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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Human rights > General
This edited book by Mills and Karp brings together political, legal and moral perspectives on the responsibilities of human rights protection in world politics today. It critiques a narrow focus on states' 'violations' of human rights, incorporates non-state actors, and looks beyond the 'Responsibility to Protect' policy framework.
The Internet is having an increasing influence on our lives, but what implications does it hold for human rights? How can it be used to promote and protect them? This book, written by an accomplished group of activists, writers, and academics, describes the development and use of the Internet for human rights, examines its impact across the world and upon various sectors of society, and discusses current and future trends in human rights promotion and protection.
- Integrates broad and comprehensive coverage of human rights and social justice challenges for vulnerable and marginalized populations, including refugees and migrants; persons involved in the criminal justice system; older adults; and groups facing oppression because of their race, culture, ethnicity, sexuality, and/or religion. - Leading scholarly experts in their respected areas (e.g., health and mental health; economic justice; etc.) draw valuable connections between theory and practice and provide case studies to illustrate how concepts apply and appear in real-life settings. - Develops an integrated social justice/human rights theoretical model that can be applied across methods, populations, and fields of practice.
Focusing on world regions where human rights abuses are the most serious, extensive and sustained; this book fills a crucial gap in our knowledge of the difficulties and promise of promoting human rights in our global age.
This book evaluates the experience of official torture of France in Algeria, as well as recently, the United States since 9/11, Israel against Palestinians, and Argentina during its "Dirty War" from 1972 to 1983. While evaluating what information was gained from torture, the book also shows the costs of undertaking this approach to interrogating suspected terrorists. Reaping What You Sow: A Comparative Examination of Torture in France, Argentina, Israel, and the United States presents a new angle in the study of this controversial practice by studying how these countries attempt to account for these secret practices and reform future interrogations against this universal crime. It also analyzes the costs of torture, whether in terms of intelligence gaffes or alienating potential supporters and enemies alike, creating strategic dilemmas in the war on terrorism. Adopting a comparative approach, the book studies questions like: What is the harm (or benefit) to the state once the torture becomes known? What are the political and strategic ramifications? Does torture help win wars? Can the use of torture bring about any lasting or beneficial reforms? These are daring questions seldom pondered. In asking them, this book will help to foster a discussion that is long overdue. The author concludes that ex-authoritarian regimes like Argentina's junta and France's colony in Algeria have reduced torture more than democracies. These authoritarian regimes collapsed, and new democratic regimes ultimately discredited their predecessors' torture. Despite many zigzags in amnesty, Argentina was more scandalized by torture of its citizens and improved more than France because the latter's subsequent, Fifth Republic regime was more similar to the Fourth, protecting many torturers with a permanent amnesty. Continuous democracies like the United States and Israel have only reduced their worst torture, while "torture lite" continues without accountability. The same elected officials and security agency personnel and prerogatives have largely remained without any legal discipline for their past, secret, criminal practices. The United States and Israel continue to innovate, hide, and resume torture with discretion because the various new, legislative, judicial, and executive checks and balances amount to wishful legal statements. Democracies need permanent accountability mechanisms to assure that security services abolish torture in practice. Otherwise, torture will continue to generate more terrorists without generating information that is consistently reliable.
A unique collection of essays that deal with the intriguing and complex problems connected to the question of Jewish identity in the contemporary world. Concerning the problem of identity formation, this book addresses very important issues: What is the content or meaning of Jewish identity? What has replaced religion in defining the content of Jewishness? How do people in different age groups construct their Jewish identity? In most cases, the authors have combined a variety of research methods: they drew samples or relied on the sample surveys of others; used personal interviews with respondents who are especially knowledgeable about their own Jewish communities, or based their research on participant observation of particular communities or communal institutions.
What is more paradoxically democratic than a people exercising their vote against the harbingers of the rule of law and democracy? What happens when the will of the people and the rule of law are at odds? Some commentators note that the presence of illiberal political movements in the public arena of many Western countries demonstrates that their democracy is so inclusive and alive that it comprehends and countenances even undemocratic forces and political agendas. But what if, on the contrary, these were the signs of the deconsolidation of democracy instead of its good health? What if democratically elected regimes were to ignore constitutional principles representing the rule of law and the limits of their power? With contributions from judges and scholars from different backgrounds and nationalities this book explores the framework in which this tension currently takes place in several Western countries by focusing on four key themes: - The Rule of Law: presenting a historical and theoretical reconstruction of the evolution of the Rule of Law; - The People: dealing with a set of problems around the notion of 'people' and the forces claiming to represent their voice; - Democracy and its enemies: tackling a variety of phenomena impacting on the traditional democratic balance of powers and institutional order; - Elected and Non-Elected: focusing on the juxtaposition between judges (and, more generally, non-representative bodies) and the people's representation.
