Pathologies Of Power Research Articles

Improving human rights NGO ethics and accountability: A critique of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and human rights utopianism

AbstractThis commentary calls for a more critical relationship with human rights NGOs, specifically, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. I argue that their politics, positionality, and power are often obscured by their conflation as intrinsically imperfect organizations that yield power and influence with the moral principles of human rights and with international human rights law itself, which are popularly perceived as unimpeachable and sacred in a secular ethical way. I contend that this conflation—often a deliberate and strategic one espoused by the organizations themselves—undermines the integrity of their work and the capacity to hold them accountable for their human rights advocacy. I illustrate ways in which both organizations have neglected to respect human rights and, specifically, principles of equality and universality. I further argue that both organizations need to be humbler and more honest about the moral, legal, and practical limitations of their work and ways in which it can be compromised. This is due to the exigencies of donor dependency and the politics of fundraising, the social, cultural, and political contexts in which the organizations operate and the expectations and demands of their supporters, and the nature of human rights as a movement, body of law, and expression of moral idealism that can sometimes obscure its prejudices, assumptions, and pathologies of power.

Examining the components of power dynamics in the family: a sample of qualitative study

Aim: The aim of the present study is to examine the components of power in the family. Method: This study was conducted with a qualitative method and a theme analysis method (Clark & Brauan, 2006). The purposeful sampling method was homogeneous in this way that 12 married people, both men and women, were satisfied and dissatisfied with married life, who were selected based on the entry and exit criteria and were interviewed. The research tool was semi-structured interview. The collected data were analyzed with the help of thematic analysis. Results: The results showed six main categories, which were 1) sources of power (legal, individual, couple, family) 2) distribution of power (based on individual capabilities, external power sources, gender and age) 3) strategies for achieving power (compatible and incompatible strategies) 4) pathology of power (lack of power hierarchy, regulation of power based on external sources and inability of one or both couples to regulate power) 5) goal of gaining power (individualism, matrimonialism and family idealism) 6) Effects of power in the family (negative effects and positive effects). Conclusion: According to these results, it can be said that power in the family is a multi-dimensional and dynamic structure whose damages can lead the family to chaos and vice versa.

From drug prohibition to regulation: a public health imperative

From drug prohibition to regulation: a public health imperative

Vaccine Inequities, Intellectual Property Rights and Pathologies of Power in the Global Response to COVID-19.

Vaccine Inequities, Intellectual Property Rights and Pathologies of Power in the Global Response to COVID-19.

Suicídio e violência estrutural. Revisão sistemática de uma correlação marcada pelo colonialismo

Resumo O suicídio é a última das causas externas de morte (CE) (que incluem homicídios e acidentes) a apresentar concentração de casos (80%) em países de baixa e média renda. Há literatura consolidada identificando a violência estrutural como determinante para as CE, mas pouca quanto ao suicídio. O objetivo deste artigo é definir novo marco teórico para o estudo do suicídio como fenômeno social, onde a interação social reflete as marcas do colonialismo. Foram analisados os dados sobre mortalidade do Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), Seattle, Washington, e realizada revisão sistemática da literatura sobre suicídio, violência estrutural, colonialismo, democracia e desenvolvimento, entre 1968 a 2018, seguindo a metodologia Prisma. Centrada na teoria crítica, adotou-se a determinação social como categoria básica para a identificação dos reflexos do colonialismo nos determinantes que caracterizam o perfil epidemiológico do suicídio, tornando possível seu enquadramento como uma “patologia do poder”. Dos dados estatísticos e da revisão sistemática, foram identificados os grupos de risco para o suicídio - os mais afetados pela assimetria de poder, oriunda do colonialismo - mesmo em países de alta renda.

