The Impact of Advertising and Media on the Arab Culture: The Case of the Arab Spring,Public Spheres,and Social Media

The Arab world has experienced some unprecedented social movements, labeled by the media as the Arab Spring. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of public policy, advertising, media, and public spheres on the Arab Spring. The media and economic policies enacted in the Arab world in the 1990s played a significant role in changing consumer culture in the Arab region, resulting in significant changes in public policy. Two studies were conducted to test how the change in consumer culture along with new public polices in the region contributed to the uprisings.     

EU Counterterrorism and the Southern Mediterranean Countries after the Arab Spring: New Potential for Cooperation?

The European Union's (EU) relationship with North African countries has long been the subject of intense academic enquiry. For many years, the EU has performed a difficult balancing act between managing the security concerns of its member states, dealing with authoritarian regimes that have questionable human rights records, creating and maintaining good economic relations, and pursuing more normative objectives. Have security objectives overridden other concerns? While the EU has cooperated with regimes with questionable human rights records, counterterrorism cooperation between the EU and North African countries has not developed as much as previous academic studies believe. However, what are the prospects of this changing with more recent developments after the Arab Spring? This article examines in detail the reasons why the EU does not currently conduct significant counterterrorism cooperation with North African countries and discusses whether this situation is likely to change as a result of the events of the Arab Spring, which has swept through North Africa and the Middle East since 2010.     

The Role of Arab American Advocacy Groups in Shaping American Foreign Policy

This paper aims to offer some insights into the ways in which Arab-Americans experience the United States and adjust to its political institutions. It stresses how such a community still finds it difficult to consolidate its efforts and exert pressure on the decision making process. But to gain national visibility and recognition, they need first to voice its concerns throughout mainstream advocacy groups. In this regard, the term “Arab lobby” is a misnomer as very often it is used as a shorthand word for the loose coalition of organizations that seek to improve Arabs’ conditions in the U.S. and to influence American foreign policy in the Middle East. Notwithstanding, this study is meant to highlight the difference between what some termed the informal Arab lobby, sponsored by rich oil countries, and the formal Arab American lobby, represented today by the Arab American Institute (AAI) and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and headquartered in Washington D.C. However, while the different components of the pro-Arab lobby cannot represent “the Arabs” as a united political group, they have been able to share a common concern: Palestine. In effect, not only the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been a top priority and a principal focus of the Arab lobby as a whole, but it has also been viewed as a tool to measure its political efficacy. Last but not least, despite the very limited success achieved by the Arab lobby in its attempts to shape American foreign policy (compared to its pro-Israel counterpart), this study demonstrates that the members of the Arab and Jewish communities in the United States share common grounds on almost every issue central to Arab-Israel peace and U.S. policy in the Middle East, on top of them the two-state solution (Zogby International, 2007).     

Lament as Transitional Justice

Works of human rights literature help to ground the formal rights system in an informal rights ethos. Writers have developed four major modes of human rights literature as follows: protest, testimony, lament, and laughter. Through interpretations of poetry in Carolyn Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting, and novels from Rwanda, the US, and Bosnia, I focus on the mode of lament, the literature of mourning. Lament is a social and ritualized form, the purposes of which are congruent with the aims of transitional justice institutions. Both laments and truth commissions employ grieving narratives to help survivors of human rights trauma bequeath to the ghosts of the past the justice of a monument while renewing the survivors’ capacity for rebuilding civil society in the future. Human rights scholars need a broader, extrajuridical meaning for “transitional justice” if we hope to capture its power.     

Human Rights and Sovereignty in the ASEAN Path Towards a Human Rights Declaration

Sovereignty and non-interference principles are trademarks of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) regional approach. Starting from 1993, ASEAN has been developing a process aimed at creating a human rights system. This process reached its acme in August 2013 when the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD) was formally launched. In the frame of the tension between sovereignty and human rights, the paper firstly analyzes the roots of the ASEAN path towards the creation of the regional human rights system grounded on the Vienna World Conference debate. Next comes an analysis of the political commitments assumed by ASEAN in the last 20 years in the process of creating a human rights body in the region. Furthermore, the paper presents an in-depth analysis of the most problematic issues connected with the nature, functions, mandate, and purposes of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Human Rights Commission (2009). This is followed by an analysis of the AHRD.     

