Alternative Accountabilities in Global Politics: The Scars of Violence

In both the fields of political science and International Relations, and in related fields of public administration and international law, there is a rapidly growing interest in the topic of 'accountability'. In this innovative new work, Steele shows how we might recognize how an alternative form of accountability in global politics has been present for some time, and that, furthermore, this form's continued presence remains one of the most politically powerful, if not endurable, possibilities for resistance in the near future. Brent Steele seeks to argue that scars of violenceare their own form of accountability. After another destructive decade, where perpetrators of systemic violence have largely avoided responsibility and accountability, the physical and visually shocking outcomes of violence remain one of our most compelling forms of accountability. The book provides several methods for accessing, and then assessing, the disruptive and accountable possibilities created by violence-induced scars. Using a wide range of empirical illustrations ranging from the massacre in WWII, and then memorializing of, the Lidice children in the modern-day Czech Republic to the loss of the Twin Towers this book can be considered both a critique of formal accountability, and a proposal for reviewing the landscape of global political practices, to provoke scholars and practitioners to refocus, and even foreground, the effects brought about by the violent activities of modern, and post-modern, violence.