Articulation Of Human Rights Research Articles

Of Old Men, Country Clubs, and Atrocities: The Visualities and Externalities of Detaining Elderly Human Rights Violators in Chile

Abstract This article explores a pair of powerful but competing symbols in the Chilean human transitional justice process: ‘pobres viejitos’ (poor little old men) and country club prisons. The symbol of the ‘pobres viejitos’ is used very effectively by conservative elements of Chilean society to argue the futility or even inhumanity of punishing perpetrators of human right violations so long after the commission of their crimes. In turn, to victims and more liberal segments of society, the country club or ‘five star’ prison for human rights violators stands as a symbol of impunity and the failure of the Chilean state to do justice for the crimes of the dictatorship. This article examines the power of these symbols in undermining support for transitional justice efforts, as well as the externalities of the debate. The fate of the ‘pobres viejitos’ and whether to release the from even their relatively comfortable places of confinement has bled into debates on penal reform for other elderly prisoners. This mostly negative externality suggests the need for international and regional courts (or countries not in the throes of transitional justice processes, particularly delayed ones) to lead the way on the articulation of human rights norms related to the trial and punishment of elderly prisoners.

Decolonizing the boomerang effect in global queer politics: A new critical framework for sociological analysis of human rights contestation

This article proposes a new critical framework for analysing transnational human rights-claiming and contestation: a ‘critical model of the boomerang effect’, that can embody sociological understanding and insights from decolonizing analyses. The article develops a critique of Keck and Sikkink’s well-known model of the ‘boomerang effect’, from politics and international relations. The new critical model is needed to analyse contestations including global queer politics, particularly to examine where and how actors in formerly or currently colonized states from the Global South can draw on the United Nations human rights system. The new model requires analysis of four themes, with a decolonizing enquiry applied to each: (1) articulation of human rights; (2) social structures and resources; (3) socio-cultural contexts; and (4) subjectivation. These themes are examined to illuminate two pivotal cases claiming decriminalization of same-sex sexual acts: Caleb Orozco in Belize, and Jason Jones in relation to Trinidad and Tobago – generating a new research agenda.

LGBTI organizations navigating imperial contexts: the Kaleidoscope Trust, the Commonwealth and the need for a decolonizing, intersectional politics

This article presents the first sustained social analysis of the Kaleidoscope Trust, the UK’s leading social movement organization on LGBTI issues internationally, and its engagement with the Commonwealth – particularly through forming The Commonwealth Equality Network, comprising national NGOs. A contribution is made to sociological and critical analysis of transnational LGBTI movements, through argument for a new analytical framework combining the sociology of human rights with a decolonizing, intersectional approach – beyond the division between optimistic theories extending Western LGBTI progressive politics, or pessimistic postcolonial queer analyses. To investigate organizations’ strategies leading to the Malta 2015 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the research utilizes sources of data including event observation and website sources, initiating analysis of online environments. The analysis deploys social movement theory to examine how and why Kaleidoscope selected the Commonwealth as a political opportunity structure to engage through strategies of framing and articulation of human rights. Invention of The Commonwealth Equality Network, shaped online and offline by imperial relations between core and periphery, is analysed via transnational public sphere and critical theories and argued to indicate a significant restructuring of global queer politics. It is contended that a consistently decolonizing and intersectional articulation of human rights is needed.

Creating a Locational Counterpublic: Manushi and the Articulation of Human Rights and Sexuality from Delhi, India

AbstractThis essay examines the Indian women’s journal Manushi’s coverage of sexual violence and a concomitant articulation of women’s rights to bodily autonomy, albeit one that did not advocate sexual autonomy and choice. However, given the almost exclusive focus on (hetero)sexual violence, the human rights framework used to talk about Indian women in Manushi was not applied to sexual minorities. I begin by situating the publication in Delhi-based women’s activism, the metropolitan context of its origin, and use Nancy Fraser’s theorization of feminist counterpublics and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ideas on subalternity to highlight how Manushi’s activism is locational rather than subaltern. Examining the journal’s publications from the 1980s to 1998, I suggest that its incomplete representation of sexuality is useful as a starting point for a historical inquiry into women’s incomplete and ongoing reclamation of geographic, institutional, typographic, and judicial space in contemporary India. I posit tha...

Voice, Visibility, and Recognition: Vertical and Horizontal Trajectories of Human Rights and Social Justice Media

Historically, the articulation of human rights and social justice discourses has typically coalesced around topics of peace and conflict, governance, transparency, and accountability. News media ha...

