Stjepan Meštrović
Dr. Stjepan Gabriel Meštrović (born 1955), is an American sociologist, professor, author of over fifteen books[1] and a distinguished expert in matters of war crimes. He testified on the trials regarding Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse and at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.[2]
His latest book is The Good Soldier on Trial?, and published shortly before this work was Rules of Engagement? A Social Anatomy of an American War Crime--Operation Iron Triangle, Iraq. It follows The Trials of Abu Ghraib: An Expert Witness Account of Shame and Honor and both books are accounts of the realities of the cases in which he served as an expert witness.[3]
Meštrović is a sociology professor at Texas A&M University and holds three degrees from Harvard University and a Ph.D. degree from Syracuse University.[2] He is a grandson of the renowned Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović.
One of his best known books, Postemotional Society, attempts to extend David Riesman's concept of other-directedness in The Lonely Crowd and apply it to contemporary social life, particularly the idea of fake sincerity. Genocide after Emotion (1996) is an anthology edited by him. It attempts to resolve the contrasts of social upheaval and warfare, confusions of histories and manipulations of reality by introducing a theoretical construct he calls ‘postemotionalism’, which he considers to be a more appropriate term than postmodernism to ‘capture the fission, Balkanization, ethnic violence and other highly emotional phenomena of the late 1990s’. The anthology contains a wide variety of interpretations and responses to the break-up of Yugoslavia, including a historical outline and analysis of the conflict through the Austro—Hungarian and Ottoman empires, responses and representations by the American media, and psychoanalytical interpretations of Serb—Croat ‘otherness’.
Books
- Emile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology, 1988.
- The Coming Fin de Siecle: An Application of Durkheim's Sociology to Modernity and Postmodernity, 1991.
- Durkheim and Postmodern Culture, 1992.
- The Road From Paradise: The Possibility of Democracy in Eastern Europe, 1993.
- Habits of the Balkan Heart: Social Character and the Fall of Communism, 1993.
- The Barbarian Temperament: Towards a Postmodern Critical Theory, 1993
- The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of Postmodernism With Postcommunism, 1994
- Anthony Giddens: The Last Modernist,1998
- Genocide After Emotion: The Postemotional Balkan War, 1996
- Postemotional Society, 1997
- This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia (co-edited with Thomas Cushman), 1996
- The Conceit of Innocence: How the Conscience of the West was Lost in the War against Bosnia, 1997
- Thorstein Veblen on Theory, Culture and Society, 2004.
- The Trials of Abu Ghraib: An Expert Witness Account of Shame and Honor, 2007
- Heart of Stone: My Grandfather, Ivan Mestrovic (in Croatian), 2007
- Rules of Engagement? A Social Anatomy of an American War Crime--Operation Iron Triangle, Iraq 2008.
- [4]
See also
- http://www.slavenletica.com/index.php?lang=hr&option=news&page=news_pregled&itemid=1&newsid=86
- Yugoslav Wars
- http://www.armedia.net.au/archive/1997a/rev03.html
- Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse
- http://www.dnevnikulturni.info/vijesti/knjizevnost/227/mestrovic_unuk_o_poremecenom_mestrovicu_djedu/
- Texas A&M University
- Ivan Meštrović
References
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