Browsing by Subject "Human rights"
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Item Open Access A Comparative Sociological Investigation of the Conceptions and Perceptions of Mental Health and Illness in Arica, Chile and Rome, Italy(2013-05-08) Kontchou, Nelly-AngeThis comparative study aimed to discover the principal factors that influence the perceptions of citizens in Arica, Chile and Rome, Italy toward mental illness. Specifically, the study aimed to investigate how these perceptions affect the societal acceptance of mentally ill individuals and to identify potential sources of stigma. In both cities, mental health services exist for free use by citizens, but stigma makes the use of these services and the acceptance of those who use them somewhat taboo. Past studies on the topic of mental health stigma have investigated the barriers to accessing mental health services (Acuña & Bolis 2005), the inception and effects of Basaglia’s Law (Tarabochia 2011), strategies to combat stigma (López et al. 2008) and images of mental illness in the media (Stout, Villeagas & Jennings 2004). To discover Aricans’ opinions on mental health and illness, personal interviews were administered to five mental health professionals, and a 20-question survey was administered to 131 members of the general population. In Rome, 27 subjects answered an 18-question survey as well as an interview, and 12 professionals participated in narrative interviews. From these interviews and surveys, the lack of economic, structural and human resources to effectively manage mental health programs was gleaned. Moreover, many participants identified how stigma infringed upon the human rights of those with mental illnesses and opined that they were barely accepted in society. Conclusions drawn were that stigma stems from multiple concurrent sources, and strategies to reduce it must align with each society’s unique needs. Stigma prevents people from caring for their mental health and from integrating those with mental illness.Item Open Access A Dialogical Approach to Human Rights: Institutions, Culture and Legitimacy(2009) Hlavac, Monica AnneIn this study I address the moral and cultural disagreement and conflict regarding the interpretation of human rights norms that threatens the legitimacy of the human rights enterprise. Such disagreements present an opportunity to probe, question and dissect beliefs to uncover inconsistencies and false assumptions and attain a deeper insight into human rights norms that are presently left in a rather abstract form in international human rights documents and conventions.
I describe and defend an institutionally-driven dialogical approach that promises to systematically address these moral and cultural disagreements. My approach rests on two claims. First, clearer content for human rights norms will emerge from within particular cultures if critical cultural and moral investigation through dialogue is encouraged. By engaging in dialogical processes, we not only discharge our obligation to aid in a process that leads to a fair specification of human rights norms, but we also come to understand how human rights norms are, at their very core, participative.
Second, one way that international human rights institutions (IHRIs) can legitimately fulfill their function of supporting human rights is by encouraging critical moral investigation through dialogue. I make this proposal more concrete by discussing the case law on the issue of transsexuals that has come before the European Court of Human Rights.
Item Open Access Anxious Citizenship: Insecurity, Apocalypse and War Memories in Peru's Andes(2007-05-10T16:02:45Z) Yezer, CarolineThe war between the Peruvian state and the Maoist Shining Path rebels began in the Department of Ayacucho, an area with a majority of indigenous Quechua- speaking peasant villages. After twenty years of violence (1980-2000), this region of South America’s Andes began a critical period of demilitarization, refugee resettlement, and reconciliation. In this transition, the rebuilding of villages devastated by the war raises critical questions about indigenous autonomy, citizenship, and the role of international human rights initiatives in local reconciliation. I examine the tensions between interventions by national and transnational organizations, and the insecurities that continue to define everyday life in villages like Wiracocha - a newly resurrected community that was in the heart of the war zone.1 Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in this village and ten months of comparative fieldwork in villages across the Ayacucho region and in the city of Huamanga, my research shows that villagers were often at odds with the aid and