We hope this will be the first in a series of issues of Theater, spread over a few volumes, documenting the work of individual artists who recalibrate theatrical form to address issues of human rights and social justice. We're starting with a director and author whose global work remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. Milo Rau, the Swiss-born founder of the International Institute of Political Murder (iipm), began as a journalist covering the Zapatista movement, studying with Pierre Bourdieu before turning to directing and activism. Over the last two decades he has traveled in Russia, South America, Africa, and elsewhere working on what he has called a "description of this global network of capital, its nightmares and hopes, its underworld and counterculture" -a "global realism." 1 Among the questions guiding his work: How is it possible that the West could overlook its complicity in the mass killings in Congo, Syria, and elsewhere? (As he observes in this issue, "Neoliberal humanism ends at Europe's borders.") How does the relationship between conventional drama and sentimental notions of empathy make possible the existence of global conditions based on intolerable suffering? Where does Western compassion end and begin? Can the actor or spectator become a witness to such violent histories and not merely depict them, represent them, or consume them? And what responsibilities does that altered mode of witnessing imply?
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