaluated in trials at the International Criminal Court (ICC). It does this by examining the evidence of two expert witnesses, one called by the prosecution and the other by the judges, who testified during the first trial at the ICC of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo regarding the context of crimes in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). What images …
Trustworthiness: The Commentators
Mark Thompson deplores the decline in the public trust of government and of public service institutions such as the BBC. But there has also been a decline in another form of trust: government's trust in the ability of professionals such as doctors and teachers to deliver high quality public services. And, unlike Thompson's type of trust, this decline was inevitable, because it was based on untenable assumptions concerning professional motivation.…
Shifting Frontiers: Historical transformati ns of identities in Latin America
Shifting Frontiers: Historical Transformati6ns of Identities in Latin America
The Sizwe will not go away: The truth and reconciliation commission, human rights and nation-building in South Africa
This article evaluates constitutionalist claims that constructing a ‘state of right’ can displace nationalism and depoliticise ethnicity. Constitutionalism extracts law from its normative context, against which this paper asserts a view of law as an open ideological system which draws from surrounding discourses on power and identity. The paper examines the slippage between nationalist discourse and rights talk in two specific instances. In the C…
In: Elizabeth Jelin and Eric Hershberg, Editors, , Westview Press, Boulder and Oxford (1996), p. x 238
Visions and Voices
Reconciliation and Revenge in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Rethinking Legal Pluralism and Human Rights
Human rights are a central element in the new governmental project in the new South Africa, and this article traces some of the specific forms of connection and disconnection between notions of justice found in townships of the Vaal and rights discourses as articulated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The introduction of human rights in post-apartheid South Africa has had varied social effects. Religious values and human rights discour…
The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up to deal with the human rights violations of apartheid during the years 1960–1994. However, as Wilson shows, the TRC's restorative justice approach to healing the nation did not always serve the needs of communities at a local level. Based on extended anthropological fieldwork, this book illustrates the impact of the TRC in urban African communities in Johannesburg. While a rel…
Children and War in Sierra Leone: A West African Diary
In June 2001, Richard Wilson participated in a technical meeting on children's participation and protection in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone, organized by UNICEF and the Human Rights Forum of Sierra Leone. The Report 'Children and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone', will be delivered in late 2001 to the UN Security Council. This is his diary of the drafting process
Portrait of a Profession Revisited
Symbolic closure through memory,reparation and revenge in post-conflict societies
Countries going through democratic transition have to address how they will deal with the human rights crimes committed during the authoritarian era. In the context of amnesty for perpetrators, truth commissions have emerged as a standard institution to document the past. Increasingly,claims are made that truth commissions have beneficial psychological consequences, that is, that they facilitate 'catharsis', or 'heal the nation', or allow the nat…
Symbolic Closure through Memory, Reparation and Revenge in post-Conflict Societies
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 1 has become the paradigmatic international model of how to ‘work through’ a violent past and in so doing, to ‘heal the nation’. Increasingly it is being argued that countries, which have undergone large-scale conflict such as Bosnia, Rwanda and Northern Ireland, need to set up similar truth commissions. A countrywide process of revealing and confirming past wrongs is said to facilitate …
Preface to Special Issue on Political Violence and Language
Human Rights in Global Perspective: Anthropological Studies of Rights, Claims and Entitlements
Mitchell 1. Representing the Common Good: The Limits of Legal Language, Kirsten Hastrup 2. Two Approaches to Rights and Religion in Contemporary France, John Bowen 3. This Turbulent Priest: Contesting Religious Rights and the State in Tibetan Shugden Controversy, Martin Mills 4. Legal/Illegal Counterpoints: Subjecthood and Subjectivity in a Pirate State, Yael Navaro-Yashin 5. Anthropologists as Expert Witness: Political Asylum Cases Involving Sri…
Justice and Retribution in Postconflict Settings
Research Article| January 01 2003 Justice and Retribution in Postconflict Settings Richard Ashby Wilson Richard Ashby Wilson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2003) 15 (1): 187–190. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-187 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cit…
Anthropological Studies of National Reconciliation Processes
This article examines how social researchers have evaluated the rise of institutions to create `national reconciliation' in countries emerging from authoritarianism and state repression. Reconciliation has been counter-posed to retributive justice by new political and religious elites, who have instead sought to construct a new notion of the national self and psyche, and in so doing used organic models of state and society and metaphors of illnes…
The trouble with truth: Anthropology's epistemological hypochondria
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the AAA meeting in November 2003, in a panel on 'Anthropological evidence and its uses', sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation. My thanks to Jane Cowan, Nigel Rapport and an anonymous reviewer for their comments
Human Rights in the 'War on Terror'
This book asks whether human rights, since the 9/11 attacks and the 'war on terror,' are a luxury we can no longer afford, or rights that must always remain a fundamental part of democratic politics, in order to determine the boundary between individual freedom and government tyranny. This volume brings together leading international lawyers, policy-makers, scholars and activists in the field of human rights to evaluate the impact of the 'war on …
Constitutional Change: A Note by the Bedside
The British constitution is undergoing major change although it tends to be carried out piecemeal and is often ignored. There are contradictory trends in what is happening. Some changes are deliberate major reforms which tend to disperse power and strengthen the rights of the individual against the State. Other changes are incidental by-products of other government policies, and tend in the other direction, towards the greater concentration of po…
Towards an open debate on the anthropology of genocide
Afterword to: Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key': The Social Life of Rights
The Moral Imperialism Critique Is Not Valid
"Afterword to "Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key: The Social Life of Human Rights
In this article, I argue for an ethnographic approach to human rights that recognizes the plural and fragmentary nature of the international rights regime and the ideological promiscuity of rights talk. Instead of determining in advance the social or political character of rights, anthropologists could profitably draw from the insights of early-20th-century "legal realists" and look closely at the underlying assumptions and hidden practices of po…
Words, Things and the Hippopotamus in the Room: A Response to Knut Myhre in This Issue
The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local
Human rights are now the dominant approach to social justice globally. But how do human rights work? What do they do? Drawing on anthropological studies of human rights work from around the world, this book examines human rights in practice. It shows how groups and organizations mobilize human rights language in a variety of local settings, often differently from those imagined by human rights law itself. The case studies reveal the contradiction…
Humanity's Histories Evaluating the Historical Accounts of International Tribunals and Truth Commissions
Cet article se propose d'interroger l'idée répandue selon laquelle les tribunaux ordinaires se révèlent généralement incapables de produire des comptes-rendus historiques satisfaisants d'épisodes de violence politique, au motif soit que leurs méthodes et leurs objectifs propres sont par nature trop étroits, soit qu'ils se centrent prioritairement sur d'autres impératifs pratiques - en particulier la recherche de la culpabilité ou de l'innocence i…
Political science (37 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Law (32 works) · Law (22 works) · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Human rights (11 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · International Law and Human Rights (9 works)