Biopolitics and Historic Justice

Human rights violations linked to norms of health, fitness, and social usefulness have long been overlooked by Historic Justice Studies. Kathrin Braun introduces the concept of »injuries of normality« to capture the specifics of this type of human rights violation and the respective struggles for historic justice. She examines the processes of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the context of coercive sterilization, institutional killings, as well as the persecution of homosexual men and of »asocials« under Nazi rule. She argues that an analytic perspective on political temporality allows us to better understand the formation of these biopolitical human rights violations and their exclusion from memory and historic justice.

Kathrin Braun, political scientist, born in 1960, has done extensive work on the politics of bioethics and biomedicine, as well as the politics of coming to terms with human rights violations related to biopolitics. She received her PhD and title of extraordinary professor from Leibniz University, Hanover and has taught at a range of universities in Germany, the US, the UK and elsewhere. Since 2018 she has been research coordinator at the Center for Interdisciplinary Risk and Innovation Studies (ZIRIUS) at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.