Universal Perspective Research Articles

Human Rights Treaty Bodies, Proceduralization and the Development of Human Rights Jus Commune

The obligations set out in UN human rights treaties are open-textured and evolutionary, therefore they present a particular challenge in articulating the basis of a substantive breach that is universally applicable. Universal applicability, however, is a primary goal of international human rights and fundamental to the recognition of a jus commune of human rights. As the specialist supervisory mechanisms of the core UN human rights treaties, the human rights treaty bodies must balance the progressive realisation of rights against the historic state sensitivity to interference in domestic affairs, an exercise that has often put the treaty bodies at odds with states. Review of treaty body jurisprudence suggests that migration toward a procedural approach to human rights violations may resonate more naturally with states due to the simplicity of establishing procedural infractions. This observation stems from examining how treaty body jurisprudence is utilised in national judicial decisions. It is argued that proceduralized decisions aid in the establishment of human rights jus commune by slowly moving away from value-based determinations, a practice that sits more easily with States. This migration is reflected in two identifiable practices. The first sees states in breach of obligations based on the failure to adhere to rules of procedure or procedural obligations under a treaty. The second bases a breach determination on the procedural dimension of a substantive right. The lingering question is whether this is a positive development in the overall protection of human rights and how this impacts the growing common law of human rights. An examination of treaty body jurisprudence across the UN treaty bodies will allow the proceduralization of human rights at the international level to be evaluated in terms of individual human rights protection. The tedious balance that must be maintained in order to advance the human rights jus commune should be evaluated from a universal perspective to assess whether proceduralization of rights adds to or detracts from the overall human rights project.

Freedom of Expression, Laïcité and Islam in France: The Tension between Two Different (Universal) Perspectives

ABSTRACTIn France, freedom of expression is perceived as a sort of liberté matricielle, a matrix of other fundamental freedoms. As such, it is reflected in many constitutional provisions, including those referring to religion. In addition, the practical exercise of freedom of expression remains strictly linked with the principle of laïcité, which is part of the institutional, legal and intellectual history of the French Republic and has even become the basis of its founding “values.” All this, however, also implies an accentuation of individual freedom of expression, which normally takes precedence over the protection of religions, sometimes justifying caricature of divinities, rules, rites and symbols. The legal cases related to the right to satirical expression are examples of this. The article underlines the role of freedom of expression in the light of the principle of laïcité, which normally rejects the communitarian dimension of religious rights, which may explain some important aspects of, on the one hand, the evolution of legislation regarding both hate speech and blasphemy within French liberal constitutionalism and, on the other, the relationship between freedom of expression and the secular state. This approach offers a possibility of better evaluating existing French law in relation to some religious nomoi groups, specifically, Islamic organizations. These issues are particularly analysed from two perspectives: the right to criticize or challenge religions and the right to satirize. This analysis makes it possible to identify the legal limits of freedom of expression before and after the 2015 Charlie Hebdo tragedy and highlights the difficulties faced by the so-called laïcité à la française in dealing with today's multicultural societies. The need emerges for a proper balance to be struck between religious diversity and protection of human rights – not only the rights of groups to be different, but also the rights of persons within these groups, which also involves the efforts of religious denominations to articulate their claims in order to make them more compatible with constitutional rights, including those referring to freedom of expression.

Examining Post-Racial Ideology in Higher Education

In this chapter, the author explores connections between post-racial ideology and exclusionary practices in higher education. Post-racialists contend that race-conscious practices and policies in higher education are no longer necessary because of significant racial progress in society. In contrast, the author argues that post-racialism extends a key tradition of higher education—the mediation of self-serving ideology for the culturally dominant group from seemingly objective stances. After presenting the historical influence of White privilege on higher education policies and practices, the author outlines two current examples of post-racialism in postsecondary education—the continued retreatment from race-conscious admissions policies and the persistence of race-neutral, universalist perspectives of knowledge. In light of continuing racial stratification for postsecondary opportunities in the United States, contesting post-racialism is critical for scholars and policy makers interested in educational equity and justice.

