Story Of Human Rights Research Articles

Intersectionalizing CEDAW

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is undergoing a process which can be described as “intersectionalization”, in which the CEDAW Committee proliferates a specific interpretation of CEDAW. This contribution aims to contextualize this process in the larger debate on the interplay between feminist theory and human rights. It examines what the development means for the discussion on the subject of human rights. Even though this development offers new perspectives, it is a chapter in the classic story of human rights: a story about inclusion. We analyze how different feminist approaches (re-)define the subject of human rights – and specifically women’s human rights – and try to figure out how inclusive such a subject can be. Our argument is that the CEDAW Committee, in the process of intersectionalizing CEDAW, (cautiously) moves to blur the boundaries of the sex/gender binary that underlies the treaty, challenging the treaty’s exclusive focus on the partial human rights subject “woman”.

Vernacular rights cultures

Vernacular rights cultures tells a different story of human rights. The book moves away from the dominant narrative of universal human rights, based on western history and epistemology, pointing readers towards ‘vernacular rights cultures’. Sumi Madhok complicates the unidirectional account instead, narrating a subaltern story of rights that is foregrounded in ‘struggles and contestations over rights’ in the south Asian context. This attentiveness to the ‘vernacular’ refers to the ways marginalized groups articulate rights claims, and to the political imaginaries and subjectivities that their articulations engender. In the first three chapters, Madhok critically engages with the multiple literatures on human rights and presents her conceptual framework. The author takes on board the robust and growing critique of the racialized basis underpinning the prevailing human rights law and discourse. Then, Madhok goes further and presents an alternative genealogy, embedded in the local notions of haq. According to the author, the word haq translates to ‘right’, but ‘in the course of its travels, it has gathered complex meanings and iterations that inform political imaginaries, subjectivities and political cultures of rights and rights claim-making’ (p. 1). This transregional term appears in multiple languages across the subcontinent, and the book conveys its historical roots and contemporary usage not only in south Asia, but also in the Middle East and North Africa. The fact that haq is transregional allows the author to traverse borders and trace power struggles over rights across states and institutions in India and Pakistan. This is particularly important in a postcolonial context of contestation over state borders and associated citizenship rights.

Kitchen sink dramas and the search for common culture: a comparative analysis of migrant domestic worker abuse in Hong Kong’s English and Chinese-language news media

What can cultural studies contribute to our understanding of Hong Kong’s print and broadcast media? We reorient the current preoccupation with politics in Hong Kong’s local media to focus upon culture. Drawing from cultural studies, and specifically the search for ‘common culture’, we explain divergent perspectives on migrant domestic worker (MDW) abuse in Hong Kong’s English and Chinese-language print and broadcast media. Whereas the English-language media relies upon international experts and NGOs to tell a story of human rights abuses against MDWs, the Chinese-language media is more likely to take us into local homes and to present the employer and community as victims of trickery from domestic workers and agencies. We use the kitchen sink drama as a metaphor to describe this reportage. What forces shape the production of these dramas? and what are the implications for the public understanding of MDW abuse and human rights?

Between Dialogue and Denunciation: The World Council of Churches, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights during the Cold War

While the historiography on the religious Cold War has tended to focus on Christian anticommunism, the World Council of Churches (WCC) sought to transcend the Cold War while simultaneously advancing religious freedom in the Soviet Union. This article connects the WCC's ecclesiastical diplomacy to the wider story of human rights, from which religion has too often been excluded. The WCC's quest for Christian fellowship led it to integrate the Russian Orthodox Church into its membership, but this commitment generated tensions with the rise of Soviet dissidence. Moreover, the WCC's turn towards the left and the Third World contrasted with newly ascendant voices for human rights in the 1970s: Amnesty International's depoliticised liberalism, evangelical anticommunism, and the Vatican under John Paul II. Thus, the WCC, an early and prominent transnational voice for human rights, ran afoul of shifts in both the Cold War and the politics of protest.

