The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment, a new book edited by professor Austin Sarat of Amherst College and lecturer Christian Boulanger of the Free University in Berlin, examines the complicated dynamics of the death penalty in eleven nations to determine what role capital punishment plays in defining a country’s political and cultural identity. The editors note that a nation’s values and cultural history influence its relationship with capital punishment. The book includes examinations of the death penalty in Mexico, the United States, Poland, Kyrgyzstan, India, Israel, Palestine, Japan, China, Singapore, and South Korea. The editors conclude: “What is clear is that the death penalty lives many different lives and dies many different deaths. Like globalization in general, the globalization of the discourses on state killing should not blind us to the very local nature of punishment. There might be universal reasons against capital punishment…but the struggle against the penalty of death must be fought again and again in each different culture in ways that acknowledge and respect capital punishment’s distinctive cultural lives.” (Stanford University Press, 2005) See International Death Penalty and Books.
