Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law

This chapter explains about human rights and international humanitarian law. International humanitarian law begins where the sovereign responsibilities of nation-states for the protection of human rights end. The chapter evaluates to bring the roles of human rights and international humanitarian law more clearly into a sociological analytic frame and to trace their implications in understanding current events linking the United States and Sudan. It argues that the processes and scales of social and legal exclusion in these countries clearly differ, their logics and consequences are related to systematic exclusion of a racial group. A key to understanding the consequences of collective punishment as a counterinsurgency strategy in Darfur involves seeing its impact beyond the killings and rapes on the surviving families. This collective punishment that is concentrated on innocent civilians is itself an obvious violation of international humanitarian law, but its larger significance includes the social, economic, and cultural costs in terms of human rights abuses of families more generally.