Mental Health Research in the Global Era: Training the Next Generation.

Psychiatric disorders are among the leading cause of disability worldwide, yet fewer than 25 % of affected individuals are estimated to have access to treatment. In many low-income settings, it is estimated that less than 10 % of affected individuals are able to access basic mental health care and, even when they do, it is often below minimum ethical and clinical standards [1]. The discipline of global mental health is dedicated to reducing mental health disparities within and between countries by preventing mental disorders and improving access to psychiatric treatment, particularly in low-resource settings [2]. The study of cross-cultural mental health dates back to the late 1800s, when European psychiatrists and anthropologists began to identify and document locally specific mental diseases in their colonies [3]. Transcultural psychiatry branched into two research traditions: “relativists,” who were focused on characterizing culture-bound syndromes, and “universalists,” who sought to identify universality across cultures in the manifestation of mental disorders [2]. Both research traditions emerged from a colonial paradigm, wherein Western researchers studied the non-Western “other.” Whereas relativists relied primarily on qualitative and ethnographic methods [4], universalists employed epidemiological methods to estimate the cross-cultural prevalence of mental disorders, as defined by Western criteria. Cross-cultural mental health research has evolved significantly from its colonial roots to what is now a global partnership model emphasizing interdependency, bi-directional knowledge generation and transfer, and shared ownership (see Fig. 1). Though the relativist and universalist perspectives still exist, most global mental health researchers have gravitated towards an integrationist perspective, recognizing both broad universality in mental disorders across cultures as well as meaningful cross-cultural variation. Global mental health research now requires an interdisciplinary approach to bridge multiple perspectives and address complex questions related to cultural adaptation, effectiveness, dissemination, and implementation. It is grounded in the social justice and human rights perspective that all people have the right to health and mental health [5], with an emphasis on creating sustainable interventions to reduce mental health disparities. This paradigm shift has many implications for the training of the next generation of global mental health researchers, including both identifying and developing critical new skill sets to propel the field forward. Fig. 1 History and evolution of global mental health research and training

Hacia una historia social de la filosofía. Preludios a un programa de Investigación

Partiendo de los atisbos de historia social de la literatura que teorizó elfilósofo colombiano Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, el presente ensayo explora laposibilidad de postular un programa de investigación llamado historia socialde la filosofía que dé cuenta de los procesos de producción, circulación,distribución y consumo de la filosofía en América Latina. Esta propuestahistoriográfica se presenta como una rama de la sociología del saber, y nointenta sustituir la tarea de seguir filosofando sin más en la región, es decir,de continuar haciendo filosofía con vocación de universalidad.

The Chinese Dream of a More Progressive Welfare State: Progress and Challenges

“The Chinese Dream” and its ideational precursors in official discourse touch upon issues of social policymaking. More specifically, official China has stated the goal of achieving a “moderate” or “appropriate” universal welfare state in order to mitigate increasing inequality and the individualization of social risk. Consequently, the new millennium witnessed a wave of social reforms in mainland China, the most significant of which were arguably within the policy fields of health insurance, pensions and unemployment protection. This paper reviews reform efforts within these three policy fields and discusses progress and looming challenges with the concept of universalism as the yardstick. From the perspective of universalism, the social right dimensions of coverage (the share of the population included), generosity (benefit levels or adequacy of welfare proved for those included) and financing (such as state, contributions or private) are quintessential. Coverage of social protection has increased significantly with new schemes in all three policy fields. The hukou divide in coverage of social insurance is not as pronounced as before, especially in health insurance. However, major challenges still persist. Declining benefit generosity or adequacy has been a tendency in both pensions and unemployment protection. The pension system also faces problems of financial fragmentation and unsustainability. The health insurance system is still inadequate in terms of protection against health risks, particularly serious or chronic illnesses. These issues are more pronounced in schemes catering to rural residents or urban residents outside the labor market. This reflects that schemes for urban workers are still much more generous. In this regard, recent tentative efforts to integrate the divided welfare system should be noted.

