A space for identity: the case of Lebanon’s naturalised Palestinians

Author(s):  
Hind Ghandour

This chapter examines a segment of Palestinians who were granted citizenship in Lebanon through a process of tawtin, a naturalization strategy underpinned by notions of national belonging and identity. It draws upon interviews and observations with naturalized citizens and refugees to illustrate and reveal patterns of citizenship practice that challenge national discourses of tawtin, and suggest the emergence of a paradigm that posits citizenship-as-rights, and not identity.  Despite the dichotomous discourse that posits Palestinian identity in dialectic to citizenship, naturalized Palestinians constructed dynamic spaces for both to exist, somewhat harmoniously. Despite the globalization of human rights and the rise of universal personhood, access to rights remains inextricably bound and dependent upon access to citizenship. Analyses of citizenship practice remains, for the most part, conscripted to frameworks that posit citizenship-as identity on the one hand, and the subsequent emergence of citizenship-as-rights on the other. Belying these existing frameworks is a negotiation and re-negotiation of citizenship by individuals that inherently challenges them from within. This necessitates a paradigmatic shift from the top-down lens within which tawtin of Palestinians in Lebanon is presented, towards a bottom-up approach that explores the individuals’ agency in its conceptualization. 

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (6-7) ◽  
pp. 557-583 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emiliano Macaluso ◽  
Uta Noppeney ◽  
Durk Talsma ◽  
Tiziana Vercillo ◽  
Jess Hartcher-O’Brien ◽  
...  

The role attention plays in our experience of a coherent, multisensory world is still controversial. On the one hand, a subset of inputs may be selected for detailed processing and multisensory integration in a top-down manner, i.e., guidance of multisensory integration by attention. On the other hand, stimuli may be integrated in a bottom-up fashion according to low-level properties such as spatial coincidence, thereby capturing attention. Moreover, attention itself is multifaceted and can be describedviaboth top-down and bottom-up mechanisms. Thus, the interaction between attention and multisensory integration is complex and situation-dependent. The authors of this opinion paper are researchers who have contributed to this discussion from behavioural, computational and neurophysiological perspectives. We posed a series of questions, the goal of which was to illustrate the interplay between bottom-up and top-down processes in various multisensory scenarios in order to clarify the standpoint taken by each author and with the hope of reaching a consensus. Although divergence of viewpoint emerges in the current responses, there is also considerable overlap: In general, it can be concluded that the amount of influence that attention exerts on MSI depends on the current task as well as prior knowledge and expectations of the observer. Moreover stimulus properties such as the reliability and salience also determine how open the processing is to influences of attention.


2007 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 053-095 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Monahan

Critics have long viewed Mahler's Sixth Symphony in A Minor (1904) as the composer's consummate essay in musical tragedy or negativity, one with deeply personal implications. Its enormous finale draws together materials from all the preceding movements and enacts a terrible conflict ending in failure. Yet few studies have looked beneath the work's bombastic rhetorical-expressive surface to explore how its negativity might be reflected in its tonal, formal, and thematic processes. This study sets out to link that negative expressivity to a breakdown of what Adorno called the "novelistic" character of Mahler's symphonies. For Adorno, Mahler pioneered a new, emancipatory symphonic idiom, one that liberated its musical materials from the dictates of preconceived formal totalities. Unlike the Classical symphony, where the parts exist for the sake of a symmetrical, tightly knit whole, the "novel-symphony" follows no predetermined path. Instead, it unfolds according to the dictates of its constituent elements, realizing its unique form from the "bottom up" rather than the "top down."Yet (as Adorno suggests) in the finale of the Sixth this integrating totality returns with a vengeance. We can read the movement as a clash between Adorno's novelistic and Classical paradigms, a showdown between the impulsive freedom of certain recalcitrant thematic elements on the one hand, and the increasingly punitive demands of rigid minor-mode sonata on the other. This drama--one that caricaturizes "classicism" itself as a repressive or stifling force--plays out on both formal and thematic levels. Several writers have noted the claustrophobic effect created by Mahler's incessant recycling of certain key motives, an "inescapable" coherence in which the organicist imperatives of the grand tradition themselves become corrupt and, ultimately, corrosive. As these generic, subthematic particles proliferate, the movement's "novelistic" themes--those seeking to subvert the strict sonata--are systematically denuded of the differentiating features and dissolved beyond recognition. In the end, the movement's infamously brutal minor-mode conclusion reveals itself to be the culmination of a musical plot spanning the entire movement, one that gathers its many details into an inexorably tragic narrative whole.


