Demand For Dignity Research Articles

The Role of Education on Human Dignity: Fostering Peace and Diminishing Violence

The concept of human dignity postulates that every individual inherently possesses intrinsic worth. This means that upholding human dignity demands an end to war and violence. Rooted in Catholic social teachings, human life is sacred, and the dignity of the human being is the foundation of a moral vision for society. This becomes instrumental in educating students about the imperative nature of respect, empathy and compassion towards all, irrespective of sociocultural backgrounds and individual beliefs. Given the profound implications held by the concept of human dignity, through their influence on their students, Catholic educational institutions can wield substantial influence in fostering peacebuilding initiatives and mitigating conflict. This research article presents a comparative study between California and Slovenia, highlighting variations in the autonomy of Catholic high schools in terms of teaching and curriculum development and implementation. Qualitative research into private Catholic high schools in these two states shows that those with greater autonomy tend to foster a more comprehensive grasp of human dignity. These schools also demonstrate students’ enhanced ability to swiftly detect violations of human dignity, even when such breaches are not immediately evident. These observations emphasise the crucial role Catholic educational settings thereby play in the realm of peacebuilding and conflict deterrence, underscoring the need to embed a profound comprehension of human dignity in the educational framework.

Waste picking as social provisioning: The case for a fair transition to a circular economy

Implementing a circular economy in Latin America can be the opportunity to include waste pickers and other informal workers in a regenerative economic model. This study performed in-depth interviews with female waste picker leaders from Ecuador and Colombia. The results suggest that the modifying effect of becoming part of an association, rooted in social provisioning communities, enables exchange of materials and training while also creating social safety nets for circular economy activities to function in informal contexts. A set of 9Rs for a fair transition to a circular economy are proposed to guide policy and practice based on demands for dignity, care-work counting, and environmental justice fostering what has worked and correcting the oppression that has accompanied the linear economy.

Identity, Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

In his 2018 book, Identity, the Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, Stanford University politi­cal scientist Francis Fukuyama addresses themes which might more properly be considered matters of political philosophy and the philosophy of law: How are we to navigate between traditional, ethnic, unitary conceptions of the nation on the one hand, and the threat of identitarian fragmentation on the other? Though Fukuyama affirms the importance of the concepts of human dignity and identity, more or less as these are commonly understood, he also criticizes the contemporary phenomenon of identity politics—which he views as a danger to liberal democ­racy. “The rise of identity politics in modern liberal democracies,” writes Fukuyama, “is one of the chief threats that they face;” and moreover, “unless we can work our way back to more universal understand­ings of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.” This paper raises the question of whether the well reasoned case against identity politics as a threat to national unity and purpose leaves room for skepticism of fast-paced and more ambitious (“Wilsonian”) pursuit of internationalist goals of globalization. Greater emphasis on political consensus at home may helpfully strengthen the hand of American foreign policy in support of liberal democracy. But we now look back with well founded skepticism on neo-conservative interventionism, and there are just and needed limits on globalizing internationalism imposed by and implicit in the retreat from identity politics. Having lost the unity of purpose of Cold War liberalism, we are yet to find a “golden mean” avoiding ethnic nationalism and short of political fragmentation.
 

From Liberation To (Re)Criminalization: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Bodily Autonomy, and the Expansion of State Rights

For more than a generation, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the constitutionally protected right to an abortion, and, in turn, the dignity-affirming power of reproductive autonomy and its role in designing one’s own destiny. The Court’s endorsement of the liberatory value of bodily autonomy in Roe v. Wade, as later affirmed in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, rejected attempts to justify restrictive prohibitions on abortion as valid exercises of state police powers. However, the Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization threatens to fundamentally redefine the boundaries between the rights of individuals and those of the state. Concluding that the decisions in Roe and Casey were “egregiously wrong,” Justice Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs asserts that the Court’s recognition of an individual right to reproductive autonomy damaged our democratic infrastructure because the decision to grant or withhold such a right should be left to the states. This Article explores the Court’s broad abdication of abortion regulation to state legislatures within the context of the expansion of state regulation of bodily autonomy, specifically in the areas of transgender rights, gender expression, and access to gender affirming healthcare. Reproductive rights jurisprudence, including cases like Griswold, Casey, and Roe, undoubtedly provided a recognizable constitutional frame for the evolution of modern transgender rights challenges. Despite the inherent differences in the nature of the lived and legal realities of cisgender women and transgender people, both communities share common demands for dignity and self-determination informed by access to life-defining healthcare services and individual expression. The Court’s dismissal of a fundamental right to abortion in Dobbs sanctioned—if not invited—more restrictive state-level regulation of reproductive care and narrowed respect for individual autonomy in the abortion context. Given the legal and societal commonalities between access to gender-affirming care and reproductive care, it should be no surprise that state legislatures are waging similar lines of attack on the rights of transgender people. This Article proceeds in three parts. Part I explores the evolving judicial treatment of constitutional challenges to state regulation of transgender status and identity. This part positions the right to free gender expression and access to necessary gender-affirming care within the broader conversation regarding the right to bodily autonomy. Part II addresses the state legislative landscape regarding the regulation and attempted erasure of transgender lives immediately before and after the Dobbs decision. Finally, Part III examines the impact of Dobbs on the future viability of autonomy-based claims involving transgender rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Recognizing the importance of the “second founding,” this section argues that any reliance on the original design of structural federalism to realize dignity or individual autonomy would be misplaced today. Instead, this Article urges the use of a revolutionary lens that is faithful to the intent of the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment—a lens that is essential to understand the liberatory nature of the early transgender and reproductive rights cases, as well as the human cost of the impending retrenchment.