interventions offered to them from the outside. I focus on the complicated nature of village war history, paying attention to the initial sympathy with Shining Path and the village's later decision to join the counterinsurgency. In Ayacucho, memory has itself become a site of struggle that reveals as much about present-day conflict, ambivalences, and insecurities of neoliberal Peru as it does about the actual history 1 Wiracocha is a pseudonym that I am using in order to maintain subject confidentiality. of the war. Villagers sometimes oppose official memory projects and humanitarian initiatives - including Peru's Truth Commission - that that they see at odds with their own visions and agendas. Finally, I examine the less predictable ways that villagers have redefined what it means to be Andean, including: the maintenance of village militarization, a return to hard-handed customary justice and the adoption of bornagain Christianity as a new form of moral order and social solidarity.Item Open Access Assessing Human Rights Risk within U.S. and UN Private Security Contracts(2018-12) Garrett, CeliaRecent trends in privatization have affected the way governments wage war and direct security services. The past two decades have witnessed the rise of Private Security Companies (PSCs) and an increasing reliance on private security contractors by governments. The pace at which the private security industry has grown outstrips normative debates about the ethical presence of PSCs and use of private security by governments, instead demanding more accountable and responsible contracts and government regulation to protect against misconduct and human rights violations. This thesis explores the recent explosion of private security in U.S. and UN operations. The U.S. and UN both report significant increases in their use of private security contractors in the last ten years. Additionally, examinations of various private security contracts reveal inadequate accountability measures both in the U.S. and at the UN, particularly through an over-reliance on reporting mechanisms and contractor self-supervision. Similarly, policy documents and guidelines relating to private security contracting show weak oversight and poor management of private security contracts by both the U.S. and UN, from monitoring and evaluation mechanisms to insufficient government capacity to lacking disciplinary procedures. However, the two governance institutions diverge in their approaches to contracting private security services and risk assessment policies. U.S. agencies have internalized private security contracting as a core competency, essential to various operations, yet this study found the UN to be more cautious in its approach to contracting private security. The UN mandates comprehensive approval, risk analysis, and mitigation procedures and promotes a culture of responsibility, which are all absent from U.S. contracting policies and practices.Item Open Access Crack-Whores and Pretty Woman: The Media Framing of Sex Workers(2018-12-05) Wang, VictoriaInternational human rights organizations such as the World Health Organization, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, and Amnesty International have advised nations to decriminalize sex work in order to protect the rights and safety of sex workers (“Sex Workers,” 2018; “Sex Workers,” 2014; “Q&A: Policy to Protect the Human Rights of Sex Workers,” 2016). However, policy-makers in the US ignore these recommendations in favor of the full criminalization of sex work (Weitzer, 2010). Media largely influence public perception and policing of sex work, and media framings of sex workers align more with the current policies on sex work in the US than the research conducted and the proposals made by accredited human rights organizations (Nelson, 1997). This study examines newspapers published in California and Texas between 2002 and 2018 to uncover how media frame sex workers. The dominant frames in this dataset, the criminal frame and the victim frame, perpetuate and are reinforced by the US’ stringent sex work policies. The same moral convictions which influenced the criminalization of sex work in the US underlay the dominant frames in the dataset.Item Open Access Delaying Child Marriage in the World’s Most Afflicted Country: Evaluating Whether or Not Ethiopia’s ‘Berhane Hewan’ Intervention Program Could Be Replicated with Success in Niger(2020-11-25) Chulack, AnnaNiger has the highest child marriage prevalence rate in the world, with 76% of girls married by 18, and 28% of girls married by 15. Although Niger’s government has made stated, policy, and legal commitments to eliminate the practice, and non-profit organisations are researching and conducting work