Baby Kamble's The Prisons We Broke as an Anti-Caste Manifesto

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Sociology and Human Rights in the Post Development Era

volume stands out both in its timeliness and in the originality of its 'new thinking' about human rights on the continent. . . . The editors offer excellent intellectual leadership to this project.--Crawford Young, University of Wisconsin, MadisonThe often oppressive existence endured by ordinary Africans means that human rights issues, along with political and economic ones, are central to Africa's progress. The 1981 African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, signed by African leaders, takes the stance that human rights in Africa must honor the traditional African concern for the collective over the sanctity and integrity of the individual. The editors and authors of this book argue against that consensus, defending the position that human rights are universal. The contributors ask whether the idea of universal human rights tenable theoretically and practically, coming at the issue from bases of social and political theory, history, and law. They conclude that the views on human rights in Africa need to move in the direction of international thinking on the issue, a posture not merely Western but quintessentially human. The book has much to offer students of African and international studies, human rights specialists, and others concerned with human rights issues.ContentsPart I. Theoretical PerspectivesEndless Teardrops: Prolegomena to the Study of Human Rights in Africa, by Ronald CohenHuman Rights and Precolonial Africa, by Timothy FernyhoughHuman and Peoples' Rights: What Point Is Africa Trying to Make? by H. W. O. Okoth-OgendoThe African Human Rights Process: A Contextual Policy-Oriented Approach, by Winston P. NaganPart II. Substantive Issues Women's Rights and the Right to Development, by Rhoda E. HowardAfrican Refugees: Defining and Defending Their Human Rights, by Art HansenLife Is War Human Rights, Political Violence, and Struggles for Power in Lesotho, by Robert ShanafeltThe National Language Question and Minority Language Rights in Africa: A Nigerian Case Study, by F. Niyi AkinnasoEducation and Rights in Nigeria, by Ajuji Ahmed and Ronald CohenAcademic Freedom in Africa: A Right Long Overlooked, by Goran HydenThe Challenges of Domesticating Rights in Africa, by Goran HydenRonald Cohen professor of anthropology and African studies at the University of Florida; among his many books and articles on Africa is Satisfying Africa's Food Needs (1988). Goran Hyden professor of political science at the University of Florida; his books on African politics and development include No Shortcuts to Progress (1983). Winston Nagan, professor of law and affiliate professor of anthropology at the University of Florida, chaired the board of Amnesty International (USA) from 1989 to 1991.

Much mainstream legal comment on human rights law presents an unhelpfully crude picture of disagreement concerning the significance that should be attached to human rights in particular cultural co...

With the aim to facilitate a debate between social and political theory for a better understanding of the societal totality, this chapter probes the ways to understand power, regulation, and social order. It starts from the morally laden conceptions of political theory in the Antiquity and then proceeds from the political theory of early modernity to the emergence of the three basic social sciences, i.e., sociology, political science, and economics. It turns out that most power conceptions have been negative and centered on influence but there are some rare exceptions of which the chapter discusses on those of Marx, Parsons, Foucault, and Mann. The canon of current social theory, i.e., Habermas, Giddens, and Bourdieu is also discussed from the perspective of positive power. A section with two examples of substantive study of power and regulation in the intersection of political and social theory dealing with the notions of hegemony and governance follows. Finally, the Conclusion lists what has been achieved thus far in the attempt to build a bridge between political and social theory and ends up with a call for continuation of the debate to overcome fragmentation in the study of society.

