Advancing the health-promoting prison: a call for global action.

The global prison population has grown exponentially in all five continents and consistent analysis shows that many diseases, illnesses and long-term conditions are over-represented in the prison population. Despite the myriad of health challenges in the population, the concept and practice of health promotion is both contested and underdeveloped with significant variation in its application in prison systems globally. The purpose of this commentary paper is twofold. The first is to provide a short overview of the health-promoting prison concept which we argue, at present, is a largely Eurocentric idea which has not been adopted on a global scale. Second, the paper makes a case for more global action on prison health promotion and invites further dialogue and discussion amongst the health promotion community

Resistant acts in post-genocide Rwanda

Performances of justice and human rights have served as international platforms for truth-telling and nation-building both in the aftermath of apartheid in South Africa, and genocide in the case of Rwanda. There are moments of overlap between actual court proceedings, which can in their own right be deemed as a performance, and the use of theatre for dialogic negotiations between past atrocities and present juridical systems for reconstruction.1 Within the messy context of post-conflict reconstruction, speech often falters. Articulations of identities and speech acts become disjointed between personal and collective memories and identities; but are forced into the construction of juridical speech in the case of Rwanda’s gacaca courts. This essay will analyze how micro and macro sociopolitical dynamics are articulated in the gacaca courts used to adjudicate crimes linked to the 1994 genocide against Tutsi during which over 1 million Tutsi and Hutu moderates were massacred. I will illustrate how these different levels of power interact with each other through social performances (Alexander, 2011) and to extend the concept of faltered speech as artistic resistance (Scott, 1990)