to fight against child marriage in Niger, there continues to be a lack of significant improvement on this issue. By comparison, Ethiopia has seen a substantial reduction in its child marriage prevalence rate in recent decades due to the success of various intervention programs – notably, the Berhane Hewan program in the rural Amhara region. Indeed, UNICEF reported in 2018 that the percentage of girls married by 18 in Ethiopia dropped substantially, from 47% to 25%, over the last decade (Clark, 2019). In the search for an impactful, sustainable, and cost-effective intervention program that could be implemented in Niger, we can look to Berhane Hewan as a potential example. This study uses open-ended qualitative interviews, both over the phone and over email, of nine research and program experts on child marriage to ascertain the extent to which Berhane Hewan might feasibly be replicated with success in Niger. While recognising that intervention programs must be tailored to the particular nature of child marriage in different local contexts, this paper finds that the various programmatic arms employed by the Berhane Hewan program are likely to be strategically successful in reducing, or delaying, child marriage in Niger. This is because, among other contextual similarities to Ethiopia, child marriage in Niger is driven strongly by a lack of access to education, as well as by traditional gender norms and patriarchal values. For example, to the latter point, married women possess little household decision-making power in both countries, and unmarried girls are likely to have even less self-agency: in Niger, only 3.5% of married women are the principal decisionmaker of their own health, and in Ethiopia during the Berhane Hewan program, this measure stood at only 14.6% (Niger DHS, 2012 & Ethiopia DHS, 2005). Despite these similarities, however, Niger experiences funding and military conflict challenges that are likely to mean that, in the short-term, only certain arms of the program will be cost-effective, and certain areas may not be able to sustain the program. In addition, the current legislative landscape may prove a barrier to sustainable, long-term change. Accordingly, key recommendations are delineated into short-, medium-, and long-term goals. In the short-term: (1) work with local community leaders and government officials to tailor the design and implementation of the various version(s) of the Berhane Hewan program; and (2) show proof of concept, by implementing two condensed studies of the Berhane Hewan program at small-scale. In the medium-term: (3) improve access to education in rural areas of Niger. In the long-term: (4) include additional arms of the program and scale the program to the national level; and (5) mobilise legal partners, local community leaders, and government officials to help assess the obstacles impeding attempts to increase the legal minimum age of marriage to 18 for girls.Item Open Access Engendering Genocide: Representations of Violence in the Long Twentieth Century(2020) Nunn, NoraGenocide studies typically emphasizes economics, law, history, political science, and sociology as the disciplines most relevant to understanding the phenomenon of premeditated mass slaughter, and the scholarship has been dominated by men, both as subjects and authors. Engendering Genocide intervenes in a field traditionally dominated by the social sciences, illustrating how U.S. literary and cultural texts provide a space for their creators and their audiences to imagine the transnational, gendered, and often quotidian nature of genocide. Weaving together literary criticism, feminist theory, and a transnational American Studies methodology, this project analyzes representations of the crime in the twentieth-century United States. Unbound to the empirical protocol of social sciences, my objects of study—which include novels, memoirs, manifestos, photographs, and film—allow for the imagination of political possibilities unafforded to other disciplines. I demonstrate that by giving this crime a name and telling its story, the figures in my project relied on both word and image in order to make visible a specific kind of violence they saw repeating in different iterations throughout human history, and in turn, to instigate nations to interfere in the domestic affairs of other sovereign powers. By chronicling their efforts, Engendering Genocide considers the ethical and aesthetic challenges and consequences involved in these acts of representation. Based on this analysis, I ultimately conclude that the horror of genocide cannot be fully represented—and that’s precisely one of the factors that makes the crime so dangerous: it can hide, so to speak, in plain sight.