A Response to Harel, Hope, and Schwartz

It is a privilege to have this opportunity of responding to the thoughtful objections made by Alon Harel, Simon Hope, and Daniel Schwartz to theses I advance in my Collected Essays, Volume III, Human Rights and Common Good. I take up first the more or less political–institutional issues, and then the underlying issues concerning the pre-political content of a community’s common good, and the basic elements in the flourishing and rights of its members as human persons facing the choices needed for worthwhile, just, and sustainable communities. All these issues, institutional or not, are thoroughly normative. And so they involve a lot of non-normative facts and predictions—not because you can get an Ought from a sheer Is (or from a Was or a Will be), but because all practical reasoning has not only at least one normative premise but also at least one factual premise about circumstances and predictable causalities. So, Section I considers Harel’s thesis that judicial review can be defended because my ‘‘inauthenticity’’ critique of it applies a fortiori to the legislative articulation of human rights. Section II considers Harel’s thesis that my account of punishment is a ‘‘consequentialism’’ of ‘‘harmony’’. Section III considers Schwartz’s thesis that the principle of subsidiarity is an insufficient restraint on governmental action. Section IV considers Harel’s and incidentally Hope’s theses on sex ethics (particularly their thesis that same-sex relations and marriage are morally acceptable), an ethics of basic and great importance for socio-political life and theory, though conspicuously neglected in late-liberal political theory (unlike early liberal, say Thomist theory). Section V, finally, considers Hope’s thesis that our understanding of basic human goods cannot be disentangled from the local morality or moralities in which we grew up—or at least, cannot be disentangled sufficiently to provide us with moral guidance.

Language Rights: The “Cinderella” Human Right

In the last 60 years, we have seen the growing development and articulation of human rights, particularly within international law and within and across supranational organizations. However, in that period, the right to maintain one's language(s), without discrimination, remains peculiarly underrepresented and/or problematized as a key human right. This is primarily because the recognition of language rights presupposes recognizing the importance of wider group memberships and social contexts; conceptions that ostensibly militate against the primacy of individual rights in the post-Second World War era. Drawing on theoretical debates in political theory and international law, as well as the substantive empirical example of Catalonia, this article argues that language rights can and should be recognized as an important human right.

The Global Citizen and the International Media

/ This article uses cosmopolitanism as a theoretical basis for the investigation and analysis of the global corporate and state media’s normative roles in human rights and democracy. Through the case studies of CNN and Xinhua’s reportage of the Tibetan protests in 2008, the article observes patterns of ideological coalescence between western capitalist hegemony and the big western media conglomerates such as CNN. It argues that, as a good global corporate citizen, CNN undoubtedly made contributions in exposing human rights abuses in Tibet, but also unwittingly worked to advance the interests of a manipulative and unjust neoliberal international order that uses human rights as a political tool. This is demonstrated not only through CNN’s selective articulation of human rights, but also the worrying coincidence between its ideological construction of the Tibet story and the rebuke of China’s human rights record by the western governments and other western institutions. While Xinhua provided an alternative discourse to that of human rights, it was observed that whereas nationalism arguably protects China’s revolutionary legacy and its modernization project, the discourse was also largely authoritarian and acted in contradiction to some of the constitutionally entrenched civil and political liberties of minorities while also raising cynicism about the Chinese government’s commitment to international human rights laws that it ratified and acceded to.

Human Rights Practice: Possibilities and Pitfalls for Developing Emancipatory Social Work

This paper seeks to analyse the contribution of a human rights perspective to emancipatory social work. Human rights practice builds on long-standing values and theoretical frameworks related to emancipatory, radical and structural social work and anti-oppressive practice. However, historical tensions within social work, notably in the United Kingdom, continue in contemporary forms, magnified by the global impact of neo-liberalism. The paper considers connections between human rights and other frameworks, including professional codes; ethical critiques drawing on feminist and indigenous perspectives; the articulation of human rights with social justice; and the strength of a rights-based approach demonstrated by community campaigns and service-user movements. It also addresses discontinuities between human rights and trends in social work and the wider context, including managerialism, privatization, and the consumerization of rights; unexamined rhetoric and limited regulatory interpretations; the dangers of rights being interpreted and imposed from dominant and/or Western perspectives; and the complexities of universal versus culturally specific rights claims. Drawing on the struggles of oppressed groups, the paper argues that a more critical and informed focus on human rights can be a further potentially powerful tool contributing to resistance to oppression, collective solidarity and the promotion of emancipatory change.

