Kathryn Sikkink’s The Justice Cascade Named 2011 WOLA-Duke Book Award Winner

In just three decades, state leaders in Latin America, Europe, and Africa have lost their immunity for their human rights violations, becoming the subjects of highly publicized trials resulting in severe consequences. Drawing on extensive research and illuminating personal experience, Kathryn Sikkink’s The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics reveals how this stunning emergence of human rights prosecutions has come about. A must-read for anyone interested in the future of world politics and human rights, The Justice Cascade also addresses what effects human rights prosecutions have had on democracy, conflict, and repression; and what these prosecutions mean for leaders and citizens everywhere.

Established in 2008, the WOLA/Duke Book Prize honors the best current, non-fiction book published in English on human rights, democracy and social justice in contemporary Latin America. Past recipients include Victoria Bruce, Karin Hayes and Jorge Enrique’s Hostage Nation (2010, Knopf); Ambassador Heraldo Muñoz’s The Dictator’s Shadow (2009, Basic Books); and Francisco Goldman’s The Art of Political Murder (2008, Grove).

Sikkink, who has a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, is Regents Professor and the McKnight Presidential Chair in Political Science at the University of Minnesota.  Past publications include Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America,  Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (co-authored with Margaret Keck and awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order, and the ISA Chadwick Alger Award for Best Book in the area of International Organizations); and The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (co-edited with Thomas Risse and Stephen Ropp). Her work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Chinese, and Arabic. Sikkink has been a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina and a Guggenheim fellow.

A talk and reception was held Wednesday, November 2, from 5:00-7:00 pm in the Rare Book Room, Perkins Library, Duke University (map).