The rights of (future) humans qua humans

Human rights are rights held “simply in virtue of humanity.” In unpacking this claim, we find that theories of human rights disclose (1) something about what we understand a minimally decent human life to be and (2) who we consider to belong within a community of rights-bearers. In this article, I address two interrelated questions: When and why do future persons have standing as rights-bearing members of a shared moral community? Are the rights held by future generations best expressed in the “greening” of existing rights or in a new distinctly environmental right? I argue that human rights theorists miss an important element of the human qua human if they take ecological embeddedness to be contingently rather than necessarily relevant to human rights. I therefore argue that there are reasons to favor a new distinctly environmental human right.     

Human rights education in US social work: Is the mandate reaching the field?

Abstract

Social work education in the United States takes place not only in classrooms but also in the many workplaces where students complete their mandatory internships. This practicum, known as “field education,” is social work’s “signature pedagogy.” Although efforts have been made to integrate human rights education (HRE) into US social work education and the Council on Social Work Education now mandates a human rights competency, little research has examined how and whether the HRE mandate is implemented in field education. This article examines the impact of HRE on social work field education by focusing on one state—Florida. For this study, we surveyed 158 Florida field educators about their human rights knowledge and practices and conducted telephone interviews with the staff members who coordinate student internships at six social work schools. The data paint a complex picture. Although strides to foster students’ ability to apply human rights understanding in field education have been made, sustained institutional support for integrating HRE in field is needed at the university and associational level. True integration of HRE into field education will only be achieved when all educators receive the support they need to become educated on social work as a human rights practice.     

From the curriculum to the classroom: The urgent need for preservice human rights teacher education in the United States

Abstract

Despite recent progress made by the human rights education movement in the United States to bring human rights education into curriculum standards, textbooks, and classrooms, preservice and in-service teachers have few opportunities to receive human rights education themselves. I argue that future teachers urgently need to receive preservice human right teacher education for a number of reasons. First, social studies curriculum standards in forty-two US states include human rights standards (Advocates for Human Rights 2016). Second, human rights education allows learners to engage with the human rights framework and gain skills to advocate to end human rights violations. Third, for human rights education to be effective in ending human rights violations, teachers must teach in a way that can help to dismantle oppression rather than perpetuate it. Thus, teacher educators must implement preservice human rights teacher education thoughtfully. I address challenges to, critiques of, and recommendations for implementation. Following this, I build on these ideas with my own recommendations for implementation. These recommendations are based on interviews I conducted with members of Human Rights Educators USA, a national volunteer network of educators and advocates who promote human rights education in the United States (HRE USA 2018).     

ASEAN and human rights: resisting Western pressure or emulating the West?

Abstract

Observers of Southeast Asian affairs commonly assume that the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are reluctant to pursue liberal agendas, and that their main concern is to resist pressure from Western powers to improve their human rights practice. This article, however, argues that such a conventional view is too simplistic. The Southeast Asian countries have voluntarily been pursuing liberal agendas, and their main concern here is to be identified as ‘Western’ countries – advanced countries with legitimate international status. They have ‘mimetically’ been adopting the norm of human rights which is championed by the advanced industrialized democracies, with the intention of securing ASEAN's identity as a legitimate institution in the community of modern states. Ultimately, they have been pursuing liberal agendas, for the same reason as cash-strapped developing countries have luxurious national airlines and newly-independent countries institute national flags. Yet it should be noted that the progress of ASEAN's liberal reform has been modest. A conventional strategy for facilitating this reform would be to put more pressure on the members of ASEAN; however, the usefulness of such a strategy is diminishing. The development of an East Asian community, the core component of which is the ASEAN–China concord, makes it difficult for the Western powers to exercise influence over the Southeast Asian countries. Hence, as an alternative strategy, this article proposes that ASEAN's external partners should ‘globalize’ the issue of its liberal reform, by openly assessing its human rights record in global settings, with the aim of boosting the concern of its members for ASEAN's international standing.     