Autophagia and Queer Transnationality: Compulsory Heteroimperial Masculinity in Deepa Mehta’sFire

Previous articleNext article No AccessAutophagia and Queer Transnationality: Compulsory Heteroimperial Masculinity in Deepa Mehta’s FireNamita GoswamiNamita GoswamiDepartment of PhilosophyDePaul University Search for more articles by this author Department of PhilosophyDePaul UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 33, Number 2Winter 2008 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/521052 Views: 334Total views on this site Citations: 8Citations are reported from Crossref © 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Gordon Hull The Biopolitics of Intellectual Property, 81 (Nov 2019).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108687232Kanika Batra Creating a Locational Counterpublic: Manushi and the Articulation of Human Rights and Sexuality from Delhi, India, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no.44 (Jun 2016): 845–867.https://doi.org/10.1086/685118Gordon Hull Cultural Branding, Geographic Source Indicators and Commodification, Theory, Culture & Society 33, no.22 (Mar 2016): 125–145.https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276415583140Meenakshi Gigi Durham Scene of the Crime, Feminist Media Studies 15, no.22 (Jul 2014): 175–191.https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2014.930061 Eungu Lee Indian Woman in Deepa Mehta’s , Journal of South Asian Studies 18, no.33 (Mar 2013): 193–212.https://doi.org/10.21587/jsas.2013.18.3.008Indrani Chatterjee When “Sexuality” Floated Free of Histories in South Asia, The Journal of Asian Studies 71, no.44 (Dec 2012): 945–962.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911812001246Gordon Hull Geographic Source Indicators in and as Branding Culture, SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2011).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1932981Bidisha Banerjee Identity at the Margins: Queer Diasporic Film and the Exploration of Same-Sex Desire in Deepa Mehta's Fire, Studies in South Asian Film & Media 2, no.11 (Jul 2010): 19–39.https://doi.org/10.1386/safm.2.1.19_1

THE CLASH OF RIGHTS: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF NEWS DISCOURSE ON HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE United STATES AND CHINA

This article examines the discursive strategies of news reports on China's human rights in The New York Times and People's Daily. After an analysis of local semantics, I argue that the discursive representations in the two newspapers reflect the struggle over articulation of human rights. The New York Times attempts to project the notion of natural rights as universal truth, whereas People's Daily defines human rights as a process of development to counter Western condemnation as well as to justify rights abuses in China. The struggle over articulation is also a manifestation of the hierarchy of discourse. The powerful try to fix the preferred meaning while the powerless strive to negate the dominant meaning.

‘Endowed by Their Creator’?

Mainstream religion has little more than an indirect concern with the fundamental nature of human rights. Scripture provides no basis for any systematic code, albeit it espouses the virtues of equality, non-discrimination, and respect for others. There remains within regligious organisations an uncritical respect for authority and repeated emphasis on the dominance of the male. Rather, the articulation of human rights as a coherent and justiciable entity was the product of political turmoil, rebellion and war. That the expression of such rights is consistent with Christian teaching, however, is to be welcomed and valued. This article is an edited version of the Warburton Lecture delivered by Lord Bingham in Lincoln's Inn, London, on 15 June 2003. It is reproduced with permission.

Human Rigghts: A Culture of Controversy

Many arguments in favour of constitutionally entrenched Bills of Rights are undermined by the inherently controversial nature of human rights with respect to their content, their form, and their valence. Even in the case of civil and political rights, the concretization of rights at the level of specificity required to decide particular cases must always be politically and morally controversial. There is no accepted moral or legal method that can be utilized to give the requisite objectivity to the value choices inherent in human rights jurisprudence. Positivization of human rights increases their utility but compromises their moral status. It follows that legitimate articulation of human rights requires ongoing democratic dialogue and decision‐making. Although perceived as a stop‐gap measure, the Human Rights Act 1998 could facilitate an enduring partnership between courts and parliaments, placing human rights more firmly on the political agenda and establishing a proper balance between the inputs of courts and parliaments which recognizes that the development of positivized human rights must be primarily located in electorally‐based politics.

Fiqh, Women and Human Rights: Competing Methodologies

This paper attempts to, firstly, examine in some depth various writers' investigations into Islam, women and human rights. Secondly, and more importantly, it attemps provide a clear conceptual framework within which to articulate a foundation for the subject in the future. Such a re-conceptualisation is necessary to anchor future attempts at law reform within an Islamic jurisprudential heritage. By re-locating the debate within the Islamic heritage, any articulation of human rights and Muslim women will have the authority of a fiqh-inspired methodology. For muslim women engaged in the struggle for human rights, such a strategy will be more successful than either employing secular "Western" feminist discourse or by claiming the right to interpret the original Islamic sources whilst ignoring fiqh history, methodology and terminology.DOI: 10.15408/sdi.v10i1.640