"Seldom does a book take readers so powerfully inside war crimes--both into the pain of the victims and, even more chilling, into the minds of the perpetrators. In a Washington so timid about supporting the international institutions designed to prevent such horrors, this book should be mandatory reading."--Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa "This searing documentary takes those large abstractions--ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity--and confronts us with the anguishing reality: the faces of the alleged killers and their victims, stories of shattered families, desolation of a ruined community. The book is also a stunning example of careful, determined pursuit of evidence by frontline human rights workers, our best hope for accountability and justice in the wake of systematic evil. This unparalleled account thus records the worst--and the best--of human capacities."--H. Jack Geiger, M.D., founding member and past president of Physicians for Human Rights "Marshalling precision in the face of obfuscation, clarity in the face of desolation, and lucidity in the face of oblivion, the authors and creators of A Village Destroyed have somehow managed to meld witness and majesty. Truth is beauty--sometimes the only solace left to us--and this is a harrowingly beautiful book."--Lawrence Weschler, author of A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers "Gilles Peress's photographs take us where we have never gone before: into the killing zones of Kosovo where ethnic Albanians were tortured, executed, robbed, and driven from the land. Here is an astounding record that will make it impossible for us to say that we never knew what happened in Kosovo or how."--Gloria Emerson, author of Gaza: A Year in the Intifada "A Village Destroyed is a very important book, offering a revealing examination of how contemporary human rights investigations and international efforts to do justice are transforming the context in which great crimes are committed."--Aryeh Neier, President of the Open Society Institute "By some of the best investigators and reporters in the human rights movement, A Village Destroyed helps comfort the afflicted by letting them speak in their own voices. Let us hope it also serves to afflict the comforted."--Juan E. Mendez, Vice-President, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights "This is a groundbreaking work. It is the anatomy of a crime: the destruction of a village. The photographs and witness accounts are of astounding power. The book is crucial for anyone who wants to know what happened in Kosovo."--Laura Silber, co-author of Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation

Liam Kennedy here takes as his focus the ways in which selected photographers have sought to frame the activities and effects of American foreign policy, often with a critical perspective, and how their work engages the dynamics of power and knowledge that attend the American worldview. What is at issue in this book is understanding relations between the geopolitical conditions of visuality and the particulars of the image. Conditions of visuality, for Kennedy, are the ideologies that determine certain ways of seeing, that support actions and representations which establish (in)visibilities and which police the relationship between seeing and believing the American worldview. The individual photographers whose work Kennedy so insightfully dissects are those who have pushed the boundaries of photographic practice and who reflect critically on the contexts and scenery of war: Larry Burrows and Philip Jones Griffiths in Vietnam, Gilles Peress covering the Iranian Revolution, Susan Meiselas in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Ron Haviv and Gary Knight in the Balkans, Ashley Gilbertson and Chris Hondros in Iraq, and Tim Hetherington and Lynsey Addario in Afghanistan. These individuals expanded the conception and technical repertoire of photojournalism, receiving critical acclaim, provoking public and professional controversy, and often incurring great personal cost to themselves. Afterimages presents us with a revisionary understanding of the art of conflict photography. The images are often searing they sometimes demonize and dehumanize the enemy, but also humanize friend or victim: a focus on the human roots the range of feeling in such imagery, from horror to pity."

While the construction of architecture has a place in architectural discourse, its destruction, generally seen as incompatible with the very idea of "culture," has been neglected in theoretical and historical discussion. Responding to this neglect, Herscher examines the case of the former Yugoslavia and in particular, Kosovo, where targeting architecture has been a prominent dimension of political violence. Rather than interpreting violence against architecture as a mere representation of "deeper" social, political, or ideological dynamics, Herscher reveals it to be a form of cultural production, irreducible to its contexts and formative of the identities and agencies that seemingly bear on it as causes. Focusing on the particular sites where violence is inflicted and where its subjects and objects are articulated, the book traces the intersection of violence and architecture from socialist modernization, through ethnic and nationalist conflict, to postwar reconstruction.

Papers from a workshop held May 9-10, 2002, sponsored by the Open Society New York and the Center for Policy Studies, Central European University.

The question of Kosovan sovereignty and independence has a history which stretches far back beyond the outbreak of war in 1998. This volume is a compilation of key documents on Kosovo from the first half of the twentieth century. These texts, including numerous diplomatic despatches from the British Foreign Office, deal initially with the Albanian uprising against Ottoman rule in the spring of 1912 and, in particular, with the period of the Serbian invasion of Kosovo in late 1912 and the repercussions of the conquest for the Albanian population. The documents from 1918 to the early 1920s focus mainly on endeavours by Albanian leaders, including those of the so-called Kosovo Committee in exile, to bring the plight of their people to the attention of the outside world - endeavours which largely failed. Further documents reflect the situation in Kosovo up to the outbreak of World War II. This collection provides new perspectives on the Kosovo question and includes many documents which have been largely unavailable up to now. It sheds new light on many of the major and minor episodes that channelled and determined subsequent events, including the Kosovo War of 1998-1999 and the declaration of independence in February 2008.

"Recent events in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, East Timor and Iraq have demonstrated with appalling clarity that the threat of genocide is still a major issue within world politics.