The limits of authoritarian solidarity: The Gulf monarchies and preserving authoritarian rule during the Arab Spring

Scholars have recently begun to examine how authoritarian rulers cooperate with each other in order to fend off popular challenges to their power. During the Arab Spring the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) supported fellow authoritarian regimes in some cases while backing opposition movements in others. Existing theoretical approaches fail to explain this variation. Advancing the study on authoritarian cooperation, this article develops a theoretical approach that sets out to explain how authoritarian regimes reach their decisions. Drawing on poliheuristic foreign policy analysis, it argues that perceptions of similarity serve as a filter for estimating threats to regime survival at home. If regimes perceive the situation in other countries as similar to their own, supporting other authoritarian regimes becomes the only acceptable strategy. In contrast, if perceptions of similarity are low, regimes also consider other options and evaluate their implications beyond the domestic political arena. Applying this framework to the example of the GCC states during the Arab Spring, the analysis reveals covariation between perceptions of similarity and threat among GCC regimes, on the one hand, and their strategies, on the other.     

Policy Responses to Human Trafficking in Southern Africa: Domesticating International Norms

Human trafficking is increasingly recognized as an outcome of economic insecurity, gender inequality, and conflict, all significant factors in the region of southern Africa. This paper examines policy responses to human trafficking in southern Africa and finds that there has been a diffusion of international norms to the regional and domestic levels. This paper finds that policy change is most notable in the strategies and approaches that differ at each level: international and regional agreements emphasize prevention measures and survivor assistance, but national policies emphasize prosecution measures. Leaders across the region have adapted these policy norms to fit regionally specific conditions, including HIV/AIDS, conflict, traditional leaders, and prostitution. Yet, national policies often fail to incorporate preventative solutions to address gender inequality, human rights, and economic development. Until appropriate funding and preventative measures are introduced, the underlying issues that foster human trafficking will continue.     

Citizenship in China: a Comparison of Rights with the East and West

After the economic rise of China with the improvement in their standard of living, there have been many changes in the rights of citizens in China. This paper provides a broad survey of rights to see how China compares with the West and some countries in the Far East. This comparison assesses citizenship theory as it might apply to China, and then assesses a number of measures of rights. First, in order to make comparisons, the very different conceptions and theories of citizenship in China must be considered. Chinese citizenship is based on more of a communitarian model than a liberal or social democratic approach mainly due to Confucianism. Despite considerable improvement in citizenship rights, China’s reliance on a more communitarian citizenship theory (rather than liberal or social democratic theories) tends to emphasize obligations over rights. Second, in assessing the level of rights in China in the 21st century, T. H. Marshall provides the classification of legal, political and social rights. Using Freedom House, Fraser Institute and other data, I make cross-national comparisons between China and Western countries (e.g., the US, Canada and select European countries) and East Asian countries or regions (e.g., Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan). I also include Russia since it has made a similar transition from communist rule. The paper argues that citizenship rights for Chinese citizens have improved for many legal and social rights but not so much for political rights. However, all of these rights in China are much lower than in the West and much of East Asia, though in a few instances the levels are quite similar to Russia. I conclude with an estimate of the possible pathways toward greater political rights in China over the next few decades.     

Social Media and Revolutionary Waves: The Case of the Arab Spring

This article argues that during the Arab Spring social media served as a tactical tool of mobilization, communication, and coordination; as an instrument of domestic and international revolutionary contagion; and, critically, as a means of enhancing pan-Arab consciousness which, in turn, was fertile soil for that contagion. These three interrelated functions are best analyzed using a revolutionary wave theoretical approach. In its absence, the Arab Spring becomes a patchwork of analytically incoherent “cascade protests.” In fact, the Arab world witnessed an extremely coherent process of revolutionary contagion whose liberal and democratic ideology was disseminated transnationally by social media. The impressive speed, scale, and effectiveness of this contagion would have not been possible without the effect of the Arab public sphere—itself partially enabled by social media—on the increasingly cohesive pan-Arab consciousness. Fundamentally, the Arab Spring was the first revolutionary wave ever to reflect the change in power relations originating in the rise of new communication networks.     

Setting the agenda: Social influence in the effects of the Human Rights Committee in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe

Analyzing original data from Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, this article explores the influence of the Human Rights Committee (HRC) of the United Nations (UN) in the configuration of states' normative agendas and the roles they seek to play. Focusing on the HRC's reporting procedure, the article investigates whether states adjust the substantive content of their periodic reports to mimic the human rights agenda explicitly set by the HRC through its concluding observations reports. The article finds that states take the HRC seriously and play the role of “good,” committed members of the human rights regime, following in their periodic reports the agenda of rights previously set by the HRC. The article, therefore, offers a specific theoretical argument and systematic, original evidence on the potential and the limits of the influence of the organs of the international human rights regime.     