Childhood: A Universalist Perspective for How Israel is using Child Arrest and Detention to further its Colonial Settler Project

AbstractDrawing from reports and documentation published by Israeli and Palestinian human rights and children's rights organizations, and establishing the analyses from the voices and stories of Palestinian children suffering from politically motivated abuses, the present paper examines child abuse in settler colonial contexts. Through the analyses of the various voices, narratives, and reports, the paper examines the inscription of state power over children's bodies and lives, marking the connection between biopolitics and geopolitics, as well as the resultant suffering of children. The analyses of the collected data suggest that knowledge about child maltreatment and the violations of children's rights cannot be dislocated from the history, politics, and structure of settler colonialism. The paper concludes by arguing that living a childhood situated in spaces of exterminability, as the voices of the studied children reveal, should be defined as child abuse and maltreatment. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

LO GROTESCO Y EL ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO LATINOAMERICANO THE GROTESQUE AND THE LATIN AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY ART

El presente artículo analiza el discurso grotesco como discurso estético/político contracultural, enalgunas de las obras de los artistas José Alberto Hernández de Costa Rica, y Regina José Galindo deGuatemala. Como representantes del arte conceptual latinoamericano, estos dos artistas contemporáneosexploran elementos de la realidad humana tanto desde una perspectiva universal, como regional.Mediante el uso de la estética grotesca, Hernández y Galindo rompen con los estándares artísticos delmainstream, explorando distintos medios, técnicas, e incluso temáticas que horrorizan, disgustan al/laespectador/a, pero a la vez lo/la atraen y fascinan, al mostrarle una perspectiva opuesta a la estéticatradicional del arte occidental, y dándole una voz propia al arte latinoamericano.

Images of Leadership Development From the Inside Out

The Problem With the codification of leadership into frameworks, models, and theories that can be taught, leadership, an art that is essentially subjective, symbolic, and context-specific, is “translated into” an objective, pragmatic, and universal domain. Development can be elusive when approached from this universal perspective if external models distract leaders from exploring their own views and practices of leadership. The Solution This article explores the subjective and symbolic reality of those in leadership roles to discover what leaders can learn about their leadership and its development from awareness of their own mental models. These models are illuminated by an exploration of leaders’ naturally occurring metaphors and implicit leadership theories (ILTs) using clean language to acknowledge experience exactly as described while minimizing external influence or interpretation. The Stakeholders Leadership development practitioners can benefit from the innovative personalized approach to surfacing and exploring leaders’ own metaphors facilitated by clean language, offered in this article. Examples are given of the range of leadership metaphors surfaced with this method. Researchers can appreciate a novel approach to qualitative research interviewing and identify future research in surfacing ILTs through naturally occurring metaphor facilitated by clean language.

Scientific Study Awareness of Science and Technology Teachers

The purpose of this study is to reveal whether the science and technology teachers working at primary schools have the habit to read the scientific studies in the recent year and are informed about the studies, and use the information they obtained from there. The study is a qualitative study and survey pattern has been used. The study group of Turkey consists of 51 science and technology teachers (of which 24 are female teachers and 27 are male teachers) working at primary schools located in three cities of Turkey including a metropolitan city. A survey consisting of structured and semi-structured questions prepared for the purpose of the study, which was drawn up by the researchers, was used to collect the data. As a result of the analysis of the research data, of 51 teachers involved in the study group, 37 stated that they have read scientific studies in the recent year and 14 stated that they have not read any scientific study. The teachers stated that they follow the scientific studies mainly on the Internet and that they follow these studies for their personal and professional development, to keep protected against misinformation and to gain a universal perspective.

Irish cosmopolitanism: location and dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett

Looking at the writing of three Irish expatriates who lived in Trieste, London, and Paris, Nels Pearson challenges conventional critical trends that view their work as either affirming Irish anticolonial sentiment or embracing international identity. In reality, he argues, these writers work constantly back and forth between a sense of national belonging that remains incomplete and ideas of human universality tied to their new global environments. For these and many other Irish writers, national and international concerns do not conflict, but overlap--and the interplay between them motivates Irish modernism. Joyce's Ulysses strives to articulate the interdependence of an Irish identity and a universal perspective. Bowen's exiled, unrooted characters were never firmly rooted in the first place. And in Beckett, the unsettled origin is felt most keenly when it is abandoned for exile. These writers demonstrate the displacement felt by many Irish citizens in an ever-changing Ireland unsteadied by long and turbulent decolonization. Ultimately, their work displays a twofold struggle to pinpoint national identity while adapting to a fluid cosmopolitan world.

