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

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.

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.


Author(s):  
Melani Mcalister

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.


Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben De Bruyn

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.


Author(s):  
Charles E. Orser

Historical archaeology has grown exponentially since its inception. By the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, practitioners of the field had conducted research throughout the world in locales only imagined in the mid-twentieth century. The spread of historical archaeology in Europe, Asia, and Africa—and other places with long, rich documentary histories—has meant that two senses of ‘historical archaeology’ now exist. The creation of modern-world archaeology seeks to define an archaeology of the post-Columbian world as an archaeology explicitly engaged in investigating the historical antecedents of our present age. This chapter explains the rationale behind the creation of modern-world archaeology, outlines some of its central tenets, and provides a brief example of one subject of relevance to the field.


Author(s):  
Telford Work

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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-63
Author(s):  
Leah Payne

Many view the twenty-first-century white Pentecostal-charismatic rejection of feminism, and enthusiasm for self-professed harasser of women, Donald J. Trump, as a departure from the movement’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century origins wherein many Pentecostal-charismatic women were welcomed into the public office of the ministry. Early Pentecostal writings, however, demonstrate that twenty-first-century white Pentecostal orientations toward women in public life are based in the movement’s early theological notions that women must uphold the American home, “rightly” ordered according to traditionally conservative, white, middle-class norms. An America wherein women work and minister primarily in the domicile, according to early white Pentecostals, would be a powerful instrument of God in the world. Thus, no matter how transgressive they may have appeared when it came to women speaking from the pulpit, for the most part, white Pentecostals sought to conserve the traditional social order of the home.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 868-886
Author(s):  
Laura Stark

In the middle of the twentieth century, bureaucratic organizations that aimed to appear democratic began using expert groups as a kind of decision-making technology. I call these groups ‘declarative bodies’ and funding panels are one example. Declarative bodies are distinctive types of groups because they have the power to make things in the world through declaration: their words bring new objects into being. Building on philosophy of language, this article theorizes and explains the unusual structural constraints that members of funding panels labour within by virtue of being part of a declarative body. The article argues that these constraints stem from three democratic ideals: impersonality, objectivity and truth. When put to work through declarative bodies, these democratic ideals create paradoxes that have fundamentally shaped how funding panellists labour together. Further, I argue that organizations use funding panels formally and intentionally to create the appearance that decisions were made by a disembodied actor to sanctify the legitimacy of the organizations’ choices. Declarative bodies, such as funding panels, have actively altered the processes of knowledge-making, the contours of scientific communities and the products of knowledge itself. By the twenty-first century, it can be hard to imagine other acceptable methods of making decision in science, despite growing worries about the unintended, undemocratic outcomes they produce. This article encourages a critical curiosity to imagine new ways of making decisions, to declare new futures and to bring other worlds into being.


Author(s):  
Dapo Akande ◽  
Jaakko Kuosmanen ◽  
Helen McDermott ◽  
Dominic Roser

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....


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Rhonda Powell

The right to security of person can be found in a plethora of international and domestic human rights instruments and, yet, we know little about it. Attention has turned to this right due to an increased focus upon ‘security’ more generally as a response to an increase in terrorism. A raft of security legislation was passed throughout the world in the early twenty-first century. These measures have been criticized for their impact upon human rights, instigating discussions about the appropriate ‘balance’ to be struck between security and human rights. Within these debates, some have suggested that we must forgo some of our liberties in the name of security—Michael Ignatieff famously questioned ‘whether the era of human rights has come and gone’ and put forward proposals that we accept the ‘lesser evil’ that is limitation of rights....


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