A Dialogical Concept Of Minority Rights

In A Dialogical Concept of Minority Rights, Hanna H. Wei offers a re-conceptualisation of the notion of minority rights as the first step of a possible solution to some of the theoretical and practical difficulties of minority protection.

The definitive and authoritative international law text, updated to reflect key case law, international practice and treaty developments.

Within the Middle East there are a wide range of minority groups outside the mainstream religious and ethnic culture. This book provides a detailed examination of their rights as minorities within this region, and their changing status throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The rights of minorities in the Middle East are subject to a range of legal frameworks, having developed in part from Islamic law, and in recent years subject to international human rights law and institutional frameworks. The book examines the context in which minority rights operate within this conflicted region, investigating how minorities engage with (or are excluded from) various sites of power and how state practice in dealing with minorities (often ostensibly based on Islamic authority) intersects with and informs modern constitutionalism and international law. The book identifies who exactly can be classed as a minority group, analysing in detail the different religious and ethnic minorities across the region. The book also pays special attention to the plight of minorities who are spread between various states, often as the result of conflict. It assesses the applicable domestic legislative instruments within the three countries investigated as case studies: Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and highlights key domestic remedies that could serve as models for ensuring greater social cohesion and greater inclusion of minorities in the political life of these countries.

In recent decades international and regional human rights norms have been increasingly applied to constitutional provisions, revealing significant tensions between primary political arrangements, such as power-sharing institutions, and human rights norms. This book argues that these tensions, generally framed as a peace versus justice dilemma, are built on an individualistic conception of justice that fails to account for the empirical reality in places characterized by ethnically based political exclusion and inequalities. By introducing the concept of 'Collective Equality' as a new theoretical basis for the law of peace, this timely book proposes a new approach for dealing with the tensions between peace-related arrangements and human rights norms. Through principled, pragmatic, and legal reasoning the book develops a new paradigm that captures more accurately what equality and human rights mean and require in the context of ethno-national conflicts, and provides potent guidance for advancing justice and peace in such places.

Achieving socio-political cohesion in a community with significant ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity is a challenge in contemporary liberal democracies. Public policies and institutions shaped by the needs of the majority can inadvertently marginalize minority interests. Intercultural Deliberation and the Politics of Minority Rights articulates a type of political deliberation designed to mitigate this problem. Instead of asking what the liberal state can tolerate, R.E. Lowe-Walker asks how our understanding of difference affects our interpretation of minority claims, shifting the focus toward inclusive deliberations. This important work serves as a measure of social justice and a vehicle for social change.

The unprecedented mass movement of populations since World War II has increased tensions among groups of people by breaking down the homogeneity of older countries and increasing the fragility of newly independent states encompassing several minorities within their borders. These changes, according to author Jay Sigler, dictate the necessity of clarifying human and minority rights. He highlights the main points of minority rights, traces their history, and demonstrates their distinctly modern features. Sigler considers the theoretical implications of minority versus individual and collective rights and examines the efforts in this area made by the United States, India, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Finally, he proposes his own provisional theory of minority rights.

Across European societies, pluralism is experienced in new and challenging ways. Our understanding of what it means for societies to be accepting of diversity has to therefore be revisited. This volume seeks to meet this challenge with perspectives that consider new dynamics towards tolerance, intolerance and respect.

This book draws attention to the nonlegal, sociocultural aspects of justice for minorities in China. The primary objectives are threefold. The first is to present a tentative analysis of the lived realities of being ‘the other’ in China, with the aim of presenting a critical picture of the complex national context and identifying main concerns and key challenges. Six topics are covered - gender roles, health, class, intimacy, ethnicity and religion, and expression. The second objective is to explore the interaction between a wide range of factors and myriad systems that enable or hinder protection and justice for these groups, be they historical, political, social, or cultural, hoping to open up a rich domain of inquiry for those interested in to what extent and in what ways otherness may or may not survive in China. The third objective is to bring attention to new trends and developments, some are easily identifiable whereas others are less detectable, some are interrelated while others are relatively isolated, some are straightforward and others remain easily misinterpreted.