After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights

(Columbia University Press) In this book, Meister confronts the problem of closure and the resolution of historical injustice. He criticizes the logic of “never again” or the reduction of evil to a cycle of violence and counterviolence, broken only once evil is remembered for what it was. He believes these methods defer justice and are susceptible to exploitation, examining the problem of this thinking in relation to Auschwitz and its evolution into the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect. Meister is a professor of social and political thought at the University of California, Santa Cruz.