Negotiating Cultural Rights

The various reports on cultural rights by UN Special Rapporteur Faridah Shaheed provide a new universal standard on cultural rights with topics ranging from cultural diversity, cultural heritage, and the right to artistic freedom to the effects of today's intellectual property regimes. The international team of expert contributors to this book reflect upon the many aspects of cultural rights in the reports and present a discussion of how cultural rights support cultural diversity, foster intercultural dialogue, and contribute to inclusive social, economic and political development.

The various reports on cultural rights by UN Special Rapporteur Faridah Shaheed provide a new universal standard on cultural rights with topics ranging from cultural diversity, cultural heritage, and the right to artistic freedom to the effects of today's intellectual property regimes. The international team of expert contributors to this book reflect upon the many aspects of cultural rights in the reports and present a discussion of how cultural rights support cultural diversity, foster intercultural dialogue, and contribute to inclusive social, economic and political development.

Rights", Lucinda Joy Peach

This book analyses the problematique of governance and administration of cultural diversity within the modern state of Afghanistan and traces patterns of national integration. It explores state construction in twentieth-century Afghanistan and Afghan nationalism, and explains the shifts in the state’s policies and societal responses to different forms of governance of cultural diversity. The book problematizes liberalism, communitarianism, and multiculturalism as approaches to governance of diversity within the nation-state. It suggests that while the western models of multiculturalism have recognized the need to accommodate different cultures, they failed to engage with them through intercultural dialogue. It also elaborates the challenge of intra-group diversity and the problem of accommodating individual choice and freedom while recognising group rights and adoption of multiculturalism. The book develops an alternative approach through synthesising critical multiculturalism and interculturalism as a framework on a democratic and inclusive approach to governance of diversity. A major intervention in understanding a war-torn country through an insider account, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics and international relations, especially those concerned with multiculturalism, state-building, nationalism, and liberalism, as well as those in cultural studies, history, Afghanistan studies, South Asian studies, Middle East studies, minority studies, and to policymakers.

This volume breaks new ground by conceptualizing landscape as a dynamic cultural complex in which the natural world and human practice are inextricably linked and are constantly interacting. It examines the social and cultural construction of space in the early medieval period in South Asia, as manifest in society, religious architecture and as shaped through trade and economic transactions.

Rival claims of ownership or control over various aspects of culture are a regular feature of our twenty-first-century world. Such debates are shaping disciplines as diverse as anthropology and archaeology, art history and museum studies, linguistics and genetics. This provocative collection of essays--a series of case studies in cultural ownership by scholars from a range of fields--explores issues of cultural heritage and intellectual property in a variety of contexts, from contests over tangible artifacts as well as more abstract forms of culture such as language and oral traditions to current studies of DNA and genes that combine nature and culture, and even new, nonproprietary models for the sharing of digital technologies. Each chapter sets the debate in its historical and disciplinary context and suggests how the approaches to these issues are changing or should change. One of the most innovative aspects of the volume is the way each author recognizes the social dimensions of group ownership and demonstrates the need for negotiation and new models. The collection as a whole thus challenges the reader to reevaluate traditional ways of thinking about cultural ownership and to examine the broader social contexts within which negotiation over the ownership of culture is taking place. In addition to Laetitia La Follette, contributors include David Bollier, Stephen Clingman, Susan DiGiacomo, Oriol Pi-Sunyer, Margaret Speas, Banu Subramaniam, Joe Watkins, and H. Martin Wobst.

Promoting cultural and scientific creativity, and knowledge and understanding, cultural rights work as atrocity prevention tools and enable people to aspire to a better future.

This collection of essays hand explores a major undercurrent of the debate on rights, namely the question of universalism and cultural relativism. It also explores how rights are claimed and contested, vindicated and politicized and, in different ways, transform social practice.