Item Open Access Examining Family Separation Through Narratives of Family, Migration, and Separation Among Deported Mexican-U.S. Family Members(2019-12-06) Kopp, TylerFamily separation entered the U.S. political mainstream in the spring of 2018 when the Trump administration began separating thousands of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border. While this policy is the first of its kind to deliberately use family separation as immigration enforcement in contemporary U.S. history, the U.S. has a much more extensive history of separating families, especially Mexican-U.S. families, through deportation. This research examines how deportation-induced family separation of Mexican-U.S. family members impacts familial relationships, as told through the narratives of deported family members in Mexico. These narratives suggest that family can be a broad and dynamic community that often includes people outside one’s biological or adopted family network. They also present a conception of family through the lens of mutually supportive relationships and shared experiences with family members. The narratives suggest that the physical aspects of family separation inhibit one’s ability to fully serve one’s familial role of support and to share experiences with one’s family members. For these reasons, family separation often stagnates or deteriorates familial relationships. Transnational and national policy reform can end family separation in the U.S. and Mexico, reunite families that have been separated, and allow the U.S. to come to terms with its past of family separation and address the victims of separation.Item Open Access Global Health: A Normative Analysis of Intellectual Property Rights and Global Distributive Justice(2007-05-07T19:06:56Z) DeCamp, Matthew WayneIn the past several years, the impact of intellectual property rights (IPRs) on access to medicines and medical technologies has come under increased scrutiny. Motivating this are highly publicized cases where IPRs appear the threaten access to particular medicines and diagnostics. As IPRs become globalized, so does the controversy: In 1998, nearly forty pharmaceutical companies filed a lawsuit against South Africa, citing (among other issues) deprivation of intellectual property. This followed South Africa’s implementation of various measures to enable and encourage the use of generic medicines – a move that was particularly controversial for the newly available (and still patented) HIV medicines. While many historical, legal, economic, and policy analyses of these cases and issues exist, few explicitly normative projects have been undertaken. This thesis utilizes interdisciplinary and explicitly normative philosophical methods to fill this normative void, engaging theoretical work on intellectual property and global distributive justice with each other, and with empirical work on IPR reform. In doing so, it explicitly rejects three mistaken assumptions about the debate over IPRs and access to essential medicines: (i) that this debate reduces to a disagreement about empirical facts; (ii) that intellectual property is normatively justified solely by its ability to “maximize innovation”; and (iii) that this controversy reduces to irresolvable disagreement about global distributive justice. Calling upon the best contemporary approaches to human rights, it argues that these approaches lend normative weight in favor of reforming IPRs – both that they should be reformed, and how – to better enable access to essential medicines. Such reforms might include modifying the present global IPR regime or creating new alternatives to the exclusivity of IPRs, both of which are considered in light of a human right to access to essential medicines. Future work will be needed, however, to better specify the content of a right to “essential medicines” and determine a fair distribution of the costs of fulfilling it.Item Open Access Human Rights and the Sovereign State: An Examination of the Compatibility of State Sovereignty with the Humanitarian Necessities of a Global World(2013-05-02) Yaffe, LeahThis thesis looks at the problem of sustaining human rights in a world of sovereign states. What does it mean for the global human rights movement that the predominant form of political organization in the world is the individual sovereign state? What are the tensions between the theories of sovereignty and humanitarianism? I trace the origin of the modern notion of sovereignty in order to demonstrate the difficulties posed for the human rights movement by state sovereignty. I argue that the relationship between the two concepts is antinomic: human rights require the resources and structure of the state for their actualization, yet are simultaneously put at risk by the unchecked power of the state. Because the human rights movement relies on state stability, but the stability of the state does not rely on the provision of human rights, an imbalance of power exists. Examining notions of sovereignty that antedate our own, I conclude that the human rights movement must become an international force strong enough to counterbalance powerful individual states in order to encourage states to adhere to human rights norms. This involves greater coordination between many elements of the human rights movement, including individuals, NGOs, regional organizations, multilateral institutions, and the international justice system.Item Open Access Post-transitional Justice in Spain: Passing the Historical Memory Law(2014-01-14) Hajji, NadiaThis honors thesis traces the origin of the post-transitional justice efforts by the Spanish government to recognize and offer reparations for the human rights crimes committed during the Spanish Civil War and subsequent Franco dictatorship. After a delay of at least thirty years, the Historical Memory Law, passed in 2007, is regarded as one of Spain’s most ambitious measures to address its past human rights violations. This thesis argues that three main factors encouraged the Law’s passage. First, Spanish involvement in foreign social justice shined a spotlight on Spain’s own unsettled past. Secondly, the maturation of a younger generation that evaded the worst years of the dictatorship turned public opinion in favor of reparation. Finally, the Law was introduced