Particularizing the Universal: Dave Eggers Writes Human Rights

This article examines the ways in which two literary texts by the American author Dave Eggers, his novel You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002) EGGERS, Dave. (2002) You Shall Know Our Velocity (San Francisco, CA: McSweeney's). [Google Scholar] and his short story “Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly,” interrogate the abstract humanism that underlies universalist rights and explore the reasons for their ineptitude at effecting their promise of universalism when faced with the particularity of individual cultures. Thematically, Eggers's stories test the limits of promoting rights on the basis of an innate shared humanity by exposing how such a basis easily slides into other universalist practices such as those of neocolonialism and neoimperialism. At the character level, these narratives consider the possibilities for meaningful cross-cultural relationships within the context of these discourses, revealing the ease with which they in turn can slip into hierarchical relations that reaffirm existing divisions. In doing so, they also engage and challenge the conclusions of cosmopolitan thinkers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah or Jürgen Habermas who have influentially proposed cross-cultural dialogues as a means of overcoming the tension between universalism and particularity. Interestingly, then, even as interdisciplinary research on literature and human rights has begun to etch out the coalescence of the two, Eggers provides an important example of how literary texts can also critique human rights discourses and can explore questions pertaining to their global reach.     

“The Empire Strikes Back”: The US Assault on the International Human Rights Regime

We argue that the post-9/11 environment has amounted to a substantive change in the longstanding United States relationship with the international human rights regime. We identify three distinct phases of that relationship, noting that in the most recent phase, since 9/11, the US has moved from passive support of the international human rights regime to a direct attack of that regime. Realist and liberal regime theories suggest that the human rights regime is relatively weak, and is unlikely to withstand such an attack. We find that the regime has not only continued to persist, but has flourished even as US support has faltered. The human rights regime is surprisingly strong. We argue it is the ideological nature of the regime that explains its resilience, which suggests that constructivist theory is necessary to fully understand the human rights regime.

Fifty years of human rights: An emergent global regime

The emergent human rights regime includes three distinct elements; international and domestic laws; government and corporate policies that deny or affirm rights; and norms of behavior that are applied against groups and individuals. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its successors were milestones in international law that sprang from the euphoria of victory in World War II. When policies violated these precepts, they came under intense international scrutiny, which produced highly visible, though not universal, improvements; and it was not long before governments and other organizations adopted positive policies that improved access to these rights. Policy scientists can analyze these rights as demands or claims that enjoy various degrees of legitimacy within both the civic and the public order. Behind the laws and policies lies a widespread awareness of the standards of human dignity. This awareness is gradually taking on a life of its own and human rights begin to function as a system of expected behavior that is becoming a global regime that reflects the preferences of nongovernmental players acting under customs and rules of their own making. Behavior that respects essential rights is increasingly taken as an obligation transcending national borders and subtly enriching the decisions and transactions of states, corporations, and special purpose organizations.     

The Power of the Pen: Human Rights Ombudsmen and Personal Integrity Violations in Latin America, 1982-2006.

Recent scholarship has focused on the effects of institutional design and constitutional provisions on human rights protections. Democratic institutions, like other manifestations of credible commitment to human rights, seem to play a role in human rights provisions across the world. Yet, there is still a great deal that we do not know about domestic institutions like the human rights ombudsman, an institution created specifically to protect human rights, on human rights provisions. We conduct an examination of the effects of the human rights ombudsman (which may go by the name Defensor del Pueblo, Procurador de Derechos Humanos, or Comisionado Nacional de Derechos Humanos), on personal integrity violations across Latin America, 1982–2006. We find evidence that this understudied institution had significant and positive impacts on reducing such violations.     

What can Post‐Democracy tell us about TNCs and Extraterritorial Violations of Human Rights?

This article considers the problem of extraterritorial human rights violations committed by transnational corporations (TNCs), and draws on Crouch's framework in Post‐democracy to illustrate why the issue has proved so difficult for states to regulate. I begin by examining the problem of corporate regulation more generally, and set out Crouch's analysis to show why and how corporations have become so influential. The second section considers the area of business and human rights, and explains why there is ‘a governance gap’ in relation to extraterritorial human rights violations committed by corporations. The third section describes efforts at the international and domestic levels to regulate corporations in relation to this issue. It concludes that while new international principles and innovative hybrid schemes are playing a valuable role in norm creation and standard‐setting, the enforcement of these principles remains limited. Corporations have largely succeeded to date in their lobbying efforts to remain free of any direct obligations under international law.     

