Bøger i Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights serien

In International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa, Kurt Mills develops a typology of responses to mass atrocities, investigates the limitations of these responses, and calls for such responses to be implemented in a more timely and thoughtful manner.

Sharon Alane Abramowitz examine how humanitarian healthcare dealt with mental health and psychiatry during Liberia's turbulent postwar transition, looking closely at the ways mental health and psychosocial interventions worked to manage trauma and produce postwar peace.

Human Rights and Disability Advocacy brings together perspectives from civil society representatives who played key roles in the drafting of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, shedding light on the emergent practices of a "new diplomacy" and the larger enterprise of human rights advocacy at the international level.

Roman David analyzes major institutional innovations devised in Central Europe to deal with officials tainted by their complicity with prior regimes. He examines the historical origins, social meanings, and political effects of personnel systems based on dismissal, exposure, and confession in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland.

In Strategies of Compliance with the European Court of Human Rights, Andreas von Staden looks at the nature of human rights challenges in two enduring liberal democracies—Germany and the United Kingdom. Employing an ambitious data set that covers the compliance status of all European Court of Human Rights judgments rendered until 2015, von Staden presents a cross-national overview of compliance that illustrates a strong correlation between the quality of a country''s democracy and the rate at which judgments have met compliance. Tracing the impact of violations in Germany and the United Kingdom specifically, he details how governments, legislators, and domestic judges responded to the court''s demands for either financial compensation or changes to laws, policies, and practices.Framing his analysis in the context of the long-standing international relations debate between rationalists who argue that actions are dictated by an actor''s preferences and cost-benefit calculations, and constructivists, who emphasize the influence of norms on behavior, von Staden argues that the question of whether to comply with a judgment needs to be analyzed separately from the question of how to comply. According to von Staden, constructivist reasoning best explains why Germany and the United Kingdom are motivated to comply with the European Court of Human Rights judgments, while rationalist reasoning in most cases accounts for how these countries bring their laws, policies, and practices into sufficient compliance for their cases to be closed. When complying with adverse decisions while also exploiting all available options to minimize their domestic impact, liberal democracies are thus both norm-abiding and rational-instrumentalist at the same time—in other words, they choose their compliance strategies rationally within the normative constraint of having to comply with the Court''s judgments.

When the Thai state violently suppressed a massive prodemocracy protest in "Black May," 1992, it initiated an unprecedented period in Thailand. The military, shamed and chagrined, withdrew from political life, and the democracy movement had more latitude than ever before in Thailand''s history, gaining an institutional presence previously unseen. This extraordinary moment created a unique opportunity for the human rights movement to emerge, for the first time, on a national scale in Thailand.Don F. Selby examines this era of Thai political history to determine how and why the time was ripe for such developments. By placing greater emphasis on human rights as an anthropological concern, he focuses on the understandings that social actors draw from human rights struggles. He concludes that what gave emergent human rights in Thailand their shape, force, and trajectories are the ways that advocates engaged, contested, or reworked debates around Buddhism in its relationship to rule and social structure; political struggle in relation to a narrative of Thai democracy that disavowed egalitarian movements; and traditional standards of social stratification and face-saving practices. In this way, human rights ideals in Thailand emerge less from global-local translation and more as a matter of negotiation within everyday forms of sociality, morality, and politics.

In Communists and Their Victims, Roman David identifies and examines four classes of justice measures—retributive, reparatory, revelatory, and reconciliatory—to discover which, if any, rectified the legacy of human rights abuses committed during the communist era in the Czech Republic. Conducting interviews, focus groups, and nationwide surveys between 1999 and 2015, David looks at the impact of financial compensation and truth-sharing on victims'' healing and examines the role of retribution in the behavior and attitudes of communists and their families. Emphasizing the narratives of former political prisoners, secret collaborators, and former Communist Party members, David tests the potential of justice measures to contribute to a shared sense of justice and their ability to overcome the class structure and ideological divides of a formerly communist regime.Complementing his original research with analysis of legal judgments, governmental reports, and historical records, David finds that some justice measures were effective in overcoming material and ideological divides while others obstructed victims'' healing and inhibited the transformation of communists. Identifying "justice without reconciliation" as the primary factor hampering the process of overcoming the past in the Czech Republic, Communists and Their Victims promotes a transformative theory of justice that demonstrates that justice measures, in order to be successful, require a degree of reconciliation.

The ruthless military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 betrayed the country''s people, presiding over massive disappearances of its citizenry and, in the process, destroying the state''s trustworthiness as the guardian of safety and well-being. Desperate relatives risked their lives to find the disappeared, and one group of mothers defied the repressive regime with weekly protests at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. How do societies cope with human losses and sociocultural traumas in the aftermath of such instances of political violence and state terror?In Argentina Betrayed, Antonius C. G. M. Robben demonstrates that the dynamics of trust and betrayal that convulsed Argentina during the dictatorship did not end when democracy returned but rather persisted in confrontations over issues such as the truth about the disappearances, the commemoration of the past, and the guilt and accountability of perpetrators. Successive governments failed to resolve these debates because of erratic policies made under pressure from both military and human rights groups. Mutual mistrust between the state, retired officers, former insurgents, and bereaved relatives has been fueled by recurrent revelations and controversies that prevent Argentine society from conclusively coming to terms with its traumatic past.With thirty years of scholarly engagement with Argentina—and drawing on his extensive, fair-minded interviews with principals at all points along the political spectrum—Robben explores how these ongoing dynamics have influenced the complicated mourning over violent deaths and disappearances. His analysis deploys key concepts from the contemporary literature of human rights, transitional justice, peace and reconciliation, and memory studies, including notions of trauma, denial, accountability, and mourning. The resulting volume is an indispensable contribution to a better understanding of the terrible crimes committed by the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s and their aftermath.