Identity: the demand for dignity and the politics of resentment

No abstract available

Making Sense of Sentences

Critics of mass incarceration and American punitiveness have called for a renewed focus on human dignity. They have proposed ways to make sanctions less severe and to ensure that punishments are more humanely administered. Attention to human dignity, however, also requires something else: greater attention to the humanity of offenders at the sentencing proceeding. Sentencing now is often a routine, unreasoned affair; even draconian sentences are sometimes imposed with little or no explanation of the goals they are meant to serve. Respect for dignity demands more than this. Judges should explain, in terms defendants can understand, the State’s legitimate purposes for requiring them to suffer the burdens of punishment. They must explain not only the factual and legal grounds for a sanction, but the State’s lawful objectives. By giving reasons, judges can affirm that offenders remain rational moral agents and members of the human community, not merely animals to be caged. Such public acknowledgment of offender dignity is morally important, but it also serves a practical purpose, for reason-giving helps ensure that sentences reflect legitimate aims, not unthinking fiat, error, or prejudice.

A Substandard Autobiographical Sketch in Three Chapters

All aspects of our lives, including educational access and quality, are affected by our socio-economic position. This reflective note about the author’s educational experiences describes the interlinkages of caste and education. It talks about how those experiences played an integral role in shaping the author’s beliefs about caste, reservation and merit, and made him challenge the implicit as well as explicit forms of discrimination prevalent in our society. The autobiographical sketch is anchored around the idea of ‘merit’ and the perceived non-meritoriousness of students belonging to the reserved categories (especially SC and ST). These first-hand as well as second-hand experiences of caste-based discrimination paint a contextual and grounded picture of the challenges faced by the author (and other Dalit students) in his education. The note ends with an implicit demand for dignity and the need of acknowledging the struggles of students from marginalised communities by not isolating their experiences from the sociological context that they are part of.

Discrimination & Defiant Pride: How the Demand for Dignity Can Create Slack for Poor Governance

Discrimination & Defiant Pride: How the Demand for Dignity Can Create Slack for Poor Governance

Mass Migrations And The Emerging Socio-Political Constructs Of Identity, Interest And Security In Hosts State

Mass Migrations And The Emerging Socio-Political Constructs Of Identity, Interest And Security In Hosts State

Book Review: Identity. The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

Book Review: Identity. The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

Identity: The demand for dignity and the politics of resentment

Identity is an urgent and necessary book―a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict. In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.

Under lying conditions of gender‐based violence—Decolonial feminism meets epistemic ignorance: Critical transnational conversations

AbstractThis article engages a doubled conversation, between South Africa and the United States, about gender‐based violence and the curious epistemic silence, even in critical psychology, about gendered and racialized violence as a deep sedimentary, transnational and transhistoric, layer of (in)human(e) existence. In this article, we lift up the long history of underlying conditions of state‐sponsored and socially enacted violence, and we also problematize how social science scholarship has been designed, underlying conditions, such that anti‐Black violence and gender‐based violence are routinely (mis)represented as if idiosyncratic ruptures—microaggressions or battered women—in an otherwise smooth social fabric. Through the lens of decolonial feminism, we examine how the COVID‐19 crisis makes public the gendering of violence, especially against Black women, as if it were a spike, obscuring how pervasive and enduring it is—a constant moan in South Africa, India, the United States, among native women in Canada, and other places around the globe. We end by calling for critical scholarship that peels back the symptom of gender‐based violence, recognizes the history and ongoing structural enactment of racialized and gendered violence, and excavates the bold and relentless heartbeat of resistance narrated in quiet and loud demands for dignity, liberation, and desire.

