Power Politics, Professionalism, and Patron–Client Relationships in Human Rights Advocacy: How Dalit Rights became Human Rights

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Aranguren
2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 127-137
Author(s):  
Noura Erakat

In late November 2019, the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the Ministry of Interior's order to deport Human Rights Watch (HRW) director for Israel and Palestine, Omar Shakir. The court based its decision on a 2017 amendment to Israel's 1952 Entry into Israel Law enabling the government to refuse entry to foreigners who allegedly advocate for the boycott of Israel. The same law was invoked to deny entry to U.S. congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar in the summer of 2019. The campaign against Shakir began almost immediately after he was hired by HRW in 2016, and the court's decision marked the culmination of a multi-year battle against the deportation order. In this interview, JPS Editorial Committee member, Rutgers University professor, and author Noura Erakat discusses the details of his case with Shakir in an exchange that also examines the implications of the case for human rights advocacy, in general, and for Palestinians, in particular. The interview was edited for length and clarity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Pils

The intensified and more public repression of civil society in China is part of a global shift toward deepened and technologically smarter dictatorship. This article uses the example of the ‘709’ government campaign against Chinese human rights lawyers to discuss this shift. It argues that the Party-State adopted more public and sophisticated forms of repression in reaction to smarter forms and techniques of human rights advocacy. In contrast to liberal legal advocacy, however, the Party-State’s authoritarian (or neo-totalitarian) propaganda is not bounded by rational argument. It can more fully exploit the potential of the political emotions it creates. Along with other forms of public repression, the crackdown indicates a rise of anti-liberal and anti-rationalist conceptions of law and governance and a return to the romanticisation of power.


2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baekkwan Park ◽  
Amanda Murdie ◽  
David R Davis

How does the discussion of human rights issues change over time? Without advocates adopting a human rights issue in the first place, international ‘shaming’ cannot occur. In this article, we examine how human rights discussions converge and diverge around new frames and new issues over time. Human rights norms do not evolve alone; their prevalence, framing, and focus are all dependent on how they relate to other norms in the advocacy community. Drawing on over 30,000 documents from dozens of human rights organizations from 1990 to 2011, we provide a temporal overview and visualization of the ebb and flow of human rights issues. Using our new dataset and state-of-the-art methods from computer science, our approach allows us to quantitatively examine (a) how new issues emerge in the advocacy network, (b) the relationship of these new issues to extant human rights advocacy and information, and (c) how the framing and specificity of these issues change over time. By focusing on the process by which a new issue gets incorporated into the work of advocates, we provide an empirical assessment of the first step in the causal process connecting shaming to improvement in human rights practices.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharina Rall ◽  
Margaret L. Satterthwaite ◽  
Anshul Vikram Pandey ◽  
John Emerson ◽  
Jeremy Boy ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sebastiaan Bierema

<p>The research presented here is an effort to interpret the discrepancy between the theoretical inalienability of human rights and the ease with which they are alienated in practice; a paradox Hannah Arendt regarded as the most conspicuous and cruel contradiction of human rights discourse. Proponents of the contemporary human rights regime have recognised that two principal characteristics of liberal human rights politics—namely, the double appellation of the Rights of Man and Citizen and an insistence on sovereignty and power-politics—directly contribute to this paradox. Nonetheless, they deem the current approach to combating rights violations to be ‘the best we can hope for’. After discussing this pragmatic liberal approach, this paper continues by analysing the alternative approaches championed by two republican traditions which criticise liberal human rights—Pettit’s neo-republicanism and Arendt’s participatory republicanism. The former of these proposes an institutional commitment to the rights of the citizen, whereas the latter deems the direct action of political subjects to be the most effective form of guaranteeing written rights in practice. Finally, in agreement with Arendt’s thought, this paper argues that while liberal power-politics and neo-republican institutionalism have their place in human rights politics, rights are at their most secure as expressions of autonomous action.</p>


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