scholarly journals Citizenship Education and Civil Society

Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Ben Kisby

Contemporary societies face a range of important challenges, including: climate change; poverty; wealth, income, and other forms of social inequality; human rights abuses; misinformation and fake news; the growth of populist movements; and citizen disenchantment with democratic politics [...]

Author(s):  
Jonas Tallberg ◽  
Karin Bäckstrand ◽  
Jan Aart Scholte

Legitimacy is central for the capacity of global governance institutions to address problems such as climate change, trade protectionism, and human rights abuses. However, despite legitimacy’s importance for global governance, its workings remain poorly understood. That is the core concern of this volume, which engages with the overarching question: whether, why, how, and with what consequences global governance institutions gain, sustain, and lose legitimacy. This introductory chapter explains the rationale of the book, introduces its conceptual framework, reviews existing literature, and presents the key themes of the volume. It emphasizes in particular the volume’s sociological approach to legitimacy in global governance, its comparative scope, and its comprehensive treatment of the topic. Moreover, a specific effort is made to explain how each chapter moves beyond existing research in exploring the book’s three themes: (1) sources of legitimacy, (2) processes of legitimation and delegitimation, and (3) consequences of legitimacy.


Global Jurist ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ebenezer Durojaye

AbstractThis article examines the role of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (African Commission) in establishing norms and standards on HIV and human rights that will assist African governments in addressing human rights abuses in the context of HIV as well as in combating the spread of the epidemic. The article argues that through the promotional and protective mandate of the Commission, opportunity exists for the establishment of important norms and standards to guide African states in addressing human rights challenges raised by HIV/AIDS. It concludes by arguing that the African Commission needs to forge more collaboration with states and civil society groups to ensure proper implementation of its norms and standards at the national level


Author(s):  
Trinh T. Minh-ha

This chapter examines not only the unrest in Tibet but also that among China's civil society. It explores social media as a platform for speaking out against the human rights abuses, as well as the limitations of social media given the Chinese government's attempts at censoring these platforms on the matter of Tibet—an act that shares similarities with the U.S. government's own attempts at information surveillance and control as depicted in the previous chapters. The chapter then turns to Chinese civil society at large, as well as the emerging socio-political significance of the legal profession as China's rule of law consistently comes under public scrutiny.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-34
Author(s):  
Ludwig Krämer

This paper discusses, if and how the challenges of climate change could be brought in a case before the Court of Justice of the European Union. It concentrates on the admissibility of such a case and finds in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights the lever to overcome the obstacles which Article 263 tfeu places in front of members of the civil society. It discusses successively the questions of the Union act which might be tackled, the questions whether individual persons are directly and whether they are individually concerned by climate change decisions; and it ends with a short concluding remark.


2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 80-97
Author(s):  
Karen Abney-Korn ◽  
Shawn Cassiman ◽  
Dana Fleetham

Abstract Activists and academics have been sounding the alarms for years: climate change, globalization, capitalism, human rights abuses, and more. The alarms appeared to fall upon the deaf ears of the slumbering “multitude.” The Arab Spring, European movements, global and local attacks upon labor, and the Occupy Wall Street movement have awakened us from a slumber reliant upon vacuous media, consumption, alienation and isolationism. In shattering this spell, Occupy Wall Street has called us into the streets in record numbers, opening space for a new opportunity to imagine. Some scholars argue, “. . . we need Marxism to understand the structure of society and anarchism to prefigure or anticipate a new society” (Lynd and Grubacic 2008:xiii). We agree. In this article, we employ a local Occupy case study to briefly discuss 1) the historical contributions to Occupy Wall Street, 2) and to argue that it is precisely the opportunity to imagine, to anticipate, to challenge the “real” that holds the most promise for the development, and future, of the Occupy Wall Street movement.


2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin M Bakke ◽  
Neil J Mitchell ◽  
Hannah M Smidt

Abstract Research suggests that civil society mobilization together with the ratification of human rights treaties put pressure on governments to improve their human rights practices. An unexplored theoretical implication is that pressure provokes counterpressure. Instead of improving treaty compliance, some governments will have an interest in demobilizing civil society to silence their critics. Yet we do not know how and to what extent this incentive shapes governments’ policies and practices regarding civil society organizations. In this article we argue and show—using a new global database of government-sponsored restrictions on civil society organizations—that when governments have committed to human rights treaties and, at the same time, continue to commit severe human rights abuses, they impose restrictions on civil society groups to avoid monitoring and mitigate the international costs of abuses.


Author(s):  
Susanne Buckley-Zistel

Abstract This chapter asks what processes of dealing with the past have been set in motion and how they relate to the search for justice and the quest for remembrance on a more global scale. In the aftermath of the “Arab Spring,” the affected countries have been going through transitions of various forms that are significantly re-configuring the MENA region. In this context, a number of new civil society actors, political elites, and international norm entrepreneurs are engaging with the lengthy histories of repression in the respective countries as well as with the violence that occurred during the Arab Spring in order to reckon with the legacy of human rights abuses (Sriram, Transitional justice in the middle East and North Africa, Hurst, London, 2017). These transitions to justice are not without obstacles and challenges, though. The objective of her chapter is therefore not to tell the stories of various transitional justice and memory projects in post-Arab Spring countries, but to situate such practices in time and space.


2015 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 57-62
Author(s):  
Richard Lerman

The author discusses the concepts he has developed while gathering sound(s) and images for projects engaging politics and place, often at sites where human rights abuses have taken place. These works include recordings made at several Japanese-American and Aleut internment sites and at Nazi concentration camps, as well as borderlands works, environmental works on water use in the U.S. Southwest, and works addressing climate change in the Arctic.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document