Reporting Without Knowledge: the Absence of Human Rights in US Journalism Education

Journalists play an important role in the realization and protection of human rights worldwide, framing and shaping the public’s understanding of issues. In the United States, however, studies show that media coverage of human rights is inadequate and frequently inaccurate, with US journalists typically framing human rights as an exclusively international issue. This study helps to explain why this is the case through an examination of the human rights content of journalism education in the United States. Journalism education is dominated by undergraduate programs in the United States, yet data from this study show that human rights education is not part of journalism training programs at the undergraduate level (at the top 10 schools, ranked according to the number of graduates, there are no human rights courses for journalism majors) and is not a focus of most graduate-level training programs. Those schools that do teach human rights do so largely with a focus on events and violations abroad. The fact that journalists are not educated about international human rights law and standards or taught to view events through a human rights lens means that crucial opportunities are missed to frame topics as human rights issues, to inform the public, and to hold governments and other human rights violators accountable.     

Integrating sociology: Observations on race and gender relations in sociology graduate programs

Issues related to the integration of race within sociology doctoral programs were explored. Two sets of data were analyzed: open-ended interviews with 26 women of color graduate students and 92 questionnaires completed by Ph.D. programs on faculty, graduate courses, and expertise in race. Quantitative data show that faculty of color are likely to be the one member of their race in the department. EuroAmerican faculty are over-represented in the rank of Full Professor and Associate Professor and faculty of color are under-represented in the tenured ranks. Less than a quarter of departments included the study of race in required theory courses. Departments listing race and ethnicity as a specialty in the area did not always offer graduate courses in the field and courses that were offered did not necessarily focus specifically on U.S. race/ethnic/minority relations, but included international studies and broad topics in social organizations and stratification. Comments by a sample of women of color graduate students point out a number of critical issues: curricula that are outdated, ignore race, are monocultural, and look better in the catalog than in the classroom; faculty that are top-heavy with older White males; students discouraged from pursuing what attracted them to the academy in the first place; and students in conflicts with racial overtones over scarce resources and favors. Qualitative results show that women of color graduate students perceive the inclusion of students and faculty of color to include an acceptance of their racial and ethnic experience in the intellectual and social culture of the department. They linked the goal of integration of the student body and the faculty to be inseparable from integration of race into the curriculum in both required and nonrequired courses, and assigned readings.     

Justified state partiality and the vulnerable subject in migration

According to David Miller, there exists a special relationship between migrants at the border and members of a political community that the migrant hopes to join. It is the task of a political philosophy of migration to define a state’s obligations toward individuals who are vulnerable to the state’s actions without being members of the political community. I define the vulnerability in question as lacking capacity to be autonomous for lack of options to realize one’s plan of life. I then discuss Miller’s claim that what matters is sufficiency of generic options rather than access to all options. Miller wants to say that sufficiency can be achieved by assuring the protection of human rights. This claim neglects the source of the individual migrant’s vulnerability. I therefore argue that Miller neglects the specific relationship he has identified between potential host state and hopeful migrant, and advocate instead that the potential host state has to consider the vulnerability that is due to its own policies, such as migration regimes. This grounds a causal responsibility to protect the basic interest in leading autonomous lives for the migrant at the border.     

Human rights at the “end of nature”

Nature has been employed as a moral concept across the millennia. Human rights are beholden to nature as a normative standard, as they developed within a tradition of natural law and natural rights. Should contemporary advocates of human rights continue to deploy the standard of nature at a time when both its physical and metaphysical statuses are increasingly challenged? I argue that the life sciences help us understand human rights in terms of the development of prosocial behavior in our species, and in this respect there remains an important role for nature to play in the advance of human rights. Attention to the status of nature in the modern world’s most important document of human rights, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, illuminates the challenges associated with linking rights to the standard of nature.     

Treating Poorly Healed Wounds: Partisan Choices and Human Rights Policies in Latin America

Despite the common trauma of systematic human rights violations under military rule, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay have responded in markedly different ways to their troubling pasts. This paper explains differences in human rights policies over time and across countries by looking at varying domestic conditions, including the ideological orientation of the governing party and the structure of party competition, as well as constraints and opportunities presented by external events. Government support for human rights derives in part from ideological proclivity but even more from the ability to build popular support for such a policy. Conservative and center-right politicians lack credibility among voters on human rights and therefore have little political incentive to adopt an activist stance on this issue. Leftist politicians are ideologically predisposed toward championing human rights but may be hamstrung by concerns about alienating centrist voters. Leftist politicians will only come out strongly in favor of human rights when they enjoy a clear political majority; leftist leaders who rely upon centrist allies will adopt a low-profile approach to human rights. Conversely, centrist political leaders who rely upon leftist allies have a strong political incentive to emphasize human rights. Once political momentum begins to shift to the right, however, centrist politicians will downplay human rights. Finally, external events may significantly alter national discourse on human rights, allowing cautious governments to gain political cover for more progressive human rights policy. By drawing attention to the important role of ideology and the structure of party competition, this paper offers a more complete explanation of the sources of human rights policy. It also provides a novel perspective on the ways in which external and international influences are filtered through national political systems.     

