This book critically looks at the tensions between the promise to transform education through the use of digital technology and the tendency to utilize digital technology in instrumental and technical ways. The widespread use of digital technology has had a remarkable effect on almost every domain of human life. This technological change has caused governments, educational departments, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to recognize the need to develop educational plans that would support the social and the cultural changes that have occurred with the ubiquitous permeation of digital technology into our everyday lives. This book challenges common assumptions regarding digital technology and education, through critical exploration of educational policies, interviews, and class observations in the US and Israel. In doing so, the author sheds light on the possibilities of advancing digital citizenship under current educational policies.

This book investigates the modern privatisation of war. It specifically focuses on the legal regime regulating private military and security company (PMSC) personnel in armed conflicts. The law regulating PMSC personnel is analysed from two perspectives. Firstly, can one of the three following legal statuses established by international humanitarian law - "mercenary", "combatant" or "civilian" - be applied to PMSC personnel? Secondly, the book employs a context-dependent methodology to explore the legal regime regulating PMSC personnel. It argues that the legal regime regulating PMSC personnel in armed conflicts depends on who hires them: individual states, the United Nations, non-governmental organisations, or armed groups. This approach represents a departure from previous literature, where attention has primarily been paid to the use of PMSCs by states.

Sociological theory has veered between an insistence on understanding human rights as a genuine universal morality and far more cynical portrayals of human rights as a veil of bourgeois capitalist enterprise. This book criticizes, adapts and combines seemingly disparate elements of contemporary sociological theory within a new approach to human rights. The practicality of the approach is clearly demonstrated in its application to one of the most important, complex and vexing locations of human rights violation in the world: modern Turkey. While sociological analyses of Turkey have largely been limited to local perspectives on individual issues of human rights violation, this book expands sociological understanding of the broad swath of Turkey's human rights violations into a new global perspective of hope and resolution.

A gripping history of China's deteriorating relationship with Hong Kong, and its implications for the rest of the world. For the 150 years that Hong Kong was a British colony, people, money and technology flowed freely, while Hong Kong residents enjoyed freedoms that simply did not exist in mainland China. When the territory was handed over to China in 1997, the Communist Party promised that Hong Kong would remain highly autonomous for fifty years. Now, at the halfway mark, it is clear that China has not kept its word. Universal suffrage and free elections have not been instituted and activists have been jailed en masse following the decree of a sweeping national security law by Beijing. As China continues to expand its global influence, Hong Kong serves as a chilling preview of how dissenters could be treated in regions that fall under the emerging superpower's control. A Hong Kong resident from 1992 to 2021, Mark L. Clifford has witnessed this transformation first-hand and has unrivalled access to the full range of the city's society, from student protestors to billionaire businessmen and senior government officials. A powerful and dramatic mix of history and on-the-ground reporting, Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World is the definitive account of one of the most important geopolitical standoffs of our time.

From the murderous reaction to the publication in a French satirical magazine of 'blasphemous' cartoons, to wrangles over the wearing of religious dress and symbols in schools and workplaces, the interaction between law and religion is rarely far from the headlines. Indeed, the editors of this Routledge collection argue that, since the events of 11 September 2001, the short- and long-term implications of multiculturalism, religious resurgence, and extremism have dominated public life both globally and domestically. Consequently, they say, the legal framework concerning the regulation of religion has changed dramatically over the last decade or so. There have been numerous developments at the global, regional, state, and sub-state level, and these changes have been accompanied by an unprecedented number of high-profile cases affecting religious individuals and groups. Now, this new collection from Routledge's Critical Concepts in Law series, edited by two prolific authors based at the world-leading Centre for Law and Religion at Cardiff University, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to help researchers and students navigate and make better sense of an abundance of scholarship. With a full index, and thoughtful introductions, newly written by the learned editors, Law and Religion traces the field's development and highlights the challenges for future explorations. The collection will be valued by legal and religious scholars as a vital and enduring resource.

European borders that aim to control migration and mobility increasingly rely on technology to distinguish between citizens and aliens. This book explores new tensions in Europe between states and citizens, and between politics, technology and human rights.

