Contingent Movements?

2021 ◽  
pp. 199-212
Author(s):  
Christopher Szabla

No single international organisation oversees and enforces global migrant rights or plans and facilitates migrant movement. Migrant rights are fragmented among, inter alia, human rights and labour law. Why does no clear, comprehensive international regime exist to integrate migrant law and provide oversight for all migrants as international refugee law and institutions do for refugees? Scholars have cited a 1951 US decision to withdraw support for a migration regime that involved communist participation. But the Cold War explanation sidesteps, among other things, the creation of an intergovernmental migration regime outside the communist world. Both the refugee and migration regimes subsequently paralleled one another’s development, but architectural differences ultimately rendered one more robust. This chapter shows how decisions that shaped the differences between these regimes were not entirely determined by the Cold War, while demonstrating how decisions related to another overarching historical force—decolonisation—resulted in the expression of these differences.

Author(s):  
Aryeh Neier

This chapter centers on Amnesty International, the best-known and largest human rights organization in the world that was established in London in 1961. It highlights how the creation of Amnesty was a major milestone in the emergence of an enduring human rights movement. It also discusses the Cold War context that played a crucial role in shaping Amnesty. The chapter explores the intention of Amnesty to operate worldwide and address the abuses of rights committed by those on all sides of the global struggle. It also talks about the principal founder of Amnesty, Peter Benenson, who was active in the efforts to promote civil liberties several years prior to taking the lead in the formation of Amnesty.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-122
Author(s):  
A. Grigoryan

Many in the West, especially in the human rights community, saw the end of the Cold War as a great opportunity for a normative transformation in international relations. They argued that the concept of sovereignty was an anachronism and that a new international regime should be created allowing for easier intervention against states that subject their citizens to violence. It seemed like a relatively straightforward issue of clashing normative principles at fi rst. As the conversation about interventions has evolved, however, it has become increasingly clear that the problem is much more complex. This article examines the set of complex trade-off s between various values and norms related to humanitarian intervention and demonstrates that no interventionist doctrine that balances these values and norms is possible. It empirically examines these tensions in the context of interventions in Kosovo and Libya.


Author(s):  
Filip Ejdus

During the cold war, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia was a middle-sized power pursuing a non-aligned foreign policy and a defence strategy based on massive armed forces, obligatory conscription, and a doctrine of ‘Total National Defence’. The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s resulted in the creation of several small states. Ever since, their defence policies and armed forces have been undergoing a thorough transformation. This chapter provides an analysis of the defence transformation of the two biggest post-Yugoslav states—Serbia and Croatia—since the end of the cold war. During the 1990s, defence transformation in both states was shaped by the undemocratic nature of their regimes and war. Ever since they started democratic transition in 2000, and in spite of their diverging foreign policies, both states have pivoted towards building modern, professional, interoperable, and democratically controlled armed forces capable of tackling both traditional and emerging threats.


2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiyoung Song

AbstractFor the past decade, the author has examined North Korean primary public documents and concludes that there have been changes of identities and ideas in the public discourse of human rights in the DPRK: from strong post-colonialism to Marxism-Leninism, from there to the creation of Juche as the state ideology and finally 'our style' socialism. This paper explains the background to Kim Jong Il's 'our style' human rights in North Korea: his broader framework, 'our style' socialism, with its two supporting ideational mechanisms, named 'virtuous politics' and 'military-first politics'. It analyses how some of these characteristics have disappeared while others have been reinforced over time. Marxism has significantly withered away since the end of the Cold War, and communism was finally deleted from the latest 2009 amended Socialist Constitution, whereas the concept of sovereignty has been strengthened and the language of duties has been actively employed by the authority almost as a relapse to the feudal Confucian tradition. The paper also includes some first-hand accounts from North Korean defectors interviewed in South Korea in October–December 2008. They show the perception of ordinary North Koreans on the ideas of human rights.


2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Nickel

Like people born shortly after World War II, the international human rights movement recently had its sixty-fifth birthday. This could mean that retirement is at hand and that death will come in a few decades. After all, the formulations of human rights that activists, lawyers, and politicians use today mostly derive from the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the world in 1948 was very different from our world today: the cold war was about to break out, communism was a strong and optimistic political force in an expansionist phase, and Western Europe was still recovering from the war. The struggle against entrenched racism and sexism had only just begun, decolonization was in its early stages, and Asia was still poor (Japan was under military reconstruction, and Mao's heavy-handed revolution in China was still in the future). Labor unions were strong in the industrialized world, and the movement of women into work outside the home and farm was in its early stages. Farming was less technological and usually on a smaller scale, the environmental movement had not yet flowered, and human-caused climate change was present but unrecognized. Personal computers and social networking were decades away, and Earth's human population was well under three billion.


2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-141
Author(s):  
Marie-Pierre Rey
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document