This study discusses social solidarity movement in the case football tragedy in Kanjuruhan. Kanjuruhan tragedy occurred on October 1, 2022 in Malang City. It killed 219 spectators and triggered a social movement involving football supporters, human rights activists, and civil society organizations. The main issue raised in this research is how the social movement emerged after the tragedy can encourage stadium security reform and the accountability of the actors involved. This research uses a qualitative approach. The theory used is Charles Tilly's social movement theory that views social movements as organized collective actions with political or social goals. In addition, resource mobilization theory is also applied to understand how supporters groups organize themselves through social media and social movement. The findings show that the social movement after the Kanjuruhan Tragedy is able to build a strong solidarity between supporters groups that are usually divided due to rivalry. And, this movement succeeded in pressuring the government to create a collaborative independent fact-finding team (TGIPF). Despite the progress in raising public awareness and discussing football management reformed, the social movement faces any obstacles in enforcing transparent accountability and deep institutional reformation. These findings underscore the importance of collective action and resource mobilization in driving social change.

Social Movements and the Social Construction of Human Rights Neil Stammers (bio) If people are not aware of the historical and contextual nature of human rights and are not aware that human rights become realized only by the struggles of real people experiencing real instances of domination, then human rights are all too easily used as symbolic legitimizers for instruments of that very domination. 1 I. Introduction Despite some recognition in recent literature that there is some sort of link between social movements and human rights, the nature of this link and its possible implications for understanding human rights have rarely been explored in any detail. A similar argument can be made in respect of the highly ambivalent relationship between human rights and power. 2 This [End Page 980] paper argues that these lacunae arise because dominant discourses from both proponents and opponents of human rights are not analytically equipped to grasp the way in which ideas and practices in respect of human rights have been socially constructed in the context of social movement challenges to extant relations and structures of power. The contention of this article is that if we use the triadic relationship between human rights, social movements, and power as an organizing focus for analysis, we get a very different picture from those offered by the dominant discourses, not only in respect of the origins and development of human rights, but also their potentials and limits. The need to see this alternative picture is made all the more urgent by the current pace of the processes of globalization, which appear to be significantly transforming the capacities of many social and political institutions, including the nation-state. The potential importance of this last point can hardly be exaggerated given that the nation-state is almost universally regarded as the main duty-bearer in respect of all forms of human rights. Beyond this, it is also clear that human rights are part of globalization processes: an important and contested, some would even say oppressive, element of political globalization. In the rest of this introduction, I will set out my assumptions in respect of social constructionism and power. The first main section of the article will then offer some initial thoughts on the nature of social movements and the role of social movements in the socio-historical development of human rights. The section which follows looks at the limits of the dominant discourses on human rights, and the third section examines how we might go about understanding the highly ambivalent relationship between human rights and power. This leads to a final section which considers some issues relating to how human rights might be reconstructed under contemporary conditions of globalization. A. Social Constructionism and Power To say that human rights are socially constructed is to say that ideas and practices in respect of human rights are created, re-created, and instanciated by human actors in particular socio-historical settings and conditions. It is a way of understanding human rights which does not require them to have any metaphysical existence (for example, through nature or God), nor does it rely on abstract reasoning or logic to ground them. The emphasis on the potential creativity of human actors in this understanding of social constructionism also stands in contrast to forms of structuralist explanation that reduce the role of social actors to nothing other than bearers of structural determinations. Taken together, these assumptions locate my ontological [End Page 981] and epistemological positions close to those of “structurationist” and “critical realist” schools of thought, 3 sharing common features with many feminist, and some cultural relativist, critiques of human rights. 4 “Power” is the other term I want to briefly discuss at the outset, because how power is conceptualized also bears heavily on how human rights have been understood. Within the western liberal tradition, the concept of power has often been used in a very limited way: as the capacities of social actors located in the political sphere (the state, government, political parties, etc.). In other words, the sort of power that has been much described, studied, and analyzed has been restricted to political power. There have been, of course, much wider understandings of power than...

