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In Search of a Better World

A Human Rights Odyssey

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A work of memoir, history, and a call to action, the CBC Massey Lectures by internationally renowned UN prosecutor and scholar Payam Akhavan is a powerful and essential work on the major human rights struggles of our times.

Renowned UN prosecutor and human rights scholar Payam Akhavan has encountered the grim realities of contemporary genocide throughout his life and career. He argues that deceptive utopias, political cynicism, and public apathy have given rise to major human rights abuses: from the religious persecution of Iranian Bahá'ís that shaped his personal life, to the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, the genocide in Rwanda, and the rise of contemporary phenomena such as the Islamic State. But he also reflects on the inspiring resilience of the human spirit and the reality of our inextricable interdependence to liberate us, whether from hateful ideologies that deny the humanity of others or an empty consumerist culture that worships greed and self-indulgence.

A timely, essential, and passionate work of memoir and history, In Search of a Better World is a tour de force by an internationally renowned human rights lawyer.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from January 15, 2018
      This publication of the 2017 CBC Massey Lecture delivered by Akhavan (Reducing Genocide to Law), a former U.N. prosecutor at the Hague, is a call for action, a powerful examination of rampant trampling of human rights around the world, and a memoir of Akhavan’s journey from child refugee to international lawyer. One of Akhavan’s childhood friends, executed by Iranian revolutionaries because she spoke out against them in a high school essay, inspired his passion for human rights and freedom. It took him from Canada to Harvard Law School to the United Nations, where he was a prosecutor in trials of war criminals from the Yugoslav Wars and Rwandan genocide. His accounts of atrocities are horrifying, and he combines the history of the conflicts with intimate portraits of their impact along with sensitive, intelligent analyses of what went wrong and why. He also looks at humanitarian crises including the Holocaust, the use of child soldiers in Uganda, and the war in Syria. It’s ugly, but also an incredible story of shared humanity. Akhavan isn’t naive, but he sees a solution to all these crises in the belief that love, not bombs, will be the way to a better future. Readers will be both shattered and inspired.

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  • English

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