Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century

2008 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 449-460
Author(s):  
Jack Straw
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Legal Development ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century

If you read certain newspapers you might be forgiven for thinking that human rights were an alien imposition foisted upon us by ‘the other’. It is a misconception that has regrettably taken root. A central theme of my lecture this evening is to explode this myth, and to demonstrate how far from being some ‘European’ imposition, Britain has been at the forefront of the political and legal development of human rights across Europe and across the world.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Dapo Akande ◽  
Jaakko Kuosmanen ◽  
Helen McDermott ◽  
Dominic Roser
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Political Context ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
High Regard ◽  
Twenty First Century

The interlocking threats of armed conflict, environmental degradation, and poverty constitute a central part of the political and moral challenges facing the world in the twenty-first century. However, anyone who considers that these challenges should be confronted with approaches that incorporate and are built upon human rights faces a difficult task. High regard for human rights seems to have developed in a particular and bygone political context. The rise of populism and nationalism in recent years may be seen as having created myriad novel and complex realities. These developments suggest that work now needs to be done to apply human rights to new realities but may also indicate that we need to adapt our understanding of human rights in light of them....

Human Rights and 21st Century Challenges

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
First Century ◽  
World Population ◽  
Security Environment ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Relative Share ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century

The world faces significant and interrelated challenges in the twenty-first century which threaten human rights in a number of ways. This book examines the relationship between human rights and three of the largest challenges of the twenty-first century: conflict and security, environment, and poverty. Technological advances in fighting wars have led to the introduction of new weapons which threaten to transform the very nature of conflict. In addition, states confront threats to security which arise from a new set of international actors not clearly defined and which operate globally. Climate change, with its potentially catastrophic impacts, features a combination of characteristics which are novel for humanity. The problem is caused by the sum of innumerable individual actions across the globe and over time, and similarly involves risks that are geographically and temporally diffuse. In recent decades, the challenges involved in addressing global and national poverty have also changed. For example, the relative share of the poor in the world population has decreased significantly while the relative share of the poor who live in countries with significant domestic capacity has increased strongly. Overcoming these global and interlocking threats constitutes this century’s core political and moral task. This book examines how these challenges may be addressed using a human rights framework. It considers how these challenges threaten human rights and seeks to reassess our understanding of human rights in the light of these challenges. The analysis considers both foundational and applied questions. The approach is multidisciplinary and contributors include some of the most prominent lawyers, philosophers, and political theorists in the debate. The authors not only include leading academics but also those who have played important roles in shaping the policy debates on these questions. Each Part includes contributions by those who have served as Special Rapporteurs within the United Nations human rights system on the challenges under consideration.

The Persecuted Body

Facing Fear ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melani Mcalister
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
First Century ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Evangelical Christians ◽  
The World ◽  
Politics Of Fear ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
International Religious Freedom Act ◽  
The U.S

This chapter examines the politics of fear underlying the antipersecution discourse that revolved around evangelical Christians at the turn of the twenty-first century. A video made by the U.S.-based Christian evangelical group Voice of the Martyrs showed that Christians are being persecuted all around the world. By the turn of the twenty-first century, a passionate concern with the persecution of Christians united conservatives as well as liberal and moderate evangelicals. The chapter shows how antipersecution discourse resulted in the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. It also considers the significance of spectacles of the violated body to the discourse of persecution and how intense attention to Christian persecution created a tension for evangelicals between the universalizing language of human rights and a specific commitment to the “persecuted body” of Christ. Finally, it explores how evangelicals' attention to Christian persecution intersects with Islamic concerns.

scholarly journals The Great Displacement: Reading Migration Fiction at the End of the World

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben De Bruyn
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
First Century ◽  
Margaret Drabble ◽  
The World ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Climate Fiction

This paper examines how contemporary works of fiction and nonfiction reflect on anticipated cases of climate dislocation. Building on existing research about migrant agency, climate fiction, and human rights, it traces the contours of climate migration discourse before analyzing how three twenty-first-century novels enable us to reimagine the “great displacement” beyond simplistic militarized and humanitarian frames. Zooming in on stories by Mohsin Hamid, John Lanchester, and Margaret Drabble that envision hypothetical calamities while responding to present-day refugee “crises”, this paper explains how these texts interrogate apocalyptic narratives by demilitarizing borderscapes, exploring survivalist mindsets, and interrogating shallow appeals to empathy.

