Building civil society through partnership: lessons from a case study of the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee

Civil society is seen increasingly as a necessary element of sustainable human development. Some Northern NGOs hope to contribute to the development of civil society by partnering with Southern NGOs. However, recent scholarship shows that such partnerships are frequently dominated by the Northern NGO, thus inhibiting the establishment of vibrant, locally owned and locally managed civil society organisations. This paper explores some of the practical reasons for this imbalance and suggests strategies for working within what Alan Fowler calls ‘authentic partnerships’. Such partnerships prevent the domination of Northern NGOs and thus help foster a climate more amenable to the growth of civil society. Suggested strategies for promoting authentic partnerships address funding, working relationships, phase-out, advocacy, and evaluation of the partnership itself. The paper draws on a case study of the partnership work of the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee (CRWRC), a North American faith-based NGO.     

Regulating business impacts on human rights in Southeast Asia - lessons from the EU

The mid-June endorsement by the United Nations Human Rights Council of a new set of Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights has been welcomed as the authoritative global standard for corporations to respect human rights. The Guiding Principles are the culmination of a 6-year UN-commissioned study by Professor John Ruggie, which concludes that companies should carry out human rights due diligence to identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for how they address their adverse human rights impacts. Drawing on related regulation in Europe, this article considers how best to implement the Guiding Principles in Southeast Asia.     

Researching rendition and torture in the War on Terror: lessons from a human rights organisation

This article describes some of the main methods and challenges of researching rendition and torture in the war on terror by a Muslim human rights organisation in the United Kingdom. It describes some of the main lessons learned from the past few years of such investigations and reflects on how such lessons might offer insights to academic research in the area.     

Methodological problems in negotiation research

SUMMARY

Despite a decade or two of researching negotiation, little more is known about it than before. Since the research methods available in communication science are varied and powerful and there is no lack of information or crucial data, the major impediments to progress must be the inability to formulate the most pertinent questions and to construct the most useful integration of information. Comprehension of negotiation depends on the methods used to accumulate this knowledge, that is observation and theory building. As in the case of other human behavioural research methodology, negotiation methodology has problems concerning theoretical assumptions providing the frame for theory development, the theories forming the basis for the selection or development of research methods and the methods determining the data observed. Methodological problems unique to negotiation research are the complexity of the phenomenon, the multi-disciplinarity, the lack of time resulting from the crisis-nature of negotiation and the present lack of methods to measure relationships between variables.     

Three ethical issues in negotiation

Conclusion The overall choice of how to negotiate, whether to emphasize moves that create value or claim it, has implications beyond single encounters. The dynamic that leads individual bargainers to poor agreements, impasses, and conflict spirals also has a larger social counterpart. Without choices that keep creative actions from being driven out, this larger social game tends toward an equilibrium in which everyone claims, engages constantly in behavior that distorts information, and worse.Most people are willing to sacrifice something to avoid such outcomes, and to improve the way people relate to each other in negotiation and beyond. The wider echos of ethical choices made in negotiation can be forces for positive change. Each person must decide if individual risks are worth general improvement, even if such improvement seems small, uncertain, and not likely to be visible. Yet a widespread choice to disregard ethics in negotiation would mark a long step down the road to a more cynical, Hobbesian world. David A. Lax is Assistant Professor at the Harvard Business School, 301 Morgan Hall, Boston, Mass. 02163.James K. Sebenius, on leave as Associate Professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, is associated with Peterson Jacobs, a merchant bank in New York. They are the co-authors ofThe Manager as Negotiator (New York: The Free Press, forthcoming).This article is adapted from a section in the authors' forthcoming book,The Manager as Negotiator (New York: Free Press, 1986). The authors are particularly indebted to Howard Raiffa and to the discussion of ethics in his bookThe Art and Science of Negotiation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).     

Prospects of peace negotiation in Papua

The Papuan conflict resembles the conflict in Aceh. Also some of the models of conflict resolution can undoubtedly be imported for Papua from Aceh. However, the existence of large migrant groups, the lack of a coherent organization of the rebel side, and the more extreme nature of economic grievances in Papua than in Aceh, give the conflict problem in Papua its own characteristics. This article speculates about how much Papua could learn from its own past and how much lessons it could emulate from other areas to establish its own mechanisms of peace negotiation.     

