ROROTOKO is exclusive authors’ interviews on some of the most fascinating intellectual nonfiction being published. Summer 2010: New Monday features and archive highlights run on this cover page through the summer; Wednesday and Friday cover features will be back in the fall.
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Joseph Mehling
About what promotes international reconciliation
Jennifer Lind on her book Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics
How can countries reconcile after terrible wars? Sorry States examines the role of memory and atonement in international reconciliation. Although many analysts argue that reconciliation requires countries to apologize for past violence, I argue that national apologies and other gestures are more likely to aggravate, rather than soothe, relations between former adversaries. Such gestures trigger divisive domestic backlash that angers and alarms overseas victims. A better approach for countries wishing to reconcile is to construct a shared and non-accusatory narrative about the past. This approach has serious drawbacks: for example, if justice is the policy goal, it is the wrong strategy. But, as John Kenneth Galbraith famously commented, “Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
Recently featured
History holds the key to understanding why America is so homicidal
Randolph Roth on his book American Homicide
August 30, 2010
Life is too complex to depend solely on the people closest to us
Melinda Blau on her book Consequential Strangers: Turning Everyday Connections Into Life-Changing Moments (with Karen L. Fingerman, now in paperback)
August 23, 2010
Geopolitical space may survive in consciousness even after vanishing from the map
Larry Wolff on his book The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture
August 16, 2010
How and why legendary figures are needed to tell historical stories
Tony Whyton on his book Jazz Icons: Heroes, Myths and the Jazz Tradition
August 9, 2010
On destruction as a kind of architecture-in-reverse
Andrew Herscher on his book Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict
August 2, 2010
Universal human rights were an integral part of decolonization—not oppression
Roland Burke on his book Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights
July 26, 2010
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Civitas by Design
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Inventing the Israelite
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Animal Characters
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Supernormal Stimuli
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Evolution of International Human Rights
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Violence Taking Place
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The Idea of Galicia
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Jazz Icons
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Consequential Strangers
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American Homicide
Randolph Roth on
American Homicide
Melinda Blau on
Consequential Strangers
Larry Wolff on
The Idea of Galicia
Tony Whyton on
Jazz Icons
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Violence Taking Place
Roland Burke on
Evolution of International Human Rights
Deirdre Barrett on
Supernormal Stimuli
Howard Gillette, Jr. on
Civitas by Design
Maurice Samuels on
Inventing the Israelite
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Animal Characters
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Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives
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Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire
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The Urban Spectator
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Secular Devotion
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Ad Women
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Loneliness as a Way of Life
M. Gigi Durham on
The Lolita Effect
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The Lie Detectors
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The Merchant Houses of Mocha
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What is a Number?