Paul Farmer: Servant to the Poor by Jennie Weiss Block

Reviewed by: Paul Farmer: Servant to the Poor by Jennie Weiss Block Meghan J. Clark Paul Farmer: Servant to the Poor. By Jennie Weiss Block . Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018. 200 pp. $14.95. Paul Farmer: Servant to the Poor . By Jennie Weiss Block. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018. 200 pp. $14.95. From Tracey Kidder's bestselling Mountains beyond Mountains to interviews on CBS Sunday morning, many already feel like they know Dr. Paul Farmer, the man who would heal the world. A radical commitment that those living in poverty are entitled to the same high-quality healthcare as the privileged animates Partners in Health, as well as Farmer's own scholarship and activism. In Paul Farmer: Servant to the Poor, Jennie Weiss Block skillfully and seamlessly weaves together Farmer's personal and professional development with a focus on his rugged, compassionate, intense, and action-oriented spirituality. Beginning with an unconventional upbringing, in which the Farmer family lived on a bus and a boat, Block weaves together Farmer's personal and professional growth while highlighting the influence of [End Page 87] spiritual mentors from Sister Julianna working with Haitian migrant workers in North Carolina to Gustavo Gutierrez, the father of liberation theology. Block narrates Farmer's spiritual journey marked by grace, mercy, and animated by the preferential option for the poor. Pathogens make a preferential option for the poor, therefore shouldn't doctors do so? This simple question is coyly named the epidemiological insight, a doctor's interpretation of the preferential option for the poor etched deeply into Dr. Paul Farmer's soul. It is a story of unwavering hope and imagination. Whether in Boston, Haiti, Rwanda, or Sierra Leone, Farmer's challenging gift is an inability to accept the limits of the status quo in which millions simply do not have access to good quality medical care. As Block begins, "Once in a great while, you meet someone who makes you believe that it is possible to build up the kingdom of God in the here and now. For me and many others, Dr. Paul Farmer is such a person" (1). Like Block, I have long been inspired by Paul Farmer. Pathologies of Power : Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor is a book that significantly influenced my development as a moral theologian. As I read the book, I found myself imagining what might have been had Paul accepted the nomination to lead USAID under President Obama. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested not only in the work of Dr. Farmer but also those committed to global health, human rights, and a lived spirituality of accompaniment. It is a book that would be excellent for undergraduates or book clubs seeking to think more deeply about hope and imagination in the pursuit of justice. Meghan J. Clark St. John's University Copyright © 2020 American Catholic Historical Society

An Essay on Self-Enslavement: The Pathology of Power and Control

This article discusses certain parallels between Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness, Fanon’s discussion of the neurotic inter-relationship between the colonial master and the native, and Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensionality in order to draw an analogy between enslavement and the status of citizen in advanced Western-style societies today. The aim is to explore the exercise of power within these societies and cast light upon the manner in which the discourse of freedom both constitutes and masks submission to power. The argument is made that submission has come to be regarded as the fulfillment of human potential insofar as we have learned to look at ourselves through the eyes of those who exercise power over us, having lost the ability to imagine that the situation in which we live could, and should, be different than it is. The conception of symbolic interaction as it is now typically employed is drawn into question for the difficulties it faces in addressing unbalanced interaction in the power-submission relationship. The concept of nouveau colonialism is developed in order to capture how the relations that once obtained between a metropole and its overseas colonial possessions have in a sense been replicated between those who exercise power and those subject to power within one and the same community.

A republic of petty bureaucrats: Upendra Baxi and the pathologies of civil service jurisprudence

The enactment of the Indian Constitution witnessed an explosion of litigation by civil servants successfully suing the state over questions of appointment, transfers, promotion and benefits. Public service law has generated a voluminous body of jurisprudence and sustained the practice of several lawyers. Upendra Baxi was the first scholar to point out that this jurisprudence poses a fundamental ‘identity crisis’ of the Indian state, where civil servants as allies of their political leaders have no hesitation riding over the rights of citizens but as adversaries come to courts attacking the political leadership for denying them their rights. This paper situates Upendra Baxi’s introduction to Justice Rama Jois’s book on service laws as the basis to understand the pathologies of power within the Indian Republic arguing that civil service litigation demonstrates both the intransigence of postcolonial state power and constructs the autonomy of the judiciary and the legal profession. Civil servants are simultaneously the arm of the state but also provide the labour of the state. To understand Baxi’s intervention, the paper argues, one has to historicize the ‘government job’ in India as a property resource and rethink the bureaucracy as simultaneously embodying the state and being a form of labour for the state.