From individual experiences of prejudice to international political debate around equal rights, social attitudes towards sexuality and transgender equalities are evolving. This timely text traces shifts at personal, national and international levels to fully assess the landscape of policy and theory today. Bringing together critical perspectives and original research, Sexuality, Equality and Diversity clearly outlines contested terms and key debates in the field. It explains how equality policy is developed and put into practice, examining what has been achieved by legislation so far and highlighting the challenges to overcome. Exploring the multiple identities and different agendas of various LGBT communities, this thought-provoking book draws on a range of rich examples to shed new light on sexual citizenship today. This is an invaluable guide through the complex terrain of equality and diversity, and is invaluable reading for students of sociology, social policy, gender studies and politics.

The Ambivalence of Good examines the genesis and evolution of international human rights politics since the 1940s. Focusing on key developments such as the shaping of the UN human rights system, decolonization, the rise of Amnesty International, the campaigns against the Pinochet dictatorship, the moral politics of Western governments, or dissidence in Eastern Europe, the book traces how human rights profoundly, if subtly, transformed global affairs. Moving beyond monocausal explanations and narratives prioritizing one particular decade, such as the 1940s or the 1970s, The Ambivalence of Good argues that we need a complex and nuanced interpretation if we want to understand the truly global reach of human rights, and account for the hopes, conflicts, and interventions to which this idea gave rise. Thus, it portrays the story of human rights as polycentric, demonstrating how actors in various locales imbued them with widely different meanings, arguing that the political field evolved in a fitful and discontinuous process. This process was shaped by consequential shifts that emerged from the search for a new world order during the Second World War, decolonization, the desire to introduce a new political morality into world affairs during the 1970s, and the visions of a peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War. Finally, the book stresses that the projects pursued in the name of human rights nonetheless proved highly ambivalent. Self-interest was as strong a driving force as was the desire to help people in need, and while international campaigns often improved the fate of the persecuted, they were equally likely to have counterproductive effects. The Ambivalence of Good provides the first research-based synopsis of the topic and one of the first synthetic studies of a transnational political field (such as population, health, or the environment) during the twentieth century. Based on archival research in six countries, it breaks new empirical ground concerning the history of human rights in the United Nations, of human rights NGOs, of far-flung mobilizations, and of the uses of human rights in state foreign policy.

This study of contemporary South Africa focuses thematically on the major political contestants, interest-groups and power-brokers in that country. The contributors, several of whom have first-hand experience of the South African problem, attempt to provide from varied perspectives - ranging from the Afrikaner establishment to the exiled liberation movements - an introduction to aspects of contemporary South African politics and an insight into its many forms of resistance.

This compilation of interdisciplinary and community voices addresses issues of globalization, democracy, human rights, and how universities can act to promote steps towards greater social justice. As a relational concept, definitions of social justice reflect beliefs, values and priorities - which are neither consensually shared in modern societies, nor among social scientists who study it.

The first women entered national government in Italy in 1946, and represented a "lost wave" of feminist action. They used a specific electoral and legislative strategy, "constitutional rights feminism," to construct an image of the female citizen as a bulwark of democracy. Mining existing tropes of femininity such as the Resistance heroine, the working mother, the sacrificial Catholic, and the "mamma Italiana," they searched for social consensus for women's equality that could reach across religious, ideological, and gender divides. The political biographies of woman politicians intertwine throughout the book with the legislative history of the women's rights law they created and helped pass: a Communist who passed the first law guaranteeing paid maternity leave in 1950, a Socialist whose law closed state-run brothels in 1958, and a Christian Democrat who passed the 1963 law guaranteeing women's right to become judges. Women politicians navigated gendered political identity as they picked and chose among competing models of femininity in Cold War Italy. In so doing, they forged a political legacy that in turn affected the rights and opportunities of all Italian women. Their work is compared throughout The Lost Wave to the constitutional rights of women in other parts of postwar Europe.