‘We will march side by side and demand a bigger table’: anger as dignity claim

Martha Nussbaum’s (2016) account of anger limits its utility in part due to its vengeful and narcissistic aspects; she notes that even when anger rightfully identifies a harm or unjust act, it too frequently represents a desire for retribution or status degradation of the offender. I think this viewpoint is incomplete, because it reduces human relations and status to a zero-sum tussle: I can only gain status if you (at least theoretically) lose it. While Nussbaum does not explore a connection between human dignity and anger, I argue that feminist political uses of anger are often premised on exactly this sort of idea. To be specific, the use of dignity that is present in feminist political anger is not of the zero-sum variety (women gain status through men’s loss of status), but as a claim of worth. Feminist political anger argues that women count too, and women deserve dignity and respect: first, as a kind of personal or bodily dignity, and second as an assertion of political identity or autonomy. It is the absence of their dignity and recognition that is the injury; their rage is an assertion of presence, a demand for dignity and recognition. This demand does not require the lessening of another’s dignity.

Fukuyama, Francis (2019): Identidad. La demanda de dignidad y las políticas de resentimiento. Barcelona: Deusto

Crítica del ensayo “Identidad. La demanda de dignidad y las políticas de resentimiento” del politólogo estadounidense Francis Fukuyama.

Identity according to Francis Fukuyama: An obstacle to the end of history

Abstract This review essay focuses on Francis Fukuyama’s book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, which was published in 2018. The text emphasises placing Fukuyama’s new publication in the context of his multi-year work for its correct interpretation. Fukuyama’s conception of the human soul is analysed in confrontation with contemporary issues of liberal democracy. It mentions other authors criticisms of Fukuyama’s work and, at the same time, it is defended by Fukuyama himself. The text can be seen as an introduction to Francis Fukuyama’s reasoning regarding the modern problems of liberal democracy and as an attempt to understand his unsuccessful prediction of the end of history. The central theme of the text is the concept of identity, which Fukuyama describes as a source of conflicts and friction areas in modern societies. Fukuyama’s findings are supplemented by the findings of other authors and current world events.

Understanding Chinese Concept of “Face”: The Limits of F. Fukuyama’s Approach to the Problem of Identity

The basic concept of Chinese culture – the concept of “face” ( mianzi ) – remains one of the most debated topics in philosophy, cultural studies and ethics. The author argues that the main methodological problem is “translation” of realities of Chinese mentality into the language of European discourse, the question of how European thinking interprets concepts that have no analogues in a non-Asian worldview and outlook. The problem of understanding realities of foreign consciousness is complicated by the fact that we can say, with a certain degree of confidence, that today there is no common global scientific field of social and humanitarian research. In spite of international contacts and diligent study of foreign languages, Asian, Euro-American and Russian studies on China do not actually constitute a single area of research. In spite of assurances of unbiased research, scientific objectivity, tolerance and equal respect for scientific schools of different countries, these studies are often afflicted with Eurocentrism or, reversely, Sinocentrism. This article discusses the main ideas of F. Fukuyama’s recently published book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment , regarding the Chinese concept of “face.” The article presents a brief analysis of the concept of “heart” in Christianity, which largely formed the general European understanding of personality and identity, and then a description of “heart” in the Taoist-Confucian philosophy, which is fundamental to the Chinese mentality. The article considers the methodological foundations of Fukuyama’s concepts and demonstrates the inefficiency of Eurocentric and Americentric criteria in interpretation of the “face” and personality in China. It is shown that the traditional understanding of Chinese consciousness as collectivistic and of European consciousness as chiefly individualistic is nothing more than a cliché. The author concludes that studying the Chinese concept of “face” requires a different methodological approach, which will be relevant not to epistemological views entrenched in the West, but to the subject of research itself.

Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018, 240 pp.

Reseña del libro de Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018, 240 pp.

State Accountability to Sovereignty of the Human Person

This project seeks to develop ways of holding governments accountable for their failure to satisfy the requirements of conflict management, political stability, economic growth, and social welfare. Since offending governments tend to resist external sources of protection and assistance for an oppressed population by pleading national sovereignty, and major international actors are less likely to act unless driven by strategic or ideological reasons, the project aims at “expounding on the normative principles of responsible sovereignty, international mechanisms and strategies for their enforcement, and empirical evidence about the performance of governments as measured by the stipulates of sovereignty.” Asserting “human dignity as an overarching goal to which all peoples and societies aspire and are committed, whatever the variations of their cultural perspectives on the institutional details of the concept” the project perceives this concept as “operationally or functionally translated into a quest for recognition and respect for human beings, both as individuals and as members of identifiable groups. Human dignity demands, in the minimum, equal treatment with full rights and duties of citizenship.”

Fukuyama, Francis: Identity. The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Fukuyama, Francis: Identity. The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment