Intractable Conflict from the Bottom Up

Negotiation Journal -     

Whither the Liberal Democratic Model? Immigration Politics in Switzerland and Japan

A comparison of Japan's and Switzerland's immigration policies disclaims both globalist and public choice explanations that would predict a similar increase in immigrant numbers and an expansion of immigrant rights in liberal democracies. Although both countries have traditionally espoused a rather exclusionary approach towards immigration, Japan is unique in having hitherto succeeded in preempting large numbers of immigrants from entering the country and in having avoided the legal and societal integration of those migrants already present in its territory. In seeking to explain the different trajectories followed by immigration politics in Japan and Switzerland, despite their similar internal and external economic constellations, this article highlights the role of domestic institutions and norms in filtering economic pressure for immigration. Whereas these internal determinants explain to a large degree why Switzerland has become a country of immigration while Japan has not, the central factor explaining the recent expansion of foreign residents’ rights in Switzerland lies not so much in internal determinants but in the country‘s progressing approximation to the European Union and its single market. Notwithstanding these differences, the article concludes that Japan‘s greater resistance to change might now have reached a critical juncture, where demographic pressure and economic demand will make an opening up to increased labor migration unavoidable.     

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).     

Mainstreaming disability in the United Nations treaty bodies

As of the beginning of this century, the United Nations (UN) human rights system had comprehensively elided persons with disabilities from its purview. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) responded to this lacuna in 2006. The CRPD obligates states parties to mainstream disability by protecting and promoting the human rights of persons with disabilities in all policies and programs and intersects disability with other discriminated-against populations. This article investigates the success of the UN in mainstreaming disability throughout its human rights treaty bodies over the period 2000–2014 by comparing the seven years before and the eight years after the CRPD's adoption for six core UN treaty bodies. In doing so, the article provides initial and unique insight into how well the UN implements human rights norms into treaty bodies and provides a template for future research on the inclusion of vulnerable group-based rights in the UN and beyond. Despite some significant variations between treaty bodies, we find an overall dramatic increase in the quantitative incidence of disability rights being referenced. Nevertheless, a closer look into the practices of two treaty bodies shows that the human rights of persons with disabilities, while noted by those bodies, are included fully only on occasion. For the UN to truly mainstream disability (or other) human rights, those rights must go beyond mere formal references and also be substantively integrated.