Bringing People Back in Politics: The Role of Civil Society,Political Parties,and Regional Organizations in a Changing Middle East

The Introduction briefly presents the ideas behind this collection of articles, namely to analyze popular mobilization and the role of civil society, political parties, and regional organizations in relation to the developments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) over the last years, and to discuss theoretical approaches and paradigms of relevance for the analysis of these new regional dynamics. The MENA region experienced, in connection with and following the Arab uprisings, a hitherto unseen popular mobilization. Despite the recent highly problematic situation in several Middle Eastern states, the Introduction emphasizes the continued relevance of focusing on a repoliticized MENA reality. The Middle East is still on the move away from the established image of unshakeable authoritarianism attributed to the region, which made the upgrading authoritarianism paradigm seem forever relevant and without any realistic alternative for the decades to come—therefore, the relevance, offered in this collection of articles, of bringing people back in politics.     

Mussolini's Secret War in the Mediterranean and the Middle East: Italian Intelligence and the British Response

Little is known of the history, structure and operations of the Italian intelligence services in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The challenge brought by Fascist Italy to the security of the British and French imperial systems is at the heart of this article, which sets out to assess not only the imperial dimension of Fascist intelligence but also the response provided by Britain's and France's colonial authorities to Mussolini's ambitions in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. An examination of British and French intelligence archival material sheds new light upon perceptions of power and threat afforded by British and French policy-makers keen to maintain political control over their colonial and client states. The paper suggests that despite comprising a multitude of competing agencies, the Fascist services could rely on the work of motivated individuals and on the support of Italian diplomatic representatives overseas. Their ability to establish relations – although short-lived – with Arab nationalist leaders and their intense activities in British colonies, protectorates and mandates generated concern within the British Foreign and Colonial Offices. Meanwhile, poor intelligence coordination and assessment coupled with misguided assumptions about the nature of Arab nationalism hindered Britain's response to the challenge mounted by Mussolini's regime.     

Norm Proxy War and Resistance Through Outsourcing: The Dynamics of Transnational Human Rights Contestation

A great deal of constructivist international relations research on norms focuses on the diffusion of liberal human rights values. In contrast, this article analyzes how critics seek to undermine human rights principles in contexts where human rights norms are increasingly hegemonic. It argues that when norm challengers are frustrated by the institutionalization of human rights, they engage in transnational strategies to pursue their agendas. In norm proxy war, actors patronize surrogates in locales where norms are weak in the hope that victories abroad will reverberate internationally and at home. This dynamic is illustrated by American evangelical sponsorship of political homophobia in Uganda, culminating in that country’s draconian anti-LGBT legislation. When norms are resisted through outsourcing, actors contract out human rights violations in an effort to erode norms through practice, as evidenced by patterns of extraterritorial detention and extraordinary rendition to torture in the post-9/11 “Global War on Terror.” Identifying these patterns broadens understanding of potential pathways of norm contestation.     

Gender Norms and Women's Political Representation: A Global Analysis of Cabinets, 1979–2009

What role does the international diffusion of gender norms play in determining recent increases in women's political representation? We argue that norm diffusion has larger positive effects on women's cabinet representation than on women's legislative representation. We also show that within cabinets, norm diffusion affects low‐prestige appointments more than high‐prestige appointments. We test these arguments using an original database of ministers from 1979 to 2009 and find that the association of women's representation with three separate indicators of international diffusion—levels of women's representation among neighboring states, levels of women's representation among intergovernmental organization partners, and time since ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women—is consistent with our arguments.     

Explaining the Vientiane Action Programme: ASEAN and the institutionalisation of human rights

Abstract

Existing explanations for the emergence of human rights on the political agenda in ASEAN focus either on the role of external pressure on ASEAN member states to ‘do something’, or on the way those states copied the form, but not the function, of other regional organisations such as the EU. Both approaches tacitly acknowledge that given the strong preference for intergovernmental governance displayed by ASEAN, regardless of interpretations, that it was states that drove the institutionalisation of rights forwards. Through examining in detail the causes and consequences of the Vientiane Action Programme this article disagrees with that assertion. At crucial moments before and after 2004 it was the Working Group for the Establishment of an ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism, a track III actor, which both inserted human rights into ASEAN discussions and forged the link between protecting those rights and the continuing success of ASEAN's security goals. Through understanding the role of the Working Group as a norm entrepreneur, assisting in the localisation of human rights standards, this article suggests that existing explanations of ASEAN institutionalisation need to be revised to include a wider range of political dynamics than previously were acknowledged.