Sharecropper’s Tuberculosis: Pathologies of Power in a Fatal Outbreak

ABSTRACTTuberculosis Bacilli (TB) is a global scourge that affects poor people and regions. Drawing on Farmer’s (2003) pathologies of power, and a case study approach, we examine the sociostructural landscape of a fatal outbreak of Sharecropper’s TB among African Americans in rural Alabama. In a mixed-method qualitative approach involving oral history, surveys, interviews and documentary analysis, we identified three pathologies that contribute to TB susceptibility: corporate power, land wealth, and structural racism. While medicine can cure non-resistant forms of TB, control of future outbreaks will depend upon a social “cure” such as addressing structural inequality and building community trust in the health system.

The Pathologies of Power: Fear, Honor, Glory, and Hubris in U.S. Foreign Policy

Books about improving U.S. foreign policy are a dime a dozen. But in The Pathologies of Power, Christopher Fettweis offers an unusual take on what he sees as the subpar foreign policy performance of the planet's sole superpower. Fettweis claims that U.S. foreign policy is driven by four pathological beliefs—fear, honor, glory, and hubris—that lead to poor policymaking. The book devotes a chapter to each of the beliefs that Fettweis contends account for foreign policy disasters like the Iraq war and the Vietnam war. Foremost among the pathological beliefs is fear, which is behind the views that the world is full of enemies and that we are living in dangerous times. According to Fettweis, America's paranoia about communism led to costly U.S. involvement in various “geopolitically irrelevant backwaters” (p. 14) during the Cold War. The (neo)conservative view of ever-present danger is unfounded today. The empirical reality is that “there has never been a more peaceful, less violent period of time than the post-Cold War era” (p. 33).

Nutrition, Pathologies of Power and the Need for Health Democracy

The Alma-Ata strategy on primary health care offers a holistic approach to ensuring the right to health and the right to food. However, the trends are going in the opposite direction. Human rights are being undermined by global rules fashioned after the interests of the corporate elite. A new movement for judiciablity of the right to food and the right to health is needed to reverse this trend, as well as international law to rein in the powers of the corporate elite.

The pathologies of power: fear, honor, glory, and hubris in U.S. foreign policy

The pathologies of power: fear, honor, glory, and hubris in U.S. foreign policy

The Disimagination Machine and the Pathologies of Power

The Disimagination Machine and the Pathologies of Power

Renewing Global Governance: demanding rights and justice in the global South

Global inequality is increasing. Global inequalities are an expression of global social injustices and ‘pathologies of power’. Global governance has been posited as a way forward. However, global governance will not deliver justice unless it embraces a more radical vision of what justice means and permits the voices of the marginalised to be heard in spaces of decision making. We identify two important approaches to building more just forms of global governance: the civil society approach, which is useful when it draws attention to the agency of those at the margins of global circuits of power; and the rights-based approach, which can provide opportunities for justice claims by marginalised groups.

Book Review: The Pathology of Power

Book Review: The Pathology of Power

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

Pandemic 2.0: Can Information Technology Help Save The Planet?

The World Health Organization (WHO) hosted the first large scientific meeting about the previously unknown A/H1N1 influenza on 29 April 2009, heading a teleconference that included more than 100 pa...

