31. Human rights

2019 ◽  
pp. 498-513
Author(s):  
Ratna Kapur
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
First Century ◽  
Liberal Internationalism ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Islamic Veil

This chapter looks at human rights, analysing the structure and politics of human rights in the twenty-first century. In particular, the chapter examines the influence of liberal internationalism on human rights and how this is shaped by the legacies of colonialism, slavery, apartheid, and engagements with sexual, religious, and racial differences. The chapter encourages questions about whether rights are universal instruments of emancipation, or whether the rights are more complex, contradictory, and contingent in their functioning. The chapter also sets out the dominant understandings of human rights as progressive, universal, and based on a common human subject. Human rights advocates sometimes differ on the strategies to be adopted to address violations; these can have material, normative, and structural consequences that are not always empowering. These competing positions are illustrated through two case studies: one on the Islamic veil bans in Europe and the second on LGBT human rights interventions.

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.

Anglican Inter-Faith Relations from 1910 to the Twenty-First Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Hedges
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter explores the development of Anglican inter-faith relations since 1910 which has been shaped by a number of factors including: the ecumenical context, changing dynamics within the global Communion, globalization issues, and moves from mission to dialogue. The chapter begins with a historical overview and traces developments in key Anglican Communion texts and meetings, especially in recent times the Lambeth Conferences of 1988, 1998, and 2008. The ecumenical context which has shaped thought on inter-faith relations in this period is also given strong attention. The chapter concludes with two case studies. The first explores relations with Buddhism in the Sri Lankan context, while the second looks at relations with Islam focusing on the Middle East. While charting some general trends, it is noted that very different dynamics and varying standpoints exist in Anglican attitudes on inter-faith relations and have been part of the historical development throughout the period surveyed.

The Dilemmas of Islamic Bioethics in the Twenty-first Century

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-75
Author(s):  
Dr. Anke Iman Bouzenita
Keyword(s):  
Brain Death ◽  
Medical Care ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
First Century ◽  
Islamic Bioethics ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Twenty First Century

The current discourse on bioethical questions often reveals a certain patchiness or seeming inability to answer contemporary bioethical problems within an Islamic epistemological paradigm. Attempting to analyze the causes of this phenomenon, the author describes the decontextualization of Islamic concepts from a background of secularized medical care and the ethics in the Islamic world—as well as the estrangement due to these questions of Islamic law from its holistic framework of application as a pervasive phenomenon, which brought about the dilemmas of bioethics in the twenty-first century. The author discusses chosen bioethical case studies in this light, with a focus on the concept of brain death. Doing so, the author takes into consideration the paradigmatic relationship between science, bioethical models, and the implications of the relevant different worldviews. The author shows how constructed realities related to the life sciences have been imported from the secular setting into an already estranged Islamic context to be answered, and describes the evolving dilemmas that make Islamic bioethics appear like a stranger moving in a strange land.

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.

Contemporary Issues

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Tolan ◽  
Gilles Veinstein ◽  
Henry Laurens
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
First Century ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
World War ◽  
Independent States ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Newly Independent States

This chapter chronicles the struggles of the Muslim world and Europe during World War II as well as its aftermath. It shows how the war had helped to end European rule and begin the process of decolonization for Muslim nations such as Libya. And with the Muslim state now independent of direct European domination, the second half of the chapter explores the ways in which the Muslim world tackled the issue of development as well as a fresh wave of problems regarding human rights, universality, and other pitfalls of newly independent states struggling to survive in a world that has changed profoundly after a series of major conflicts. The chapter also reflects on the still-intertwined relationships between the Muslim world and Europe as history progresses into the twenty-first century.

A la dérive

2020 ◽  
pp. 271-286
Author(s):  
Eric Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
First Century ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
Michel Leiris ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Carl Einstein ◽  
Formal Constraints

The notion of the formless found a lasting definition in Documents, the dissident Surrealist magazine led by Georges Bataille, Carl Einstein and Michel Leiris from 1929 to 1931.  In an unassuming short entry for its ‘Dictionnaire’, Bataille presents the informe emphatically not as a system or a structure, but as ‘un terme servant à déclasser’; yet neither the disruptive impulse of the 'Dictionnaire', nor the more recent exhibitions it has generated, can avoid a measure of taxonomic organisation (L'Informe: mode d'emploi, 1996; Undercover Surrealism, 2006). In the realm of poetry, free verse has eroded the boundaries of the poetic, but its freedom from formal constraints is limited too; as Jay Parini (2008) contends, ‘formless poetry does not really exist, as poets inevitably create patterns in language that replicate forms of experience.’  Through  a small number of case studies, this chapter will consider the legacy of Bataille’s definition while assessing the ongoing tension between form and its undoing in textual and visual art of the twenty-first century.

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