under opportune political circumstances and encompassed minimal reparations to receive the necessary congressional vote.Item Open Access Reproductive Rights as Social Rights: Building a Post-Pandemic Reproductive Healthcare Service Recovery Agenda of Kenya(2023-04-10) Choi, Bentley (Hanul)Reproductive health is crucial in female empowerment, as it enhances one’s physical and mental well-being. In Sub-Saharan Africa, national health infrastructure and institutional financing lag behind individuals’ need for access to reproductive healthcare services. The COVID-19 pandemic halted essential reproductive care delivery by limiting in-person visits and reducing workforce and funding. To meet population needs in post-pandemic life, the government needs to adjust a national rights-based framework for reproductive health to lessons from this global health crisis. This thesis aims to construct a post-pandemic reproductive healthcare service recovery framework grounded on theoretical knowledge of reproductive rights as ‘social rights’. This framework highlights the need for practical actions mentioned in the Kenyan government’s Reproductive Health Policy Strategy (2022-2032) and incorporates key informants’ lessons on reproductive justice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Interviews with 25 Kenyan reproductive health key informant organisations were conducted to collect data. Responses were initially coded using factors of the health policy framework, and any noteworthy codes were later defined during the analysis. Then, these codes were later redistributed by each factor of Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal and Environmental (PESTEL) analysis utilised in the national Reproductive Health Policy Strategy (2022-2032). Key findings are the critical impact of the government’s decisions to halt transmission being a major disruptor of RH service delivery and two distinct perspectives of returning to “normalcy” among service providers. Acknowledging the government’s role in achieving reproductive justice, this framework will be crucial in ascertaining necessary critical changes to move a step further for reproductive health equity in post-pandemic lives.Item Open Access Restorative Justice and Political Forgiveness: A Comparative Study of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions(2016) Ayee, Gloria Yayra AyorkorThis research project involves a comparative, cross-national study of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) in countries around the world that have used these extra-judicial institutions to pursue justice and promote national reconciliation during periods of democratic transition or following a civil conflict marked by intense violence and severe human rights abuses. An important objective of truth and reconciliation commissions involves instituting measures to address serious human rights abuses that have occurred as a result of discrimination, ethnocentrism and racism. In recent years, rather than solely utilizing traditional methods of conflict resolution and criminal prosecution, transitional governments have established truth and reconciliation commissions as part of efforts to foster psychological, social and political healing.
The primary objective of this research project is to determine why there has been a proliferation of truth and reconciliation commissions around the world in recent decades, and assess whether the perceived effectiveness of these commissions is real and substantial. In this work, using a multi-method approach that involves quantitative and qualitative analysis, I consider the institutional design and structural composition of truth and reconciliation commissions, as well as the roles that these commissions play in the democratic transformation of nations with a history of civil conflict and human rights violations.
In addition to a focus on institutional design of truth and reconciliation commissions, I use a group identity framework that is grounded in social identity theory to examine the historical background and sociopolitical context in which truth commissions have been adopted in countries around the world. This group identity framework serves as an invaluable lens through which questions related to truth and reconciliation commissions and other transitional justice mechanisms can be explored. I also present a unique theoretical framework, the reconciliatory democratization paradigm, that is especially useful for examining the complex interactions between the various political elements that directly affect the processes of democratic consolidation and reconciliation in countries in which truth and reconciliation commissions have been established. Finally, I tackle the question of whether successor regimes that institute truth and reconciliation commissions can effectively address the human rights violations that occurred in the past, and prevent the recurrence of these abuses.
Item Open Access Rethinking International Law: Hugo Grotius, Human Rights and Humanitarian Intervention(2010) Troester, NicholasThe dissertation takes up the subject of humanitarian intervention in contemporary international law. It identifies a problem, The Dilemma of Humanitarian Intervention, which underlies almost all contemporary theorizing about the subject. In an attempt to find a more palatable means to address the problem of the violation of human rights, the dissertation turns to the work of Hugo Grotius. Through an analysis of international law and its theoretical and philosophical bases, a thorough critique of the state of contemporary international law is made. Using a close-text reading of Grotius, alternative theories are established concerning human rights and humanitarian intervention. The dissertation finds that when the concept of human rights is attached to other normative concepts like moderation or faith, the pressure to resolve all questions of justice in terms of rights can be lessened. Further, if contemporary theorists recognize that the opposition of sovereignty and intervention is a structural and institutional feature of international law, and not a necessary feature of the concept of sovereignty itself, the Dilemma may be overcome by not forcing policymakers to choose either a defense of sovereignty or a defense of human rights.
