Why Human Rights Still Matter In Contemporary Global Affairs

This book elucidates why human rights still matter in contemporary global affairs, and what can lead to better protection of international human rights in a post-liberal order. It blends theoretical, empirical, and normative perspectives, while providing much-needed analysis in light of the perils of populism, authoritarianism, and toxic nationalism, as well as highlighting the hopes with which people around the world view human rights in the new millennium. Systematically combining theoretical perspectives from across the disciplines with numerous case studies, it demonstrates not only the complexities of the domestic conditions involved, but also the ways in which human dignity can be preserved and promoted during periods of rapid change and uncertainty. Finally, the book addresses the question of how to protect human rights in such a world in which the active promotion of democratic values and enforcement of human rights may not be necessarily aligned with evolving economic and geopolitical interests of many great and diverse powers on the global scene. As such, it is a timely intervention for human rights as a concept as it has been attacked and eroded by the instability in our world today. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of human rights in politics, law, philosophy, sociology, and history and to humanitarian bodies, practitioners, and policy makers.

This comprehensive introduction to the study of human rights in international politics blends concrete developments with theoretical inquiry, illuminating both in the process. Franke Wilmer presents the nuts and bolts of human rights concepts, actors, and implementation before grappling with issues ranging from war and genocide to social and economic needs to racial and religious discrimination. Two themes¿the tension between values and interests, and the role of the state as both a protector of human rights and a perpetrator of human rights violations¿are reflected throughout the text. The result is a clear, accessible exposition of the evolution of international human rights, as well as the challenges that those rights pose, in the context of the state system.

This book offers a fresh approach to human rights by analyzing the role of institutional checks and balances, governmentalism and system's approach, intended for the prevention of human rights violations, the enforcement of human rights norms and rules, and important actors such as International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGO), and domestic Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). The book presents case studies that offer innovative, political, historical, and social perspectives on how the International Human Rights Regime (IHRG) is practiced. It critically examines the interpretation, inconsistency, and application of the human rights norms in the Global South, and shows how the national mobilization of human rights is directly affected by the interdependence existing between the national and the transnational levels. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of human rights, and more broadly of comparative politics, international law, global governance, international and nongovernmental organizations.

International efforts to construct a set of standardised human rights guidelines are based upon the identification of agreed key values regarding the relationships between individuals and the institutions governing them, which are viewed as critical to the well-being of humanity and the character of being human. This publication considers these issues of justice at the national, regional, and international levels by analysing civil, political, economic and social rights aspects.

In 1973, Hillary Rodham Clinton famously stated that "children's rights" is a slogan in search of a definition, used to bolster various arguments for peace and for specific rights, but without any coherent conception of children as political beings. In 1989, the United Nations established the basis for this definition in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), a document every nation in the world, save the United States, has ratified. Still, human rights theorists, scholars, and jurists continue to disagree as to the theoretical justification for children's human rights. In Suffer the Children, Richard P. Hiskes establishes the first substantive theoretical foundation for the human rights of children. As Hiskes argues, recognizing the rights of children fundamentally alters the meaning and usefulness of human rights in a global context. Ironically, the case for children's rights, as Hiskes argues, should be seen as the evolution, distillation, or "maturing" of human rights in general. Children's human rights will end the debate about whether groups can have rights because, globally, many rights claims today are precisely group claims, including those from children. Moreover, Hiskes provides a new critical assessment of the United Nations CRC and explores child activism for human rights worldwide--in courts, on social networks, and in public demonstrations--to show how children are already claiming their rights in ways that will fundamentally change the meaning both of rights themselves and of democratic processes. Giving children rights in a way that avoids privileging any single cultural experience of children would make rights no longer a "Western," individualistic idea, but a truly global one.

This interdisciplinary volume examines the potential of human rights to challenge economic inequalities and their adverse impacts on human wellbeing.

This book argues that ultimately human rights can be actualized, in two senses. By answering important challenges to them, the real-world relevance of human rights can be brought out; and people worldwide can be motivated as needed for realizing human rights. Taking a perspective from moral and political philosophy, the book focuses on two challenges to human rights that have until now received little attention, but that need to be addressed if human rights are to remain plausible as a global ideal. Firstly, the challenge of global inequality: how, if at all, can one be sincerely committed to human rights in a structurally greatly unequal world that produces widespread inequalities of human rights protection? Secondly, the challenge of future people: how to adequately include future people in human rights, and how to set adequate priorities between the present and the future, especially in times of climate change? The book also asks whether people worldwide can be motivated to do what it takes to realize human rights. Furthermore, it considers the common and prominent challenges of relativism and of the political abuse of human rights. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of human rights, political philosophy, and more broadly political theory, philosophy and the wider social sciences. The Open Access version of this book, available at: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781003011569, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Rights advocacy has become a prominent facet of South Korea's increasingly transnational motion picture output, and today films about political prisoners, undocumented workers, and people with disabilities attract mainstream attention. Movie Minorities offers the first English-language study of Korean cinema's role in helping to galvanize activist social movements across these and other identity-based categories.