The Politics of Human Rights

Clinical training in the vast majority of graduate programs in psychology fails to educate future therapists into perspectives that integrate personality theory with political and social theory. Instead, the emphases are on imparting highly specialized knowledge of personality dynamics and on techniques of psychological assessment and therapy. This narrowness of training means that, as a rule, clinicians rarely examine the historical, cultural, and political factors and dynamics that influence decisively people's identities and experiences of the social world around them. These factors and dynamics may create systemic illnesses that appear in the psyches of people; indeed, these same factors and dynamics may lead clinicians into holding unexamined assumptions about the nature and goals of therapy. In short, there are global, macroscopic events and processes that constitute the world in which therapeutic activity takes place; the significance of these should be perceived and fathomed by the psychologist, at least if he is to develop realistic and sound expectations about his role as a therapist, and if he wishes to have a broad and rich understanding of the connections that hold between social processes and the genesis of individual pathologies. The modern psychologist is usually an uneducated person, if by we mean an individual who has some knowledge of philosophy, sociology, political theory, and literature and cultural history. Indeed, a psychologist ought not to be called educated unless he manifests a drive to gain insight into the significant relationships that hold between social and political arrangements, cultural dynamics, and dilemmas that people experience in common. The psychologist of worth should, in addition, seek to appreciate the nature of the historical and intellectual traditions of his society, ones that may inform his guiding assumptions about the categories of health and illness. In short, a therapist is never value-free in his practice of healing psychic derangements, and he, as much as the next person, is shaped in his outlook by the course of social and political history. If this is so, then it follows that meaningful inquiry into the psyche should not be separated from studies of history and culture, and politics and philosophy. Evidently these areas have been separated artificially, with the result that each has developed its own distinctive language, priorities for research, presuppositions about the best methods of inquiry, and high levels of specialization. We have the unfortunate consequence that meaningful dialogue between fields is quite difficult. However, just as it is quite misleading to study a single leaf without having knowledge of the characteristics of the whole tree to which it belongs, so it is ultimately fruitless to examine the psyche apart from the historical, cultural, social, and political conditions in which it is nurtured. In short, a psychologist who truly deserves that title ought to be educated to hold broad and thoughtful interdisciplinary perspectives, and the trend toward value neutrality in the study of man is a misguided fashion that shirks the real task of creating a humanly meaningful form of scientific activity.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewMichael J. Perry, Toward a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xii+253 pp. $70.00 (cloth).Mark Modak‐Truran, Mark Modak‐TruranMississippi College. Search for more articles by this author , Mississippi College.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 88, Number 2April 2008 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/587600 Views: 28Total views on this site © 2008 by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

A major new collection of essays on a classic theme, Politics and Social Theory explores contemporary issues about the competing traditions of social and political theory in social science. This book should be of interest to students of social theory, sociology, political theory.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Animal Rights Movement in Theory and Practice: A Review of the Sociological Literature

A novel and multidisciplinary exposition and theorization of human dignity and rights, brought to bear on current issues in bioethics and biolaw. “Human dignity” has been enshrined in international agreements and national constitutions as a fundamental human right. The World Medical Association calls on physicians to respect human dignity and to discharge their duties with dignity. And yet human dignity is a term—like love, hope, and justice—that is intuitively grasped but never clearly defined. Some ethicists and bioethicists dismiss it; other thinkers point to its use in the service of particular ideologies. In this book, Michael Barilan offers an urgently needed, nonideological, and thorough conceptual clarification of human dignity and human rights, relating these ideas to current issues in ethics, law, and bioethics. Combining social history, history of ideas, moral theology, applied ethics, and political theory, Barilan tells the story of human dignity as a background moral ethos to human rights. After setting the problem in its scholarly context, he offers a hermeneutics of the formative texts on Imago Dei; provides a philosophical explication of the value of human dignity and of vulnerability; presents a comprehensive theory of human rights from a natural, humanist perspective; explores issues of moral status; and examines the value of responsibility as a link between virtue ethics and human dignity and rights. Barilan accompanies his theoretical claim with numerous practical illustrations, linking his theory to such issues in bioethics as end-of-life care, cloning, abortion, torture, treatment of the mentally incapacitated, the right to health care, the human organ market, disability and notions of difference, and privacy, highlighting many relevant legal aspects in constitutional and humanitarian law.