Item Open Access State Violence and Transgender Cultural Politics in Post-Dictatorship Argentina(2020) Rizki, Cole AlexanderThis dissertation turns to illiberal state violence and state formation in Latin America’s Southern Cone region as the ground for trans politics and activisms. Focusing on the entanglements of Argentine trans politics with histories of dictatorship (1976-83), I ask: how do contemporary transgender cultural producers deploy and revise historical narratives of national trauma to stake gender rights claims in the present? What sorts of political, aesthetic, and legal tactics do trans cultural producers adopt within political contexts hyper-saturated by state violence? What ethical and political challenges arise? In response, I formulate a trans framework of analysis that combines archival, visual culture, literary, and ethnographic methods to study contemporary transgender politics and cultural production as these have taken shape in response to shifting Argentine state formations.
Each chapter considers how trans activists strategically deploy existing visual and material culture, activist strategies, and legal interventions developed by antigenocide activists such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to forward trans rights claims. In doing so, my work traces unexpected affinities between Argentine transgender and antigenocide politics, cultural production, and activisms. Taken together, the dissertation’s chapters evoke an interdisciplinary method that twins the study of cultural practices with histories of state violence, focusing on gender and sexuality as central to such analyses. By tracing the ways Argentine trans activists reanimate the past to meet the demands of the present, my dissertation offers an historical interpretation of trans political subjectivity that extends and revises trans studies’ geopolitical imagination, bringing Latinx American archives, national histories, and political strategies to bear on existing trans studies scholarship.
Item Open Access The Politics of Asylum Among Eritrean Refugees in Italy(2019) Hung, CarlaMy dissertation investigates how hospitality among Eritreans is criminalized by Europe’s border security system. Eritreans create autonomous structures of care to confront the securitization of European borders and the discriminatory distribution of resources in Italy. When prosecutors accuse refugees of illegal squatting and human trafficking, they misunderstand refugee solidarity as exploitative and profit seeking. Using profit to distinguish trafficking from humanitarianism develops during the movement to abolish slavery. My dissertation extends abolitionist debates, about the co-imbrication of humanitarian sentiment with the rise of industrial capitalism, by showing how this logic is used to define humanitarianism as non-for-profit. I argue that the economies of care Eritrean refugees rely upon to seek asylum have their own cultural histories and humanitarian paradigms are inadequate to evaluate them. By bringing abolitionist debates to bear on Europe’s asylum system my work reveals a fundamental contradiction faced by refugees who have the right to seek asylum but no legitimate means to arrive at sites of refuge. My work extends postcolonial scholarship on refugees in Europe by showing how Eritreans articulate political conflict about sovereignty through the political asylum system. My dissertation shows how political conflict in the Eritrean diaspora, coupled with structural inequality in Italy, influenced the politics of a human trafficking case against certain Eritrean refugees. My work exposes bias in humanitarian practices that lead to cultural misunderstanding and criminalization.
Item Open Access The Promise of Marriage Consent: Family Politics, the United Nations, and Women’s Rights in the US, 1947-1967(2019) Malitoris, JessicaIn this dissertation, I use women’s marriage rights as framed in the 1962 United Nations Marriage Convention to demonstrate the contradictions contained within human rights that allow them to be coopted into the preservation of systems of power, from imperialism to Jim Crow. The treaty’s creators in the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) designed it to defend women’s marriage consent. Delegates pursued a higher age of marriage and more government registration of marriage, and they specifically pushed for the abolition of child marriage, polygamy, and bride price systems. The Marriage Convention’s standards of family resonated with many delegates and policymakers, including segregationist Senators in the United States who otherwise distrusted outside intervention into domestic affairs because they found within the treaty’s human rights project an opportunity to shore up state anti-miscegenation laws.
