Opposition to immigration in contemporary Russia

The study examines sources of opposition to immigration in contemporary Russia. It distinguishes between two types of opposition to immigration: exclusionary attitudes based on national membership and exclusionary attitudes based on race or ethnicity, directed exclusively at foreigners with non-Slavic or non-European origins. Findings indicate that a quarter of ethnic Russians can be classified as “racial exclusionists”; they are willing to admit immigrants who share a race/ethnic group with most of Russia’s people but object to the admission of racially/ethnically different immigrants. Another 42% of ethnic Russians are classified as “total exclusionists”; they object to immigration of all foreigners, regardless of their race/ethnicity. Multivariate analysis focuses on the impact of perceived collective vulnerability, human values, and socio-demographic attributes. Opposition to immigration in Russia is further situated within temporal and cross-national comparative perspectives. Apparently, exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants who share a race/ethnicity with most Russians increased between 2006 and 2016.     

“It's Like Fighting for Survival”: How Rejected Black African Asylum Seekers Experience Living Conditions in an Eastern German State

This article explores how Black African asylum seekers in an eastern German state experienced living conditions and the forms of agency they exhibited to redress the stressful circumstances of everyday life. The article draws on 12 in-depth interviews with rejected Black African asylum seekers and ethnographic research. Participants experienced various socio-environmental stressors and the absence of resources that affected their well-being and were injurious to their human rights. Their responses were embedded in different practices tied to the accumulation of capital that buffered stress and contested repressive asylum laws. The implications of the study for policy and advocacy are discussed.     

气候变化对青藏高原水资源安全的影响

青藏高原不仅是世界屋脊、亚洲水塔和地球第三极,也是中国重要的生态安全屏障和战略资源储备基地,更是资源政治与地缘政治的结合之处。青藏高原是世界上第三大淡水资源“储存库”,气候变化会加速高原地区的冰川消融,改变跨国界河流径流量的年度和季节性变化,增加水资源分配模式的不稳定性,从而加剧地区性水资源稀缺性危机,使地区性洪涝灾害增多,水治理难度提升。气候变化对青藏高原水资源安全的影响会产生连锁性的政治、经济与安全效应,不仅影响高原地区国家的水力开发计划与基础设施安全,加剧地缘政治博弈的复杂性,而且影响中国的海外水电投资,使中国的“一带一路”倡议和水利“十三五”发展规划的实施面临更多的国际压力与挑战。在气候变化的影响下,青藏高原水资源安全涉及十几亿人口的生存和发展问题,涉及亚洲的稳定与和平。对此,中国应积极实践构建人类命运共同体理念,在青藏高原水资源安全的维护上扮演更重要的角色,一方面在技术层面上加强对青藏高原水资源安全动态的深度调查与持续性跟踪研究,另一方面在政治层面上推动高原地区国家的气候治理合作与区域合作框架构建。     

Totalitarian tendencies in drone strikes by states

Lethal drones or unmanned combat aerial vehicles have been used to kill thousands of persons suspected of complicity in terrorism. Despite concerns aired by legal scholars that drone strikes outside areas of active hostilities violate international law, the US government contends that targeted killing is distinct from assassination, and has persisted in the practice to the point where it has become normalised as a standard operating procedure and taken up by other nations as well. Drone strikes have been championed by Western politicians as a “light footprint” approach to war, but the institutional apparatus of remote-control killing rests on totalitarian, not democratic principles. Secretive targeting criteria and procedures are withheld from citizens under a pretext of national security, resulting in a conflation of executive with judicial authority and an inversion of the burden of proof, undermining the very framework of universal human rights said to be championed by modern Western states. Moreover, lethal drones hovering above in the sky threaten all persons on the ground with the arbitrary termination of their lives and as such represent a form of terrorism no less than the suicide bombings of jihadist groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS.     

