Expanding Perspectives on Human Rights in Africa

Expanding Perspectives on Human Rights in Africa PDF Author: M. Raymond Izarali
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351398458
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This book draws attention to emerging issues around the rights of minorities, marginalized groups, and persons in Africa. It explores the gaps between human rights provisions and conditions, showing that although international human rights principles have been embraced in the continent, various minority groups and marginalized persons are denied such rights through criminalization and persecution. African countries have a good record of signing and ratifying international and regional rights instruments but the political will and capacity for enforcing these with respect to minorities remain weak. International contributors to the book provide new perspectives on the rights of marginalized and minority groups in different parts of Africa and the extent to which they are deprived or denied entitlement to the universality and equality articulated in law. The authors show that human rights, while having come of age as a moral ideal, has not been fully entrenched in practice towards groups such as children, indigenous populations, the mentally ill, persons with disabilities, and persons with albinism. This volume is geared toward scholars, students, human rights groups, policy makers, social workers, international organizations, and policy makers in the fields of criminology, security studies, development studies, political science, sociology, children studies, social psychology, international relations, postcolonial studies, and African Studies.

Expanding Perspectives on Human Rights in Africa

Expanding Perspectives on Human Rights in Africa PDF Author: M. Raymond Izarali
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351398458
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book draws attention to emerging issues around the rights of minorities, marginalized groups, and persons in Africa. It explores the gaps between human rights provisions and conditions, showing that although international human rights principles have been embraced in the continent, various minority groups and marginalized persons are denied such rights through criminalization and persecution. African countries have a good record of signing and ratifying international and regional rights instruments but the political will and capacity for enforcing these with respect to minorities remain weak. International contributors to the book provide new perspectives on the rights of marginalized and minority groups in different parts of Africa and the extent to which they are deprived or denied entitlement to the universality and equality articulated in law. The authors show that human rights, while having come of age as a moral ideal, has not been fully entrenched in practice towards groups such as children, indigenous populations, the mentally ill, persons with disabilities, and persons with albinism. This volume is geared toward scholars, students, human rights groups, policy makers, social workers, international organizations, and policy makers in the fields of criminology, security studies, development studies, political science, sociology, children studies, social psychology, international relations, postcolonial studies, and African Studies.

The Sociology of Human Rights

The Sociology of Human Rights PDF Author: Mark Frezzo
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745686680
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Long the arena of philosophers, legal scholars, and political scientists, the interdisciplinary study of human rights has recently seen an influx of sociologists. Why is this so, and how do sociologists contribute to our understanding of human rights in the contemporary world? In this landmark new text, Mark Frezzo explores the sociological perspective on human rights, which he shows to be uniquely placed to illuminate the economic, political, social, and cultural conditions under which human rights norms and laws are devised, interpreted, implemented, and enforced. Sociologists treat human rights not as immutable attributes but as highly contested claims that vary across historical time and geographic space, and investigate how human rights can serve either to empower or to constrain social actors, from large societies to small communities and identity groups. Frezzo guides readers through the scholarly, pedagogical, and practical applications of a sociological view of major debates such as foundationalism vs. social constructionism, universalism vs. particularism, globalism vs. localism, and collective vs. individual rights. This cutting-edge text will appeal to students of sociology, political science, law, development, and social movements, and all interested in the nature, scope, and applicability of human rights in the twenty-first century.

The Right to Landscape

The Right to Landscape PDF Author: Shelley Egoz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351882791
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Associating social justice with landscape is not new, yet the twenty-first century's heightened threats to landscape and their impact on both human and, more generally, nature's habitats necessitate novel intellectual tools to address such challenges. This book offers that innovative critical thinking framework. The establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, in the aftermath of Second World War atrocities, was an aspiration to guarantee both concrete necessities for survival and the spiritual/emotional/psychological needs that are quintessential to the human experience. While landscape is place, nature and culture specific, the idea transcends nation-state boundaries and as such can be understood as a universal theoretical concept similar to the way in which human rights are perceived. The first step towards the intellectual interface between landscape and human rights is a dynamic and layered understanding of landscape. Accordingly, the 'Right to Landscape' is conceived as the place where the expansive definition of landscape, with its tangible and intangible dimensions, overlaps with the rights that support both life and human dignity, as defined by the UDHR. By expanding on the concept of human rights in the context of landscape this book presents a new model for addressing human rights - alternative scenarios for constructing conflict-reduced approaches to landscape-use and human welfare are generated. This book introduces a rich new discourse on landscape and human rights, serving as a platform to inspire a diversity of ideas and conceptual interpretations. The case studies discussed are wide in their geographical distribution and interdisciplinary in the theoretical situation of their authors, breaking fresh ground for an emerging critical dialogue on the convergence of landscape and human rights.