How business students view corruption, and why this should concern us: insights from Lebanon, Romania and the United States

When seeking to understand corruption in its ongoing temporal context, it is useful to consider business students. Because of their high numbers and the kinds of jobs they enter, they have a key role to play in challenging or sustaining corruption in their societies. This exploratory study focuses on these people in three countries in different regions – the USA, Romania and Lebanon – and asks ‘How does long-standing corruption in a country shape their attitudes toward bribery?’ Using a case-study methodology structured along four theoretical perspectives – universalism, cultural relativism, ethical relativism and consequentialism – the study suggests that, when viewed from a universalist perspective, students in corrupt societies may be more tolerant of corrupt practice than those living in less corrupt countries. Thus, rather depressingly, those who should be part of the solution may actually be part of the problem.

The linguistic encoding of space in child Mandarin: A corpus-based study

AbstractThis study investigates the acquisition of Mandarin spatial phrases from the perspective of language universality and specificity. The potential language universals discussed in this study include aspect shift (

Universal Elements in Saudi Novel: A Study of Al-Gosaibi’s “Freedom Apartment” and Alem’s “The Dove’s Necklace”

In spite of the short history of the Saudi fiction, compared with the genre of poetry and with the rise of novel in other Arab countries like Egypt, Lebanon and Iraqi, Saudi novelists start to occupy a remarkable part of the space of Arab narration. Although Saudi novelists face the challenge of a restrictive cultural milieu, they seek to go beyond the local and regional levels and maintain a real significant universal presence. This study is a critical reaction to an outstanding attitude that colors the reception of Saudi fictional works. In reading of Saudi narrative texts readers, critics and scholars obviously focus on the local and regional aspects, and consciously or unconsciously ignore the universal perspectives that characterize their thematic and technical concerns. The study, accordingly, explores the world of Saudi fiction, concentrating on the question of universality, a concern which has been and will remain a core issue of critical and scholarly controversy. With reference to selected works, the study is an attempt to shed light on the universal aspects in Saudi novel. The basic and core premise of the study, then, is that the production of some Saudi novelists is rich in universal elements. The study concentrates on Gazi Al-Gosaibi (1940 – 2010) and Rajaa Alem (1956 – present) as writers representing the search for universality in Saudi novel. Al-Gosaibi’s Freedom Apartment (1994) and Alem’s The Doves’ Necklace (2010) are works rich in persistent universal narrative themes and images. The main objective of the study is to show how these two texts, like many others, incarnate and present both Saudi culture and universal human values. With reference to these two novels, the researchers seek to prove the reliability of the main premise of the study. Keywords: Challenge Saudi novel, Universal elements of novel, Human values, Culture, Comparative literature

The textuality of diagonal ornamentation: Historical transformations of signification from the Baltic perspective

This paper deals with textual aspects of the geometric diagonal linear ornamentation that appears on traditional woven Lithuanian bands. Taking into consideration diachronic, local as well as universal perspectives, it aims to determine and classify the basic elements of the ornament that relate to the development of textuality. Previous investigations of Baltic and Lithuanian textile ornaments have been based on a purely geometric analysis of ornamental form, or on creating linguistic inventories of folk pattern denominations. This paper describes a unique, elaborated, interdisciplinary method for studying such ornaments based on historical-typological comparative analyses, the classification of patterns with regard to their form and meaning, and the semiotic interpretation of mythopoetic images of patterns names. Further, the paper discusses whether an authentic folk classification and a tradition of typology based on the forms of patterns and names can be detected. From the traditional point of view the main meaning-carrying element of this ornamentation is the type of pattern. Therefore, reconstructions and interpretations of the semantic field of patterns’ signification may be based on the mythopoetic context of folk culture.