The right to commemoration and “ideal victims”: the puzzle of victim dissatisfaction with State-led commemoration after 9/11 and 3/11

This article explores the puzzle of victim dissatisfaction with State-led commemoration following 9/11 and 3/11 by offering a cross-national case study through which to view key areas of theoretical debate in the sociology of human rights, cultural trauma and collective memory, and the politics of victimhood. Although State-led commemorative processes are often highly contested, we would expect them to be less so in the cases of 9/11 and 3/11, given broad social consensus about the victims’ right to commemoration and the traumatic nature of the events, and especially the “ideal nature” of the victims who as symbolic representatives of the State are conferred with great moral authority. Drawing on primary and secondary data on the commemoration of the attacks of 11th September 2001 and 11th March 2004 we find that despite sharp differences between commemorative processes, three common key areas of contestation and dissatisfaction for victims emerge: political instrumentalisation, hierarchies of worth and exclusion. We show how the status of ideal victimhood for victims of transnational terrorism carries within it an inherent paradox which provides the key to their dissatisfaction, namely the moral authority conferred on them as representatives of the State simultaneously depersonalises them, excluding them as individuals with rights and needs.     

On our terms! How domestic elites localised the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala

Abstract

In summer 2004, an UN-sponsored international rule of law commission based on an initiative of the Guatemalan human rights community was rejected by Guatemalan political elites. In 2007, a new version, the International Commission against Impunity (CICIG), was approved by the Guatemalan Congress and has since been active in the country, supporting the modernisation of the Guatemalan judicial system and the investigation and prosecution of criminal networks. The CICIG has been hailed as part of a new generation of rule of law promotion that addresses the problems of post-conflict states. How did this change in elite support come about? Neither increased pressure from the international community nor changes in the elite groups in power can fully explain this shift. Rather, Guatemalan elites actively reshaped the commission; in addition, the human rights community reframed it to better fit the risk perceptions of the general public.     

Opening up to OERs: Electronic Original Sourcebook Versus Traditional Textbook in the Introduction to American Government Course

Traditional American Government textbooks are expensive and often unpopular with students. New technologies and Open Educational Resources (OERs) open up the potential for change, but questions of quality are ever present: can OERs really help students learn better, or are they just cheaper? I developed an OER based on original sources and compared student learning outcomes with the OER section to those in a free digital textbook section. While the OER I created did not work as well as I had hoped, I nonetheless developed a redesign of my course and my approach to teaching, which is the true benefit of adopting OERs.     

One anthropologist’s answer to Glenn D. Paige’s question challenging peace studies

ABSTRACT

Glenn D. Paige pioneered in the revolutionary development of a far-reaching transformation of science, academia, and society from a killing to a nonkilling worldview, values, and attitudes. For six decades, anthropology has been accumulating scientific empirical evidence and rational arguments demonstrating that nonkilling societies exist, thereby rebutting the simplistic biological determinist myth that human nature inevitably and universally generates violence and war. Nevertheless, Hobbessians persist in their echo chamber advertising and celebrating the innate depravity of the human species as apologists for war and peace resisters. This systemic bias operates in synergy with the American industrial-military-media-academic complex and culture, the latter exemplified by a revealing comparison of war and football. With great intellectual courage and creative thinking, Paige critically challenges the anachronistic Hobbesian paradigm and offers a far more compelling and positive alternative for sustainable peace in the future.     

Human rights and Nubian mobilisation in Egypt: towards recognition of indigeneity

How are global human rights localised in authoritarian societies? How and what human rights discourses are mobilised by indigenous peoples to further their demands? Building upon original fieldwork among Nubian activists in Egypt, this article explores the complexities regarding human rights framing through a discussion of recognition of Nubian indigeneity. The article finds that the history and political experience of Egypt’s Nubians bring about diverging opinions and also limitations as to how, and what, human rights frameworks rights claimants and their supporters are to employ. It argues that Egyptian nationalism not only affects how Nubian activists mobilise in general, but also helps explain the very limited appeals to a global discourse of human rights.     

Understanding contested women’s rights in development: the Latin American campaign for the humanisation of birth and the challenge of midwifery in Mexico

This article builds on the recent debates on human rights and development to discuss the case of reproductive rights and midwifery activism as part of the broader mobilisation for the humanisation of birth and against obstetric violence in Latin America and Mexico. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the analysis shows how human rights continue to form a significant contentious and constructed terrain among women in the global South. The mobilisation for the humanisation of birth and against obstetric violence indicates how the clinical developmental view of reproductive rights is challenged by these activists as not necessarily safeguarding the rights of women during birth. In Mexico this campaign is essentially linked to the struggle to bring back and strengthen midwifery as a way of ensuring improved human rights in birth. The article concludes, however, that this campaign might be challenged by Indigenous rights in the near future.