Successfully combining military, political, and cultural analysis with a serious treatment of legal and human rights considerations, this book will appeal to anyone interested in the conversion from war to peace in Latin America and around the world.

In Employment and Human Rights: The International Dimension, Richard Lewis Siegel discusses the historical evolution of the right to employment as well as regional and global efforts to achieve full employment. In the first section of the book, he examines a wealth of material, from English radical pamphlets of the seventeenth century to the recent debates at the United Nations and the International Labor Organization, placing intellectual history in the broadest possible economic, political, and social contexts.In the second section, Siegel examines global and regional efforts in the present century intended to further the implementation of the right to employment. He traces the development of international cooperation and examines the reasons for the limited accomplishments, including a lack of consensus about the effectiveness of public policies; the politicization and strongly ideological nature of the international debates; and the turf and policy struggles within and among the highly influential intergovernmental organizations and national governments.

In this important work, Menno T. Kamminga challenges one of the cornerstones of classic international law: the presumption that states are entitled to exercise diplomatic protection only on behalf of their own nationals.

Designed for educational use in international relations, law, political science, economics, and philosophy classes, Human Rights in the World Community treats the full range of human rights issues, including implementation problems and processes involving international, national, and nongovernmental action. Now with online appendices.

Medical Humanitarianism provides comparative ethnographies of the moral, practical, and policy implications of modern medical humanitarian practice. It offers twelve vivid case studies that challenge readers to reach a more critical and compassionate understanding of humanitarian assistance.

The Human Right to Citizenship provides an accessible overview of citizenship around the globe, focusing on empirical cases of denied or weakened legal rights. This wide-ranging volume provides a theoretical framework to understand the particular ambiguities, paradoxes, and evolutions of citizenship regimes in the twenty-first century.

Immigration Judges and U.S. Asylum Policy investigates hundreds of thousands of U.S. asylum cases with theoretical sophistication and empirical rigor, finding that immigration judges tend to assess legally relevant facts objectively while their decisions may be subjectively influenced by extralegal facts.

Human Rights and Adolescence presents a multifaceted inquiry into the global circumstances of adolescents, focused on the human rights challenges and socioeconomic obstacles young adults face.

With contributions from leading scholars and activists from the U.S. and Mexico, Binational Human Rights analyzes the feminicides in Ciudad Juarez, the drug war, and the plight of migrants within the context of U.S. and Mexican policies, which mutually affect human rights conditions in each nation.

Combining firsthand ethnographic reportage with historical research, Human Rights as War by Other Means traces the use of rights discourse in Northern Ireland's politics from the local civil rights campaigns of the 1960s to present-day activism for truth recovery and LGBT equality.

Aid in Danger explores why aid workers are attacked, kidnapped, and killed around the world and critically examines how aid agencies respond to these dangers. It addresses a timely and neglected topic, providing a unique analytical perspective on broader issues of humanitarianism and humanitarian reform.

Analyzing "heritage events"-from Roma wedding music to Trinidadian wining, Moroccan verbal art, and neopagan rituals-Cultural Heritage in Transit tracks the effects of the heritage industry, focusing on cultural rights and human rights writ large.

Drawing on more than 700 amnesties instituted between 1970 and 2005, Renee Jeffery maps out significant trends in the use of amnesty and offers a historical account of how both the use and the perception of amnesty has changed.

Rather than seek retribution and reconciliation, Spain's political leaders agreed to place the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship in the past. Omar G. Encarnacion examines the political factors that made possible the "politics of forgetting" and explores the advantages and consequences of democratizing without confronting the past.

Sonia Cardenas offers the most comprehensive account to date of the emergence of national human rights institutions, exploring why states create these institutions and examining their impact on contemporary human rights struggles.

Susan L. Kang analyzes comparative case studies of campaigns by trade unions to link local labor rights disputes to international human rights frameworks. She finds that contingent political incentives, rather than normative arguments, compel governments to make reforms to better protect these fundamental human rights.

This book examines why states make formal commitments to rights provisions and to judicial independence and what effect these commitments have on actual state behavior, especially political repression.

In this study of French discourse regarding the treatment of Muslim immigrants and their descendants, Elaine R. Thomas forges new theoretical tools for analyzing today's contentious politics of belonging in France and beyond.

In Human Rights and State Security: Indonesia and the Philippines, Anja Jetschke considers the impact of transnational human rights advocacy on the process of human rights reform and democratization in two countries that have been successful in countering and blocking international human rights pressures.

Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa provides a comprehensive evaluation of the TRC process and its impact on South African society. Based on a six-year study, the volume draws on an analysis of the victim hearings, amnesty hearings, institutional hearings, public opinion survey data, and extensive interviews.

Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights: A Legal Resource Guide is an indispensable reference work for all those working in the field of international human rights law, organized in an easy-to-use format and accessible to both lawyers and nonlawyers.

Offers a more benign view than that of Thomas Hobbes and later followers of the origins of the social contract. "A scholarly tour de force that situates the development of justice in relationships, beginning with the foundational human relationships of mother and child."-Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade