Taking a fresh thematic approach to politics and society in Latin America, this introductory textbook analyzes the region's past and present in an accessible and engaging style well-suited to undergraduate students. The book provides historical insights into modern states and critical issues they are facing, with insightful analyses that are supported by empirical data, maps and timelines. Drawing upon cutting-edge research, the text considers critical topics relevant to all countries within the region such as the expansion of democracy and citizenship rights and responses to human rights abuses, corruption, and violence. Each richly illustrated chapter contains a compelling and cohesive narrative, followed by thought-provoking questions and further reading suggestions, making this text a vital resource for anyone encountering the complexities of Latin American politics for the first time in their studies.

This fascinating volume introduces an international audience to citizenship in Japan. It traces the development of citizenship education from before the Second World war to the present day, demonstrating the role of both the school system and the wider society. The book provides a detailed account anchored in critical analysis of the curriculum, educational resources, pedagogy and assessment. Citizenship Education in Japan explores controversial issues through tracing four themes: global/intercultural education environmental education geographical education historical education. It also examines current curricular innovations. Overall, this insightful volume demonstrates that contemporary citizenship education entails not only knowledge about social, historical and geographical affairs, but also participation in society locally, nationally, and globally.

This volume investigates the nature and changing roles of the non-state armed groups in the Middle East with a special focus on Kurdish, Shia and Islamic State groups. To understand the nature of transformation in the Middle Eastern geopolitical space, it provides new empirical and analytical insights into the impact of three prominent actors, namely ISIS, YPG and Shia Militias. With its distinctive detailed and multi-faceted analyses, it offers new findings on the changing contours of sovereignty, geopolitics and ideology, particularly after the Arab Uprisings. Overall this volume contributes to the study of violent geopolitics, critical security studies and international relations particularly by exploring the ideologies and strategies of the new non-state armed actors.

This innovative and timely Handbook brings together the work of 25 leading human rights scholars from all over the world to consider a broad range of human rights topics. The book discusses a wide range of contemporary themes, for example jurisdictional issues, such as human rights in the private sphere and extra-territorial obligations. It also deals with global and regional human rights systems, intersections with other areas of international law and practice, such as international criminal law and globalisation, and specific human rights topics including terrorism and indigenous peoples. Providing an excellent grounding for scholars seeking to understand the major topics within the discipline, this topical book is accessible to the novice human rights scholar, yet of great interest to the most seasoned human rights researcher. It will strongly appeal to law academics as well as students and practitioners of human rights.

This book examines the remaking of women's citizenship in the aftermath of conflict and international intervention. It develops a feminist critique of consociationalism as the dominant model of post-conflict governance by tracking the gendered implications of the Dayton Peace Agreement. It illustrates how the legitimisation of ethnonationalist power enabled by the agreement has reduced citizenship to an all-encompassing logic of ethnonational belonging and implicitly reproduced its attendant patriarchal gender order. Foregrounding women's diverse experiences, the book reveals gendered ramifications produced at the intersection of conflict, ethno-nationalism and international peacebuilding. Deploying a multidimensional feminist approach centred around women's narratives of belonging, exclusion, and agency, this book offers a critical interrogation of the promises of peace and explores individual/collective efforts to re-imagine citizenship.

The social security of a person in the modern world can only be ensured by a purposeful policy and actions of the state and society aimed at achieving it. This requires favorable socio-economic conditions and creating an effective personal security system protecting property and citizens. Human social security can be threatened by phenomena and processes that lead to drastic changes in the life of society and dangerous deformations that entail severe social consequences for the individual, social groups, and institutions. Regulating Human Rights, Social Security, and Socio-Economic Structures in a Global Perspective discusses the global regulation of human rights, social security, and socio-economic structures in an era of acute challenges and crises. It presents comprehensive research on political structures and the conflicts within causing challenges to individual identity and insecurity. Covering topics such as legal-socio studies, digital authoritarianism, and regional security, this premier reference source is an essential resource for government officials, politicians, geopolitical experts, economists, non-profit organizations, human rights advocates, libraries, students, researchers, and academicians.

Questions about democracy and human rights have emerged in the advent of the 21st century, a time in which the prospects for progress in these areas have never been greater. This book is designed to respond to some of these questions with reference to Latin America, where democratic regimes have alternated with authoritarian governments and the human rights record is inconsistent at best. Taken together, these essays reveal the complexity of democratic transitions, the importance of support for human rights, and the way in which democracy and human rights are linked in Latin America.

