Gender Violence

Sally Engle Merry is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Law and Society Program at New York University. Her recent books include Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (2006), and The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Local and the Global, (co-edited with Mark Goodale; 2007). She is past president of the Law and Society Association and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.

This acute analysis raises a troubling paradox: neither the growing awareness of gender violence, nor the activism directed toward it have lessened its incidence. If anything can make a difference, however, this book will.-Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago Gender Violence skillfully charts a tempered course through some of the most charged and globally relevant issues today. Sally Merry draws on her extensive and long-term research both to provide a primer for neophytes in how to think about gender violence and a sophisticated analysis of the structural conditions that unevenly distribute those subject to it. With critical care, she adheres to the complex and ambiguous social, personal, and political predicaments that foster its occlusion while addressing how activism has shaped the changing terms in which it is made visible, confronted, and understood.-Ann Laura Stoler, The New School

• Preface vi 1 Introduction 12 Gender Violence and Social Movements 253 Punishment, Safety, and Reform: Interventions in Domestic Violence 484 Gender Violence as a Human Rights Violation 775 Poverty, Racism, and Migration 1026 Violent "Cultural" Practices in the Family 1277 Women and Armed Confl ict 1568 Conclusions 179References 187Index 207