A General Theory for Our Times: On Piketty

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Mann
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Stance ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty has offered, and many have desperately snatched at, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money of our epoch. Piketty’s affinity with John Maynard Keynes and his groundbreaking 1936 landmark is largely unreflexive. But the ties that bind him to Keynes are powerful, and manifest themselves at many levels in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The epistemology, the political stance, the methodological commitments, and the politics resonate in imperfect but remarkable harmony. This is no accident, because the world in which Piketty’s book appeared is saturated with the specifically capitalist form of anxiety that Keynes sought to diagnose, and fix, the last time it made the richest economies in the world tremble.

Pentecostal and Charismatic

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Telford Work
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
World Council Of Churches ◽  
Ecumenical Movement ◽  
The World ◽  
World Council ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Charismatic Christianity

Accounts of Pentecostal ecumenism tend to take two basic shapes. In one, the story of Pentecostal and charismatic ecumenism is subsumed into the wider course of twentieth-century ecumenism, whose centre has been the World Council of Churches. The other regards Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity as an ecumenical movement in its own right, expressed in innumerable informal relationships and recently embodied in the Global Christian Forum. These two popular visions often keep Pentecostals, charismatics, and mainstream ecumenists talking past one another. An inventory of the gifts offered, gifts received, and gifts withheld or rejected among these parties in twentieth- and twenty-first-century ecumenism leads to a different interpretation of their interrelationship. The ecumenical movement at large and Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity itself are both among the renewing tides in Christ’s ecclesial ecumene. The most significant Pentecostal/charismatic contribution to ecumenism may be its own spirit, and vice versa.

The Growing Equality across Countries and Inequality within some Countries

2021 ◽  
pp. 86-105
Author(s):  
Francis Teal
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Poor Countries ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
Rich Countries ◽  
Over Time

Just as unemployment dominated the political agenda of the 1930s, so inequality has come to dominate the concerns of both rich and poor countries in the twenty-first century. Contrary to what is widely believed, inequality across countries has been declining since the 1980s, driven primarily, but not exclusively, by the rise in incomes in China. Looking at inequality within countries, on average inequality is much higher in poor than in rich countries. Changes over time in inequality are modest, compared with differences across countries. We observe a world with countries which have policies, or politics, which generate high inequality and ones which generate much lower inequality. There is little link between inequality and growth on average across the world.

From Kubrick’s Political Icon to Television Sex Symbol

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Stanley Kubrick ◽  
Film Version ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Female Bodies

This chapter starts from the iconic 1960 Stanley Kubrick film version of Spartacus and it compares it with the other version to demonstrate how in the Kubrick version the political and ideological nature of the Spartacus figure re-emerges in the twenty-first century, reinvented and far more sexualized than its predecessor. STARZ Spartacus, the chapter argues, has an altogether different set of objectives, placing special emphasis on the glorified and eroticized image of mostly male—but also female—bodies. This chapter concludes that Kubrick's Spartacus is transformed from a political icon, representing freedom, equality, and independence, into a new Spartacus who also becomes the image of a hypersexualized masculinity.

AALS Annual Convention Plenary Panel: Impact of Globalization on Human Rights – Introduction of the Panel

2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 373-374
Author(s):  
Dean Claudio Grossman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
First Century ◽  
Annual Convention ◽  
Development Bank ◽  
Heart Transplants ◽  
Ninth Symphony ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century

Addressing Human Rights requires that we consider both reality and imagination. What forces are shaping the world in which we live? What space is available for change? What role is played, and can be played by individuals? At a meeting of relatively young leaders of this hemisphere, organized by the Inter-American Development Bank at the end of the Twentieth Century, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was asked what we might expect from the Twenty-First Century as we emerge from the Twentieth Century, which distinguished itself with two world wars and with genocide. Gabriel Garcia Marquez responded by saying that we should not expect anything from the Twenty-First Century. He explained that everything relevant was the result of imagination, from the Ninth Symphony to heart transplants; they were in the heads of their inventors before taking place in reality.

scholarly journals Resisting Borders: Transnational Cartographies in US Latinx Studies

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Macarena García-Avello
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Alicia Gaspar De Alba ◽  
Economic Reality ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The One

This article examines the evolution of the borderlands as an organizing trope by focusing on how the transcendence beyond cultural nationalist perspectives traces the shift from Chicano/a to Latinx discourses. In order to address this issue, I will analyse two twenty-first-century Latinx texts that delve into the intricate ways in which transnational forces collide with economic, cultural and political processes that persistently revolve around the framework of the nation-state: Alicia Gaspar de Alba´s Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders (2005) and Maya Chinchilla´s The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética (2014). The corpus of works selected will focus on the political readings derived from textual negotiation with a changing political, social and economic reality. This results in constant tensions between globalising processes, worldwide interconnectedness and transnational interactions, on the one hand, and the regulatory power of the state, on the other.

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