The first part of the book includes chapters that cast a critical eye on democracy and human rights trends in Chile, Venezuela, Columbia, and Brazil. Part two gauges the impact and prospects of foreign initiatives promoting democracy and human rights in the region, focusing especially on those efforts made by the United States in Haiti and Cuba. Each chapter reaffirms the essential linkages between procedural democracy and substantive human rights, and argues that states with authoritarian pasts must reorient their political cultures, and that these initiatives must come from both domestic and international agents. Students and scholars interested in the problems and prospects inherent in democratic transitions in contemporary Latin America will find this collection enlightening.

This book offers a unique exploration of the current state of freedom of speech as a basic right available to everyone. The research focuses on the different development stages of the concept of freedom of speech and the use of modern indicators to depict the its treatment in different legal cultures, including the obligations under international treaties and the effects that the globalising and digitalising environment have had on it. The authors conduct a broad survey of freedom of speech around the world, from Europe over Russia and both Americas to Africa, Asia, and Australia. The aim of this survey is to identify safeguards of freedom of speech on both a national and an international level, violations and threat scenarios, and in particular challenges to freedom of speech in the digital era.

This book builds a compelling picture of injustices inside immigration detention centers, within the context of the rise of the use of immigration detention in the Global North. The author presents the rarely heard voices of refugees, bringing their perspectives to light and personalising and humanising a global political issue. Based on in-depth interviews with formerly detained refugees who were involved in a wide range of protests, such as sit-ins and non-compliance, hunger strikes, lip sewing, escapes and riots, Human Rights, Refugee Protest and Immigration Detention presents a comprehensive insight into immigration detention and protest. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt, the book challenges contemporary human rights discourses which institutionalise power and will be a must-read for scholars, advocates and policymakers engaged in debates about immigration detention and forced migration.

Native Americans in the United States, similar to other indigenous people, created political, economic, and social movements to meet and adjust to major changes that impacted their cultures. For centuries, Native Americans dealt with the onslaught of non-Indian land claims, the appropriation of their homelands, and the destruction of their ways of life. Through various movements, Native Americans accepted, rejected, or accommodated themselves to the nontraditional worldviews of the colonizers and their policies. The Historical Dictionary of Native American Movements is designed to provide a useful reference for students and scholars to consult on topics dealing with key movements, organizations, leadership strategies, and the major issues these groups confronted. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Native American Movements contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 200 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, language, religion, politics, and the environment.

This handbook questions, debates and subverts commonly held assumptions about disability and citizenship in the global postcolonial context. Discourses of citizenship and human rights, so elemental to strategies for addressing disability-based inequality in wealthier nations, have vastly different ramifications in societies of the Global South, where resources for development are limited, democratic processes may be uncertain, and access to education, health, transport and other key services cannot be taken for granted. In a broad range of areas relevant to disability equity and transformation, an eclectic group of contributors critically consider whether, when and how citizenship may be used as a lever of change in circumstances far removed from UN boardrooms in New York or Geneva. Debate is polyvocal, with voices from the South engaging with those from the North, disabled people with nondisabled, and activists and politicians intersecting with researchers and theoreticians. Along the way, accepted wisdoms on a host of issues in disability and international development are enriched and problematized. The volume explores what life for disabled people in low and middle income countries tells us about subjects such as identity and intersectionality, labour and the global market, family life and intimate relationships, migration, climate change, access to the digital world, participation in sport and the performing arts, and much else.

Why did German states for so long make it extraordinarily difficult for foreigners who were not ethnic Germans to become citizens? To what extent was this policy a product of popular national feeling, and to what extent was it shaped by the more state-centered goals of the political elite? In what ways did Nazi citizenship policies perpetuate, or break with, the actions of earlier German states? What does this larger historical context suggest about the causes for, and implications of, the recent and dramatic liberalization in German citizenship laws?German states have long exercised tight control over which foreigners might become citizens. Because Germans felt a cultural attachment to other ethnic Germans, it has been argued, German national states naturally welcomed the immigration of ethnic Germans and sought to prevent the naturalization of individuals who were considered foreign. It is true that ethnic nationalism came to play a - and after 1918 the - key role in German citizenship and naturalization policies. But ethnicity was far from the only criterion employed to distinguish desirable from undesirable subjects or citizens.In a study that begins in the early nineteenth century and reaches the dramatic changes of the 1990s, the author challenges the traditional interpretation of the role of ethnicity. He shows that appeals to ethnic solidarity often masked more political objectives. Other factors affecting the politics of citizenship included German states' efforts to mold and improve society and to safeguard their own grip on power; changing conceptions of economic and military utility; the personality and political aims of Bismarck; the international conflict with Britain, France, and Russia; anti-Semitism and the world wars. While other authors have stressed consensus within German society, this account focuses on conflict.

