Ethno Cultural Diversity And Human Rights

Drawing from diverse scholarship in international law, legal and moral philosophy, and political science, Ethno-Cultural Diversity and Human Rights brings prominent experts together to address contested dimensions of the role of ethno-cultural groups in human rights discourse.

By unanimous adoption of the Universal Declaration of Cultural Diversity, the UNESCO Member States accepted a new ethical approach to respect diversity as a guiding principle for democratic societies. While support for the Declaration remains strong, there is a general awareness that the democratic management of multicultural societies needs rethinking and further development. This publication examines the political governance of cultural diversity, specifically how public policy-making has dealt with the claims for cultural recognition that have increasingly been expressed by ethno-national movements, language groups, religious minorities, indigenous peoples and migrant communities. Its principle aim is to understand, explain and assess public policy responses to ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity. Adopting interdisciplinary perspectives of comparative social sciences, the contributors address the conditions, forms, and consequences of democratic and human-rights-based governance of multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-faith societies.--Publisher's description.

Despite decades of nation-building exercise, ethnic-based claims for substantive equality, justice and equitable political inclusion and socio-economic order continue to result in communal rivalries. These are claims that define and represent the issue of minorities in Africa, of which these conflicts are manifestations. Although ethnic conflicts in Africa have been a subject of a large number of studies, the potential and role of norms on minority rights to address claims that ethno-cultural groups raise has not received the attention it deserves. Based on materials from normative political theory and international human rights law and using an empirical and prescriptive analysis, this book defends a robust system of minority rights built around culture, equality and self-determination. This is employed to elaborate an adequate constitutional design providing policy frameworks (multilingual language policy, recognition and affirmation of cultural diversity,), structures (that ensure just representation and participation of members of all groups) and norms (that guarantee substantive equality and the rights to language, religion and culture). The study then proffers two cases studies (South Africa and Ethiopia) to ascertain how such constitutional design might be translated into actual policy frameworks, institutions and norms.

This theoretically innovative anthology investigates the problematic linkages between conserving cultural heritage, maintaining cultural diversity, defining and establishing cultural citizenship, and enforcing human rights. It is the first publication to address the notions of cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights in one volume. Heritage provides the basis of humanity’s rich cultural diversity. While there is a considerable literature dealing separately with cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights, this book is distinctive and has contemporary relevance in focusing on the intersection between the three concepts. Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights establishes a fresh approach that will interest students and practitioners alike and on which future work in the heritage field might proceed.

Cultural diversity, as expressed for instance in different normative orders or legal cultures, poses both a practical and a theoretical challenge to the idea of universal human rights. In the present volume, the authors seek to address and contain this challenge with a view to the changing nature of the global society. While 'culture' is sometimes signposted as an obstacle to human rights on the ground, this volume suggests that in so far as the global 'culture of human rights' is primarily seen as a formal and institutional order based on a particular view of equal human worth, local cultures cannot trump it. The main point is that the culture of human rights is inclusive of all and must maintain a standard by which all peoples and cultures can measure their own performances. Further, and as demonstrated in the present volume from a range of disciplines such as law, literature, history and anthropology, culture is not a mental prison but a particular outlook upon the world, for ever changing in response to new experiences and insights.

Liberal theories have long insisted that cultural diversity in democratic societies can be accommodated through classical liberal tools, in particular through individual rights, and they have often rejected the claims of cultural minorities for group rights as illiberal. Group Rights as Human Rights argues that such a rejection is misguided. Based on a thorough analysis of the concept of group rights, it proposes to overcome the dominant dichotomy between "individual" human rights and "collective" group rights by recognizing that group rights also serve individual interests. It also challenges the claim that group rights, so understood, conflict with the liberal principle of neutrality; on the contrary, these rights help realize the neutrality ideal as they counter cultural biases that exist in Western states. Group rights deserve to be classified as human rights because they respond to fundamental, and morally important, human interests. Reading the theories of Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor as complementary rather than opposed, Group Rights as Human Rights sees group rights as anchored both in the value of cultural belonging for the development of individual autonomy and in each person’s need for a recognition of her identity. This double foundation has important consequences for the scope of group rights: it highlights their potential not only in dealing with national minorities but also with immigrant groups; and it allows to determine how far such rights should also benefit illiberal groups. Participation, not intervention, should here be the guiding principle if group rights are to realize the liberal promise.

Drawing from a comprehensive review of legal instruments, practice, jurisprudence and literature, and using a multidisciplinary approach, this unique book brings forth the full spectrum of cultural rights, as individual and collective human rights, and offers a compelling vision for public policy.

This volume describes and analyzes alternative and emerging models of non-territorial autonomy (NTA), particularly in relation to decentralization. The authors push the NTA debate in new directions by offering a re-conceptualization based on ethno-cultural bottom-up decentralized action that redefines autonomy into its true sense of autonomous action. Through description, critical analysis, and evaluation of several case studies, this book assesses the potential for new paradigms within decentralized systems. The authors explore two approaches to political decentralization which add to the theoretical debate on NTA – network governance, which focuses on new dynamics in policy processes, and normative pluralism, which focuses on accommodating the distinctness of the groups through the subsidiarity principle with regard to their own affairs. The book explores the potential ramifications of ethno-cultural NTA institutions acting within the wider framework of state institutions and assesses the functions of these institutions as another dimension of decentralization and thus another ‘layer’ of democracy. With contemporary examples from Europe, the Middle East, Asia and South Africa, as well as theoretical aspects of the conceptualization of autonomy, this book offers a truly global perspective. It will be of great interest to policy-makers in countries experiencing adverse developments due to the pressure on public management, as well as advanced students and scholars questioning the ability of the Westphalian system to address cultural diversity.