This article analyses the relationship between political theory and social theory. The separation of political and social theory (and of political theory from other areas in the study of politics) is a relatively recent development. The most significant difference between conventional political theory and conventional social theory concerns the relationship between normative and descriptive/explanatory issues in the analysis of social/political life. In spite of their differences, however, political and social theory share the one set of historical roots and, partly in consequence, a core set of assumptions. They specifically share intellectual and cultural history.

In the twenty-first century, after more than 60 years of development1 since its rise to prominence worldwide, the modern human rights system has become a common, even popular, public and policy dis...

South-East Asia has been characterized by rapid economic growth and enduring so- cio-political disruptions. After the Second World War, many independent movements in the region ended up in or were replaced by authoritarian regimes. Only in the past few decades, mass protests have led to the fall of some of these authoritarian regimes, including the Philippines and Indonesia. Social movements and collective activism have played a crucial role in these upheavals. The region has seen an emer- gence of various forms of collective action and social activism ranging from small- scale mobilization to mass movements concerned with social justice, political and democratic freedom, gender, minorities, and the environment as well as civic, ethnic, indigenous, and human rights.The history of social movements is deeply connected with the struggle for social change. Forming a heterogeneous compound of collective actors with a variety of demands and strategies, social movements essentially represent the conscious, con- certed, and sustained efforts by ordinary people to change some aspect of their soci- ety by using extra-institutional means (Goodwin & Jasper, 2009, p. 3). As a complex system of relations and networks, social movements transcend local, regional, and national borders and connect very different actors on various levels (Van Dyke & Mc- Cammon, 2010). The heterogeneous groups and networks demonstrate manifold pro- cesses of emergence, formation, organization, and transformation, which render any analysis of internal and external dynamics a significant challenge to the researcher.In the past, research on collective action and social activism was mainly focused on issues of labor, class, and the nation, referring mainly to Marxist and structural- functionalist traditions (Delia Porta & Diani, 2006). In South-East Asia, this overlap of the working class movement and emerging nationalism became obvious, for exam- ple, with the strong independent movements in Burma/Myanmar, French Indochina, Indonesia (with the third largest Communist Party outside of the Soviet Union and China), or the Philippines (Anderson, 1998, pp. 7-8). The emergence of the so called social movements, which mobilized actors across class boundaries, including women, students, ethnic minorities, migrants, or peasants, prompted a quick and innovative response with regard to empirical and theoretical analysis and has led to the proliferation of a range of social movement theories (Delia Porta & Diani, 2006). In this context, collective action and identity theory, for example, points to the social psychology of collective behavior (McCarthy & Zald, 2009, p. 193; cf. Calhoun, 1994; Cohen, 1985; Melucci, 1995), while resource mobilization theory addresses the more deliberate and strategic behavior and rational choices of conscious actors, notably in the early work of Mayer Zald and Charles Tilly (Freeman, 1979; Jenkins, 1983; Mc- Carthy & Zald, 1977). The political process theory focuses on the political and insti- tutional environment in which social actors operate (McAdam 1982; Tilly, 1978) and the new social movement theory highlights the structural origins of social conflict (Melucci, 1989,1996; Touraine, 1981). Each of these approaches gives some proliferate answers to questions with regard to the structural conditions and pre-requisites for the emergence of collective action, the cultural and symbolic production of meaning and identity, the role of political and economic regimes, and the availability or non- availability of organizational and individual resources. These theoretical advances open a broad space for innovative analytical frameworks for the study of social activ- ism and protest originating in the global South - a site rarely regarded as the place of production of social movements theory (Boudreau, 2004). Indeed, existing discrepan- cies between the geographical and historical roots of social movements theory and social movement activity today have been increasingly addressed by scholars from both social studies and area studies (Ford, 2013; Foweraker, 1995). …