The Kings and Their Gods: The Pathology of Power

Daniel Berrigan's latest book is a mixture of biblical commentary, current social and political condemnation, and heightened language. Ostensibly the book uses 1 and 2 Kings to show how kings and prophets manipulated their gods for political ends, and how politicians and religious figures of today do likewise. Before the preface there is a note that Berrigan uses the NRSV and NAB, though they are “sometimes slightly altered” (p. v), “[a]nd sometimes he is rendering the biblical text in his own poetic equivalent, or creating a rich interplay of different biblical versions” (p. v). In fact, Berrigan's translation is often so free, his subsequent commentary is based on his own text, not the Bible. For example, in 2 Kings 19:21–28, several verses are omitted while others are inserted to add insults that Isaiah (the author of the oracle) apparently forgot to include against Sennacherib, the “great tawny-flanked bull(y), // I shall tan your hide, flay you, // shall fashion // from leathern pelt // thongs, sandals of my feet” (p. 185). Elsewhere, the lament over the losses of Elijah (in 2 Kings 2:12) and Elisha (in 2 Kings 13:14) are changed to suggest that these prophets were the advisors, “the chariot drivers” of Israel, in order to criticize the use of power by these inferior prophets. While such emendations may seem insignificant if viewed in isolation, the overall effect makes one wonder why Berrigan even uses the Bible, since he changes it at will.

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor.

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human and the New War on the Poor. Farmer, P. Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif, University of California Press, 2005, hardcover, 402 pp, $27.50. Pathologies of Power, is a text that examines medicine in the age of globalized poverty. Farmer writes from the point of view of a physician and anthropologist who has much experience dealing with poverty in his own medical practice in rural Haiti. He challenges us to look beyond the obvions symptoms of the nameless, faceless poor, in order to critically examine societal structures, which are the real causes of poverty and oppression in the world today. The term structural violence is used to describe the unequal distribution of power within the world and the resulting offenses against human dignity. The book begins with a foreword written by economist and former Nobel Peace Prize winner, Amartya Sen. It appears that Farmer is using his mentor, Sen, to extend appeal of his central thesis to a larger audience. This strategy opens the door for Farmer to take many professions to task for their role in the development and maintenance of structural violence. Will we choose to participate in an authentic multidisciplinary dialogue and explore a badly needed paradigm shift of power in order to make the world a better place? In the foreword, Sen states, Paul Farmer teaches us how to stop whistling and start thinking. We have reason to be grateful. Pathologies of Power is then divided into 2 parts. The first part entitled Bearing Witness sets the stage to open our eyes, hearts, and consciousness as Farmer presents case studies of victims of structural violence. He shares stories of his patients and describes how structural violence has impacted not only their lives, but also the choices they and their families have had to make for survival. Farmer brilliantly allows his audience to connect on an emotional and personal level with these characters as a way to engage his readers with the nameless and faceless poor of the world. He then deconstructs, with almost angry chastisement, the policies and structures in place that promote inequality and perpetuate the oppression of the poor. Farmer effectively channels that moral outrage into praxis, which allows his readers to examine the possibilities of change. He is quick to point out that because many of the societal structures that oppress others have been created by humans, they can also be changed by humans if we are willing to accept a paradigm shift of power. According to Farmer, with the possibility of a paradigm shift, one can find hope in making the world a more just place for all. The second part of the book, titled One Physician's Perspective on Human Rights, expands the discussion of the role of structural violence to issues of health care. Farmer's chapters open with dramatic quotations and poems written from the voice of the nameless, faceless poor. This strategy is an example of critical pedagogy used to further engage the reader in the serious topic of human rights. Farmer takes his readers through exhausting moralizing rhetoric, and yet, in this process, he is able to create a sense of hopefulness. Aid, rather than trade, initiatives continue to perpetuate the cycle of oppression. He also implicates international lending organizations, the World Trade Organization, and development projects. The fact that we all play a role in structural violence either by our actions or our complacency can be disconcerting. Farmer, however, challenges us to look beyond the present situation, to engage in creating a better vision of the future, and to work for change within the system. After exposing the problems associated with structural violence, Farmer makes a case for his solution to the global problem of structural violence. He examines the various social justice models of charity, development, and liberation. In Farmer's opinion, charity models are deeply flawed as a system of oppressors helping the oppressed perpetuate the theme of structural violence. …

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor – By Paul Farmer

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor – By Paul Farmer