Activating Human Rights and Peace


Book Description

Human rights and peace issues and concerns have come about at a critical time. The world has recently witnessed a plethora of turning points that speak of the hopes and vulnerabilities which are inherent in being human and demonstrate that change in the service of human rights and peace is possible. At the same time, however, other events indicate that wherever there is life, there is vulnerability in a world characterized by instability and endemic human suffering. On top of all this, the collapse of the global financial system and the serious, rapid destruction of the environment have brought the world to a precarious state of vulnerability. Activating human rights and peace is, therefore, a project that is always in progress, and is never finally achieved. This enlightening collection of well thought through cases is aimed at academics and students of human rights, political science, law and justice, peace and conflict studies and sociology.




Activating Human Rights


Book Description

Papers originally presented at an international conference held in Australia, 2003.




International Law in the Transition to Peace


Book Description

This book proposes a normative framework specifically designed for the complex and legally uncertain time period between armed conflicts and peace. As such, it contributes both to the furthering of a jus post bellum framework, and to enhanced legal clarity in complex and legally uncertain environments. This, in turn, contributes to strengthened protection engagements, and thus to improved prospects of enabling sustainable peace and security in both national and international perspectives. The book offers a novel but persuasive argument for a legal framework specific for transitional environments. Such legal framework, it is argued, is warranted in order to enable legal clarity to contemporary and outstanding legal issues, as well as to furthering peace efforts in complex environments. The legal framework suggested proposes a dividing line between applicable legal frameworks that, it is submitted, enhances both legal clarity on protection engagements and the quest for sustainable peace. The framework proposed is founded on a legal analysis of the protective nature and function of law. It thus provides a rare but important perspective on law that is of value in the quest for sustainable peace and security. The research draws uniquely on both contemporary legal debates, and on peace and conflict research. It does so in order to enable legal analysis that is both legally sound, as well as appropriate and adequate in today’s peace and security realities. The book provides a valuable resource for academics, researchers and policy-makers in the areas of Public International Law, International Humanitarian Law, International Human Rights Law, (the law of) Peace Operations, and Peace and Security Studies.







Activating Cultural and Social Change


Book Description

In this thought-provoking book, a diverse range of educators, activists, academics, and community advocates provide theoretical and practical ways of activating our knowledge and understanding of how to build a human rights culture. Addressing approaches and applications to human rights within current socio-cultural, political, socio-legal, environmental, educational, and global contexts, these chapters explore tensions, contradictions, and complexities within human rights education. The book establishes cultural and educational practices as intrinsically linked to human rights consciousness and social justice, showing how signature pedagogies used by human rights practitioners can be intellectual, creative, or a combination of both. Across three sections, the book discusses ways of bringing about holistic, relevant, and compelling approaches for challenging and understanding structures of power, which have become a global system, while also suggesting a move from abstract human rights principles, declarations, and instruments to meaningful changes that do not dehumanise and distance us from intrinsic and extrinsic oppressions, denial of identity and community, and other forms of human rights abuse. Offering new critical cultural studies approaches on how a human rights consciousness arises and is practised, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of cultural studies, education studies, critical sociology, human rights education, and human rights studies.




Perspectives on the right to development


Book Description

The last couple of decades has not only witnessed an increased convergence between human rights and development but also a significant shift towards rights-based approaches to development, including especially responsiveness to the fact that development in itself is a human right guaranteed to be enjoyed by all peoples. This edited volume of peer-reviewed papers constitutes the first product resulting from the annual international conference series on the right to development, organised by the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, and the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute at the University of South Africa. It explores the complex nature of the right to development from a diversified perspective, including from a conceptual, thematic, country and regional points of view. Conceived with the purpose to overshadow dominant economic growth approaches to development, the perspectives on the right to development articulated in this publication seek to locate the developmentalist discourse within the framework of accountability and people-centred development programming, necessitating appropriate policy formulation to ensure the constant improvement in human well-being. The book is written with the aim to reach out to researchers, academics, practitioners and policy makers who desire an in-depth understanding of the right to development as it applies universally.







International Human Rights Law and Destitution


Book Description

This book explores destitution from the perspective of international human rights law and, more specifically, economic, social, and cultural rights. The experience of destitution correlates to the non-realisation of a range of economic, social, and cultural rights. However, destitution has not been defined from this perspective. Consequently, the nexus between destitution and the denial of economic, social, and cultural rights remains unrecognised within academia and policy and practice. This book expressly addresses this issue and in so doing renders the nexus between destitution and the non-realisation of these rights visible. The book proposes a new human rights-based definition of destitution, composed of two parts. The rights which must be realised (the component rights) and the level of realisation of these rights which must be met (the destitution threshold) to avoid destitution. This human rights-based understanding of destitution is then applied to a UK case study to highlight the relationship between government policy and destitution, to illustrate how destitution manifests itself, and to make recommendations – founded upon engendering the realisation of economic, social, and cultural rights – aimed towards addressing destitution. This book will have global and cross-sectoral appeal to anti-poverty advocates, policy makers, as well as to researchers, academics and students in the fields of human rights law, poverty studies, and social policy.




Contemporary Challenges to Human Rights Law


Book Description

This collection of essays highlights the many problems and challenges facing human rights law today. Bringing together academics, practitioners and NGOs, it examines some of the contemporary challenges facing human rights law and practice in England, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, France and America. It is clear that we live in a time where human rights are in crisis. A decade of austerity measures at the domestic, regional and international levels evidently has had a detrimental effect on the protection of human rights. Cuts to social spending have resulted a failing social welfare system, a health service buckling under pressure, unprecedented rises in homelessness and child poverty, and the emergence of the ‘working poor’ and zero hours contracts. Austerity, famine, civil war, oppressive governmental regimes and climate change have seen vast migrations, resulting in a resurrection of far right-wing ideology. In the UK, this is seen in what can only be described as propaganda and scaremongering during the campaign for Brexit and in subsequent political elections evidenced by the increase in racially motivated hate crime within the UK. The landscape of human rights is such that it has resulted in some beginning to question, are human rights rights at all?




Learning, Teaching and Social Justice in Higher Education


Book Description

"This book brings together a wide range of higher education practitioners from across disciplines. Their chapters suggest innovative approaches to learning, teaching and delivering a tertiary education experience that centres social justice as a core mission of universities. The authors address the ways in which universities grapple with the challenges involved in the selection processes, administration, teaching and learning and student support associated with an increasingly large student population drawn from a broad range of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, including many students who will be returning to live overseas. Some of the specific challenges of these developments have included those of selection, academic literacy, independent learning, student support and student engagement. A second dimension is the traditional role of the universities as sources of independent intellectual and ethical critique of social institutions, both in terms of research and public intellectual contribution to political and social policy debates, and in terms of the formation of students in their capacities as critical, ethical, citizens and professionals. This social-ethical critique has traditionally been built into the humanities and the social science disciplines and the 'helping professions' but has now found its way into other disciplines and professional areas, such as business and engineering. As well, broader social policy and political discourse has more explicitly embraced social-ethical agendas of inclusiveness and marginalisation of social groups; recognition of the damage to the overall society of enduring and increasing social inequality." -- BOOK JACKET.