Veiled women in the West appear menacing. Their visible invisibility is a cause of obsession. What is beneath the veil more than a woman? This book investigates the preoccupation with the veiled body through the imaging and imagining of Muslim women. It examines the relationship between the body and knowledge through the politics of freedom as grounded in a 'natural' body, in the index of flesh. The impulse to unveil is more than a desire to free the Muslim woman. What lies at the heart of the fantasy of saving the Muslim woman is the West's desire to save itself. The preoccupation with the veiled woman is a defense that preserves neither the object of orientalism nor the difference embodied in women's bodies, but inversely, insists on the corporeal boundaries of the West's mode of knowing and truth-making. The book contends that the imagination of unveiling restores the West's sense of its own power and enables it to intrude where it is 'other' - thus making it the centre and the agent by promising universal freedom, all the while stifling the question of what freedom is.

This volume presents an overview of the evolution of the current Chinese Constitution (1982) and the characteristics of constitutional studies since 1978. Readers are introduced to the basic principles of constitutional system in China and gain insights into the real state of Chinese law, allowing them to form their own opinions. It will also aid commercial communications with Chinese legal professionals as well as enterprises. The book covers a number of topics, including the history of constitutional communication between Chinese constitutionalists and the International Association of Constitutional Law since 1981, the most important academic contributions to international conferences concerning constitutional law by Chinese constitutionalists, the main characteristics of the current Chinese Constitution in the field of constitutional studies in China, the key issues of constitutional practice and implementation in China, the challenges of running the fundamental political system of the People's Representative Congress and the characteristics of rule of law specific to China.

What is a right? What, if anything, makes rights different from other features of the normative world, such as duties, standards, rules, or principles? Do all rights serve some ultimate purpose? In addition to raising these questions, philosophers and jurists have long been aware that different senses of 'a right' abound. To help make sense of this diversity, and to address the above questions, they developed two types of accounts of rights: models and theories. This book explicates rights modelling and theorising and scrutinises their methodological underpinnings. It then challenges this framework by showing why the theories ought to be abandoned. In addition to exploring structural concerns, the book also addresses the various ways that rights can be used. It clarifies important differences between rights exercise, enforcement, remedying, and vindication, and identifies forms of legal rights-claiming and rights-invoking outside of institutional contexts.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to dalits in India (who comprise over one-sixth of the country's population) from the origins of caste system to the present day. Despite a plethora of provisions for affirmative action in the Indian Constitution, dalits are largely excluded from the mainstream except for a minuscule section. The book traces the multifarious changes that befell them during the colonial period and their development thereafter under the leadership of Babasaheb Ambedkar in the centre of political arena. It looks at hitherto unexplored aspects of the degeneration of the dalit movement during the post-Ambedkar period, as well as salient contemporary issues such as the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party, dalit capitalism, the occupation of dalit discourse by NGOs, neoliberalism and its impact, and the various implicit or explicit emancipation schemas thrown up by them. The work also discusses ideology, strategy and tactics of the dalit movement; touches upon one of the most contentious issues of increasing divergence between the dalit and Marxist movements; and delineates the role of the state, both colonial and post-colonial, in shaping dalit politics in particular ways. A tour de force, this book brings to the fore many key contemporary concerns and will be of great interest to students, scholars and teachers of politics and political economy, sociology, history, social exclusion studies and the general reader.

At the dawn of the 1700s the Natchez viewed the first Francophones in the Lower Mississippi Valley as potential inductees to their chiefdom. This mistaken perception lulled them into permitting these outsiders to settle among them. Within two decades conditions in Natchez Country had taken a turn for the worse. The trickle of wayfarers had given way to a torrent of colonists (and their enslaved Africans) who refused to recognize the Natchez's hierarchy. These newcomers threatened to seize key authority-generating features of Natchez Country: mounds, a plaza, and a temple. This threat inspired these Indians to turn to a recent import-racial categories-to re-establish social order. They began to call themselves "red men" to reunite their polity and to distance themselves from the "blacks" and "whites" into which their neighbours divided themselves. After refashioning their identity, they launched an attack that destroyed the nearby colonial settlements. Their 1729 assault began a two-year war that resulted in the death or enslavement of most of the Natchez people. In Natchez Country, George Edward Milne provides the most comprehensive history of the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Natchez to date. From La Salle's first encounter with what would become Louisiana to the ultimate dispersal of the Natchez by the close of the 1730s, Milne also analyses the ways in which French attitudes about race and slavery influenced native North American Indians in the vicinity of French colonial settlements on the Mississippi River and how Native Americans in turn adopted and resisted colonial ideology.