Children's rights in a risk society: the case of schooling in Japan

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ongoing discourse on children's rights and related attitudes towards individualisation and risk in contemporary Japan's education system. The paper is also interested in how this discourse is translated into concrete change. The concepts of ‘children's rights’ and ‘risk society’ both have their origins in Western conceptions of the relationship between the individual and society, and the place of children and young people in that society. This paper explores the way that these concepts have been transformed by their adoption into domestic Japanese discourse on education reform. After a discussion of how the classical liberal concepts of positive and negative human rights can be applied to the specific case of children's rights, the discussion moves on to show how this debate has developed in Japan since the 1980s. Then the paradigm of the ‘Risk Society’ is introduced and the concepts of ‘positive risks’ and ‘negative risks’ are explored, first with reference to schooling in Western countries and then in relation to Japan. Finally, the relationship between risk, rights and neoliberalism is discussed, and it is shown how Western notions of individualisation have met strong resistance from various actors on both sides of the political spectrum. In the case of the Japanese education system, the shift of responsibility from state bureaucracies to individuals and private-sector organisations that is predicted by Risk Society theory has only partially taken place.     

Historic Breakthrough in North-South Korean Relations

North and South Korea announced simultaneously on April 10 that their heads ofstate, President Kim Jong H and Kim Dae Jung will hold a summit in Py-ongyang from June 12 through 14. This is the first inter-Korean summit since thepeninsular was divided more than half a century ago. It is in the interest of bothsides and good to ending the cold war and bringing about peace on the peninsularand maintaining peace and stability in Northeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific as awhole. The announcement inspired the two Koreas with enthusiasm and drewgreat attention from the international community.     

Historic Decline of LDP Politics in Japan

Japan＇s ruling Liberal Democratic Party （LDP） suffered a crushing defeat in the August 30th general election to the House of Representatives. This was due to a change in election rules, the decline of LDP＇s traditional bases of support, and the long-standing internal problems. If the LDP now fails to respond to these changed realities, it will further lose credibility with the Japanese people.     

The ‘Economy of Communion’: a case study of business and civil society in partnership for change

The role of Northern‐based civil society organisations has undergone dramatic changes in recent years. In particular, their principal role as ‘redistributive’ agencies working in the South has come under criticism, leading them to seek new ways of defining their part in eradicating poverty. One widely adopted strategy has been an increasing emphasis on advocacy for social justice, while another is the creation of partnerships with non‐state and state actors, including the private sector. Such partnerships raise some difficult questions relating to the underlying values and civic legitimacy of the action, in particular of Northernbased development NGOs. This paper examines the question of partnerships between civil society organisations and business through a case study of the ‘Economy of Communion’, a global project bringing together small businesses and church‐based organisations whose shared aim is that of eradicating poverty.     

Collective memory of the Spanish civil war: The case of the political amnesty in the Spanish transition to democracy

This article focuses on two interrelated, but relatively ignored, factors in the Spanish transition to democracy (1975–78): first, the most important political mobilizations of the period in which the people demanded an amnesty for the political prisoners of the dictatorship; second, the presence of a collective memory of the Spanish civil war (1936–39), whose repetition was now to be avoided at all costs. It argues that the many collective actions that took place in Spain in favour of an amnesty were, to a great extent, inspired by a widespread desire for reconciliation among Spaniards. Spanish society had suffered a deep split as a consequence of the civil war and, because of the presence of the Francoist regime, no symbolic measures to reach national reconciliation had taken place. The climate generated by the often violent confrontations between police and demonstrators (and not only during demonstrations in favour of the amnesty), and the number of resulting deaths and injuries, made the people remember the serious problems of public order that had confronted the Second Republic (1931–36), whose collapse marked the beginning of the Spanish civil war. These factors help explain why the main political parties of the left felt the need to contain the very mobilization process that they had helped to create. The generous amnesty of October 1977, passed by a democratically elected parliament, was interpreted as the symbolic overcoming of the division among Spaniards that resulted from the dramatic civil confrontation of the 1930s.     

Food security and human rights in Indonesia

Food is crucial to an adequate standard of living. The acknowledgement of the right to food in government policies is fundamental to the protection of human dignity, particularly in relation to food insecurity. It allows the right-holder to seek redress and hold government accountable for non-fulfilment. With reference to Indonesia, the article highlights deficits in meeting obligations to the right to food as stipulated in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The state links food policy to the issue of national stability, with a resulting focus on the national rather than household or individual levels, and the inhibition at the grassroots of the right to food.     

Human rights and companies in conflict zones

Companies appear to be taking the business ramifications of conflict far more seriously, yet with limited consideration of the full extent of their responsibilities. Certainly, they see conflict resolution as primarily the responsibility of government yet find themselves in context specific situations where they are nevertheless expected to work actively to protect and promote human rights. In addition to “traditional” civil and political rights, companies' human rights responsibilities are increasingly also recognised. It is not impossible to apply human rights principles to conflict situations or to integrate them with a policy of conflict management. The process of managing human rights and a company's economic performance in conflict zones are directly related.