The Ultra Cruel: Comparing Human Rights Violators

Abstract

Worst of the Worst: Dealing with Repressive and Rogue Nations. Edited by Robert I. Rotberg. Cambridge, MA: World Peace Foundation, and Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2007. 342 pp., $59.95 cloth (ISBN-13: 978-0-8157-7566-9). The Worst of the Worst: Dealing with Repressive and Rogue Nations , edited by Robert I. Rotberg, examines some of the worst human rights violating states in the early twenty-first century. The book combines two quantitative chapters with nine descriptive chapters focused on some of the worst offenders. The case studies represent nearly every world region. The volume includes states in Asia (North Korea and Burma), the former Soviet region (Belarus, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), Sub-Saharan Africa (Equatorial Guinea, Togo, and Zimbabwe), North Africa (Tunisia), and the Middle East (Syria). Latin America is notably absent, demonstrating how far that region has come in turning around its human rights record. There can be little doubt that these regimes are horrific. For example, in North Korea, “babies born in prison were killed at birth.” In the natural gas rich country of Turkmenistan, “most hospitals outside the capital had been shut down … condemning thousands to death from common, treatable illnesses such as tuberculosis” (p. 19). Each of the volume's case studies, all of them interesting and well written, assume little knowledge of the particular state and thus are most useful for scholars interested in comparing violators but whose knowledge is limited to one or a handful of states. The case studies are complimented by an introductory chapter on the question of quantifying rogue states’ misdeeds …