Conflicts about what human rights were and how best to defend them took shape through the debates about the Marriage Convention, both in the United Nations and in the United States as proponents pressured the Senate to ratify it. Beginning after World War II and ending with the 1967 Senate hearing that ended the Marriage Convention’s future in the United States, I examine events that catalyzed transformations in human rights, including the end of World War II, the founding of the United Nations, the Cold War, and decolonization. I focus especially on the United States, where these international changes dovetailed with those caused by civil and women’s rights movements domestically to make for a complex reception of human rights treaties. I use official United Nations documents, State Department and Women’s Bureau records, newspapers, representatives’ personal papers, and the records of women’s organizations to illustrate the ways that delegates and lawmakers mobilized rights claims as they debated the Marriage Convention.
I argue that the appropriation of human rights by systems of power should not be taken as a corruption of the human rights project but as part of the process of shaping human rights concepts. All parties interested in the Marriage Convention pursued the relationship between marriage and state power to serve their own ends, whether those ends were protecting women, strengthening national governance, or preserving Jim Crow segregation laws. I conclude that supporters of the Marriage Convention were primarily successful in advancing their cause where it coincided with the normal racist and sexist operation of US power at home and abroad. The Marriage Convention speaks to broader changes in the history of human rights, but the treaty’s specific relationship to issues of gender and race through marriage make for a story of rights unique to it.
Item Open Access The Role of Syrian Refugees in The Sharing Economy and Technology Sector in Germany: A Neoliberal Approach to Integration and Empowerment(2016-04-25) Smith, EmmaFrom January through December of 2015, Germany accepted nearly one million refugees. Though arriving with diverse skillsets and past experiences, approximately half of these refugees share one thing in common: they are Syrian. As the influx of Syrians in Germany represented a larger trend of what was happening throughout Europe during this time, it seemed fitting to study their case for this thesis. This study sets out to explore innovations that give refugees agency to contribute to their own advancement and integration. Over the course of three months, twelve refugees were interviewed and fifteen were surveyed to produce the results for this work. The work presented here suggests that the existing dependency-creating aid structure must be changed to give agency to refugees. Such changes improve integration of refugees and enable them to contribute in a meaningful way to their host communities. The three chapters in this work will narrow in on this topic. Chapter One will go on to provide further background and context about Syrian refugees, German policies and practices as they relate to integration, and the field of social entrepreneurship. Chapter Two and Three argue respectively that the sharing economy and the technology sector can be used to help Syrian refugees integrate into their communities in Germany. Comprehensively, this research contributes to a growing field of work around how refugees can serve as economic boon instead of burden.Item Open Access The Southern Cone Novel and Human Rights Crises: Form and Narrative Responsibility (1973-2000)(2015-04-29) Pearce, AlexisThe Southern Cone Novel and Human Rights Crises: Form and Narrative Responsibility (1973-2000) Abstract: Argentina and Chile experienced violent oppression throughout the 1970s and 1980s when the quest to exterminate communism and the desire for neoliberal economics culminated into military regimes that acted with impunity. Most common among the techniques were the kidnapping, torturing, and, especially in Argentina, the “disappearing” of victims. The thousands of human rights transgressions that occurred during this time period opened up deep wounds and chasms across Argentine and Chilean society. The strength, however, of human rights organizations and their political pressure led to popular social mobilizations, most notably the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, which urged the transitional governments of both countries to begin judicial processes against the juntas. The truth commissions, el Informe Sábato (Argentina, 1984) and el Informe Rettig (Chile, 1991), delineated the transgressions undertaken by the Armed Forces and attempted to calculate the number of disappeared and/or tortured. Interestingly, el Informe Sábato, as suggested by its informal name, was directed by Ernesto Sábato, who, despite his limited publications, was a profound literary and moral figure in Argentina. That such a literary voice presided over the National Commission for Disappeared Persons speaks to the overlapping of literature, human rights, and justice that