O pojęciu sprawiedliwości w pismach Emmanuela Levinasa

Celem poniższych analiz jest eksplikacja, ujednoznacznienie i przystępne wyłożenie znaczenia pojęcia sprawiedliwość, występującego w pismach Emmanuela Levinasa. Cel to o tyle ważny, że pojęcie to – jak mam nadzieję wykazać – jest jednym z kluczowych pojęć spajających konstrukcję myślową filozofii Levinasa, a sam Levinas – jak z przekonaniem sądzę – jest jednym z ważniejszych myślicieli XX stulecia; nie wspominając już o wadze teoretycznej i politycznej samego tego pojęcia w perspektywie uniwersalnej.

Deepening the consequences of double fit for organisational performance

Purpose– This paper aims to go a step further in the analysis of double fit in the human resource management (HRM) strategy context, exploring how its effect on performance is influenced by employees’ perceptions about the HRM strategy. Traditionally, the literature has considered the need for a double fit (horizontal and vertical) in the design of HRM strategies. However, as recent critical reviews have argued, a deeper theoretical analysis seems to be needed to understand fully how they affect organisational performance, and why firms with similar levels of alignment have different human resource outcomes.Design/methodology/approach– Based on the literature review, the paper proposes a new theoretical model combining two fields of the strategic HRM literature which had been traditionally disconnected: the double fit approach and the literature on employee satisfaction and involvement. The design of the HRM strategy is reviewed considering the classical distinction between universalistic, contingent, contextual and configurational perspectives.Findings– The findings of this paper provide an alternative model to examine the double fit in the HRM strategy context.Originality/value– Drawing on these approaches, the paper proposes the introduction of the “system strength” construct, which measures the perceived robustness of the HRM system, as a moderator of the effects of double fit on organisational performance.

Getting on the Same Page: Expanding Student Support Services to Increase Candidate Success and Educator Accountability

Today’s teacher candidates frequently exhibit confusion and express discouragement while navigating the expectations of their educational journeys and career goals. Characteristically, many candidates tend to be first-generation college students limited in universal knowledge, global travels, diverse experiences, and multiple perspectives. Contemporary candidates continue to live at or near home, work full- or part-time, and intend to seek teaching positions in their local communities. Overall, they appear restricted in individual ingenuity and academic acumen contributing to personal, professional, and pedagogical competence and confidence. Thus, faculty specializing in middle and secondary education customized a College of Education student support system to assist their candidates. This article describes the department services, candidate interactions, faculty growth, and program benefits through narrative enquiry addressing thematic, structural, dialogic, and visual aspects of their student support services and educator accountability.

Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Leadership Styles in Nigerian Work Organisations

This research project investigated four managerial leadership styles in Nigerian organizations. The research question that the research tries to address is: to what extent are the leadership styles expressed in modern management theories consistent with Nigerian Traditional values? The findings do confirm that the perceived leadership style in the organizations by the managers is autocratic, the preferred style is the paternalistic and the rejected is the autocratic. For about one in five Nigerian managers, the democratic style is the most often rejected. The study challenges the validity of dominant Western universal perspectives in managerial leadership in traditional African organizations. The study suggests that elements of traditional values pose serious challenge to Nigerian managers’ ability to adopt traditional and modern management practice that can improve the effectiveness of leadership in their organizations

Hegel, Imperialism, and Universal History

Abstract A growing body of scholarship has addressed Hegel's analysis of the social question and of European expansionism. An equally significant literature has focused on his philosophy of history, discussing its Eurocentrism or even his racist distortions. Study of the link between Hegel's political economy and his philosophy of history reveals the centrality of labor and of historical evolution in his work. This permitted Hegel to overcome, in part, the naturalizing approach of the classical economists and to identify some contradictions of the system. As he also ended up by naturalizing it, however, Hegel promoted European expansionism on the basis of a Eurocentric vision that clashes with the universalist perspective of the Philosophy of Right.