How does the way we think and feel about the world around us affect the
existence and administration of the death penalty? What role does
capital punishment play in defining our political and cultural identity?
After centuries during which capital punishment was a normal and
self-evident part of criminal punishment, it has now taken on a life of
its own in various arenas far beyond the limits of the penal sphere. In
this volume, the authors argue that in order to understand the death
penalty, we need to know more about the "cultural lives"--past and
present--of the state's ultimate sanction.
They undertake this "cultural voyage" comparatively--examining the
dynamics of the death penalty in Mexico, the United States, Poland,
Kyrgyzstan, India, Israel, Palestine, Japan, China, Singapore, and South
Korea--arguing that we need to look beyond the United States to see how
capital punishment "lives" or "dies" in the rest of the world, how
images of state killing are produced and consumed elsewhere, and how
they are reflected, back and forth, in the emerging international
judicial and political discourse on the penalty of death and its
abolition.
Contributors:
Sangmin Bae
Christian Boulanger
Julia Eckert
Agata Fijalkowski
Evi Girling
Virgil K.Y. Ho
David T. Johnson
Botagoz Kassymbekova
Shai Lavi
Jürgen Martschukat
Alfred Oehlers
Judith Randle
Judith Mendelsohn Rood
Austin Sarat
Patrick Timmons
Nicole Tarulevicz
Louise Tyler
