Looking without seeing, listening without hearing: Cohen, denial and human rights

I was hugely fortunate to have had the opportunity to teach with, and learn from, Stan Cohen during our shared years at the LSE. It was a chance meeting with him that led me to apply for a job in the Sociology Department/Human Rights Centre at the LSE where I have worked since 2004. Stan became a mentor, friend and inspiration to me from the outset. Stan was a vital figure in the emergence, life and direction of the Human Rights Centre where I taught with (and learned from) him during the years we spent teaching successive cohorts of students on the Human Rights MSc. This was a huge pleasure for me, and I will never forget how enjoyable, and sometimes hilarious, those shared teaching sessions were, and how much he inspired the students he taught. He was the only person I knew who could shoehorn the odd genocide joke into a lecture, a controversial privilege he could, rightly, claim. I feel that I will continue to learn from him through his always insightful, elegant and deeply morally engaged writings and will definitely remember some of the very many, and very funny, jokes he told (even if it is not my privilege to repeat them). In particular, his work on torture and his position on the question of Palestine/Israel was, to me and to many others, unflinching, invaluable and brave. More parochially, Stan was always hilariously caustic about the rise of the new academic manageriat, inventing new acronyms to replace those that symbolized new forms of bureaucracy and surveillance in academic life. It is entirely axiomatic, now, to note how hugely important and influential Stan’s work was, and will continue to be, first in the field of criminology and later in human rights. In this tribute, I want to concentrate on his characteristically shrewd and entirely distinctive contribution to thinking about human rights, and upon the ways in which his ideas have imprinted my own work.