Active Learning in Large Graduate Classes: Reflections on an “Attaining Citizenship” Simulation

Abstract

This article details a role-playing “citizenship simulation” used in a large graduate seminar offered by the Masters of International Relations (IR) faculty at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. While recognizing the need for a more systematic analysis of the relationship between class size and active learning strategies, this article offers an anecdotal reflection on the challenges faced when employing active learning in an IR course with growing enrollment numbers. We describe and analyze a simulation used in the graduate course to evaluate the feasibility and desirability of structuring large IR classrooms to include participatory group activities such as simulations. We also hope the simulation provides instructors with an effective sample design for simulations in their own larger courses.     

Cultivating Character: John Stuart Mill and the Subject of Rights

The antidemocratic tendencies of rights appear to be numerous. As trumps, rights are denounced for shutting down political debate and undermining the common good. As disciplinary, rights are attacked for reinforcing a politics of exclusion. I argue that an appreciation of the democratic potential of rights requires conceiving of them as political claims, as claims that represent a perspective that we seek to persuade others to adopt and through which we can create and contest community and identity. I cull a political conception of rights from the work of John Stuart Mill by rethinking the meaning of and connection between his ontological commitments and his politics. Paying careful attention to his notion of "character" and its cultivation, I argue that Mill embraces a conception of the socially constituted subject who is both disciplined and enabled by rights.     

Defining the Boundaries of Public Administration: Undisciplined Mongrels versus Disciplined Purists

"Undisciplined mongrels" are faculty from public administration programs who publish in a wide variety of journals. We expected that undisciplined mongrels would have more successful publishing records than their counterparts—"disciplined purists" who publish exclusively in public administration journals. This expectation is supported through an analysis of journal publications by a panel of 91 junior faculty members. We also expected that the methods that are currently used to rank public administration programs would discard a massive body of publication activity by public administration faculty. This expectation is also soundly supported. Findings indicate that from 1990 through 1997, a scant 18 percent of the articles published by the faculty panel were published in the highly selective set of 11 journals that are currently used to rank public administration programs.     

Manufacturing Trust: Community Currencies and the Creation of Social Capital

In this study I examine whether an innovative government program in Ichikawa, Japan has been successful in increasing the level of generalized interpersonal trust in the community by rewarding civic participation by local citizens. Japan has sponsored the development of a number of “community currency” programs at the local level that are designed to create social capital. A community currency is a local “money” that is only useable within a neighborhood or town. In a typical community currency program, a town rewards civic volunteers with credits to barter with other citizens, use at participating stores, or pay for town services. These programs are specifically designed to stimulate generalized trust by rewarding civic engagement and encouraging social interaction. I evaluate whether the new Tekona community currency program in Ichikawa, Japan has been successful in raising levels of trust among participants, as compared to a randomly selected control group of town residents. I find that community currency involvement increases general trust, which demonstrates that it is possible to institute government programs that create social capital.

Communicating law,building peace: the pedagogy of public outreach from war crimes courts

ABSTRACT

There has been a growing interdisciplinary concern with the implications of public outreach processes from war crimes trials for new forms of citizenship in the wake of violent conflict. The enactment of such outreach, through seminars, civil society initiatives and workshops, provides a glimpse of the tensions between different conceptions of justice, belonging and rights in the post-conflict period. Specifically, such events constitute a rare public arena in the more fragmented and securitised domain of international legal practices. This paper focuses on a series of public workshops for survivors of wartime sexual violence carried out in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) 2011–13. Drawing on participant observations and open-ended interviews, we argue that such public outreach programmes can be viewed as a form of pedagogy, where the materials, format and arrangement of the events structure the nature of participation and engagement. In doing so we are making two contributions. First, the discussion advances understandings of public outreach as a form of pedagogy, illustrating how practices of dissent, rejection and resistance animate processes of public outreach. Second, the paper illuminates the role of pedagogy as a governmental instrument, reflecting the micro-situations within which individuals are interpellated into the state.     

