The grassroots advocacy campaign, Women on 20s, had a simple request: put a woman on the $20 bill by 2020 to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of the 19th amendment, which granted women the right to vote in the United States. Starting with a list of 15 women...
Invisible Children's "Kony 2012" campaign provides many of us professors with a unique opportunity to address and learn how students respond to such campaigns and engage with human rights issues....
KONY, WE GON' FIND YOU - as soon as I buy my bracelet!Anyone who has been on Facebook and Twitter over the past 24 hours has probably seen impassioned pleas to watch a high-production video by...
Occupy AustinSource: Austin American StatesmanWith New York City police and cities around the country cracking down on Occupy Wall Street encampments, it seems like the nascent movement might...
UK-based NGO Landmine Action says yes. In a recent report, the organization points out that we do not consider explosive bombs an acceptable tool in police operations, and proposes they be stigmatized as tools of counter-insurgency and military operations other than war as well - at least when used in populated areas. The report cites evidence of the civilian consequences of explosive violence used in populated areas, an argument with which it's easy to agree from a human security perspective. Whether the percentage of civilian deaths from explosives are on average 83% as the report...
Blogging will be light over the next few days as I'm traveling to conduct focus groups with global civil servants drawn from the network of organizations working broadly in the area of human security, to figure out why some issues resonate and others fall through the cracks in these networks. Before I disappear, I thought I'd draw readers' attention to a new human security campaign just taking off, to get your hunches as to whether it has what it takes to gain traction on the global agenda.The Oxford Research Group has launched a Recording Casualties of Armed Conflict (RCAC) Project, that is...
60 Minutes ran an excellent expose on conflict minerals in the Congo last night. You can see some of it here:Watch CBS News Videos OnlineGood coverage of an under-reported area of the world. It left me with two thoughts: First, via Facebook, my colleague Virginia Haufler suggests this story shows that corporations rather than states are running the show in issue areas such as conflict minerals - both as trouble-makers and potential governors. (Haufler makes this argument at greater length in a chapter of a forthcoming book, Who Governs the Globe) And I thought the same thing when I first...
This week I served on a panel discussion for Jonathan Torgovnik's photo exhibit on the Rwandan genocide at the Woodrow Wilson School Bernstein Galley at Princeton University. The exhibit contained extraordinary photographs of female genocide survivors and their children born as a result of genocidal rape. There is also a extremely evocative video available here. I was asked to comment critically on the exhibit and the accompanying book, Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape. The review I presented was mixed. On the one hand the exhibit is very much needed. Children like these...
Anthony Arend at Georgetown University reports on a new campaign that many of us will want to support. Its promotional video, culled from the film Taxi to the Dark Side:Unlike many anti-torture activists who base their arguments on consequentialism (e.g., we shouldn't torture because it's ineffective, we shouldn't torture because it puts our troops at risk), this campaign reminds us that human rights law forbids torture even if - perhaps especially if - it costs us nothing and we have everything to gain. To quote Senator McCain, who in the olden days put his money where his mouth was, "It's...
This month I am teaching (for the first time) an intensive summer course. Since the topic is the "Politics of International Human Rights," and since I'm forcing my students to blog, all my blog posts for this month will concern human rights in one way or another.Let's begin with news from the American Political Science Association. APSA, which had contracted with New Orleans for its 2012 convention, is under pressure from a number of APSA sections to boycott the city because the state of Louisiana amended its Constitution to ban gay marriage or the recognition of "marriage-like incidents."...
A DC-based NGO is promulgating a novel idea: that states should compensate civilians that they legally harm during combat operations. The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict(CIVIC) has launched a "You Harm You Help" campaign. Having succeeded in convincing the US Government to create a trust fund for victims of collateral damage in Afghanistan and Iraq, the organization is now trying to figure out how to turn this practice into a global norm. The idea is important because the existing laws of war don't require governments to compensate war victims.Governments are often required to pay...