Expanding Human Rights

Expanding Human Rights PDF Author: Alison Brysk
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1785368842
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The 21st century demands expanding rights, as the established human rights regime is necessary but not sufficient. This project will analyze the global dynamics of the mobilization of new actors, claims, institutions and modes of accountability. Our multi-disciplinary, multi-method analysis draws from a full range of global experience, with balanced attention to civil-political and social-economic rights; from LBGT movements in the new Europe to campaigns for the right to food in India.

The Human Right to Dominate

The Human Right to Dominate PDF Author: Nicola Perugini
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199365032
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
At the turn of the millennium, a new phenomenon emerged: conservatives, who just decades before had rejected the expanding human rights culture, began to embrace human rights in order to advance their political goals. In this book, Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon account for how human rights--generally conceived as a counter-hegemonic instrument for righting historical injustices--are being deployed to further subjugate the weak and legitimize domination. Using Israel/Palestine as its main case study, The Human Right to Dominate describes the establishment of settler NGOs that appropriate human rights to dispossess indigenous Palestinians and military think-tanks that rationalize lethal violence by invoking human rights. The book underscores the increasing convergences between human rights NGOs, security agencies, settler organizations, and extreme right nationalists, showing how political actors of different stripes champion the dissemination of human rights and mirror each other's political strategies. Indeed, Perugini and Gordon demonstrate the multifaceted role that this discourse is currently playing in the international arena: on the one hand, human rights have become the lingua franca of global moral speak, while on the other, they have become reconstrued as a tool for enhancing domination.

Vulnerability and Human Rights

Vulnerability and Human Rights PDF Author: Bryan S. Turner
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271030445
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
The mass violence of the twentieth century’s two world wars—followed more recently by decentralized and privatized warfare, manifested in terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and other localized forms of killing—has led to a heightened awareness of human beings’ vulnerability and the precarious nature of the institutions they create to protect themselves from violence and exploitation. This vulnerability, something humans share amid the diversity of cultural beliefs and values that mark their differences, provides solid ground on which to construct a framework of human rights. Bryan Turner undertakes this task here, developing a sociology of rights from a sociology of the human body. His blending of empirical research with normative analysis constitutes an important step forward for the discipline of sociology. Like anthropology, sociology has traditionally eschewed the study of justice as beyond the limits of a discipline that pays homage to cultural relativism and the “value neutrality” of positivistic science. Turner’s expanded approach accordingly involves a truly interdisciplinary dialogue with the literature of economics, law, medicine, philosophy, political science, and religion.

Rescuing Human Rights

Rescuing Human Rights PDF Author: Hurst Hannum
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108417485
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Focuses on understanding human rights as they really are and their proper role in international affairs.

Human Rights in the World Community

Human Rights in the World Community PDF Author: Richard Pierre Claude
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812213966
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Less Than a Roar

Evidence for Hope

Evidence for Hope PDF Author: Kathryn Sikkink
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691192715
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
A history of the successes of the human rights movement and a case for why human rights work Evidence for Hope makes the case that yes, human rights work. Critics may counter that the movement is in serious jeopardy or even a questionable byproduct of Western imperialism. Guantánamo is still open and governments are cracking down on NGOs everywhere. But human rights expert Kathryn Sikkink draws on decades of research and fieldwork to provide a rigorous rebuttal to doubts about human rights laws and institutions. Past and current trends indicate that in the long term, human rights movements have been vastly effective. Exploring the strategies that have led to real humanitarian gains since the middle of the twentieth century, Evidence for Hope looks at how essential advances can be sustained for decades to come.

Human Rights and Human Well-Being

Human Rights and Human Well-Being PDF Author: William J. Talbott
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199813191
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
In the last half of the twentieth century, legalized segregation ended in the southern United States, apartheid ended in South Africa, women in many parts of the world came to be recognized as having equal rights with men, persons with disabilities came to be recognized as having rights to develop and exercise their human capabilities, colonial peoples' rights of self-determination were recognized, and rights of gays and lesbians have begun to be recognized. It is hard not to see these developments as examples of real moral progress. But what is moral progress? In this book, William Talbott offers a surprising answer to that question. He proposes a consequentialist meta-theoretical principle of moral and legal progress, the "main principle", to explain why these changes are examples of moral and legal progress. On Talbott's account, improvements to our moral or legal practices are changes that, when evaluated as a practice, contribute to equitably promoting well-being. Talbott uses the main principle to explain why almost all the substantive moral norms and principles used in moral or legal reasoning have exceptions and why it is almost inevitable that, no matter how much we improve them, there will always be more exceptions. This explanation enables Talbott to propose a new, non-skeptical understanding of what has been called the "naturalistic fallacy". Talbott uses the main principle to complete the project begun in his 2005 book of identifying the human rights that should be universal-that is, legally guaranteed in all human societies. Talbott identifies a list of fourteen robust, inalienable human rights. Talbott contrasts his consequentialist (though not utilitarian) account with many of the most influential nonconsequentialist accounts of morality and justice in the philosophical literature, including those of Ronald Dworkin, Jurgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, Phillip Pettit, John Rawls, T.M. Scanlon, Amartya Sen, Judith Thomson.