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Antony Beevor's Berlin: The Downfall 1945 has been an international best-selling history of the fall of Berlin to Soviet troops in 1945. Now published in paperback, Beevor's magisterial narrative of Berlin's downfall has become a leading work of contemporary popular history. The public discussion of this book has been dominated by two themes: first, the 'normalization' of the suffering of German civilians and, second, the 'disclosure' of mass rapes by the liberating Soviet army in Germany: This review traces how key debates concerning the remembrance of the Second World War form these dominant readings of Berlin. In particular, it examines the formation of the re-remembering of the wartime rapes of Berlin women, and considers the implications of Beevor's account of the downfall of Berlin for how we understand sexual violence in armed conflict. Keywords: Beevor; Berlin; Soviet Army; rape in armed conflict; history; memory.

The testimonies of witnesses who testify before criminal courts provide crucial insights into the situated experience of conflict-related sexual violence. Witness testimonies highlight the complex realities and everyday lives of individuals caught up in situations of armed conflict. The evidence presented by witnesses can provide vital insights into lived experiences of wartime violence, and reveal the seemingly mundane strategies and tactics adopted by victims to cope with, survive and resist the violent and coercive circumstances of war. This article foregrounds conflict-related sexual violence witness testimonies as highly significant sources of knowledge of everyday experiences of conflict. It sets out a bottom-up, mixed-method approach for identifying and analysing the experiential accounts of those who lived through conflict-related sexual violence, while engaging with the opportunities and challenges of using witness testimony. Our approach unsettles existing notions of 'the everyday' in Peace & Conflict Studies as a synonym for narratives and practices of violence, justice and peacebuilding that are private, informal and largely hidden from view. Understanding witness testimonies requires conceptualising the everyday as an amalgam of formal and informal practices, as accessible through both elite and lay knowledges and as documented in both public and private (e.g. redacted) sources. It requires challenging taken-for-granted dichotomies that are frequently invoked to understand conflict and peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflict-related sexual violence is now a conspicuous concern of academics, activists, and practitioners. However, a number of central and persistent conceptual and political problems are becoming increasingly evident in this burgeoning research field. This paper analyzes these key problems of knowledge production in the field, which concern the object and subject of research, models of knowing, and values in research. This paper then outlines the Gender Justice Methodology, which offers a new approach to studies of conflict-related sexual violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Play of Reason: From the Modern to the Postmodern Linda Nicholson, Open University Press, 1999, 14.99 £, xii+179pp. Linda Nicholson is perhaps best known for her influential work in [...]