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-291
Author(s):  
Manuel A. Vasquez ◽  
Anna L. Peterson

In this article, we explore the debates surrounding the proposed canonization of Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken defender of human rights and the poor during the civil war in El Salvador, who was assassinated in March 1980 by paramilitary death squads while saying Mass. More specifically, we examine the tension between, on the one hand, local and popular understandings of Romero’s life and legacy and, on the other hand, transnational and institutional interpretations. We argue that the reluctance of the Vatican to advance Romero’s canonization process has to do with the need to domesticate and “privatize” his image. This depoliticization of Romero’s work and teachings is a part of a larger agenda of neo-Romanization, an attempt by the Holy See to redeploy a post-colonial and transnational Catholic regime in the face of the crisis of modernity and the advent of postmodern relativism. This redeployment is based on the control of local religious expressions, particularly those that advocate for a more participatory church, which have proliferated with contemporary globalization


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Luisa Frick

Against the background of the trend of Islamizing human rights on the one hand, as well as increasing skepticism about the compatibility of Islam and human rights on the other, I intend to analyze the potential of Islamic ethics to meet the requirements for vitalizing the idea of human rights. I will argue that the compatibility of Islam and human rights cannot be determined merely on the basis of comparing the specific content of the Islamic moral code(s) with the rights stipulated in the International Bill of Rights, but by scanning (different conceptions of) Islamic ethics for the two indispensable formal prerequisites of any human rights conception: the principle of universalism (i.e., normative equality) and individualism (i.e., the individual enjoyment of rights). In contrast to many contemporary (political) attempts to reconcile Islam and human rights due to urgent (global) societal needs, this contribution is solely committed to philosophical reasoning. Its guiding questions are “What are the conditions for deriving both universalism and individualism from Islamic ethics?” and “What axiological axioms have to be faded out or reorganized hierarchically in return?”


Author(s):  
Dolores Morondo Taramundi

This chapter analyses arguments regarding conflicts of rights in the field of antidiscrimination law, which is a troublesome and less studied area of the growing literature on conflicts of rights. Through discussion of Ladele and McFarlane v. The United Kingdom, a case before the European Court of Human Rights, the chapter examines how the construction of this kind of controversy in terms of ‘competing rights’ or ‘conflicts of rights’ seems to produce paradoxical results. Assessment of these apparent difficulties leads the discussion in two different directions. On the one hand, some troubles come to light regarding the use of the conflict of rights frame itself in the field of antidiscrimination law, particularly in relation to the main technique (‘balancing of rights’) to solve them. On the other hand, some serious consequences of the conflict of rights frame on the development of the antidiscrimination theory of the ECtHR are unearthed.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER VIALS

American studies has developed excellent critiques of post-1945 imperial modes that are grounded in human rights and Enlightenment liberalism. But to fully gauge US violence in the twenty-first century, we also need to more closely consider antiliberal cultural logics. This essay traces an emergent mode of white nationalist militarism that it calls Identitarian war. It consists, on the one hand, of a formal ideology informed by Identitarian ethno-pluralism and Carl Schmitt, and, on the other, an openly violent white male “structure of feeling” embodied by the film and graphic novel 300, a key source text for the transatlantic far right.


Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 1682
Author(s):  
Yoonja Kang ◽  
Yeongji Oh

The interactive roles of zooplankton grazing (top-down) and nutrient (bottom-up) processes on phytoplankton distribution in a temperate estuary were investigated via dilution and nutrient addition experiments. The responses of size-fractionated phytoplankton and major phytoplankton groups, as determined by flow cytometry, were examined in association with zooplankton grazing and nutrient availability. The summer bloom was attributed to nanoplankton, and microplankton was largely responsible for the winter bloom, whereas the picoplankton biomass was relatively consistent throughout the sampling periods, except for the fall. The nutrient addition experiments illustrated that nanoplankton responded more quickly to phosphate than the other groups in the summer, whereas microplankton had a faster response to most nutrients in the winter. The dilution experiments ascribed that the grazing mortality rates of eukaryotes were low compared to those of the other groups, whereas autotrophic cyanobacteria were more palatable to zooplankton than cryptophytes and eukaryotes. Our experimental results indicate that efficient escape from zooplankton grazing and fast response to nutrient availability synergistically caused the microplankton to bloom in the winter, whereas the bottom-up process (i.e., the phosphate effect) largely governed the nanoplankton bloom in the summer.


Author(s):  
Hannah Smidt ◽  
Dominic Perera ◽  
Neil J. Mitchell ◽  
Kristin M. Bakke

Abstract International ‘naming and shaming’ campaigns rely on domestic civil society organizations (CSOs) for information on local human rights conditions. To stop this flow of information, some governments restrict CSOs, for example by limiting their access to funding. Do such restrictions reduce international naming and shaming campaigns that rely on information from domestic CSOs? This article argues that on the one hand, restrictions may reduce CSOs’ ability and motives to monitor local abuses. On the other hand, these organizations may mobilize against restrictions and find new ways of delivering information on human rights violations to international publics. Using a cross-national dataset and in-depth evidence from Egypt, the study finds that low numbers of restrictions trigger shaming by international non-governmental organizations. Yet once governments impose multiple types of restrictions, it becomes harder for CSOs to adapt, resulting in fewer international shaming campaigns.


2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDRA HUNEEUS

AbstractThis article argues that human rights law – which mediates between claims about universal human nature, on the one hand, and hard-fought political battles, on the other – is in particular need of a richer exchange between jurisprudential approaches and social science theory and methods. Using the example of the Inter-American Human Rights System, the article calls for more human rights scholarship with a new realist sensibility. It demonstrates in what ways legal and social science scholarship on human rights law both stand to improve through sustained, thoughtful exchange.


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-86
Author(s):  
Dragan Trailovic

The article explores the European Union's approach to human rights issues in China through the processes of bilateral and multilateral dialogue on human rights between the EU and the People's Republic of China, on the one hand. On the other hand, the paper deals with the analysis of the EU's human rights policy in the specific case of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which is examined through normative and political activities of the EU, its institutions and individual member states. Besides, the paper examines China's response to the European Union's human rights approaches, in general, but also when it comes to the specific case of UAR Xinjiang. ?his is done through a review of China's discourse and behaviour within the EU-China Human Rights Dialogue framework, but also at the UN level and within the framework of bilateral relations with individual member states. The paper aims to show whether and how the characteristics of the EU's general approach to human rights in China are reflected in the individual case of Xinjiang. Particular attention shall be given to the differentiation of member states in terms of their approach to human rights issues in China, which is conditioned by the discrepancy between their political values, normative interests and ideational factors, on the one hand, and material factors and economic interests, on the other. Also, the paper aims to show the important features of the different views of the European Union and the Chinese state on the very role of Human Rights Dialogue, as well as their different understandings of the concept of human rights itself. The study concluded that the characteristics of the Union's general approach to human rights in China, as well as the different perceptions of human rights issues between China and the EU, were manifested in the same way in the case of UAR Xinjiang.


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