This book discusses voting procedures in collective decision-making. Drawing on well-established election processes from all over the world, the author presents a voting procedure that allows for the speedy but fair election of a proportional, all-party coalition. The methodology - a matrix vote - is accurate, robust and ethno-color blind. In the vote, the counting procedure encourages all concerned to cross the gender as well as any party and/or sectarian divides. While in the resulting executive each party will be represented fairly and, at best, with the consensus of parliament, every minister will be the one most suited to his/her new portfolio. By using preferential voting and thus achieving consensus, the matrix vote will be fundamental to the resolution of conflicts. The matrix vote can also be used when: * two or more parliamentary parties elect a coalition government * one parliamentary party elects a government or shadow cabinet, or organizations in civil society elect their governing boards or executive committees * any group chooses a fixed number of individuals to form a team in which each member carries out a different function

Stories of women of peace, justice and rights, who have distinguished themselves in a world ruled by men. Women who have made a decisive contribution to the vindication of rights or the drafting of legal treaties, some of which are in force to this day. Sometimes promoters, at others formidable supporters, all have worked without reserve, with the courage of those who never stop believing. Opposed and hindered, they have nevertheless managed to impose themselves with the strength of their ideas, achieving, in the end, prizes and recognition. Their stories are usually little-known, but it is especially their humanity that makes them role models. The book reports their captivating personal, human and professional experiences, all lived in the advancement of human progress. To this day, our society is indebted to their battles and their victories.

The people of Africa emerged from colonial rule with optimism and determination to transform their society and bring prosperity to the continent, but today there is neither economic nor political freedom. In order to seize control of its destiny, Kofi Apraku contends, Africa must mobilize all of its resources, and recognize the contributions that emigrants in the United States can make toward its development. In this work, Apraku offers a comprehensive look at these emigrants, demonstrating that Africa has well-trained, experienced, and productive personnel in the United States, and that they are willing to return to their native lands only if African leaders are willing to undertake the necessary political and economic reforms.

Apraku's study addresses four main questions concerning African emigrants: Who are the skilled emigrants employed in the United States? Why did they come to America? What potential role can they play in Africa's development? and What types of reforms are needed to allow them to contribute to Africa's development? In addition, the book discusses contemporary African issues, including agriculture and food production, population growth, economic integration, diversification of African economies, privatization, democratization of political systems, and industrial policy for the 1990s. A review of failed economic policies is presented, along with suggestions for new approaches and a new emphasis on sustained economic growth and political stability. This work will be an important reference source for students of African studies and international development, as well as for international policymakers and professionals in development agencies.

What is the basis for choosing a nonviolent response to conflict and violence? By presenting and analyzing some of the most significant answers that have been given to this question throughout history, this anthology of writings from both Western and nonwestern traditions proposes principled and strategic nonviolence as a realistic alternative. It includes a selection of historical sources on nonviolence--ranging from the Bhagavad-Gita to the Bible--as well as a wide range of writings by authors such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela, who have contributed to both the theory and the practice of nonviolence. Besides tracing the historical development of the concept, this volume also suggests ways of applying nonviolence to our everyday lives in the first decade of the 21st century, which the United Nations General Assembly has declared to be the Decade for Education for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence.

Immigrants from South Asian countries are among the fastest growing segment of our population. This work, designed for students and interested readers, provides the first in-depth examination of recent South Asian immigrant groups--their history and background, current facts, comparative cultures, and contributions to contemporary American life. Groups discussed include Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Nepalis, and Afghans. The topics covered include patterns of immigration, adaption to American life and work, cultural traditions, religious traditions, women's roles, the family, adolescence, and dating and marriage. Controversial questions are examined: Does the American political economy welcome or exploit South Asian immigrants? Are American and South Asian values compatible? Leonard shows how the American social, religious, and cultural landscape looks to these immigrants and the contributions they make to it, and she outlines the experiences and views of the various South Asian groups. Statistics and tables provide information on migration, population, income, and employment. Biographical profiles of noted South Asian Americans, a glossary of terms, and selected maps and photos complete the text.

The opening chapter introduces the reader to South Asian history, culture, and politics, material on which the rest of the book draws because of its continuing relevance to South Asians settled in the United States. Leonard provides a fascinating look at the early South Asian immigrant Punjabi Mexican American community whose second and third generations are grappling with the issue of being Mexican, Hindu, and American. A comparative examination of immigrant groups from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Afghanistan illuminates the similarities and differences of their rich cultural and religious traditions, the social fabric of their communities, and how these immigrants have adapted to American life. Leonard looks closely at the diversity of cultural traditions--music, dance, poetry, foods, fashion, yoga, fine arts, entertainment, and literature--and how these traditions have changed in the United States. Keeping the family together is important to these immigrants. Leonard examines family issues, second generation identities, adolescence, making marriages, and wedding traditions. This work provides a wealth of information for students and interested readers to help them understand South Asian immigrant life, culture, and contributions to American life.