“I Don’t Want to Live in a World Where People Die Every Day Simply Because They Are Poor”: From the Treatment Action Campaign to Equal Education, from Stories of Human Rights to the Poetics of Inequality

This essay explores the rhetorical and genre differences between human rights arguments and inequality arguments, speculating that the former privileges narrative as a dominant mode of representation and that the latter frequently require a poetics—paradoxically the poetics of numbers. Two South African NGOs—the Treatment Action Campaign, whose rationale deployed a health and human rights framework, and Equal Education, an organization deeply invested in arguments about inequalities in education and opportunity—are presented as examples of the defining contrast between the ways that human rights and inequality arguments broach the question of justice.

Victims' Stories of Human Rights Abuse: The Ethics of Ownership, Dissemination, and Reception

AbstractThis paper addresses three commentaries on Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights. In response to Vittorio Bufacchi, it argues that asking victims to tell their stories needn't be coercive or unjust and that victims are entitled to decide whether and under what conditions to tell their stories. In response to Serene Khader, it argues that empathy with victims' stories can contribute to building a culture of human rights provided that measures are taken to overcome the implicit biases and colonialist interpellations she identifies. In response to Andrea Westlund, it proposes a taxonomy of types of narrative closure and offers some arguments to strengthen her view that empathy with victims' stories endows audience members with a new reason and new motivation to support human rights.

By addressing life trajectories and political violence, human rights education can overcome radicalizing narratives

As the needs and interests of young people are shifting under the influence of demographics and other social developments, 'new stories' have started to attract many that undermine the human rights narrative and nurture radical attitudes. This has consequences for human rights education (HRE). As competing narratives have gained a foothold in major target audiences of HRE, the latter has to realize it is facing an uphill battle. The evidence suggests that HRE can no longer rely on the mere transfer of knowledge and that the 'story of human rights' needs to be told in completely new ways. If HRE aims to change attitudes to be more inclusive and respectful, and to promote a struggle for justice, it has to make its story heard and win people over. Here HRE faces a central dilemma: how to promote fundamental freedoms while including the freedom not to subscribe to these same values? Instead of conceptual persuasion, emphasis should be put more on the affect, and relate to people's lived experiences. Crucially, HRE has to be prepared to make room for the discussion of the paradoxes of political violence. By making clear that it has vital relevance for its audience and can better answer the question of what someone should meaningfully do in life, HRE can change the narrative.

Lives rendered invisible: Bearing witness to human suffering

This paper explores the ethical challenges involved in the ways public representation structures our experiences of atrocities and facilitates an adequate awareness of and response towards the suffering of others. It points out that such an analysis should not exhaust itself in answering what makes public representations of human suffering ethically suspicious and intolerable, but should rather extend this task by clarifying how the public forms sentiments about their social and political reality by elucidating under which conditions public representation promotes broader political agendas. One of the central tenets of human rights advocacy is the widespread conviction that exposure to images and stories of human rights abuse has a mobilizing effect on western audience(s) whose exposure to such knowledge can motivate them to intervene and prevent future atrocities. In order to assess the basic implications of such a conviction we must answer at least three principal clusters of questions. First, how do public representations of atrocities affect individuals and their capacities to conceive and respond to social injustices and the suffering of others? Under what circumstances may agents respond effectively to shocking content? Second, how do social powers operate within the field of perception in order to control how the viewing public is affected? And how do these effects inform and galvanize political support or opposition regarding concrete historical events? Finally, what can be said about the responsibilities of visual representation? Whose agency is it that images inform, and what reforms are necessary to make representations of suffering ethically effective means to encourage better acknowledgment of individual and collective responsibilities that would motivate the public to meet its moral and political obligations? This paper ultimately suggests that in order for politically implicated images to have an immediate critical effect on individuals and their agency, they need to cultivate alternative modes of perception.Article first published online: 21 DEC 2015

A humane story of human rights

A humane story of human rights

Teaching Progress: A Critique of the Grand Narrative of Human Rights as Pedagogy for Marginalized Students

