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 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.

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.

6 Successes, Problems, and Potential

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nussberger Angelika
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Direct Impact ◽  
Member States ◽  
European Court ◽  
Military Conflicts ◽  
The World ◽  
Bona Fide ◽  
Political Success

This concluding chapter explores how far the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Commission have influenced politics in the forty-seven Member States, created common standards in Europe, and set a model for other parts of the world. The assessment of political success or failure of the Convention model will depend on the expectancies. Undoubtedly, the Court’s jurisprudence reflects the new political tensions and provides answers. Three factors, however, cannot but reduce the direct impact of the Court’s advocacy for ‘bona fide democracy’. First, the Court can only decide on cases brought before it. Second, the Court can only play a subsidiary role. Third, the whole Convention system is dependent on the good will of the Member States. If they do not execute politically important judgments that do not ‘please’ them, the Court's means in forcing them are rather restricted. Despite all these difficulties, whenever it could and within the framework provided by the Convention, the Court has identified the relevant violations and assessed them within the political context. Ultimately, the Court is a ‘European’ court and can speak only for its European Member States. Nevertheless, its voice is not only heard in Europe, but also beyond its borders. This is especially true when the challenges it has to deal with are universal, such as terrorism, migration, and military conflicts.

Dealing with Disasters in an Age of Globalized Sentiment: Testing the Boundaries of the Cosmopolitan Ideal?

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 283-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darren O’Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Global Civil Society ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Global Response ◽  
The World ◽  
Per Se

AbstractNatural disasters, such as the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, have not only tested the fragility of the world capitalist system, but have asked questions of the ‘cosmopolitan ideal’ that underpins the discourse on global civil society prevalent in much literature on globalization. In this article I consider why the global response to such tragedies is markedly different to the more muted response to more overtly political tragedies, such as atrocities committed by states, and suggests that what it demonstrates is not a full cosmopolitanismper se, but a ‘selective cosmopolitanism’ grounded in a ‘de-politicization of feeling’. As a result, the political context of these natural disasters is often ignored and this calls for a repositioning of such disasters within a human rights framework and for an analysis of them informed by a critical globalization studies.

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.

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.

Dealing with World Domination: Lessons from The Powerpuff Girls and Friends

2004 ◽  
Vol 113 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-29
Author(s):  
Steve Stockwell
Keyword(s):  
September 11 ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Global Media ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Brain

How did the world change on September 11, 2001? While the events of that day may be more the product of shifting geopolitical formations than the cause, September 11 brings into focus the political functions of global media networks and their potential as conduits of world domination. In this context, Cartoon Network provides some insights and challenges for both media theory and the politics of the twenty-first century. World domination is a recurring theme on Cartoon Network in anime products such as Dragon Ball Z and Gundam Wing, in post-feminist products such as The Powerpuff Girls and Dexter's Laboratory, and in cross-over work such as Samurai Jack and, most intriguingly, Pinky and the Brain, where a super-smart lab rat and his stupid friend are constantly plotting to take over the world. The failure — on Cartoon Network at least — of all plans for world domination invites us to consider means of resistance to aspirational politics on a global scale.

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