Interorganizational Collaborations for Humanitarian Aid: An Analysis of Partnership,Community, and Single Organization Outcomes

Abstract

This article explores collaborative activities across organizational and sectoral boundaries. Interorganizational collaborations are an increasingly common setup to address societal needs; however, current research lacks insights into such collaborations and their outcomes. This study contributes to the existing literature by assessing empirically perceptions of interorganizational collaboration outcomes, considering different dimensions that should be measured when planning and performing tasks of social interest. The article is set in the context of disaster relief, where actors from different humanitarian relief organizations within the public and nonprofit sector engage in collaborative activities. I describe how interorganizational collaborations create outcomes for (1) the partnership structure that is established, (2) single organizational members involved in the collaborative activity, and (3) the community targeted by the interorganizational operation.     

Teaching Community Organizing and the Practice of Democracy

This article builds on the political science literature on the pedagogy of civic engagement by discussing a recent pedagogical experiment that treats community partners as leaders and full participants in the design and implementation of community-engaged learning. The courses discussed here combine democratic theory, community organizing and leadership development, and partnership between students and a community organization in carrying out research and action projects on affordable housing.     

Civil Rights and Political Human Rights: Contesting Human Rights Failures within the Minimally Democratic State

Allen Buchanan argues that democracy ought to be added to the list of basic human rights, but he limits the conception of democracy to a minimum of electoral representation within the nation state, effectively collapsing human rights into civil rights. This, however, leaves him unable to address the problem of human rights failures occurring within established states that meet his standard of minimal democratic representation. In order to address this problem, I appeal to James Bohman's conception of the political human rights of all members of humanity, as opposed to the civil rights of the citizens of particular states. I argue that while this provides the basis on which to address the problem of human rights failures within minimally democratic states, Bohman's conception also entails the potential for deep tensions to arise between the different claims of civil and human rights.     

Intersectional citizenship,violence, and lesbian resistance in South Africa

Abstract

There is a growing body of literature on intersectionality and citizenship, with scholars positing a need to analyze multiple identities simultaneously in order to understand both the legal incorporation and embodied experience of citizenship for marginalized groups. Building upon this central insight, I contribute to this literature by articulating the components of an intersectional citizenship framework to better understand the way multiple identities mediate citizenship, with particular reference to black lesbians in South Africa. Based on in-depth interviews with eighteen members of the black lesbian organization Free Gender, in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, I argue that Free Gender’s organizational goals can usefully be understood as asserting the commensurability of the identity “black lesbian” with “community member,” “African,” and “woman.” In applying a theoretical framework of intersectional citizenship to South Africa, it becomes clear that Free Gender’s activism reveals differential access to identities necessary to be seen as citizens entitled to rights. More than just extending juridical citizenship, black lesbians must have socially and politically legitimate access to multiple identity categories simultaneously in order to live free of violence.     

The ritualization of human rights education and training: The fallacy of the potency of knowing

Human rights education and training have become one of the principal pillars of the international human rights movement. Based on a comprehensive survey of training resources and approaches developed for police internationally, this article concludes that they principally follow a dry information transmission model using a traditional lecture-style pedagogy. Looking across the large body of training material available internationally, it appears that there is a fixed body of resource material that circulates and gets recycled, the regularity of its employment rather than its quality now bequeathing it the title best practice. Human rights training has taken on a ritualistic quality. Rather than simply assuming that such ritualism is indicative of mindlessness or cynicism, however, this article treats it as a point of curiosity. It asks: How is it that a template of action has developed and is continuing to expand, with the support of a range of stakeholders when it evidently falls short on key dimensions? Why continue to repeat a performance that seems so ill conceived? The article proposes eight explanations for the persistence of ritualized practices in human rights training for police.     

Future generations as rightholders

Many people believe that we have obligations with respect to future generations concerning the state of the environment that we pass on to them. Apart from the practical problem of people not really acting on such beliefs, there are also conceptual or philosophical issues that make these obligations problematic. The so-called non-identity problem is especially difficult: depending on which courses of action we adopt, different people will be born in the future, which means that even future people who due to our behavior will live under fairly poor circumstances might not have any ground for complaint. Had we not behaved as we did, they would not even have existed. It is argued here that, at least within a rights-theoretical approach, the non-identity problem can be solved by moving from considering individual rights to generational rights, rights which future generations hold qua generations.