Books

[Mark A. Drumbl is Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University. Barbora Holá is Professor in Empirical Legal Studies of International Criminal Justice at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.] Even the journey can be the destination…Mňága a Žďorp, Czech rock band Writing this book, as we note in its opening pages, lifted us to many places and spaces, physically...

[Dr. Mia Swart is Visiting Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand Law School] Informers Up Close focuses almost exclusively on informers in the context of Communist Czechoslovakia. Drumbl and Holá state explicitly that, but for a sideways glance here and there, the book is not comparative in nature. It zooms in on individuals that informed to the secret police or...

[Nesam McMillan is an Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and author of Imagining the International: Crime, Justice and the Promise of Community (2020)] In their new book, Drumbl and Holá offer a meditative scholarly inquiry into the practice, motivations and social significance of informing. They invite the reader to better appreciate the everydayness of informing (p....

[Saira Mohamed is Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley] Mark Drumbl and Barbora Holá’s fascinating Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague offers a rigorous and engrossing account of the lives of informers in Czechoslovakia and the reckoning that comes for them after the fall of Communism. The book gives the reader so much to grapple with and...

[Sergey Vasiliev is Professor of International Law at the Open University in the Netherlands] Why bring a new book about the secret police (StB) collaborators in Communist Czechoslovakia, of all topics, into the burning, drowning, and splintered world of 2024? Can it serve purposes other than indulging one’s historical curiosity or wanderlust – an unaffordable distraction? I certainly thought so, if...

[Chief Charles A. Taku is great grandson of Asunganyi, King of the Bangwa, Counsel before International Courts and Tribunals, and Former President of the International Criminal Court Bar Association]  ‘To validate one’s heritage, to explore one’s culture, to examine thoroughly those institutions which have persisted through centuries, is perhaps the first step in a peoples’ search for independence and in their...

[Sasha Merigot is a Master's Student in Political Science at Sciences Po Paris and a graduate from Leiden University College The Hague, winning the Thesis of Merit award with the thesis on Reproducing and Re-Constructing National Identity at the Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac] A key theme of Confronting Colonial Objects is the complicity of collectors, museums and racial science...

[Dr Emery Patrick Effiboley is Museologist and Art Historian, and Head of the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Abomey-Calavi (Republic of Benin). He was Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for the Creative Arts of Africa at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.] Confronting Colonial Objects argues that ‘distancing, discursive silencing and erasure are common...

[Raghavi Viswanath and Jessica Wiseman are PhD candidates at the European University Institute (EUI)] In the opening chapter of his book ‘Confronting Colonial Objects: Histories, Legalities, and Access to Culture’, Carsten Stahn promises to “present both the different facets of colonial violence and their enduring effects, and possible avenues to renew relations” (page 8). In the first six chapters of his...

[João Figueiredo is a research associate at the Käte Hamburger kolleg “Legal Unity and Pluralism” of the University of Münster, Germany. He researches Portuguese colonialism in Angola, using historical anthropology and legal history to shed new light on aspects of the history of the slave trade, abolitionism, and the origins of systemic racism.] Individual examples prove nothing. Still, a single case...

[Gracia Lwanzo Kasongo is a PhD researcher at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium and a member of the Institute of Political Science Louvain-Europe (ISPOLE). She is a legal scholar and political scientist and former fellow of the American Bar Association (ABA)] 1. Introduction  In the colonialist moves to collect human remains, and the desire to demonstrate grandeur and strength,...