Most advanced industrial democracies have been successful in controlling ethnic political conflicts peacefully. This book examines ethnoregional conflicts in seven ethnoregions-in Scotland, Flanders, Wallonia, Brussels, Quebec, Northern Ireland, and the Basque region of Spain-to explain what mactors determine electoral support for ethnoregional parties, why in some cases electoral conflict has co-existed with ethnic violence, and why there appears to be an inverse relationship between electoral success and policy success among many ethnoregional parties. As ethnic conflicts-peaceful and violent-continue to rage around the world, this important new study merits the attention of scholars and students in comparative politics and ethnic studies.

Governments use human rights both as a tool and as an objective of foreign policy. "The Role of Human Rights in Foreign Policy" analyzes conflicting policy goals such as peace and security, economic relations and development cooperation. The use of diplomatic, economic and military means is discussed, together with the role of state actors, intergovernmental organizations and non-state actors.

When a person is not recognised as a citizen anywhere, they are typically referred to as ‘stateless’. This can give rise to challenges both for individuals and for the institutions that try to govern them. Statelessness, governance, and the problem of citizenship breaks from tradition by relocating the ‘problem’ to be addressed from one of statelessness to one of citizenship. It problematises the governance of citizenship – and the use of citizenship as a governance tool – and traces the ‘problem of citizenship’ from global and regional governance mechanisms to national and even individual levels. With contributions from activists, affected persons, artists, lawyers, academics, and national and international policy experts, this volume rejects the idea that statelessness and stateless persons are a problem. It argues that the reality of statelessness helps to uncover a more fundamental challenge: the problem of citizenship. -- .

The book assesses the adoption of counterterrorism measures in the Netherlands and the United States, which facilitate criminal investigations with a preventive focus (anticipative criminal investigations), from the perspective of rule of law principles. Anticipative criminal investigation has emerged in the legal systems of the Netherlands and the United States as a consequence of counterterrorism approaches where the objective of realizing terrorism prevention is combined with the objective to eventually prosecute and punish terrorists. This book has addressed this new preventive function of criminal justice and identified the rule of law principles limiting the role of criminal investigation in terrorism prevention. The possibilities and limits of criminal investigation in general and of cooperation and the division of responsibilities between law enforcement and intelligence have been addressed in a manner transcending differences between national legal systems. Valuable for academics and practitioners interested in criminal investigation, rule of law and counterterrorism.

The collapse of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union has resulted in a proliferation of discontented minorities. Preventing the violent conflict triggered by such disaffection has become a driving issue in post-Cold War Europe. National Minorities and the European Nation-States System reveals that the contemporary international system is the root cause of the problem and viable solutions to it must acknowledge this structural limitation.

The Falungong movement originated in 1992 as a system of breathing exercises designed to promote health and well-being. Riding on the coattails of the qigong fever that swept through China, it attracted an extensive following until 1994, when the Chinese government suppressed the qigong movement. A series of protest rallies by Falungong organizations against local government repression set in motion an upward conflict spiral that culminated in the siege of the Party headquarters in Beijing on April 25, 1999, by more than 20,000 Falungong practitioners. Revenge of the Forbidden City begins with the shock of the Politburo against such insolent defiance, resolving to retaliate against the Falungong, a retaliation that represented "the most serious political incident" since the Tiananmen upheaval in 1989.
James W. Tong reveals how the Chinese government's relentless, sustained repression of the Falungong movement typifies its response towards perceived internal threats. Though many claim that the Democratic reforms in China have eroded the government's ability to monitor and control its citizens, the success of the campaign to eradicate Falungong indicates otherwise: the government effectively implemented a multifaceted offensive involving unsparing suppression, pervasive propaganda, and coercive conversion. The successful execution of this complex campaign reveals the resilience of China's authoritarian institutions. Using empirical evidence and thorough analysis, Tong reveals the Chinese state's formidable ability to crush dissent and provides a cogent rebuttal to those who claim that the Communist government is on the verge of collapse. The definitive account of China's response to Falungong, Revenge of the Forbidden City is essential for any scholar interested in how the Chinese state actually operates.