With the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, education about human rights became an important focus of the new human rights regime and a core method of spreading its values throughout the world. This story of human rights is consistently presented as a progressive teleology that contextualizes the expansion of rights within a larger grand narrative of liberalization, emancipation, and social justice. This paper examines the disjuncture between the grand narrative on international movements for human rights and social justice and the lived experiences of marginalized students in urban environments in the United States. Drawing on our experience as professors who teach human rights, social justice, and social movements courses at an urban, four-year college in Providence, R.I., with a student body which includes large populations of students who are of color, first-generation, economically disadvantaged, and nontraditional in other ways, we explore the relevance and impact of these grand narratives for the lives of our students and their sense of agency. In particular, we advocate for a critical and transformational approach to human rights pedagogy to counter and overcome the pervasive individualization that undergirds the grand narrative of human rights. We argue that a critical (and radical) human rights pedagogy must evaluate the position of the individual in modern life if liberation through human rights law and activism is to be possible.

Shadows of Universalism: The Untold Story of Human Rights around 1948

Previous articleNext article No AccessArticleShadows of Universalism: The Untold Story of Human Rights around 1948Lydia H. LiuLydia H. Liu Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 40, Number 4Summer 2014Around 1948: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Transformation, edited by Leela Gandhi and Deborah L. Nelson Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/676413 Views: 1023Total views on this site Citations: 18Citations are reported from Crossref © 2014 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/14/4004-0006$10.00. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Meredith Terretta Heart Transplants, Legislating Death, and Disruptive Anti-Apartheid Advocacy, Law and History Review 40, no.22 (Apr 2022): 335–369.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248021000547Sadia Saeed Decolonization Struggles at the United Nations: The Question of Algeria, 1955-1961, European Journal of Sociology 8 (Dec 2021): 1–35.https://doi.org/10.1017/S000397562100028XErin Soros I Call This Institutionalized Rape, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 43 (Sep 2021): 71–80.https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-43-006Simon Marginson, Lili Yang Individual and collective outcomes of higher education: a comparison of Anglo-American and Chinese approaches, Globalisation, Societies and Education 17 (May 2021): 1–31.https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2021.1932436Jingqiu Ren, Joe Feagin Face mask symbolism in anti-Asian hate crimes, Ethnic and Racial Studies 44, no.55 (Nov 2020): 746–758.https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2020.1826553Tamara T. Chin The Afro-Asian Silk Road: Chinese Experiments in Postcolonial Premodernity, PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 136, no.11 (Jan 2021): 17–38.https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812920000061Julie Fraser Social Institutions and International Human Rights Law Implementation, 30 (Sep 2020).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108777711Charlotte Steinorth Rewriting the Past: The Global South in Human Rights History, Global Policy 10, no.33 (Aug 2019): 445–448.https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12727Robin Ramcharan, Bertrand Ramcharan Conclusion, (Nov 2018): 221–231.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2104-7_10Roland Burke, James Kirby The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Politics and Provisions (1945–1948), (Mar 2018): 1–23.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4516-5_2-1Roland Burke, James Kirby The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Politics and Provisions (1945–1948), (Sep 2018): 25–47.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5206-4_2Pinghua Sun The Relevant Literature on P. C. Chang by Scholars and Others, (Mar 2018): 37–101.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8370-9_3Darren Newbury , Visual Studies 33, no.11 ( 2018): 41.https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2018.1426229Kelly Oliver Earthquakes: Deconstructing Humanitarianism, Derrida Today 10, no.11 (May 2017): 38–50.https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2017.0141Paul Betts Universalism and its Discontents: Humanity as a Twentieth-Century Concept, (Oct 2016): 51–70.https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666101458.51Hadji Bakara Poetry in the Shadow of Human Rights, American Literary History 28, no.33 (Sep 2016): 512–541.https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajw030Jessica Whyte Legitimacy and the shadows of universalism: a response to Meine’s ‘Debating legitimacy transnationally’, Global Discourse 6, no.33 (Jul 2016): 347–351.https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2016.1207941Gary Wilder Here/Hear Now Aimé Césaire!, South Atlantic Quarterly 115, no.33 (Jul 2016): 585–604.https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3608653

No concessions: the life of Yap Thiam Hien, Indonesian human rights lawyer

The compelling personal story of human rights lawyer Yap Thiam Hien (1913-1989) brings decades of modern Indonesian history to life. No Concessions is a penetrating analysis of the trajectory of the Chinese minority in Indonesia over close to a century and the remarkable making of a civic leader. Without abandoning his ethnic roots, Yap transcended them by becoming a courageous legal defender of civil and human rights of all oppressed Indonesians, including former communists and radical Muslims.