Between 1937 and 1949, Joseph Stalin deported more than two million people of 13 nationalities from their homelands to remote areas of the U.S.S.R. His regime perfected the crime of ethnic cleansing as an adjunct to its security policy during those decades. Based upon material recently released from Soviet archives, this study describes the mass deportation of these minorities, their conditions in exile, and their eventual release. It includes a large amount of statistical data on the number of people deported; deaths and births in exile; and the role of the exiles in developing the economy of remote areas of the Soviet Union. The first wholesale deportation involved the Soviet Koreans, relocated to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to prevent them from assisting Japanese spies and saboteurs. The success of this operation led the secret police to adopt, as standard procedure, the deportation of whole ethnic groups suspected of disloyalty to the Soviet state. In 1941, the policy affected Soviet Finns and Germans; in 1943, the Karachays and Kalmyks were forcibly relocated; in 1944, the massive deportation affected the Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Crimean Greeks, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Khemshils; and finally, the Black Sea Greeks were moved in 1949 and 1950.
The last decade has witnessed an increased criticism against the human rights paradigm for its obsession with the 'culture of claims and rights.' According to the critics, this culture has led to an obsession with the rights of individuals at the expense of due attention to groups and to communities worldwide, resulting in the neglect of responsibilities and duties. It is also argued that there should be a shift from the Western emphasis on the rights for individuals to more attention to the responsibilities of individuals and collectivities as present in other cultures of the world. Several documents have been drafted to this effect. These discussions, and the ensuing documents, are far from only theoretical or abstract. They bear consequences in everyday life as evidenced in a number of areas, such as globalization, terrorism, multiculturalism, etc. This book examines this important human rights debate.
The author re-examines the concept of equality in international society, past and present. The view that equality necessarily flows from sovereignty is considered a contingent rather than a necessary contention. A new framework for equality in international society is sketched out emphasising the normative strength of the principle of equality.
This ground-breaking collection examines the erosion of the legal boundaries traditionally dividing civil detention from criminal punishment. The contributors empirically demonstrate how the mentally ill, non-citizen immigrants, and enemy combatants are treated like criminals in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.
This book uses the concept of universal human rights to explore the relationship between the individual, society, and truth. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was meant to provide a moral standard for judging the state's treatment of the individual, but some still contend that the principles expressed therein are not universal, but culturally relative. To answer the question of whether we can say something universally true about human beings while lacking the philosophical means to do so coherently, the author explores the changing relationship between truth and politics from Plato to Locke.
Intergroup relations is a contentious issue both inside and outside South Africa, where it has dominated political thinking for the past several decades, and affected the day-to-day lives of all the country's inhabitants. In recent years scholars have recognized the urgency and complexity of the problem posed by intergroup relations and responded to the challenge. This report of the Main Committee of the Human Sciences Research Council represents not merely a scientific analysis of intergroup relations in South Africa but a comprehensive interdisciplinary attempt to address all facets of the issue in a scientifically accountable way.
Based on extensive fieldwork that began in Argentina, this book asks how detained and disappeared persons inhabit the categories that international law has constructed to mark, judge, understand, and repair the horror.
From New York City's Chinatown to urban Indonesia, there are
fifty-five million ethnic Chinese living outside of China. Their
strong sense of community, along with their considerable economic
clout, makes them a compelling group with which to study immigrant
political participation.
This book vividly recreates the lives and identities of the children born of relationships between French men and African women in colonial French West Africa. The book shows how colonial policies and attitudes influenced the lives of this mixed-race population, and analyses their responses to living in a racially divided society.
In this book, Joel Spring offers a powerful and closely reasoned
justification and definition for the universal right to
education--applicable to all cultures--as provided for in Article
26 of the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
When should the international community intervene to prevent
suffering within sovereign states? This book argues that since
Kosovo, the normative thesis has failed to influence international
politics, as evidenced by events in Iraq and Darfur. This critique
rejects realism and offers a new perspective on this important
issue.
This book addresses the challenges within teaching Criminology and Criminal Justice, for students studying and academics involved in designing and delivering courses at an undergraduate and postgraduate level. The book highlights a number of contemporary issues through a wide context of themes and reflections of practice. The chapters are arranged in thematic parts: firstly 'the challenges of diversity and inclusion' secondly 'challenges of creating authentic learning environments', and lastly 'the challenge of creating transformative conversation'. These themes discuss different teaching approaches and present materials which address questions relevant for meeting the challenges. The book focuses on the role and impact of teaching Criminology and Criminal Justice in the real world and explores debates which have autonomy in their questioning and overlapping themes. The narratives reflect upon others' experiences and explore transformative learning and innovation in Criminology and Criminal Justice.
This work examines three advanced Latin American republics with long records of democracy, political stability, and economic prosperity which degenerated into instability and military dictatorship--and issues a warning for other democratic peoples. Although not beset by overpopulation, serious racial diversity, or widespread illiteracy, in recent decades the people of Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile destroyed much of the good life and many of the freedoms they formerly enjoyed. Electing too few statesmen and too many politicians, they demanded more from their governments than they were willing to pay for. Rejecting sound economic policies, they engaged in unrealistic practices which led to exorbitant inflation. In contrast to traditional respect for individual freedoms, the military governments they brought in to solve their problems committed gross violations of human rights. The political and economic blunders and their unfortunate consequences should serve as a warnings to the citizens of all democracies.
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