occurred during and right after the military dictatorships. This study seeks to explore these intersections further by examining various approaches to Argentine and Chilean literary production and human rights discourse across a timespan of twenty-five years. Libro de Manuel by Julio Cortázar (Manual for Manuel, 1973), Abaddón el exterminador by Ernesto Sábato (Abaddón the Exterminator, 1974), and Nocturno de Chile by Roberto Bolaño (By Night in Chile, 2000) serve as the primary literary texts analyzed in this study. While both Cortázar in Libro de Manuel and Sábato in Abaddón el exterminador employ distancing techniques in order to challenge their reader critically, Bolaño employs his masterful storytelling to draw in the reader while still presenting problematics related to Chile’s recent past and politics of amnesia. Mainly focusing on literary analysis and exploration of themes of human rights, justice, and the articulation of both in the texts themselves, the theoretical framework of this study relies on The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City (2002) and Cruel Modernity (2014) by Jean Franco, as well as Human Rights, Inc. (Joseph Slaughter, 2014) and ideas posited by Andreas Huyssen that relate to memory and utopia. It is within this latter heuristic model that the study ends by questioning the transition from the future-oriented texts of Cortázar and Sábato to fiction anchored in turbulent historical moments, as represented by Bolaño’s fiction. As time, dominant historical narratives, and amnesia continue to distance us from the thousands of human rights transgressions whose justice still has not been exhausted, it is of the utmost importance to reproblematize the past and its representations. In this way, we are able to serve our duty to the past and there relocate a utopia in which justice is given to those whose basic rights were ignored in the conquest of progress.Item Open Access The ‘Best Interest of the Child’: Exploring the International Human Rights Norm as an Applied Standard in Residential Care Centers in New Delhi, India(2019) Plunkett, JamesBackground: Although used previously as a function of the judiciary primarily in custody battles, the best interest of the child because an international human rights standard with the 1989 adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) by the UN General Assembly. The ‘best interest’ standard has consequently been adopted and used in many State-level child protection polices, particularly in reference to orphans and separated children (OSC), in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), including India. However, little attention has been paid to how State-level actors, including both policy stakeholders as well as direct carers of OSC, interpret and implement this standard in their local contexts.
Objective: This study’s objective was to explore how the best interest of the child as a norm of international human rights is interpreted and applied to the care and protection of OSC in residential care policy in India.
Methods: Using a qualitative, experimental, design we conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews and focused group discussions with two distinct groups: 1) Child Protection Policy Stakeholders and 2) Direct caregivers of OSC in a residential care center (RCC). Policy group participants completed in-depth interviews about current child protection policies in India and their interpretation of the best interest of the child. Direct caregivers of OSC completed in-depth interviews and, for certain caregiver sub-categories, focused-group discussions on their daily lived experience working with and, sometimes, living with OSC in residential care settings.
Results: Thirty-eight direct caregivers of OSC from one particular residential care center in New Delhi took part in the study. Eighteen policy stakeholders, including government bureaucrats, policy researchers, child rights advocates, and directors of RCCs also took part. Interview results were grouped into ‘key area domains’, with five domains emerging per participant group. Ultimately three domains were overlapping between the groups: Resources, Accountability, and Approaches to Care while two domains were distinct for each group: Policy Frameworks and Reforms (Policy Stakeholders) and Institutional Processes and Perceptions of the Experience of the Child (Direct caregiver group). Distinct differences and similarities were noted amongst all of the domains between the two participant groups. All domains were somehow related to the attempt to construct the best interest of the child in RCCs in India.
Conclusion: Although a de jure standard, both internationally and nationally, the best interest of the child seems to be a de facto reality in India, especially as defined by direct caregivers of OSC. In this setting, the best interest emerged not as a standard that individuals and organizations held themselves to, but as a construct that was created and re-created based on , in particular, availability of resources, accountability mechanisms, and the way in which individuals approached caring for children.