“Defense and attack”

From attacks on oil infrastructures in postwar reconstruction Iraq to the laying of gas pipelines in the Amazon rain forest through indigenous community villages, infrastructure projects are sites of intense human rights struggles. Often these projects are privately carried out and involve a substantial foreign element; this only adds to their controversial character. Many state and nonstate actors have proposed legal solutions for handling human rights in the context of specific infrastructure projects. Solutions have been admired for being lofty in principle; however, more often than not they have been judged wanting in practice. This book analyzes how human rights are handled in varied contexts, focusing specifically on privatized infrastructure projects, and then assesses the feasibility and desirability of a common international institutional solution under the auspices of the United Nations to the alleged problem of the inability to translate human rights into practice.

It asks a number of questions, including: Why do groups target infrastructure projects to achieve social change through both violent and nonviolent means? Are certain strategies more successful than others? How do targeted parties respond to attacks and to social movements? What types of countermeasures do they adopt? How do measures and countermeasures interact with one another? And what does all of this mean for the realization of human rights?

In addition to the issues surrounding infrastructure projects in postwar reconstruction and within national development, it also examines such things as al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S. financial and transportation infrastructures and their impact on human rights, as well as the human rights issues arising from the spread of Western European infrastructures into the European Union's new member states in Central and Eastern Europe.