The jurisdiction of the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples' Rights (ACJHPR) will include international crimes of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). This article explores the challenges the Court is likely to face in building regional and national accountability for CRSV, by considering the lessons that might be learnt from the experiences of the former Yugoslavia in prosecuting these crimes. The article focuses on the two key challenges of developing 'best practice' within regional and national courts, and of linking these prosecutions to peace processes and post-conflict reconstruction. To address these challenges, the article argues for a 'gender justice framework' of guiding principles to ensure effective and equitable CRSV prosecutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do witnesses testify to the traumas of war before the law? What narrative forms do these testimonies to trauma take in the legal field? This paper explores three different forms of testifying to the crimes of war, focusing on conflict-related sexual violence. The first two testimonial forms appear in international criminal law. These are victim-witnessing and collective witnessing, which the paper traces through two cases before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The third form of testimony appears in alternative legal forums. This is transformative witnessing. The paper traces through the new models of testimonial practice currently developing in the Women's Court for the former Yugoslavia, showing how might they shift our understanding of the truth of testimonial evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the most recent shift in ongoing debates concerning the relationship between international criminal law and transitional justice, using the examples of international criminal prosecutions before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and transitional justice mechanisms in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It reframes the problematic relationship between the two fields by revisiting the important but underexplored concept of ‘the social’ that underpins these two very different models of international justice. The article draws on the work of Bruno Latour, who argues that we should study law by analysing how its practices construct ‘the social.’ Building on this approach, the article shows how international criminal law and transitional justice offer different ways of reassembling social relationships after conflict. While transitional justice seeks to reassemble a society in conflict through ‘justice’ processes, international criminal law seeks to make social ties through ‘law.’ The current shift in justice discourses reveals that what is ultimately at stake in these debates is the fundamental question of how international justice can reassemble ‘the social’ in more just forms after conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has generated huge archival holdings. With the ICTY’s impending closure, the archive has become part of broader debates regarding its legacy for the former Yugoslavia. In particular, the memorial function of this archive has now become highly contentious. Ultimately, these concern the relationship between law and collective memory. This article uses the example of the ICTY archive to explore the relationship between law and memory in post-conflict transition. It argues that this ‘legal archive’ functions as a mnemonic system that produces ‘legal memory’ through its juridical, international, and transitional structure. It then considers the competing discourses of how the legal archive remembers or forgets the justice of law and the injustice of war. Ultimately, these discourses figure the archive as a ‘legal memorial’ that fails to produce collective memory. For this reason, I develop an alternative concept of ‘memorial law’ in order to suggest other memorial practices that can sustain legal memory as a living memory, rather than as a dead archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is now a well-established ‘spatial turn in law’. However, it remains oriented towards notions of space rather than law. How, then, to capture both the spatiality of law and the legality of space? This article draws on Bruno Latour's concept of the legal construction of the ‘social’ to explore the assemblage of the city of law. It shows how law functions as a particular form of association in urban life by tracing two key forms of urban legal association in London, the city of law. The first form is ‘legal ordering’. This seeks to order urban life through domination, and includes citadel law, police law and laws of exception. The second is ‘legal consociations’, which build new forms of urban life, such as urban rights, the rights of the city and the right to the city. Finally, the article explores the creation of a spatial justice that can build more just legal associations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Protecting victims and punishing perpetrators are now seen as integral elements of the implementation and enforcement of humanitarian norms. However, how international law constructs the victims and perpetrators of international crimes as entities with rights and duties remains insufficiently examined. This paper explores the different models of victims and perpetrators as legal persons in international criminal law. It argues that the legal person takes two forms: the victim of human rights and the perpetrator of criminal responsibility. While the legal regime presents these as autonomous and singular individuals, it also constitutes them as members of groups that criminal norms seek to protect or punish. Contemporary international criminal law resolves this tension between individual and collective rights and responsibilities by reconstituting legal subjectivity through an intersubjective conception of the universal community of humans. Ultimately, this 'legal person' relies on the idea of 'humanity', the collectivity of all humans, to hide this problematic conceptual basis of the rights and duties of victims and perpetrators in ICL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context Recent case reports detail the successful use of temozolomide in the management of aggressive pituitary tumours. O6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase (MGMT) is a DNA repair protein that counteracts the effect of temozolomide. Objective To study MGMT expression in pituitary tumours and consider whether MGMT expression is associated with response to temozolomide therapy in aggressive pituitary tumours. Patients We report two patients with aggressive pituitary tumours treated with temozolomide, one who responded to temozolomide and the other who did not. MGMT expression was assessed in a further 88 archived pituitary tumour samples. Design MGMT expression was assessed by immunohistochemistry. MGMT promoter methylation was studied by methylation-specific polymerase chain reaction (MSP), sequencing of MGMT was performed and loss of heterozygosity (LOH) analysis undertaken. Results Low MGMT expression and MGMT promoter methylation were found in the pituitary tumour of the patient who responded to temozolomide. Conversely, high MGMT expression was seen in the patient demonstrating a poor response to temozolomide. Eleven out of 88 archived tumour samples (13%) had low MGMT expression. Prolactinomas were more likely to have low MGMT expression compared with other pituitary tumour subtypes ( P < 0·001). There was no significant difference in MGMT expression between invasive and noninvasive tumours, or between recurrent and nonrecurrent tumours. A significant inverse correlation was found between MGMT expression and promoter methylation ( P = 0·012). Conclusion MGMT expression as assessed by immunohistochemistry may predict response to temozolomide therapy in patients with aggressive pituitary tumours. MGMT promoter methylation is likely to explain low MGMT expression in some, but not all, pituitary tumours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Rosi Braidotti on a radical positive project against a narrative of failure and another by Jeremy Gilbert on the notion of 1968 as signalling the defeat of the left.

Recent efforts to develop and implement progressive models of transitional justice have been significantly influenced by major developments in the law concerning sexual violence in armed conflict. In particular, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has pioneered accountability for sexual violence against women in armed conflict. This article takes the ICTY as a case study of how gender can structure the accountability mechanisms of transitional justice. The article analyses how legal norms and practices instantiate and reiterate, rather than transform, existing hierarchical gender relations. It considers the existing models of sexual violence as a criminal harm under international law, and then examines gendered patterns of legal practice in ICTY prosecutions. To address this engendering of transitional justice, the article produces a new model of the harm of sexual violence in conflict, suggests the development of a new international offence of sexual violence and generates different strategies for international prosecutions of sexual violence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Introduces articles on the transitional justice plan for Iraq, published in the September 2004 issue of "Social & Legal Studies."

Explores the notion of the international humanitarian law in the course of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Benefit of the establishment of the international tribunal; Means of restoring and maintaining peace; Description of the conviction of rape as a crime against humanity.

Judith Butler's Antigone's Claim explores our most intimate ties to others — the ties of kinship. Antigone's Claim explores the politics of kinship through a reading of the figure of Antigone. For Butler, Antigone represents a crisis of the Oedipal order of kinship, revealing the possibility of new forms of kinship itself. Butler presents a persuasive and moving argument for the necessity of changes in our conception and practice of kinship. However, her account of new kinship forms is less persuasive, failing to engage adequately with the sociality of kinship or to provide a radical model of its new forms. Butler argues that Antigone does not represent a feminist politics. However, Antigone's Claim suggests that, if we are to re-conceive the politics of kinship, then it is necessary to reread Antigone as a political figure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines philosopher Jacques Lacan's notion of glissement or the shift in meaning. Important questions for reading and producing theory involved in the study of glissement; Arguments supporting Lacan's claim that psychoanalysis puts people in a strange position.

A response by Kristen A. Campbell and colleagues to a letter to the editor regarding their article "The Half-Lives of Plasma Free Metanephrines" in the 2011 issue is presented.