Librarians’ Note: This E-Library is maintained by the International Crimes Strategy Forum (ICSF), a strategic coalition of activists and organisations sharing the common goal of assisting the prosecution of war criminals of Bangladesh 1971. Only the members registered to E-Library site will enjoy FULL-TEXT download-access to the entries. It is advised that you open your free-account today by clicking the Registration link. To be able to download full-text of the items stored on this library, or to add new items, you will need additional user-rights which can be requested from the Library-Admin at the Feedback-Address. You are also welcome to suggest new records to the library database. We hope the resources made available on this site will facilitate serious research of high standard on issues relating to the Liberation War of Bangladesh and the prosecution of war criminals.

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Kushner, Barak. “Pawns of Empire: Postwar Taiwan, Japan and the Dilemma of War Crimes.” Japanese Studies. 30.1 (2010): 111-133.

Examining the plight of the Taiwanese, who were pawns in the larger conflict of World War Two, helps us to understand the complicated process of the breakdown of the Japanese empire. The postwar legal adjudication of BC class Japanese war crimes in East Asia is a key element in unwinding the historical complexity of postwar power shifts, the formation of a Taiwanese identity, and its connection to Japan’s postwar foreign relations goals. This paper considers three inter-related issues – analyzing how Japanese rule was restructured in the postwar former colonies, dissecting the prosecution of lower-level Japanese war crimes, and resolving the conundrum of collaboration within the former empire. These problems are tied intimately together due to the transformation of postwar identity and colonial politics.

Ackerly, Brooke A and D’Costa, Bina. Transnational Feminism: Political Strategies and Theoretical Resources. Department of International Relations RSPAS, 2005.

Despite sharing many successes at promoting international collaboration, enabling effective responses to politically powerful states, increasing awareness of formerly invisible violations of the human rights of women, and gaining ground in many countries and in international law, women’s human rights activists have many differences among them—in resources, location, issue-focus and strategies. It is appropriate to pay attention to these differences, particularly as they create challenges to the movement for women’s rights. However, we argue that the women’s human rights discourse—as developed and deployed by women’s human rights activists—can be a resource for addressing these challenges internal to the movement while facing current challenges from outside the movement. Attentive to the politics of defining a movement and its spokespeople, the article includes an extensive methodological discussion. We arrive at our conclusions after observing a broad range of women’s activism and interpreting the reflections of a wide range of activists. Taken together, they offer a view of human rights as indivisible and of the rights of all humans as interrelated. This view is useful for self-reflection within women’s movements and for the ability of participants of various women’s movements to use the women’s human rights framework for meeting contemporary challenges.

D’Costa, Bina. War Babies: The Question of National Honour.

Abstract: Historically rape is used in war as a genocide strategy aimed at destroying the racial distinctiveness of a community is located in many other regional examples, including the Bangladesh case. Women (and their bodies) had been occupied as the medium through which men concretised the pact of violence, but, because they were not simply the things to be looted and plundered, but also subjects, they retained the memory of this rape and depredation. That terrible stunning violence and then silencing curtain that plunged like a shroud around it have always just hovered at the edges of history; the story of 1971, while one of the attainment of independence, is also a gendered narrative of displacement and dispossession,
of large scale and widespread violence, and of the realignment of family and national identity as people were enforced to accommodate the radically altered reality that now prevailed.

Ackerly, Brooke A. Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference. Cambridge University Press, 2008. 10 Oct. 2010

From the diverse work and often competing insights of women’s human rights activists, Brooke Ackerly has written a feminist and a universal theory of human rights that bridges the relativists’ concerns about universalizing from particulars and the activists’ commitment to justice. Unlike universal theories that rely on shared commitments to divine authority or to an ‘enlightened’ way of reasoning, Ackerly’s theory relies on rigorous methodological attention to difference and disagreement. She sets out human rights as at once a research ethic, a tool for criticism of injustice and a call to recognize our obligations to promote justice through our actions. This book will be of great interest to political theorists, feminist and gender studies scholars and researchers of social movements.

D’Costa, Bina and Hossain, Sara. “Redress for Sexual Violence Before the International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh: Lessons from History, and Hopes for the Future.” Criminal Law Forum. 21.2 (2010): 331-359.

The authors argue that in developing its approach and priorities for addressing sexual violence, the Tribunal could draw upon three earlier national experiences, set two decades apart, of addressing gendered violence during the war, by the Bangladesh State and sections of civil society respectively. The first two, in the immediate aftermath of the war, in 1972, involved a scheme undertaken for rehabilitation of ‘Birangonas’ or the ‘war heroines’ (rape survivors)and another to enable adoption of ‘war babies’. The third experience,in 1992, involved women rape survivors living testimony at an informal public hearing convened by the ‘Peoples’ Tribunal for Elimination for War Criminals and Collaborators’. The Tribunal could examine these experiences, not only to identify the nature of cases which it may choose to investigate, but also to analyse some of the challenges which would face a criminal justice process in addressing the sexual violence that took place in 1971.