Philosophers, Activists, and Radicals: A Story of Human Rights and Other Scandals

Paradoxically, the political success of human rights is often taken to be its philosophical failing. From US interventions to International NGOs to indigenous movements, human rights have found a place in diverse political spaces, while being applied to disparate goals and expressed in a range of practices. This heteronomy is vital to the global appeal of human rights, but for traditional moral and political philosophy it is something of a scandal. This paper is an attempt to understand and theorize human rights on the terrain of the social actors who put them to use, particularly radical activists that have a more critical relationship to human rights. Attempting to avoid the philosophical pathology of demanding that the world reflect our conception of it, we base our reflection on the ambiguous, and potentially un-patterned, texture of human rights practice—taking seriously the idea that human rights express a relationship of power, importantly concerned with its legitimate arrangement and limitation. In both the philosophical literature and human rights activism, there seems to be a consensus on basic rights as undeniable moral principles of political legitimacy. This use of human rights is contrasted with radical social movements that reject this conception of rights as ideological and illegitimate, making specific reference to the Zapatista movement (Chiapas, Mexico) and the Landless Peasant Movement of Brazil (MST, from the Portuguese Movimento dos trabalhadores rurais Sem Terra), which are critical of the human rights discourse, but also make strategic use of the idea and offer alternative articulations of political legitimacy.

Unfinished Business

The full story of human rights abuse in the ‘war on terror’ remains secret, says Jameel Jaffer

Resilience in Families and Communities: Latin American Contributions from the Psychology of Liberation

A systemic understanding of resilience is expanded by studying the meaning of hope and solidarity in a Latin American context facing war and political repression. Understanding the language used in Latin America to refer to coping with adversity has valuable theoretical and therapeutic potential. This article compares, integrates, and further develops Froma Walsh’s systemic view of resilience by discussing Latin American literature that addresses the notions of hope and solidarity as pathways to cope with social trauma. The concept of collective resilience is introduced based on the stories of human rights activists who developed the capacity to cope with adversity. Collective resilience refers to the coping processes that occur in reference to and dependent on a given social context. These processes aim to rebuild and sustain social relationships to heal the wounds of trauma, the losses of war, and the reconstruction of a sense of belonging and personal identity.

Human Rights in the United Nations

world viewpoint on human rights must be that of the United Nations, and the reconciliation of conflicting views must be the outcome of the patient activity of the United Nations in endeavouring, under the Charter, to promote human rights and fundamental freedoms. Therefore the story of human rights at an international level is none other than the story of human rights in the United Nations. This very vast subject goes back ultimately to the four freedoms proclaimed by President Roosevelt as lying at the base of the issues of the second world war freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of speech and freedom of belief. There was a very strong feeling during the second world war that this time military victory was not enough, but that an end must be put to the possibility of violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms by tyrannies and dictatorships. When the first draft of the Charter of the United Nations was drawn up at Dumbarton Oaks certain minimum provisions concerning this matter found their way to the text of the draft, and at the San Francisco Conference, largely due to the enlightened activity of certain non-governmental organizations particularly religious organizations these provisions were considerably amplified ; in 1946 the Commission on Human Rights was set up for the express purpose of fulfilling the promise of the Charter in regard to this matter. This Commission, headed by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, than whom, no person was more fit to carry on the inspiration of her husband in this general field, worked assiduously for two years on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and when the Declaration was proclaimed by the General Assembly in December 1948 every word and comma and semicolon was gone over most carefully several times by the chancelleries and representatives of some fifty-eight governments, so that, considering the supreme importance of its subjectmatter, this document marked, on the theoretical side, a veritable mile-