In entries such as Jane Addams and the Settlement House Movement, Booker T. Washington and Black Self-Help, and Betty Friedan and the National Organization for Women, this dictionary provides in-depth examination of major American reformers and the movements they defined. With coverage extending from the early republic to today, the book considers abolitionism, women's rights, temperance, the social gospel, birth control, pacifism, civil rights, environmentalism, consumerism, and other controversial movements. Each entry combines biography with historical analysis to show the historical context and character of the movement and person. Individually, the entries provide modern, interpretive treatments of their subjects. Collectively, they reveal the direction and dynamics of American reform over two centuries. Emphasizing social reform over civic reform, the book gives special attention to reformers and reforms that have significantly altered the social order. Written by prominent scholars, the entries show the importance of personality and historical context in reform movements and the relationship between particular reforms and the temperament of an age. With full-bodied biographies of the reformers and their movements, a time-line on American reform, up-to-date interpretations and bibliographies, and a wide range of subjects, this book provides the most comprehensive and cogent view of American reform and reformers anywhere. It also provides the fullest treatment to date of post-World War II reform activity and personalities.

Unlike many who separate environmental from other social issues in their analyses of the locally unwanted land use (LULU) problem, O'Looney argues that the issues are really connected and must be addressed jointly. He frames the question this way: What is the appropriate distribution of land development rights and responsibilities overall?, then offers an answer based on Madison's conception of property and Jefferson's ideas about small-scale democracy. In doing so O'Looney examines the ideological roots of the NIMBY-LULU problem and the various zoning, land-use, and antidiscrimination policies that have been created to solve it. A thoughtful study for corporate and public executives, who need new ways to reconcile economic development with other social needs, and an innovative, challenging analysis for the public policy experts and political scientists who advise them.

This booklet contains the texts of the Theo van Boven Lectures held in 2014 and 2015. They deal with the subject of defending human dignity by looking at the different roles the human rights defender, the scholar and the human rights NGO can play in achieving this goal. Hina Jilani looks at the opportunities and limitations of human rights defenders in their fight to stand up for the protection of human dignity. Jean Allain discusses the role of the legal scholar in studying contemporary forms of slavery. Finally Aidan McQuade denounces practices of slavery from the perspective of a human rights NGO. The Theo van Boven Lecture Series are organised annually by the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights as a tribute to Theo van Boven, emeritus Professor of International Law at Maastricht University, and formerly Director of the UN Division of Human Rights, member of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. The themes covered by the lectures reflect the wide range of interests of Theo van Boven. This publication is interesting for human rights practitioners, scholars and students.

European Union equality and anti-discrimination law were revolutionized by the incorporation of Article 13 into the EC Treaty, adding new anti-discrimination grounds and new possibilities. This comprehensive 2007 volume provides a fresh approach to Article 13 and its directives; it adopts a contextual framework to equality and anti-discrimination law in the European Union. Part I deals with the evolution of Article 13, demographic and social change and the inter-relationship between European Equality Law and Human Rights. Part II contains expert essays on each of the Article 13 anti-discrimination grounds: sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age and sexual orientation, with common themes weaving throughout. This book will be of interest to everyone concerned with combating discrimination, academics, NGOs, lawyers, human resource professionals, employers, employees, research students and many others in the European Union and beyond.

In the past two decades, '"civil society" has become a central organizing concept in the social sciences. Occupying the middle ground between the state and private life, the civil sphere encompasses everything from associations to protests to church groups to nongovernmental organizations. Interest in the topic exploded with the decline of statism in the 1980s and 1990s, and many of our current debates about politics and social policy are informed by the renewed focus on civil society. Michael Edwards, author of the most authoritative single-authored book on civil society, serves as the editor for The Oxford Handbook of Civil Society. Broadly speaking, the book views the topic through three prisms: as a part of society (voluntary associations), as a kind of society (marked out by certain social norms), and as a space for citizen action and engagement (the public square or sphere). It does not focus solely on the West (a failing of much of the literature to date), but looks at civil society in both the developed and developing worlds. Throughout, it merges theory, practice, and empirical research. In sum, The Oxford Handbook on Civil Society will be the definitive work on the topic.